8 ms·

Travelling to the 70s must feel like going to the future: these futuristic capsule buildings existed, supersonic air travel was commonplace, and there were huma

Travelling to the 70s must feel like going to the future: these futuristic capsule buildings existed, supersonic air travel was commonplace, and there were humans travelling to the moon. The epitome of modernity these days is how fast your car videos can load.

johncalvinyoung 5y ago
Sadly true, at least in some dimensions. Though as I sit here in my bedroom staring into a massive multipanel array of sharp pixels, attached to a global fiberoptic firehose of information... it feels like a different sort of imagined future came true, though maybe not the best one. All it's missing is VR goggles (never been that interested personally) and hackable wetware.
rbg246 5y ago
Having a total of 20 supersonic airlines wasn't exactly common place. And spending 1.5% of your GDP to send like ten people to the moon probably isn't that great an achievement from a cost benefit analysis (I know there will be fierce disagreement). Not taking away from how amazing those things are but we have billions of computers that connect most people in the world together which in my opinion just insanely amazing.
- masswerk 5y ago
  That these planes were operated only by BA and Air France (and a similar plane to some extent by Aeroflot) was merely an accident. Concorde was developed as a mass transport and there was broad interest. Then the US ban and the oil crisis happened.
  - rbg246 5y ago
    Yes but this is my point is there are great reasons why concorde failed but equally it's technology was not enough of progress to overcome the fact that 747s could do things at much greater scale and more economically. The reach of aeroplane travel is far more impressive now than flying under a 100 people at supersonic speeds. I also dispute that there was mass transport plans - the total passenger load was tiny. Not to take away that the plane itself is an amazing piece of technology.
    - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
      Concorde failed because of politics, not technology. The US wanted to make way for its own SST project so it limited Concorde's access to the US market. A Concorde B variant with an even longer range and quieter engines was already being developed, and airlines were very interested in it. if the US market had been more open it's likely other markets would have followed suit. Once it was stabilised in the market other improvements would have followed. Concorde was always a first class for the first class market, not an air bus. But if supersonic travel had become established there would have been market pressure to commoditise it, and we might have seen a continuing supersonic long haul market working in parallel with the smaller more local subsonic services we have now.
      - pfdietz 5y ago
        Concorde failed because of the technology. It was hugely expensive and consumed mass amounts of fuel (13x the fuel per passenger of a 747-200). It used 2 tons of fuel just to taxi to the runway for takeoff! I dispute that airlines were actually interested in a Concorde B. The economic problems of supersonic flight would have remained. There's a reason Boeing abandoned any pretense of interest in SST after Congress declined to fund it.
        checker 5y ago
        Yeah I'll take decent in-flight internet connectivity over massive amounts of fuel being consumed to get to the destination faster.
        CapricornNoble 5y ago
        I'd like the option of supersonic travel for transoceanic voyages. I'm looking at plane tickets back to the East Coast from Japan.... Tokyo to Dallas alone is ~12hrs, total travel time ~24hrs across 3 flights. Flying to the other side of the planet faster would be far more valuable to me than even browsing HN while airborne (I tend to sleep through my flights, no matter how long, anyway).
- papaf 5y ago
  Not taking away from how amazing those things are but we have billions of computers that connect most people in the world together which in my opinion just insanely amazing. The 70s looks at your example of progress, thinks of it as a big ARPANET and is not impressed.
  - rbg246 5y ago
    Scale is everything though - great technology is nothing without reach
    - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
      Politics is everything. We have wristwatch and pocket supercomputers with access to a global network. But many people also live in a far more precarious economy, the global network is far too much a source of poor-quality or tainted information and toxic social experiences, monitoring and manipulation of all kinds are pervasive, and a compulsory personal ethic of branding, consumption, and selling is far more prevalent than anything more adventurous or creative.
      - eru 5y ago
        > But many people also live in a far more precarious economy, [...] What? Global inequality has dropped through the floor compared to the 70s. People in India and China used to starve, now they have smartphones.
        mahogany 5y ago
        To be pedantic, a reduction in poverty is not the same as a reduction in inequality. Your example of India and China seems to be pointing to the former. Also, from a US-centric point of view, it seems to me that economic inequality has gotten worse since the 70s, or at least the 80s. See for example: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-... or https://academic.oup.com/cje/article-abstract/37/4/921/1712745 https://academic.oup.com/cje/article-abstract/37/4/921/17127.... I'm not sure what the parent commenter meant, but when I think "precarious economy", I'm thinking about things like wage stagnation and rising costs of healthcare, housing, and debt, rather than the fact that people now have iPhones (which for many are only affordable if paid for in monthly installments over years).
- pydry 5y ago
  The computers and communication tech you love were developed as a result of the moon landing. Loads of stuff like that entered the public domain. That's apart from improvements in digital imaging, large scale manufacturing, material sciences and flight control that were derived from the project. Moreover, it was a longer term investment in humankind becoming a spacefaring species - something that will be necessary for our survival. It was a bargain.
  - eru 5y ago
    You are missing opportunity costs. All the resources that went into the moonlanding could have gone into something else. Eg could have stayed in private hands. For a different example: Yes, in the real world WW2 sort-of gave us computers. But IBM (and similar companies) would have invented electronic general purpose computers anyway, and probably sooner, if there hadn't been a war going on.
swiley 5y ago
how fast the ads can load Of course in the 70s they had over the air TV so the ads loaded instantly.
- Cerium 5y ago
  They just had very low jitter networks. Displays in that age didn't even have enough space to buffer a single frame. The ads loaded no faster than real-time.
mustacheemperor 5y ago
I can put on a lightweight headset and hang out to shoot pool with a group of strangers from around the world in virtual reality. In my lifetime countries, including political enemies, worked together to build a space station that has been continually occupied by humans, each usually staying long term, since it became habitable. I watched the F-35 hover over the water and shoot out of sight instantly at Fleet Week, and I can wirelessly throw an essentially unlimited supply of media from throughout history onto a TV I can’t perceive the pixels on. I can fly across california for $100 round trip and instead of owning a car I can rent an electric one with an app on my phone. The air isn’t polluted by leaded gasoline. The equal employment act and title ix didn’t pass until 1972, America is a more balanced and equitable society today than it was in 1970. All that to say I find this take is needlessly pessimistic from multiple angles, and I disagree.
- masswerk 5y ago
  Hm. In 1969, you could watch a Harrier jet hover the water and shoot out of sight and several emancipatory legislations were a direct result of these era. (In fact, you could watch Apollo 16 going to the moon and celebrate the equal employment act passed just the previous month.) And it's also the 1970s, when awareness rose for environmental issues (like leaded gasoline and many more). Regarding pixels, well, there were still some high-res vector displays left (otherwise, there weren't any compression artefacts, at least). ;-)
  - buran77 5y ago
    The view OP presents is a bit grim though. Most of the real "modernity" of the '70s was not something regular people would enjoy. Going to the Moon, or the Concorde were no different from today's fusion experiments, including the fact that they were based heavily on "earlier work". Perhaps society decided to turn that progress into something a regular person could benefit from. Think EVs, or a network of internet satellites, work from home (and everything supporting that), getting all your shopping delivered at home, all the virtual "networks" (I don't mean FB here, any networking possibility) you can imagine, and all the knowledge now available from the comfort of your own personal pocket device. There are also plenty of social movements and evolution, think on the line of equal rights, that may have been rooted in the '70s but were completely in the realm of the implausible until the last 2 decades. Of course people no longer see that as evolution and modernity because so many were born into them already. They look like normality. And even the "modernity" that was available to normal people in their daily lives was mostly for the sake of the looks. I lived in some modern buildings of the '70s (not unlike the one presented in the article) and that wasn't modernity, it was creativity and embellishment mixed with a lot of impracticality. They were more art than practical creation. The result of the same current that gave birth to The Jetsons a decade earlier, just put in tangible reality in the '70s.
systemvoltage 5y ago
70's and 80's were peak of humans I believe. It will be hard to undo all the crap we've built including the internet which I have mixed feelings about.
knolax 5y ago
I've gotten into camping and climbing recently and every time I walk into an REI I'm pretty amazed at how different the gear is from when I was younger. Might not be as flashy but there certainly has been a great deal of improvement in pretty much every consumer good there is.
- FabHK 5y ago
  Indeed. Got a new bicycle recently, and most components (saddle, light, brakes, gears, etc.) are better in many small ways and large.
- the-dude 5y ago
  This week I bought a gardening scissor ( to cut small branches ). "Main" : modern looking, lots of plastic, maybe had 'advanced' features ( I couldn't imagine what those would be ) Close to € 25. "House brand" : more or less the same as the main About € 14 "Basic" or "Budget" : the exactly same scissor I remember my parents had, and everybody had in 70s & 80s. € 3,19
kiba 5y ago
Today, we're working on building retro sci-fi style rockets with volume greater than the ISS. Pretty exciting time to be alive.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Yes, though this and electric cars both required a single man with combination of wealth, charisma and ability to think beyond their own wallet - which is a very rare set of characteristics to coincide in a single person - who then could drag the market kicking and screaming into accepting EVs and reusable rockets. Unfortunately, depending on such happenstance doesn't scale, so it's not a reliable way of creating a better future.
  - pell 5y ago
    I think you're giving Musk too much credit here.
  - eru 5y ago
    > Yes, though this and electric cars both required a single man with combination of wealth, charisma and ability to think beyond their own wallet [...] Elon Musk became the richest African-American in the process. I don't think he needed to think beyond his own wallet? (He might have or not. I don't know what he's thinking.)
    - ben_w 5y ago
      Both SpaceX and Tesla came close to bankruptcy, and he started the former and took over the latter with enough PayPal money to spend the rest of his life in extreme comfort.
      - eru 5y ago
        He certainly seems to have a high enough risk tolerance. But I am fairly sure he still his (subjective) expected value was still positive.
    - 5y ago
nitwit005 5y ago
At least from a Japanese point of view, the 70s were a bit depressing because that was the end of their economic boom.
- nereye 5y ago
  Maybe you’re thinking of the 90s? The ‘lost decade’ is considered to have started in 1991, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_(Japan) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_(Japan) and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_economic_miracle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_economic_miracle.
  - nitwit005 5y ago
    From that article (edit: second article): > The economical miracle can be divided into four stages: the recovery (1946–1954), the high increase (1955–1972), the steady increase (1972–1992), and the low increase (1992–2017). The period of highest growth ended in the 70s, which ended some of the optimism of that period.
    - Aeolun 5y ago
      If I remember right the steady increase was ended by a huge asset bubble.
      - FabHK 5y ago
        Yes, the Nikkei 225 still hasn't reached its 1989 peak, see the graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikkei_225 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikkei_225 (Though, mind you, a price index, not total return, so not including dividends, IIRC)
      - eru 5y ago
        Not really. The problem is that their central bank let their nominal GDP implode.
everyone 5y ago
Supersonic air travel was absolutely not commonplace.
baybal2 5y ago
It's a big mystery for me how the things went down since seventies. I think the first signs of not decline, but I'd say "wind down" were quite apparent in eighties already.
- FabHK 5y ago
  > It's a big mystery for me how the things went down since seventies. There is a insightful (if a bit messy, and occasionally wrong) book that purports to answer that question: Where is my flying car?: A memoir of future past, by J. Storrs Hall. [1] In that author's view, it boils down to * a levelling off of energy consumption per capita, that previously had doubled every 10 years. (In particular, the author laments the dearth of advanced nuclear power, which would be good for the economy and the climate.) * increasing regulation and risk aversion. * as well as “centralized funding streams”, “bureaucratic inertia,” “cultural malaise and indifference”. [1] Reviews: https://rootsofprogress.org/where-is-my-flying-car https://rootsofprogress.org/where-is-my-flying-car https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/09/where-is-my-flying-car-a-memoir-of-future-past-by-j-storrs-hall.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/09/wh... https://jakeseliger.com/2020/12/28/where-is-my-flying-car-a-memoir-of-future-past-j-storrs-hall/ https://jakeseliger.com/2020/12/28/where-is-my-flying-car-a-...
- ekianjo 5y ago
  Oh you had smartphones and the web in the 70s ?
  - baybal2 5y ago
    They would've indeed been outright sci-fi with a time set for few centuries in the future. Now we have them, and don't much give a damn how sci-fi the semi industry became. Concordes on other sides were a cult icon even when they were flying. People were saving money to "fly on a Concorde once in a lifetime"
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
joe_the_user 5y ago
In the 1970s, plane travel was rare and expensive, with high quality service and everything sparkling. Long distance phone calls were exciting. There was much less future, it was less advanced but it felt more special, yes.
- eru 5y ago
  Part of the reason air travel was rare and expensive was regulation. De-regulation of air travel made it cheap and commonplace. See eg https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/AirlineDeregulation.html https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/AirlineDeregulation.html
  - joe_the_user 5y ago
    Yep, Deregulation made air travel cheap, commonplace and miserable. I took Greyhound across the country several times in t70s. The quality of travel in airplanes is essentially at that level - but much faster of course. The 1950-70s were an era of regulated private monopolies. Those regulation stood in the way of all sorts of progress but also gave a substantial portion of the working class a middle class income. I'm not going to argue whether one was better than the other because the change was inevitable, we'll never change back, just "change forward" to some further situation.
    - eru 5y ago
      You can still get really, really good air travel, if you are willing to pay those past prices.
andi999 5y ago
"In the past everything was better, even the future" (K. Valentin, translated)
ekianjo 5y ago
> supersonic air travel was commonplace, Only if you had deep pockets
- gavinmckenzie 5y ago
  I had the pleasure of flying the Concorde, almost by accident, in the 90s. Yes, I was flying on business, but for some reason I couldn't get a flight on KLM to the Netherlands at all that week and my creative travel agent mused "Hey, do you want to take the Concorde?" The cost was $3500, which at the time was within a couple of hundred dollars compared to a business-class seat on KLM. Yes, that ticket price wasn't something I'd contemplate for personal travel, and it was a bit discounted at that; but for business travel it certainly wasn't exorbitant.
loloquwowndueo 5y ago
Edit: CAT videos. I meant to say cat videos :)
- teel 5y ago
  Heh, thanks for correcting the typo, that saved my Friday afternoon :) I had not heard car videos are so popular nowadays that their download speed can be used as a measure of modernity. But actually, that did not surprise me any more, more like the opposite. I feel that the older I get (I was born in 76), the more I see and hear things related to computers, music, media that apparently are very popular now I have never heard of. Sometimes it feels like I'm forever stuck in the 90's in a way. I mean, music was best in 90s-early 2000s, All you bases belonged to us as far as the best memes go and so on. But then again, with the technology in my hands today, I wouldn't change it to 90's junk in a million years.
bregma 5y ago
In the 1970s we lived under the shadow of The Bomb. We assumed our future was as glowing cinders under literally leaden skies. Now, the future in the 1960s was wonderful. Spaceships! Atomic-powered flying cars! Jet travel to anywhere in the world! Air raid drills with duck and cover! That past had a future!
eru 5y ago
> [...] supersonic air travel was commonplace, [...] It was more commonplace than now, but flying in general was much, much more expensive, and supersonic travel even more.

johncalvinyoung 5y ago

Sadly true, at least in some dimensions. Though as I sit here in my bedroom staring into a massive multipanel array of sharp pixels, attached to a global fiberoptic firehose of information... it feels like a different sort of imagined future came true, though maybe not the best one. All it's missing is VR goggles (never been that interested personally) and hackable wetware.

rbg246 5y ago

Having a total of 20 supersonic airlines wasn't exactly common place. And spending 1.5% of your GDP to send like ten people to the moon probably isn't that great an achievement from a cost benefit analysis (I know there will be fierce disagreement). Not taking away from how amazing those things are but we have billions of computers that connect most people in the world together which in my opinion just insanely amazing.

masswerk 5y ago
That these planes were operated only by BA and Air France (and a similar plane to some extent by Aeroflot) was merely an accident. Concorde was developed as a mass transport and there was broad interest. Then the US ban and the oil crisis happened.
- rbg246 5y ago
  Yes but this is my point is there are great reasons why concorde failed but equally it's technology was not enough of progress to overcome the fact that 747s could do things at much greater scale and more economically. The reach of aeroplane travel is far more impressive now than flying under a 100 people at supersonic speeds. I also dispute that there was mass transport plans - the total passenger load was tiny. Not to take away that the plane itself is an amazing piece of technology.
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
    Concorde failed because of politics, not technology. The US wanted to make way for its own SST project so it limited Concorde's access to the US market. A Concorde B variant with an even longer range and quieter engines was already being developed, and airlines were very interested in it. if the US market had been more open it's likely other markets would have followed suit. Once it was stabilised in the market other improvements would have followed. Concorde was always a first class for the first class market, not an air bus. But if supersonic travel had become established there would have been market pressure to commoditise it, and we might have seen a continuing supersonic long haul market working in parallel with the smaller more local subsonic services we have now.
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      Concorde failed because of the technology. It was hugely expensive and consumed mass amounts of fuel (13x the fuel per passenger of a 747-200). It used 2 tons of fuel just to taxi to the runway for takeoff! I dispute that airlines were actually interested in a Concorde B. The economic problems of supersonic flight would have remained. There's a reason Boeing abandoned any pretense of interest in SST after Congress declined to fund it.
      - checker 5y ago
        Yeah I'll take decent in-flight internet connectivity over massive amounts of fuel being consumed to get to the destination faster.
        CapricornNoble 5y ago
        I'd like the option of supersonic travel for transoceanic voyages. I'm looking at plane tickets back to the East Coast from Japan.... Tokyo to Dallas alone is ~12hrs, total travel time ~24hrs across 3 flights. Flying to the other side of the planet faster would be far more valuable to me than even browsing HN while airborne (I tend to sleep through my flights, no matter how long, anyway).
papaf 5y ago
Not taking away from how amazing those things are but we have billions of computers that connect most people in the world together which in my opinion just insanely amazing. The 70s looks at your example of progress, thinks of it as a big ARPANET and is not impressed.
- rbg246 5y ago
  Scale is everything though - great technology is nothing without reach
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
    Politics is everything. We have wristwatch and pocket supercomputers with access to a global network. But many people also live in a far more precarious economy, the global network is far too much a source of poor-quality or tainted information and toxic social experiences, monitoring and manipulation of all kinds are pervasive, and a compulsory personal ethic of branding, consumption, and selling is far more prevalent than anything more adventurous or creative.
    - eru 5y ago
      > But many people also live in a far more precarious economy, [...] What? Global inequality has dropped through the floor compared to the 70s. People in India and China used to starve, now they have smartphones.
      - mahogany 5y ago
        To be pedantic, a reduction in poverty is not the same as a reduction in inequality. Your example of India and China seems to be pointing to the former. Also, from a US-centric point of view, it seems to me that economic inequality has gotten worse since the 70s, or at least the 80s. See for example: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-... or https://academic.oup.com/cje/article-abstract/37/4/921/1712745 https://academic.oup.com/cje/article-abstract/37/4/921/17127.... I'm not sure what the parent commenter meant, but when I think "precarious economy", I'm thinking about things like wage stagnation and rising costs of healthcare, housing, and debt, rather than the fact that people now have iPhones (which for many are only affordable if paid for in monthly installments over years).
pydry 5y ago
The computers and communication tech you love were developed as a result of the moon landing. Loads of stuff like that entered the public domain. That's apart from improvements in digital imaging, large scale manufacturing, material sciences and flight control that were derived from the project. Moreover, it was a longer term investment in humankind becoming a spacefaring species - something that will be necessary for our survival. It was a bargain.
- eru 5y ago
  You are missing opportunity costs. All the resources that went into the moonlanding could have gone into something else. Eg could have stayed in private hands. For a different example: Yes, in the real world WW2 sort-of gave us computers. But IBM (and similar companies) would have invented electronic general purpose computers anyway, and probably sooner, if there hadn't been a war going on.

swiley 5y ago

how fast the ads can load Of course in the 70s they had over the air TV so the ads loaded instantly.

Cerium 5y ago
They just had very low jitter networks. Displays in that age didn't even have enough space to buffer a single frame. The ads loaded no faster than real-time.

mustacheemperor 5y ago

I can put on a lightweight headset and hang out to shoot pool with a group of strangers from around the world in virtual reality. In my lifetime countries, including political enemies, worked together to build a space station that has been continually occupied by humans, each usually staying long term, since it became habitable. I watched the F-35 hover over the water and shoot out of sight instantly at Fleet Week, and I can wirelessly throw an essentially unlimited supply of media from throughout history onto a TV I can’t perceive the pixels on. I can fly across california for $100 round trip and instead of owning a car I can rent an electric one with an app on my phone. The air isn’t polluted by leaded gasoline. The equal employment act and title ix didn’t pass until 1972, America is a more balanced and equitable society today than it was in 1970. All that to say I find this take is needlessly pessimistic from multiple angles, and I disagree.

masswerk 5y ago
Hm. In 1969, you could watch a Harrier jet hover the water and shoot out of sight and several emancipatory legislations were a direct result of these era. (In fact, you could watch Apollo 16 going to the moon and celebrate the equal employment act passed just the previous month.) And it's also the 1970s, when awareness rose for environmental issues (like leaded gasoline and many more). Regarding pixels, well, there were still some high-res vector displays left (otherwise, there weren't any compression artefacts, at least). ;-)
- buran77 5y ago
  The view OP presents is a bit grim though. Most of the real "modernity" of the '70s was not something regular people would enjoy. Going to the Moon, or the Concorde were no different from today's fusion experiments, including the fact that they were based heavily on "earlier work". Perhaps society decided to turn that progress into something a regular person could benefit from. Think EVs, or a network of internet satellites, work from home (and everything supporting that), getting all your shopping delivered at home, all the virtual "networks" (I don't mean FB here, any networking possibility) you can imagine, and all the knowledge now available from the comfort of your own personal pocket device. There are also plenty of social movements and evolution, think on the line of equal rights, that may have been rooted in the '70s but were completely in the realm of the implausible until the last 2 decades. Of course people no longer see that as evolution and modernity because so many were born into them already. They look like normality. And even the "modernity" that was available to normal people in their daily lives was mostly for the sake of the looks. I lived in some modern buildings of the '70s (not unlike the one presented in the article) and that wasn't modernity, it was creativity and embellishment mixed with a lot of impracticality. They were more art than practical creation. The result of the same current that gave birth to The Jetsons a decade earlier, just put in tangible reality in the '70s.

systemvoltage 5y ago

70's and 80's were peak of humans I believe. It will be hard to undo all the crap we've built including the internet which I have mixed feelings about.

knolax 5y ago

I've gotten into camping and climbing recently and every time I walk into an REI I'm pretty amazed at how different the gear is from when I was younger. Might not be as flashy but there certainly has been a great deal of improvement in pretty much every consumer good there is.

FabHK 5y ago
Indeed. Got a new bicycle recently, and most components (saddle, light, brakes, gears, etc.) are better in many small ways and large.
the-dude 5y ago
This week I bought a gardening scissor ( to cut small branches ). "Main" : modern looking, lots of plastic, maybe had 'advanced' features ( I couldn't imagine what those would be ) Close to € 25. "House brand" : more or less the same as the main About € 14 "Basic" or "Budget" : the exactly same scissor I remember my parents had, and everybody had in 70s & 80s. € 3,19

kiba 5y ago

Today, we're working on building retro sci-fi style rockets with volume greater than the ISS. Pretty exciting time to be alive.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
Yes, though this and electric cars both required a single man with combination of wealth, charisma and ability to think beyond their own wallet - which is a very rare set of characteristics to coincide in a single person - who then could drag the market kicking and screaming into accepting EVs and reusable rockets. Unfortunately, depending on such happenstance doesn't scale, so it's not a reliable way of creating a better future.
- pell 5y ago
  I think you're giving Musk too much credit here.
- eru 5y ago
  > Yes, though this and electric cars both required a single man with combination of wealth, charisma and ability to think beyond their own wallet [...] Elon Musk became the richest African-American in the process. I don't think he needed to think beyond his own wallet? (He might have or not. I don't know what he's thinking.)
  - ben_w 5y ago
    Both SpaceX and Tesla came close to bankruptcy, and he started the former and took over the latter with enough PayPal money to spend the rest of his life in extreme comfort.
    - eru 5y ago
      He certainly seems to have a high enough risk tolerance. But I am fairly sure he still his (subjective) expected value was still positive.
  - 5y ago

nitwit005 5y ago

At least from a Japanese point of view, the 70s were a bit depressing because that was the end of their economic boom.

nereye 5y ago
Maybe you’re thinking of the 90s? The ‘lost decade’ is considered to have started in 1991, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_(Japan) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_(Japan) and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_economic_miracle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_economic_miracle.
- nitwit005 5y ago
  From that article (edit: second article): > The economical miracle can be divided into four stages: the recovery (1946–1954), the high increase (1955–1972), the steady increase (1972–1992), and the low increase (1992–2017). The period of highest growth ended in the 70s, which ended some of the optimism of that period.
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    If I remember right the steady increase was ended by a huge asset bubble.
    - FabHK 5y ago
      Yes, the Nikkei 225 still hasn't reached its 1989 peak, see the graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikkei_225 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikkei_225 (Though, mind you, a price index, not total return, so not including dividends, IIRC)
    - eru 5y ago
      Not really. The problem is that their central bank let their nominal GDP implode.

everyone 5y ago

Supersonic air travel was absolutely not commonplace.

baybal2 5y ago

It's a big mystery for me how the things went down since seventies. I think the first signs of not decline, but I'd say "wind down" were quite apparent in eighties already.

FabHK 5y ago
> It's a big mystery for me how the things went down since seventies. There is a insightful (if a bit messy, and occasionally wrong) book that purports to answer that question: Where is my flying car?: A memoir of future past, by J. Storrs Hall. [1] In that author's view, it boils down to * a levelling off of energy consumption per capita, that previously had doubled every 10 years. (In particular, the author laments the dearth of advanced nuclear power, which would be good for the economy and the climate.) * increasing regulation and risk aversion. * as well as “centralized funding streams”, “bureaucratic inertia,” “cultural malaise and indifference”. [1] Reviews: https://rootsofprogress.org/where-is-my-flying-car https://rootsofprogress.org/where-is-my-flying-car https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/09/where-is-my-flying-car-a-memoir-of-future-past-by-j-storrs-hall.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/09/wh... https://jakeseliger.com/2020/12/28/where-is-my-flying-car-a-memoir-of-future-past-j-storrs-hall/ https://jakeseliger.com/2020/12/28/where-is-my-flying-car-a-...
ekianjo 5y ago
Oh you had smartphones and the web in the 70s ?
- baybal2 5y ago
  They would've indeed been outright sci-fi with a time set for few centuries in the future. Now we have them, and don't much give a damn how sci-fi the semi industry became. Concordes on other sides were a cult icon even when they were flying. People were saving money to "fly on a Concorde once in a lifetime"
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

joe_the_user 5y ago

In the 1970s, plane travel was rare and expensive, with high quality service and everything sparkling. Long distance phone calls were exciting. There was much less future, it was less advanced but it felt more special, yes.

eru 5y ago
Part of the reason air travel was rare and expensive was regulation. De-regulation of air travel made it cheap and commonplace. See eg https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/AirlineDeregulation.html https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/AirlineDeregulation.html
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  Yep, Deregulation made air travel cheap, commonplace and miserable. I took Greyhound across the country several times in t70s. The quality of travel in airplanes is essentially at that level - but much faster of course. The 1950-70s were an era of regulated private monopolies. Those regulation stood in the way of all sorts of progress but also gave a substantial portion of the working class a middle class income. I'm not going to argue whether one was better than the other because the change was inevitable, we'll never change back, just "change forward" to some further situation.
  - eru 5y ago
    You can still get really, really good air travel, if you are willing to pay those past prices.

andi999 5y ago

"In the past everything was better, even the future" (K. Valentin, translated)

ekianjo 5y ago

> supersonic air travel was commonplace, Only if you had deep pockets

gavinmckenzie 5y ago
I had the pleasure of flying the Concorde, almost by accident, in the 90s. Yes, I was flying on business, but for some reason I couldn't get a flight on KLM to the Netherlands at all that week and my creative travel agent mused "Hey, do you want to take the Concorde?" The cost was $3500, which at the time was within a couple of hundred dollars compared to a business-class seat on KLM. Yes, that ticket price wasn't something I'd contemplate for personal travel, and it was a bit discounted at that; but for business travel it certainly wasn't exorbitant.

loloquwowndueo 5y ago

Edit: CAT videos. I meant to say cat videos :)

teel 5y ago
Heh, thanks for correcting the typo, that saved my Friday afternoon :) I had not heard car videos are so popular nowadays that their download speed can be used as a measure of modernity. But actually, that did not surprise me any more, more like the opposite. I feel that the older I get (I was born in 76), the more I see and hear things related to computers, music, media that apparently are very popular now I have never heard of. Sometimes it feels like I'm forever stuck in the 90's in a way. I mean, music was best in 90s-early 2000s, All you bases belonged to us as far as the best memes go and so on. But then again, with the technology in my hands today, I wouldn't change it to 90's junk in a million years.

bregma 5y ago

In the 1970s we lived under the shadow of The Bomb. We assumed our future was as glowing cinders under literally leaden skies. Now, the future in the 1960s was wonderful. Spaceships! Atomic-powered flying cars! Jet travel to anywhere in the world! Air raid drills with duck and cover! That past had a future!

eru 5y ago

> [...] supersonic air travel was commonplace, [...] It was more commonplace than now, but flying in general was much, much more expensive, and supersonic travel even more.