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Comment by jsisto | Hacker News Reader

> They have access to cheap travel, better food

What cheap travel? Better food compared to when? Most kids are obese eating poisoned food.

When was the last time you met somebody who only walked all thier life? Never rode a horse because only the rich could afford such things.

When was the last time you had no food? Starvation used to be a real problem. I'm not taking about running short at the end of the month, I'm talking about there isn't food for even the wealthy people.

Food today is safer than ever. You talk about poison, but that is pure lie, it might not be the best, but it isn't moldy because you have a fridge.

> You talk about poison, but that is pure lie

I think it's fairly well accepted that the high obesity rates are caused by the shifting American diet. Yes it's more available than the 1950s (although I suspect not terribly so), but the effect it has on public health has been a nightmare.

You can just as readily find correlation with behavioral changes linked to a sedentary lifestyle driven by a firehouse of entertainment that first became available with cable television. That doesn't satisfy the orthorexic cause, so isn't discussed much.

Fundamentally, obesity is caused by an excess of calories. The foods we eat today are more calorie-dense. Even an apple is sweeter and larger than it was in the 1950s. But bottom line people are obese because calories are cheaper and more readily available than they used to be.

Shifting diet, but poison is the wrong term.

So better off today compared to 200 years ago.

He seems to focused on what happened in the last few decades. Your points seem to apply to a much longer time-scale.

The last few decades are much harder to quantify. I wouldn't want to go back to my youth.

It seems uncontroversial to say that young people now, and for the last 25 years, have access to cheaper travel than previous generations. The network of budget airlines in Europe, Asia, and MENA is extensive; I can often find a WizzAir flight for as little as 10€ if I'm willing to fly with just a smaller carry-on. As for long-distance bus travel, FlixBus in Europe sucks in so many ways and has a monopoly over whole countries, but its tickets (if you purchase well in advance) are often cheaper than the local operators that one had to use before.

Regarding travel, you can decide for yourself:

https://www.bts.gov/content/annual-us-domestic-average-itine...

I specifically do not want kids because it feels like I would be shortchanging them. I imagine all generations think it was better in their day. But you are right. Owning a car is absurdly expensive, public transit is pretty grim in the US and definitely not cheap, plus our food supply is literal slop. Even the cheap stuff is expensive now.

It is truly depressing. I can’t imagine being a kid who has to navigate all that on top of social media and constant agitprop.

I guess this is just what selection pressure looks like. It’s possible that adults who struggle to navigate social media and agitprop to the extent that they can’t imagine being able to raise kids in the 21st century might actually be right that their offspring would also struggle.

Shortchanging? Do you have any idea what a "typical" middle class lifestyle was like in the 1960s? (Not the romanticized one). Do you think they were eating organic avocados?

Life and technology and healthcare and many other things are objectively better in many, many ways.

> Do you have any idea what a "typical" middle class lifestyle was like in the 1960s?

You mean the one where they could have 3 kids, send them to college, and graduate with no debt?

One of my professors went to UC Berkeley in the 60's. Inflation adjusted, his cost was $700 (I forget if this was per semester or per year).

Do you know how many people went to college in 1960?

Do you know how many households didn't have indoor plumbing?

Do you know how many people died of measles?

You are cherry picking a few data points to paint a very, very rosy picture of a reality in which the vast, vast majority of people were living a life much, much poorer than even a poor person today.

Only about 10% of Americans had college degrees in the 1960s compared to about 37% today and the large majority of them were men. Does that sound like a past anyone wants to return to?

And how many of those degrees are going to result in a worthwhile job? University is a massive industry now, billions of dollars are at play, and it has never been easier to take out $100k in perma-debt to go to school. Of course more people go, a B.S. is the ground floor now, yet many degrees are barely worth the paper they are printed on.

And those classrooms had no AC (probably), no WiFi, no projectors, no access to (almost unlimited) online resources, no fancy gym, etc etc.

In 1988 in _Atlanta_ my local public school finally got ceiling fans installed, thanks to the PTA fundraising. We never had AC. We had one window unit at home in my parents bedroom. It was fine.

Without global warming, AC were not necedsary. Wifi, projector and nonfancy gym are literally no issues - if they disappeared you wont regret.

There was progress, but these are not important parts of it.

The projectors are not worth the extra cost (not even close!). When I think of all the classes I took in over a decade at universities, very few benefited from projectors. They existed mostly for lazy professors who wanted to write a slide deck once and keep using it, without doing interactive work on the whiteboard.

Wherever I studied (admittedly in the north), we did not need ACs. Heating was important, and many of the buildings were old and used the same heating they had in the 60's.

WiFi: Mostly not in my time either. I certainly don't see it as important in education. I personally didn't even own a WiFi capable device until 2012.

Online resources: I'll grant you that, but I'll point out where I went in the early 00's, our low ranked university had excellent Internet access (ranked amongst the top in the country), and the annual cost was $2600. Never found a journal, etc that I didn't have access to.

Gym? Seriously? For the extra cost in education, you can go to any good gym! Are you going to tell kids these days "Sorry you can't afford a degree that will help you get a job - we wanted a fancy gym!"

Other than the Internet, none of the other items is valuable for most degrees. Personally, in a hotter climate, I'd really want the AC - but I wouldn't pay that much just for an AC.

Maybe not organic avocados but more likely to be eating produce from your own backyard garden.

That was done for cost reasons back then but today local and seasonal produce is a staple of high end restaurants.

The 1960s was well after agriculture as a percentage of the population in the US had declined to a small figure, and relatively few suburban or urban dwellers were growing things for their own consumption.

Well we still were in small town America in the 1970s. :)

Absolutely incorrect. Do you really think the majority of people lived on an acre of arable land providing bountiful vegetables year-round? Do you know what a "tenement" is? Do you know how many people had indoor plumbing in 1960? How many died of the measles?

The vegetables obviously weren’t fresh year round but my grandmother and mother and aunts canned lots and lots of vegetables we ate throughout the winter.

> I imagine all generations think it was better in their day.

This might be objectively true these days, considering climate change.

Have you ever heard of leaded gas?

Did you see the "these days" part in my comment?

Edit: nevermind that even, leaded gas was banned in Europe in 2000, and while I was a child in the 90s, it did not affect me or anyone I know negatively (that we know of), so not sure how to interpret your reply at all.

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