A hot shower, air almost 50 degrees cooler than the outside air coming out of my vents, communicating instantly thousands of miles away, it's all so easy to just forget and take for granted
Now I have a great standby generator, though, so I'm sure I'll start taking it all for granted again soon.
The power goes out a lot in the winter but at least we are cozy, particularly with today's LED/Lithium lights.
Back when I had ADSL from the central office my internet would stay up when I lost power so I had enough power to run a cordless phone and one (of two) DSL modems off a small UPS -- so I could keep 21st century comms. Once I got fiber-to-the-node most outages would affect the node so I gave up on the UPS. They're supposed to get FTTH to my house soon but I have no idea how that is going to be affected by outages.
That would depend on the source of the outage and if your power has single points of failure in common with the comms infrastructure. One would hope the exchange has generator backups to cover short complete outages, but I'm not so sure about equipment between there and your residence (does the local cabinet have a power source, perhaps a battery or its power feed being provided by the exchange and its backups, that would survive at least a short area-wide outage?).
I've certainly had full internet access when power has dropped for my (very urban) home and the rest of the local area, so at least in cases like me the exchange and infrastructure between kept running (and my laptop battery & the small UPS protecting the ONT, router, switch, and AP, kept my infrastructure going even though the desktop PC dropped as it isn't on the UPS).
After a few of these outages and typically two to three nines of utility power availability, I got a portable generator for my well (we have an automatic generator for the house, but the well is on a separate meter); but we've also had a well pump fail. That was "fun", I think the well company came out the next day to troubleshoot, and then the 3rd day to replace the pump, which took pretty much all day because of the depth of the well. At least it happened during good weather.
I've been seeing aliexpress battery + hybrid charger deals that could probably support my pump, at least for a little while, will probably do one of those eventually, especially if we build a pumphouse.
That's the crux, isn't it? You aren't just dependent, you are dependent on a system that relentlessly stalks you with increased demands. You are tasked with keeping ahead of a pack of hunters who want to take you down -- and not only will your companions leave you for dead the moment that happens, the group will punish any suggestion that we might want to do something about this on a systemic level because they strive to join the hunters themselves.
It's grim and people are correct to behave like it's grim.
>> You are tasked with keeping ahead of a pack of hunters who want to take you down -- and not only will your companions leave you for dead the moment that happens, the group will punish any suggestion that we might want to do something about this on a systemic level because they strive to join the hunters themselves.
...as referring to software engineers as a whole, because it fits.
We're laborers, but a significant fraction of us has misinterpreted having a comfortable salary now as being capitalists themselves, so bought into libertarian propaganda and behave like they're temporarily embarrassed billionaires (for instance, by strongly resisting things like unionization).
Unfortunately, too many of us who are actually interested in "[doing] something about this on a systemic level," are too pampered to have the focus to actually be effective, and get distracted and put all kinds of divisive stuff front-and-center (basically playing into the divide-and-conquer game of the bosses).
We've had that game before. Ask yourself why a the capitalists are so eager to make everyone else a "capitalist" too: Because the relationship between companies is even more adversarial and bent on domination than a formalized employer-employee relationship.
Every CEO would love to have "independent contractors" instead of employees.
You don’t even need to start a business to be a capitalist, just buy capital that can earn you money. That can be as simple as putting a portion of your savings in stocks or as proletarian as buying a lawnmower and a trailer and mowing people’s lawns for extra cash.
Step 1: be rich.
> That can be as simple as putting a portion of your savings in stocks or as proletarian as buying a lawnmower and a trailer and mowing people’s lawns for extra cash.
No, that's not being a capitalist. You're not living of the proceeds of your capital, you're living off the proceeds of your labor. The proof: if you stop pushing that mower, your business (or your profits) collapse. "Being your own boss" != being a capitalist.
Now if you can buy 100 mowers and 100 trailers and hire 100 people to push them (plus a couple managers), you might be able to become a bottom-rung capitalist.
It ain’t perfect - and we’ll work to improve it - but it’s way better than the way it used to be for so many people. Civilization aint all bad.
> and we’ll work to improve it
Who is "we"? The people in power (or the dominant opinion at HN) don't even see a problem there.
The entire county lost power for about 8 hours. From the social media posts, you would have thought people were undergoing severe hardship, because they had to wait 1/3 of a day for their propane-heated showers. Also, some were angry that the county hadn't done more to plan for these situations... which happen maybe once every decade or so.
When the power goes out, and you’re forced to sit and talk to people or just enjoy the quiet of the night. I think about how much we’ve lost in the modern rat race.
One of the things that sits with me is that for all we’ve been given, most of us have lost the ability to just sit out in a field and enjoy the stars (light pollution, starlink, etc)
I'm not trying to single you out but I am intensely annoyed by the light and airy disregard of an intensely complex graph of interconnected services that make life possible at the density and quality that we enjoy.
We've lost a great deal less than we've gained, and anyone who doesn't think so has not had the joy of involuntarily going without them for a significant length of time.
We are very fortunate to have clean water and sewage. There are terrible stories in Victorian England of like workers popping in water systems and killing hundreds of people.
Electricity powers a ton of basics and maybe you think you could do without heating and air conditioning until a heat wave passes over Europe and kills hundreds of people. I do think beyond that you start to deal in a lot of tradeoffs. I hate they seemed to have systematically replaced wood burning fireplaces with gas. I moved out of a house with a wood burning fireplace and what a mistake,
Except automated bill pay. I swear I could go back and live in the 70’s if it wasn’t for automated bill pay.
Depends on what essentials need power. Furnace? Sewerage lift pump? Water pump?
I'm also reminded of a while back when the power went out in Spain, and people said it was like a time capsule to the 1970s.
People, outside, talking! Imagine...
Life is a series of maintenance tasks + a few moments of rest and happiness followed by death.
I think millenials like minimalism for many reasons but some may be the trauma of having clutter in their boomer parents home as well as the idea that each item is a liability. Each item needs a place to rest, possibly time spent maintaining and repairing it, and possibly energy in the form of electricity/fuel etc. Less items = less potential chaos.
I guess the very wealthy don't feel any of these issues since while they are still there money can handle dealing with the entropy. How I envy them sometimes.
Even small things are enlightening, when my slippers disintegrated I didn’t replace them for a month. It gave me a whole new appreciation for something I otherwise considered insignificant.
It also fits severe water restrictions due to drought. I would not romanticise that much either.
There is an infinite sequence of future problems to be solved. Each time you solve a problem, you don't reduce the total number of future problems, but you are left with one or more better problems than you had before. It's a very good thing that, as soon as you get accustomed to having air conditioning, you start looking for the next problem to fix.
Hedonic adaptation prevents us from asking "is this worth the downsides, or should we go back to how it was?"
But that's not really what the hedonic treadmill refers to! The hedonic treadmill is referring to the fact that, when a problem is solved, the level of pleasure or happiness individuals experience reportedly quickly returns to the pre-solution baseline.
[0] Crucially, this must not be conflated with advocating a general slowdown or pause on attempts at progress. That's the civilizational death sentence.
When there's a specific explanation why a specific experiment should move slowly (or even be prohibited), I respect that, but the explanation can't just be "we don't know all the bad things that might happen as a result of this experiment." That's the precautionary principle, which I staunchly oppose.
We can progress science, knowledge and technology all we want without necessarily committing every resource we can find to producing ten times more stuff than we need. Moving too quickly in terms of production can be detrimental to progress: first movers can and often do take over entire markets, leaving no room for the often better-designed second or third movers to shine. Moving more slowly allows for better maneuvering and making sure the best systems and technology can prevail. And it allows us to see problems coming before they hit us.
I think we could have made a utopia purely from fossil fuels if we had been more careful and restrained using them. In my view, the fact that we couldn't do that is a major indictment of our process.
And it's a moot point anyway because there was no way to slow down even if some people wanted to.
And let's not mix everything up. Every innovation is different. Penicillin and the Green Revolution aren't in the same category as bottled water and fast fashion. We can certainly fast track technologies that have large, immediate positive effects while throttling frivolous crap.
Or maybe we can't. Maybe humanity can't plan ahead -- being made from thinking agents doesn't necessarily grant a system a capacity to think. But I find it's a strange act of faith to believe barreling ahead thoughtlessly is somehow always going to be fine.
That is not a fact or objective truth or even historical, that is a hypothesis and a theory.
And the distinction matters. It is not in fact true that all people in all setups and classes and historical periods and periods of their lives were equally happy. In fact, you can be unhappy, solve the problem and be more happy/content for the rest of your life. Overall peoples happiness go up and down.
Hedonistic treadmill is a theory. It is also a slight of hand argumentative trick to shoo away valid complains people have. It was worst in the past, but you are not completely happy accepting bullshit today, therefore you just dont know how good you have it, basically.
Global warming make quite a lot of people (like hundred thousands) miserable as they had to evacuate and then return back to non-existent houses. They literally lost everything except bank account and whatever fit into the car. The areas with high drug and alcohol use, high violence rates are in fact not full of people who have it too good. I could go on ... the inequality and accumulation of power is threatening to make most of us all worst off and it is not because we got spoiled by hedonistic treadmill.
Not by much. I seem to remember some research that compared lottery winners to double amputees. Within a short period both groups had reverted to similar levels of happiness.
>I could go on ... the inequality and accumulation of power is threatening to make most of us all worst off and it is not because we got spoiled by hedonistic treadmill.
There isn't much individuals can do about that outside of polling day. What they can do though is start comparing their lives to their grandparents rather than the Kardashians.
Actually, it's the other way around. Thanks to technology, civilization has become unnecessary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JS2N4VWIbCI
“Visiting,” says a French writer, “forms the cord which binds society together, and it is so firmly tied, that were the knot severed, society would perish.”
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/39293/39293-h/39293-h.htm#CH...
Why?
I.e. like my grandparents, who grew up in the 1920s on a farm, only 1 heated room, privy outside, no running water, limited food options, hard work each day. As my granny used to say to anyone with nostalgia: no, things were definitely not better back then.
Misery week would greatly increase happiness for the rest of the year, add humility, and empathy with the less privileged.
Looking for water in the wilderness - even with access to maps - can be quite a challenge in and of itself!
but regardless it not going to bring any meaningful humbleness because you will forget all about it.
i grew up in povery for first 20 yrs of my life in a desert but i have never think of that life and experience humbless in any different way than ppl who have never experienced it.
When it would get near to the "camping" time my friend would be preparing giant battery banks, hotspots, and other tech with the right usb/hdmi cables and more...
The future isn’t evenly distributed
N months ago I was like, "OMG, claude code can work on this code base with me and like, understand it, and do high level things that I tell it, this is magic, how can this possibly even exist?"
Now I'm like, "OMG, I can't believe claude code still needs me to explain XYZ, why is it so incredibly limited..."
But in the hedonic adaptation sense like - and comparisons are complicated - people aren’t by and large happier now (because of the hedonism this is sidestepping the argument of how well distributed it is, and I’m talking the past 50-100 years not compared to subsistence farming and the like early Industrial Revolution etc et al)
I do think a lot of the senses that things are better now are based on this adaptation, not thinking about would you be less happy if you didn’t know about some of the small things you were missing.
I notice a lot of resistance and discomfort whenever someone says anything like this (“are you suggesting my pain doesn’t matter? How about the starving kids in xyz?”), and I get that. But it feels like there might be something to it.
> "It would seem that human beings are not able to describe, nor perhaps to imagine, happiness except in terms of contrast."
Funnily, this range contains WWII, great depression, run up to them and falldown from them. It all involved a lot of royally unhappy desperate people. It is also shortly after WWI and ex soldiers were in fact unhappy, traumatized and causing further traumatization to others around.
Also, at least in rural areas I know more history about, it involved society with high alcoholism rates, high domestic violence rates, prostitution by young teenagers (14-17) as a genuine social problem. A lot of us are happier then them. Trully. Not a wife of violent gambler and alcoholic today, but we have less wife's of violent gamblers and alcoholics today.
Suicide rates are also up and s/alcoholism/fentanyl addiction/. Funny you bring up gambling because gambling is also up. Rural areas famously peaked in the like mid 20th century and haven’t recovered.
My argument isn’t the typical “gosh the good old days”. It’s more just like the iPhone didn’t make us happier. I might also predict many of the trends you identified are more correlated with economic success than technological evolution.
If we keep on the trend we’re on and America has lost its post war economic domination, those numbers are going to keep looking worse, cute cat videos be damned.
My point is that hedonistic treadmill is a theory that holds only for the less important things. Yes, I get used to new better headphones and they do not fundamentally change my situation. But, when the evolution allows me to live with less pain or without disability, gives me more agency, then yes, I will be more happier and it will be durable result.
> Suicide rates are also up and s/alcoholism/fentanyl addiction/
I did not said it goes up all the time, I said it goes up and down. Despite growth of alcoholism it was much worst in some past periods.
> If we keep on the trend we’re on and America has lost its post war economic domination, those numbers are going to keep looking worse, cute cat videos be damned.
America does not need economic domination over the whole world to be happy. The unhappy people have nothing to do with overall world economic dominance. America could have happier people, if that was its political goal.
> I mean it also includes 2008, COVID and the Ukrainian war.
2008 does not compare to great depression, COVID and the Ukrainian war do not compare to WWII and Holocaust. Not even when we judge by what is going on in the Ukraine itself (as bad as it is, WWII was worst there). And specifically Americans did fought in WWII, bud did not in Ukraine.
So to keep your home at 70, you need exit temperature to be 50-55F.
seems like it might be lower or higher, depending on humidity.
So on a 102 degree day, for 72 degrees indoors, you might need 52 degree vent temperature.
In phoenix - just go to work and come home after dark.
So, +1 to the recommendation
Think about all those elated anecdotes about how someone used an inferior tool for a decade, was fine with it, then tried a better one and now “can’t imagine how I lived without it...” well it’s a bittersweet memory distortion innit.
You mean Fahreneit, of course.