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The amount of stuff people used to just get done in the 20th century constantly boggles my mind. It feels like everything is so hamstrung and bottlenecked toda
by Wolfenstein98k 5y ago
The amount of stuff people used to just get done in the 20th century constantly boggles my mind.
It feels like everything is so hamstrung and bottlenecked today by comparison.
- Railsify 5y ago"hamstrung and bottlenecked", that's called regulation.
- cortesoft 5y agoYeah, back then we didn’t care if lots of people died.
- Wolfenstein98k 5y agoMost of the incidence of regulatory burden is unrelated to risk to human life.
- frutiger 5y agoWhat makes you say that? I believe most of our modern electrical/clinical/construction/etc. standards have saved many lives.
- _ofdw 5y agoDepends. I work in Aerospace and most of our regulations are written in blood, as they say. I prefer to paraphrase A Few Good Men: "We follow rules, or people die".
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y agoWell, we cared, but we also understood that death is part of life, and some things are worth the risk. At least worth it to those doing the dangerous jobs. Don't think for a moment these guys didn't know how dangerous their jobs were.
- Railsify 5y agoThat's right. We are not talking about forced labor. Choosing to risk your life to better the lives of your family members and society is part of being part of a community.
- DenisM 5y agoHow about SpaceX? It's like shooting a bullet into the sky so that falls back into the barrel of the gun. I think it's up there. Sadly, I can't come up with much else.
- rp1 5y agoI think the lack of "getting stuff done" is due to the innovator's dilemma on a societal scale. The marginal gain of any additional project is just too small for society, as a whole, to care about.
- laurent92 5y agoJust destroy and rebuild right. Today, we have so much experience with building things, as if every invoice is ready to be sent to order every piece of a building, that we don’t have experience with repairing. Moreover, insurances tell us that a desk or a telecom switch devaluates 25% per year, so we value the existing furnished building to basically scrap value after 5 years. But insurances evaluate at the resale price. But an equipment in-place and working has at least 90% of its purchase value for 3-10 years, if not 125% of its purchase value, since it would cost a lot of maintenance to scrap and re-plug a new one. If insurances/accounting rules admitted that equipments are worth 90% of their purchase price for 3 years, we would put more value into repairing things. Our replacement culture is rooted in the way we perform accounting.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y agoOr it could just be because everyone is wasting their lives on Facebook.
- throwawayboise 5y agoI definitely waste a ton of time on the internet. Not Facebook, but online nonetheless. It's very easy to justify, as reading about interesting things is not exactly wasted time, but hours can go by without a lot of awareness of their passing. I've given serious thought to not having internet at home, because I grew up and spent nearly half my adult life without it, and it sure sure seems that I got more done in those days.
- adventured 5y agoPeople used to waste an enormous amount of time a century ago doing things we no longer have to do, that today are either automated or sourced out to other labor. It'd be interesting to attempt to compare and contrast in a realistic manner, then vs now on time wasting and time trade-offs (was that Facebook time, a century ago, spent doing something that has been heavily automated away today?).
- KingMachiavelli 5y agoI forget what the effect is called but when some new technology or industry becomes the dominate method or form of productivity it tends to cause other areas of industry to suffer. Partly due to brain drain from previous industry X to new industry Y. It's also just that people think Y is newer and worth more so more time and energy gets moved from X to Y. In the 20th century, new building materials was one of the new technologies of the day so it makes sense that a lot of time and energy was spent doing things related to buildings/construction. The end of the 20th century and the 21st are dominated by technology and software being the growing method of productivity. Plus now we have software and math that (probably) shows moving a building 90 degrees is going to cause 10 new problems we didn't even consider in the 20th century. It's all about opportunity cost. In the 20th century we built a ton of buildings that stored and manipulated giant volumes of paper documents and physical files. Now we have databases and virtual filesystems so we don't need giant clerk offices or document storage buildings. Giant data-center buildings might be the most apt comparison on some level.
- Wolfenstein98k 5y agoInteresting, thanks. I guess in a way we perform majestically-large relocations of digital storage buildings all the time now, which as you put it is roughly equivalent.
- anamax 5y agoIt's related to Jevon's "Paradox", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox, which actually isn't a "paradox" at all, but merely an entirely foreseeable consequence of supply/demand. It's also related to "The pinnacle of {technology} happened right as it was superseded by {other technology}". (Well, duh. People stopped trying to improve {technology}, so no improvements happened.)
- Aeolun 5y agoNot entirely related, but I’m sort of sad that these giant storage buildings don’t need to exist any more. There’s something about having everything on paper, and getting a printed memo on your desk that can’t be replaced by email.
- BurningFrog 5y agoChina still gets tons of stuff done. It's a choice.
- Wolfenstein98k 5y agoChina is now, in many ways, where the US was last century (think growth rate and GDP per capita). I agree but I think they will settle down to a similar place in the coming decades.
- tamaharbor 5y agoThere is no Facebook in China. (See earlier comment).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- throwaway984393 5y agoIt's the startup vs Enterprise dilemma. Startups have no red tape, so anyone can get anything done immediately. Enterprises are the opposite. It's always been fascinating to me that billion-dollar-revenue companies will spend zero dollars on anything they don't have to, whereas a startup will blow through 50 million in a few months on an experiment.
- Wolfenstein98k 5y agoDraw two columns for each business, and compare: 1) "What we have to lose" 2) "What we have to gain"
- bobsmooth 5y agoOSHA was founded in 1971.
- crooked-v 5y agoOn the other hand, those 20th century projects casually accepted quite a lot of deaths and permanent crippling injuries as just the cost of doing business.
- throwawayboise 5y agoI don't think they were "casually" accepted, as many workplace safety rules and agencies were developed in the 20th century. There may have been a certain feeling that some level of injuries were inevitable in large industrial/construction settings, but there definitely were efforts to reduce them.
- black_13 5y agoWe accept this now we just off shored the injuries to other countries.
- amelius 5y agoWhat amazes me more is that antique stuff is often so much better than the stuff we make today, not only build quality but also design. And it is not survivor bias, because often I cannot even find equivalent new stuff with equal quality.
- adventured 5y agoIt's not very surprising, it's by design. They're intentionally not pursuing maximum quality and longevity. In most cases they're pursuing an optimization for lower to moderate cost, margin, volume of sales, manufacturing optimization, supply chain matters (including shipping). You'll make more money selling 10 humidifiers to a typical consumer over a 20 year span at $40-$60 each, than what you could ever max them out on for one humidifier that will last that full 20 years. If you're the business in question, it's illogical to pursue any other path unless you're making a conscious choice to give up profit to specifically build something of vastly superior quality. It's obviously not because we can't do it. The great majority of consumers won't pay for it and or can't afford it. It's cheap-rotational-product-as-a-service. Most consumers don't have the purchasing power to buy a $500 humidifier (and or don't want to save up to do so), and they want to allocate their money elsewhere at a given time, so the $39.95 plastic cheap humidifier that'll last 2-3 years wins every time (that way they can buy 10-12 things that last a few years for $40 instead of one per year for a decade). Or put another way, it's payday loan consumerism.
- ksdale 5y agoThere's also a large element of survivorship bias. Everything that's left is the stuff that was built well enough to last, and we don't see all the other things that are long gone.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago> If you're the business in question, it's illogical to pursue any other path unless you're making a conscious choice to give up profit to specifically build something of vastly superior quality. The logic is that customers will prefer your product and you'll take market share from competitors. But that logic only works if you're small. If you have 2% of the market and making a better product would allow you to take 5% of the market, you do it. If you have 30% of the market and making a better product would allow you to take 33% of the market, at the cost of having a longer interval between repeat business, eh. So the real problem is that we have too much consolidation and vertical integration. It's too hard to start a new company that goes from zero to 5% of the market in the first year by making a better product. So that's not what happens anymore. And it's in the interest of the consolidated incumbents to sell you a new device every three years, not to sell you a 20% more expensive device that lasts for decades. Although I wonder if an upstart couldn't still disrupt this in some markets. The Korean automakers took a big chunk of the market from out of nowhere by offering triple the usual powertrain warranties. What happens if you design a washing machine to last for decades and sell it with a 30 year warranty?
- lettergram 5y agoPut another way, "it's amazing what people can do when you get out of their way." I feel as if I'm always swimming up a river to get things done, "well so-and-so wouldn't approve", "what about XXXX", "YYYY wont be ready until March, etc. etc." People used to grow up needing to milk the cows every day. There wasn't time to waste, get going and get it done. Regulations were more minimal and everything was contractual. Today, you need permits to change a kitchen sink, you'll get a ticket for not wearing a seat belt, etc. etc.
- 656565656565 5y agoIn my opinion it feels like regulation has gone from serving a purpose (we will review a to protect b) to the default standard (we will deeply review a-z because it is ‘best practice’).
- reaperducer 5y agoI feel as if I'm always swimming up a river to get things done We used to call those "salmon days." You spend all day swimming against the current, only to get screwed in the end.
- jareklupinski 5y agocheck out the Sarcophagus structure as it is slid over Chernobyl NPP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7aMcKinrWY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7aMcKinrWY
- reaperducer 5y agoThe amount of stuff people used to just get done in the 20th century constantly boggles my mind. Yep. The downtowns of entire cities were elevated dozens of feet. Rivers were reversed. Tunnels were blasted through mountains because it was the most direct route, initial cost be damned. In the 20th century, renumbering the addresses of an entire city was so inconsequential that in some places it happened multiple times. Today, that could never happen. People just don't have the will to do anything big anymore, unless there's a buck in it. "Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir mens’ blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency." — Daniel Burnham (1846-1912)
- orangeoxidation 5y agoCertainly impressive. ... But we are still doing this, today. Though not excactly by hand-crank. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_relocation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_relocation
- m4rtink 5y agoYeah, for example in 1975 the whole historical church of Most in Czechoslovakia was moved by almost a full kilometer via rail and hydraulics, to enable lignite coal mining beneath its former location: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/moved-church-of-most-kostel-nanebevzeti-panny-marie-church-of-the-assumption-of-the-virgin-mary https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/moved-church-of-most-kos...
- eyelidlessness 5y agoAt time of writing this reply I don’t see anyone challenging this premise, so fine I’ll go for it. Tons of stuff gets done all the time. All around us. A lot of it is unremarkable because it’s so commonplace. Where I live, most of Seattle’s most vulnerable buildings have been retrofitted for earthquakes with nearly no fanfare. It’s an enormous task, but it happened gradually and in compliance with regulations. It doesn’t fit the narrative of getting stuff done I’m some big show of accomplishment, but it certainly fits the narrative of the original tweet.
- Wolfenstein98k 5y agoThat's a good point, thanks. I was thinking of it in contrast with all the subway projects that don't happen and cost ten times as much now, and things like that - think Collison's lists.
- Animats 5y agoThe huge and hugely expensive East Side Access project in NYC is almost finished. Test trains are running and the Governor of New York just made a visit. That involved putting an 8 track, two level railroad station underneath Grand Central Station, 140 feet below ground. San Francisco's subway from SOMA to Union Square to Chinatown opens in 2022.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Animats 5y agoBuildings are moved routinely now. Mammoet just moved Pier 70 in San Francisco.[1] They moved their own US HQ building in Texas, although that was more showing off.[2] Since the invention of self propelled modular transporters, you can move pretty much anything you can jack up. [1] https://www.mammoet.com/news/mammoet-moves-historic-building-for-pier-70 https://www.mammoet.com/news/mammoet-moves-historic-building... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cjafqoHnh8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cjafqoHnh8