phantasmish

A lot of it's that. Our GDP is inflated by bullshit like over-paying for healthcare to the tune of double-digit percentages of total GDP, among other things, so we're flat-out not as rich as we look on paper, as a country. Our social safety net is really bad, government retirement systems and disability are sub-par by OECD standards, and we may have as few as zero paid vacation days or ability to refuse a shift (without being fired for it).

Anyone under the top 20% or so in the US is struggling, or at least stressed out by knowing that one bad month can mess them up for years and years and ruin any long-term plans they had.

We're also a lot more spread out than most countries. It's a lot more expensive and time-consuming to go protest in DC when you live in, say, Colorado, than it is for someone in Marseilles to go attend a protest in Paris. So they go to some local protest with 50 people instead, or maybe to one in Denver with a couple thousand, and you never hear about it. And the protests don't get rowdy (they might get teargassed anyway, of course) because see above about the "one bad month" thing—an arrest without charges of a working adult can easily end up making their family homeless, because they lose their job and can't get another one fast enough (and it's much, much worse if even very low-level charges are filed, even if the charges don't stick or are dropped—our legal system is great at eating thousands of dollars for what ends up being nothing, besides further schedule disruption bringing further risk to employment)

Probably US Customs and Border Protection.

[edit] I mean yes 1984's map was even worse, but 1980's was reeeeeal bad. Six states won in 1980, versus one in 1984. And we have a guy who won a pretty ordinary split of states and less than a majority of votes-cast calling his win in 2024 a "landslide", lol. No, Reagan's elections are what a landslide looks like.

[edit edit] I mean I don't really want to quibble over the details, it probably was the one-two punch of those that really set the direction and we seem to agree on the basics that it was Reagan's crushing electoral success that set the tone for Democrats for up until... well, still today, largely.

Ours stopped after (an extremely cursory coverage of) the ‘50s and ‘60 civil rights movement because there was no way to cover Vietnam and Nixon and such basically at all without greatly upsetting Republican parents. Anything newer than ~30 years (at the time) was treated as about as handsome-off as religion. Dunno if that’s changed.

The colloquial, broad sense of “democracy” is also how political scientists employ the term in most contexts. That is: the people who study this for a living are entirely OK with that usage. If they didn’t use that sense of the word they’d need another one to mean the same thing, because it’s very useful.

It sucks as a parent because you get this from both ends: “parent better! (Putting in tons of work that our parents didn’t have to)” and also “lol what are you doing restricting kids on computers is impossible, give up you idiot”.

(And on some platforms it is, for practical purposes, impossible—looking at you, Linux, not just because it’s a powerful open platform but because its permissions and capabilities system is decades behind the state-of-the-art and tools for sensibly managing any of that on a scale smaller than “fleet of servers” and in the context of user-session applications are nonexistent)

Phones are among the easiest devices to manage.

Minecraft is notably insane due to this. I don’t know how normies get their kids playing online with it (ours is locked down to just-with-friends, and we gatekeep the friend list), I thought it was hard as a techie. Cross-platform play (outside of X-Box, I suppose) requires creating and carefully-massaging permissions on two overlapping but unrelated systems, both the account on the console itself and a Microsoft account (and their UI for managing this is, in modern Microsoft fashion, entirely nutty). Then, if anything goes wrong, the error messages are careful never to tell you which account’s settings blocked an action, so you get to guess. Fun!

(Getting “classic” Java Minecraft working, just with a local server, was even harder)

Your options are to go all-in on one or two ecosystems; to take on just a fuckload of work getting it all set up nicely and maintaining that with a half-dozen accounts per kid or whatever; or to give up.

Then schools send chromebooks home with less-restrictive settings than I’d use if I were managing it and no way for me to tighten those, and a kid stays up all night playing shovelware free Web games before we realize we need to account for those devices before bed time. Thanks for the extra work, assholes.

It’s a shit message, but they’re apparently permanently damaged by the 1980 landslide re-election loss to Reagan and incapable of moving on. IDK if liberal democracy will survive here long enough for us to see if another wing of the party can ever get those folks to let them try something else.

[edit] not for nothing, Obama lightly hinted at a move away from that in his campaigning (if not his governing) and it seemed to work pretty damn well. Why they didn’t double down on that is anyone’s guess, but I’d suppose it rhymes with “bobbying”.

I think it’s kinda lame in its escaped-containment form, and am surprised it’s been one of those things that stuck around as long as it has, but would place it low on my list of language gripes, personally.

Last couple plays I’ve used zig-zag approach when traveling through random encounter zones, effectively ~doubling distance traveled, and encounters. Stretches those out, but removes most of the separate, dedicated grinding.

(Not defending the game design that makes this necessary, mind you)

Maybe 3rd. Jedi is gorgeous but the script for everything past Jabba’s Palace is a mess. Doesn’t know what to do with all its characters, feels the need to have them all around anyway.

Outside the specific case of Apple's "magical" cross-device interoperability, I can't think of many areas where this is true. When I step outside the Apple ecosystem, stuff feels pretty much the same as it did in 2005 or so, except it's all using 5-20x the resources (and is a fully enshittified ad-filled disjointed mess of an OS in Windows' case)...

> I agree that we sometimes make things incredibly complex for no purpose in SE, but also think that we do a rose-colored thing where we forget how shitty things were in the 1990s.

... aside from that everything crashes way, way less now than in the '90s, but a ton of that's down to OS and driver improvements. Our tools are supposed to be handling most of the rest. If that improved stability is imposing high costs on development of user-facing software, something's gone very wrong.

You're right that all the instability used to be truly awful, but I'm not sure it's better now because software delivery slowed way down (in general—maybe for operating systems and drivers)

On iPhone, specifically, it was awful for me. I was too likely to have wet hands (raining, just got out of shower, whatever—even dried, the higher moisture in my skin meant it didn't work) or gloves on or some other problem that made it fail. Trying to hold it the right way, one-handed, to get a finger in the right position (waaaaay down near the bottom) was also a high-risk maneuver for a drop, and was not a way I'd otherwise have tried to hold the device.

You had all these small-by-modern-standards teams (though sometimes in large companies) putting out desktop applications, sometimes on multiple platforms, with shitloads of features. On fairly tight schedules. To address markets that are itty-bitty by modern standards.

Now people are like “We’ll need (3x the personnel) and (2x the time) and you can forget about native, it’s webshit or else you can double those figures… for one platform. What’s that? Your TAM is only (the size of the entire home PC market circa 1995)? Oh forget about it then, you’ll never get funded”

It seems like we’ve gotten far less efficient.

I’m skeptical this problem has to do with code-writing, and so am skeptical that LLMs are going to even get us back to our former baseline.

Retrofitting that into "cloud" bullshit is such a bad idea.

I assume that movie is for Japanese civil servants like the show Silicon Valley is for programmers. Stuff like the repeated meeting-room changes for no apparent reason reads as too specific and weird to be made-up.

For a long while we managed to stay around $500-600 but that was before COVID inflation. I dunno how the official inflation rate's as low as it is, we don't buy much that'd be considered "luxury" level (we're not buying caviar, say, and rarely even get stuff like the grass-fed "fancy" butter [actually yellow instead of white, tastes like something rather than just having texture but no flavor] instead of the cheapest available) and I'm pretty sure we buy a lot less meat per person than the US average, but if we fill up a cart now it's like $250-$300. I've hit $150 on small shopping trips where I didn't even fully fill one of the smaller, short carts.

If you're getting a lot of value out of LLM writing right now, your quality was already garbage and you're just using it to increase volume, or you have let your quality crater.

Clothes brands do this too.

Clothes at the outlet store aren't the same as clothes at Dillards, what's stocked at a struggling Macy's in a relatively poor area may be different from what's available for the same brand at Macy's in Manhattan, and all that may not be the same as what's in their flagship stores.

Sometimes they make it semi-obvious provided you learn their secret label language (Polo by Ralph Lauren, Chaps by Ralph Lauren, Ralph Lauren Purple Label, and about a half-dozen other major variants, for example). They do this so they can sell shit to unsophisticated consumers at a large mark-up for the name, riding on the reputation and clout of the good versions of what they sell (elsewhere, at even higher prices).