4 ms·

It depends on how much lifting the word fundamentally is doing. On one side, we are born, maybe reproduce, then we die. Fundamentally the same. On the other ext

It depends on how much lifting the word fundamentally is doing. On one side, we are born, maybe reproduce, then we die. Fundamentally the same. On the other extreme we have tik tok so the times are fundamentally different.

konschubert 3y ago
We have penicillin and much better cancer therapy and jet airplanes. Humans have stepped on the moon.
- turnsout 3y ago
  In 1923 they'd say "we have modern medicine and air travel" and feel just as smug. Jets and the moon landing are cool, but they happened closer to 1923 than 2023.
  - konschubert 3y ago
    I am not feeling smug, I am saying that there has been progress in the past 100 years.
    - turnsout 3y ago
      The point is not that there hasn’t been progress. The point is that the alleged explosion of the economy has not fundamentally changed society, which seems to run counter to OP’s point. I maintain that the lives of most people—while measurably better in many ways—are not fundamentally different than they were 100 years ago. In 1923, there were people in Queens who took the train into Manhattan to work at a pharmacy, saving up to buy a radio. Substitute laptop for radio and that story is still happening today. The economy is “bigger” but thanks to inflation, does it matter? So I reject OP’s premise that the “growth” of the economy is unsustainable or somehow alarming.
      - mlyle 3y ago
        > I maintain that the lives of most people—while measurably better in many ways—are not fundamentally different than they were 100 years ago. Average hours worked per week was about 25% more than today, with much more of your earnings going to necessity. Your odds of surviving from 18 to retirement age were roughly 50-50. You might not expect to be able to afford to actually retire depending upon your occupation. > Substitute laptop for radio and that story is still happening today. A cheap radio in 1923 cost far more than a cheap laptop today. Even more so if we compare to typical wages, and even more so if we compare to disposable income. > So I reject OP’s premise that the “growth” of the economy is unsustainable or somehow alarming. Resource intensity per person is far higher than in 1923. See the graph on page 3 of https://pubs.usgs.gov/annrev/ar-23-107/aerdocnew.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/annrev/ar-23-107/aerdocnew.pdf
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Well, jets then and jets now are two different things. As for medicine, 1923 was around the time when anything resembling medicine begun to form, and people actually started to understand what they're doing. This is one of those fields that only begun in the earnest in the last 100 years.
    - starttoaster 3y ago
      > As for medicine, 1923 was around the time when anything resembling medicine begun to form I, for one, resent that modern medicine has decided to debase phrenology as a science. /s
  - boxed 3y ago
    And they were RIGHT. Enormously so. In 1823 life was absolute shit compared to 1923. And life in 1723 was absolute shit compared to 1823.
    - jvm___ 3y ago
      Hopefully life in 2123 won't be absolute shit compared to 2023. Maybe for the surviving people 2123 will be ok but the mass death that seems likely before then will suck.
      - southernplaces7 3y ago
        And what remotely concrete thing makes you so sure that there will be new levels of mass death between now and 2123?
        jvm___ 3y ago
        The climate changes seem to be catastrophic and already baked into the system. Geoengineering might work but the fixes won't be equally distributed and the poor will suffer the most. I don't see a way out of a massive redistribution of who lives where, which will come with strife and maybe death.
        panarchy 3y ago
        And there's always the chance that our attempts at geoengineering fuck things over even more. Like throwing water onto a oil fire.
        jvm___ 3y ago
        There was a interesting video that correlated the extreme north Atlantic warming with the changes in sulpher content in cargo ship fuel. Less sulpher fuels means less bits in the atmosphere to seed rain and reflective clouds. The good news was that we could seed clouds by just spraying salt water from the ocean. The water would evaporate and the salt would just fall back into the ocean after it seeded more clouds.
  - idopmstuff 3y ago
    But how many people would have actually flown on an airplane? What makes lives meaningfully different isn't whether a thing exists in the world somewhere; it's whether people experience it.
  - mlyle 3y ago
    > In 1923 they'd say "we have modern medicine and air travel" Not really. Penicillin was ~1930. Ford Air Transport Service was founded in 1925. Typical people didn't have a whole lot. Indoor plumbing was only starting to become commonplace in the late 1920s. Radio only reached the majority of homes in the 1930s. Only about half of families had a car by 1923.
    - jvm___ 3y ago
      In the 1940 USA census 50% of houses reported having indoor plumbing.
      - mlyle 3y ago
        The issue here is defining what indoor plumbing is. It was a small majority in 1940 if you include heated water, a bath, and a flush toilet exclusive to that dwelling unit. If you include toilets alone and apartments with shared toilet facilities, the majority was reached a bit earlier-- around 1930, meaning that I judged indoor plumbing was rapidly becoming commonplace in the late 20s. In 1923, a huge chunk of households still used kerosene lamps as a primary means of lighting (it was a decent percentage in 1940, even).
        jvm___ 3y ago
        Agreed, but they didn't ask the indoor plumbing question in the earlier censuses because it wasn't worth asking.
- mr_toad 3y ago
  > We have penicillin and much better cancer therapy and jet airplanes. Humans have stepped on the moon. We have domestic electric refrigerators (since 1927). Cold beer on a hot afternoon. The development of refrigeration has transformed the world’s economy, and is a good example of how technology can multiply economic growth.
turnsout 3y ago
Yeah, I guess I'm thinking: although we have the internet (neat!), most of western society is still organized around getting educated, getting a job and working for a living. It was not always this way, and if the OP was correct, we might expect that 100 years of explosive growth would have dramatically reshaped the structure of society. Basically, it hasn't. In 1923, you might have supported your family by working in a factory putting buttons on coats. Today, you might work in an office putting buttons on webpages. We have not descended back into feudalism; technology hasn't eliminated the need to work; socialism never took off. Nothing has fundamentally changed.
- stanski 3y ago
  Interesting that you are comparing a 1923 factory job to one in web development. It's a very delightful stretch of the imagination to put those two in the same sentence.
  - turnsout 3y ago
    As someone who has done both parts assembly and web dev, I assure you they are not worlds apart.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      I've also done both. Factory (making HVAC) had a truck-sized door open to the elements at all times. And workplace health and safety has changed a lot since 1923, like you're no longer supposed to use bare hands when threading synthetic wool through a mix of acid and formaldehyde: https://youtu.be/O4pVny7NV8E https://youtu.be/O4pVny7NV8E
wussboy 3y ago
> On one side, we are born, maybe reproduce, then we die I think you could probably back that one up earlier than "100 years ago".
II2II 3y ago
> On one side, we are born, maybe reproduce, then we die. Fundamentally the same. Yet birth can involve medical procedures to protect the life of both child and mother. When and how often we choose to have children is different. We don't need to have as many children (indeed, it is undesirable to have as many children) because of that last point, how and when we die. While the causes of death to the body may be the same, the distribution of those causes is different since we tend to live to an older age. About 10 years ago, I went to an abandoned cemetary in a remote community. It was quite tragic simply seeing the distribution of those deaths. A great many were infants. A great many more were teens and young adults. Then there were the elders. While we still have deaths at all ages, we don't have as many people dying so young because the in between things, the factors in people's lives that cause them to die at a young age, are not a part of our lives. We must be careful about over generalizations and trivializing the challenges of past eras.
- mejutoco 3y ago
  I did not trivialize them. I think my tik tok example came accross as sarcastic maybe? We can replace it with modern medicine and half the comments would agree with the interpretation. My whole point is it really depends on the interpretation of fundamentally. I am not advocating for any interpretation in particular. I thought it was completely uncontroversial. It is the old topic of Parmenides (nothing changes) or Heraclitus (everything is in permanent change).
johnnyworker 3y ago
It's not doing any lifting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word As for changes: > For biodiversity loss, the estimated current boundary level of >100 extinctions per million species-years exceeds the space available in the figure. https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2009/2009_Rockstrom_ro06010m.pdf https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2009/2009_Rockstrom_ro06010m...

konschubert 3y ago

We have penicillin and much better cancer therapy and jet airplanes. Humans have stepped on the moon.

turnsout 3y ago
In 1923 they'd say "we have modern medicine and air travel" and feel just as smug. Jets and the moon landing are cool, but they happened closer to 1923 than 2023.
- konschubert 3y ago
  I am not feeling smug, I am saying that there has been progress in the past 100 years.
  - turnsout 3y ago
    The point is not that there hasn’t been progress. The point is that the alleged explosion of the economy has not fundamentally changed society, which seems to run counter to OP’s point. I maintain that the lives of most people—while measurably better in many ways—are not fundamentally different than they were 100 years ago. In 1923, there were people in Queens who took the train into Manhattan to work at a pharmacy, saving up to buy a radio. Substitute laptop for radio and that story is still happening today. The economy is “bigger” but thanks to inflation, does it matter? So I reject OP’s premise that the “growth” of the economy is unsustainable or somehow alarming.
    - mlyle 3y ago
      > I maintain that the lives of most people—while measurably better in many ways—are not fundamentally different than they were 100 years ago. Average hours worked per week was about 25% more than today, with much more of your earnings going to necessity. Your odds of surviving from 18 to retirement age were roughly 50-50. You might not expect to be able to afford to actually retire depending upon your occupation. > Substitute laptop for radio and that story is still happening today. A cheap radio in 1923 cost far more than a cheap laptop today. Even more so if we compare to typical wages, and even more so if we compare to disposable income. > So I reject OP’s premise that the “growth” of the economy is unsustainable or somehow alarming. Resource intensity per person is far higher than in 1923. See the graph on page 3 of https://pubs.usgs.gov/annrev/ar-23-107/aerdocnew.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/annrev/ar-23-107/aerdocnew.pdf
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Well, jets then and jets now are two different things. As for medicine, 1923 was around the time when anything resembling medicine begun to form, and people actually started to understand what they're doing. This is one of those fields that only begun in the earnest in the last 100 years.
  - starttoaster 3y ago
    > As for medicine, 1923 was around the time when anything resembling medicine begun to form I, for one, resent that modern medicine has decided to debase phrenology as a science. /s
- boxed 3y ago
  And they were RIGHT. Enormously so. In 1823 life was absolute shit compared to 1923. And life in 1723 was absolute shit compared to 1823.
  - jvm___ 3y ago
    Hopefully life in 2123 won't be absolute shit compared to 2023. Maybe for the surviving people 2123 will be ok but the mass death that seems likely before then will suck.
    - southernplaces7 3y ago
      And what remotely concrete thing makes you so sure that there will be new levels of mass death between now and 2123?
      - jvm___ 3y ago
        The climate changes seem to be catastrophic and already baked into the system. Geoengineering might work but the fixes won't be equally distributed and the poor will suffer the most. I don't see a way out of a massive redistribution of who lives where, which will come with strife and maybe death.
        panarchy 3y ago
        And there's always the chance that our attempts at geoengineering fuck things over even more. Like throwing water onto a oil fire.
        jvm___ 3y ago
        There was a interesting video that correlated the extreme north Atlantic warming with the changes in sulpher content in cargo ship fuel. Less sulpher fuels means less bits in the atmosphere to seed rain and reflective clouds. The good news was that we could seed clouds by just spraying salt water from the ocean. The water would evaporate and the salt would just fall back into the ocean after it seeded more clouds.
- idopmstuff 3y ago
  But how many people would have actually flown on an airplane? What makes lives meaningfully different isn't whether a thing exists in the world somewhere; it's whether people experience it.
- mlyle 3y ago
  > In 1923 they'd say "we have modern medicine and air travel" Not really. Penicillin was ~1930. Ford Air Transport Service was founded in 1925. Typical people didn't have a whole lot. Indoor plumbing was only starting to become commonplace in the late 1920s. Radio only reached the majority of homes in the 1930s. Only about half of families had a car by 1923.
  - jvm___ 3y ago
    In the 1940 USA census 50% of houses reported having indoor plumbing.
    - mlyle 3y ago
      The issue here is defining what indoor plumbing is. It was a small majority in 1940 if you include heated water, a bath, and a flush toilet exclusive to that dwelling unit. If you include toilets alone and apartments with shared toilet facilities, the majority was reached a bit earlier-- around 1930, meaning that I judged indoor plumbing was rapidly becoming commonplace in the late 20s. In 1923, a huge chunk of households still used kerosene lamps as a primary means of lighting (it was a decent percentage in 1940, even).
      - jvm___ 3y ago
        Agreed, but they didn't ask the indoor plumbing question in the earlier censuses because it wasn't worth asking.
mr_toad 3y ago
> We have penicillin and much better cancer therapy and jet airplanes. Humans have stepped on the moon. We have domestic electric refrigerators (since 1927). Cold beer on a hot afternoon. The development of refrigeration has transformed the world’s economy, and is a good example of how technology can multiply economic growth.

turnsout 3y ago

Yeah, I guess I'm thinking: although we have the internet (neat!), most of western society is still organized around getting educated, getting a job and working for a living. It was not always this way, and if the OP was correct, we might expect that 100 years of explosive growth would have dramatically reshaped the structure of society. Basically, it hasn't. In 1923, you might have supported your family by working in a factory putting buttons on coats. Today, you might work in an office putting buttons on webpages. We have not descended back into feudalism; technology hasn't eliminated the need to work; socialism never took off. Nothing has fundamentally changed.

stanski 3y ago
Interesting that you are comparing a 1923 factory job to one in web development. It's a very delightful stretch of the imagination to put those two in the same sentence.
- turnsout 3y ago
  As someone who has done both parts assembly and web dev, I assure you they are not worlds apart.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    I've also done both. Factory (making HVAC) had a truck-sized door open to the elements at all times. And workplace health and safety has changed a lot since 1923, like you're no longer supposed to use bare hands when threading synthetic wool through a mix of acid and formaldehyde: https://youtu.be/O4pVny7NV8E https://youtu.be/O4pVny7NV8E

wussboy 3y ago

> On one side, we are born, maybe reproduce, then we die I think you could probably back that one up earlier than "100 years ago".

II2II 3y ago

> On one side, we are born, maybe reproduce, then we die. Fundamentally the same. Yet birth can involve medical procedures to protect the life of both child and mother. When and how often we choose to have children is different. We don't need to have as many children (indeed, it is undesirable to have as many children) because of that last point, how and when we die. While the causes of death to the body may be the same, the distribution of those causes is different since we tend to live to an older age. About 10 years ago, I went to an abandoned cemetary in a remote community. It was quite tragic simply seeing the distribution of those deaths. A great many were infants. A great many more were teens and young adults. Then there were the elders. While we still have deaths at all ages, we don't have as many people dying so young because the in between things, the factors in people's lives that cause them to die at a young age, are not a part of our lives. We must be careful about over generalizations and trivializing the challenges of past eras.

mejutoco 3y ago
I did not trivialize them. I think my tik tok example came accross as sarcastic maybe? We can replace it with modern medicine and half the comments would agree with the interpretation. My whole point is it really depends on the interpretation of fundamentally. I am not advocating for any interpretation in particular. I thought it was completely uncontroversial. It is the old topic of Parmenides (nothing changes) or Heraclitus (everything is in permanent change).

johnnyworker 3y ago

It's not doing any lifting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word As for changes: > For biodiversity loss, the estimated current boundary level of >100 extinctions per million species-years exceeds the space available in the figure. https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2009/2009_Rockstrom_ro06010m.pdf https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2009/2009_Rockstrom_ro06010m...