5 ms·

Sometimes I am deeply struck by how much COVID has changed our lives

bdcravens 3y ago
There will be those events that change our lives forever, many of which we don't think about because they happened before many were even aware of how things used to be. For example, the changes introduced due to 9/11.
- lkbm 3y ago
  I was only 19 when 9/11 happened, but I don't think there was any lasting change that directly effected my day-to-day life. Airport security got much stricter, but that's an annoyance a few times a year. Things definitely changed for anyone Arabic-looking, at least for a while, and for people in certain countries (or the military). It probably changed a lot for various aspects of immigration, which I suspect had downstream effects I don't recognize as being due to 9/11. But overall, I continued to live my life as normal. COVID is pretty much the only event where I see real, lasting changes. Are there things I'm missing about 9/11? Or other big events?
  - hobs 3y ago
    Being able to continue your life as normal is just a calculation of how insulated you are from the real world. The department of homeland security and basically everything snowden brought us. The war in Iraq. The war in Afhangistan. Millions of refugees and impacted soldiers and families at home. The bringing back of militarized equipment and approaches into the cops at home.
    - lkbm 3y ago
      This might shock you, but life and the world I live in is actually as real as the ones other people live in. You don't become real by serving in the military, or having a family member in the military. It affected people in the military a lot—I mentioned that. It massively effected people in certain other countries, as I mentioned. But for the majority of people living in the US, what changed?
      - phone8675309 3y ago
        > But for the majority of people living in the US, what changed? Everyone of a certain age knows at least one of their schoolmates or college friends that died in the war. The US government used the occasion to assassinate American citizens abroad with drones with no due process. Everything you say or do on the Internet is tracked not only by advertisers but by the US government itself. Trillions of dollars spent and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani civilians are dead thanks to the war and sanctions conducted by the US. This ended up being a complete waste in Afghanistan due to the Taliban immediately retaking the country. If you can't see these as impacts then it's because your separation from them is a privilege.
        lkbm 3y ago
        > Everyone of a certain age knows at least one of their schoolmates or college friends that died in the war. What age? As I said, I was 19 at the time. For Americans, we're looking at ~2500 for Afghanistan and another ~5000 for Iraq. That's several times fewer than the number of high schools. A lot more were wounded. There's a good chance most people knew someone wounded in one of the wars. But "someone I know was killed" is true with or without the wars. If the number of fatal car accidents increased by 5%, would you say this was a major change to our day to day life? That would take about three years to exceed the total US deaths from both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars over their entire many-year time span.
        dgfitz 3y ago
        It’s not about just the dead. Think about all the people who deployed, leaving family and friends behind. Kids didn’t see their parents for months to years at a time. People got divorced. PTSD is a very real thing. To couch your arguments in a death count is quite lazy.
        lkbm 3y ago
        Reminder: this is the thing I'm responding to: "Everyone of a certain age knows at least one of their schoolmates or college friends that died in the war." I didn't come up with deaths as the metric. Notice that only one comment mentions people being wounded: mine.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - dgfitz 3y ago
    Yeah, the war. The impact it had on countless lives, directly and indirectly.
  - phone8675309 3y ago
    9/11 brought back the US Imperial Presidency, the effects of which we are still feeling today Edit: Downvote me harder, fascists
    - lr4444lr 3y ago
      You are likely being downvoted just as much for the inaccurate implication that US Imperialism only started after 9-11 as the explicit accusation of US imperialism at all.
      - dragonwriter 3y ago
        The "Imperial Presidency" is a term that is entirely orthogonal to US imperialism, though I suppose it is possible that people are ignorant enough to downvote for both of the reasons you suggest.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > 9/11 brought back the US Imperial Presidency The "imperial presidency" was pretty much a linear progression for decades before 9/11; 9/11 didn't materially impact it, and definitely didn't "bring it back" as if it had gone somewhere between when it was first identified and 9/11,
    - Mountain_Skies 3y ago
      Centralization of power in the presidency had been going on for a long time before 9/11, motivated by two things: nuclear weapons and a semi-permanent Congress. Because of the need to be able to respond quickly during a nuclear attack, much of Congress's oversight in military matters were transferred to the presidency. Also, because congress critters tend to be cowards who want to avoid doing things that would upset the voters in their district, the presidency has been given lots of regulatory power it shouldn't have. Congress critters love giving presents to voters far more than they enjoy slapping them with a bunch of regulation and restrictions. Let the president and the Executive Branch's bureaucracy take that heat. 9/11 gave the government, especially the federal government, much more power than it had before, which means everyone's slice of that power grew, but I'm not convinced that it's all that responsible for the slice for the executive branch having grown to be such a large share as it was already there before the attack.
  - vikingerik 3y ago
    Try taking a photograph of any piece of transportation infrastructure since 9/11. If any law officer sees you, you'll be drummed out of there posthaste. (Even if it is in fact legal, in which case you might be able to stay after an extensive argument.) Or try entering any New York City subway - there are random bag checks and inspection points created as a direct response to 9/11.
    - lkbm 3y ago
      > Try taking a photograph of any piece of transportation infrastructure since 9/11. If any law officer sees you, you'll be drummed out of there posthaste. (Even if it is in fact legal, in which case you might be able to stay after an extensive argument.) I think this was medium-true for a couple years, and now very rarely true, though depends exactly what you mean. People take photos and videos inside airports and subways all the time—I've never been accosted when doing it. I see videos of trains stations, subway stations, and railroad tracks all the time. > Or try entering any New York City subway - there are random bag checks and inspection points created as a direct response to 9/11. There definitely is much more surveillance and random security nonsense than before. It's a valid point that it's not something you only come across with the TSA. A lot of this security nonsense should be rolled back, obviously, but the reason people don't rebel is because....it mostly doesn't affect most people. Helps to be white, of course. As I said, Arabic people, and anyone who even looks possibly-Arabic, had a really hard time for a while, and are still facing a lot of unearned abuse.
  - shaftway 3y ago
    Militarization of the police was a pretty big change. It's less noticeable in most rural areas, but some places the police have unexpected access to hardware. Think of towns of ~1000 people that have anti-riot vehicles. That kind of access came after increased security spending after 9/11. A lot of police departments saw it as money from the heavens and were worried that if they didn't spend it, they wouldn't get more of it. There has also been an increase in police officers carrying gear that used to be restricted to SWAT teams. I've worked in a couple major cities where every day I had to walk past cops that were basically just standing around with an M4A1 strapped across their chest and their hand resting on the grip. --- The mortgage crisis around 2008 completely changed the way that homes are bought and sold. If you bought a home before that time you had to do way less paperwork and way less work to prove that you can afford the McMansion you just bought. --- The dot-com crash in the 90's fundamentally changed how startups are funded and valued. Before that crash startups didn't need to have any plan to profitability. VC decks were basically: 1. Steal underpants 2. ??? 3. Go public 4. Profit VCs still invest in bubbles, but you need a much clearer picture of how you'll become profitable one day. Amazon is a notable hold-over from those days. They've never technically turned a profit, and have no real plans to.
    - shaftway 3y ago
      https://www.nationalpriorities.org/blog/2020/08/27/small-towns-dont-need-military-helicopters/ https://www.nationalpriorities.org/blog/2020/08/27/small-tow... > Winthrop Harbor, Illinois, with under 7,000 residents, received 10 helicopters, a mine-resistant armored vehicle, two Humvees, and other equipment worth over $6.5 million. Officials claim these transfers help with “counterterrorism” operations, but it seems unlikely that Winthrop Harbor has a terrorism problem that requires 10 helicopters to address.
      - wglb 3y ago
        I live in Winthrop harbor and would love to know where this stuff is. I am reasonably familiar with the area and it would be a significant challenge to find anywhere safe to land a helicopter and nowhere to store them. I am highly skeptical of this claim.
  - lr4444lr 3y ago
    I was the same age. The military police with fully automatic weapons that to this day patrol Penn station still give me the creeps.
  - atq2119 3y ago
    > I don't think there was any lasting change that directly effected my day-to-day life. True, but only because you misspelled "affected" ;)
  - cykros 3y ago
    The KYC/AML stuff got stepped up a lot -- more just a time waster for a lot of people, and a drag on the financial industries, for better or worse (and hey, militant groups still get funding!). I think more of what 9/11 did is change the trajectory of the many systems that didn't yet exist at the time it happened. And it's hard to say what would have been had it not happened, and had we not seen the rise of the surveillance state. But you don't end up with the apparatus that Snowden revealed without at least some of that underlying architecture affecting the end-user experience.
Der_Einzige 3y ago
I feel like outside of the AI advancements, 2019 is a timeless year, and not much has changed from 2019-2024. Has it felt like anything has significantly changed since then? 2024 is just 2019 with ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion.
- kvonhorn 3y ago
  It feels like everything is noticeably more expensive now than in 2019 and I'm seeing far more homeless people and their tents. Finding a job seems way tougher now, too, even though they're claiming a 3.7% unemployment rate.
  - eropple 3y ago
    > It feels like everything is noticeably more expensive now than in 2019 Yup. The BLS suggests about a 20-25% increase on food between 2019 and 2022, and that's backed up by independent estimates. That said, we've seen much larger spikes in the past; in the 1970s you can see spikes in that ballpark in one year. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1hsGr https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1hsGr > Finding a job seems way tougher now, too, even though they're claiming a 3.7% unemployment rate. Maybe in tech (chiefly on the more junior or on the more support-ish side, from what I can tell), but that doesn't mean that "they" are describing something incorrectly--just that perhaps you're on the wrong side of an average. I mostly run in circles that are of not-tech-people, and while the jobs may suck, I get the feeling that finding them is not the hard part right now.
    - kvonhorn 3y ago
      > I mostly run in circles that are of not-tech-people, and while the jobs may suck, I get the feeling that finding them is not the hard part right now. I moved out of tech a few years back. I'm responding to ads that claim to be desperate to hire people, yet I'm not getting replies.
      - eropple 3y ago
seydor 3y ago
I'm often struck by how quickly we went back to old inefficient habits
- recursive 3y ago
  I went back to my old efficient habit. I went back to the office as soon as I was allowed. I'm more productive there, and I prefer it.
  - Xeyz0r 3y ago
    I also prefer working in the office. I am more productive there. There are many distracting factors at home, such as pets, for example
  - slooprad 3y ago
    The office should be an option, if it’s preferred and possible. I’ve never worked in an office, and hope I never have to.
- zer00eyz 3y ago
  Are they inefficient? They feel that way because you know where your local maximum is. But that isn't the maximum for a whole organization. If the people on the factory floor have to show up for work every day why should you get to stay home? If the business you're in has lots of gray legal risk, working from home means more things in writing. There are good interactions that can happen in bullpens and hallway and (I hate that I'm using this word) synergy from overheard conversations. I don't think the office as it was (open floor plan) helped any one. I don't think that we all need to go in all the time. There is a happy medium that would give us "the best of all worlds" and we should be looking for that!
  - hardware2win 3y ago
    >If the people on the factory floor have to show up for work every day why should you get to stay home? Different jobs, different pros and cons?
  - 3y ago

There will be those events that change our lives forever, many of which we don't think about because they happened before many were even aware of how things used to be. For example, the changes introduced due to 9/11.

lkbm 3y ago
I was only 19 when 9/11 happened, but I don't think there was any lasting change that directly effected my day-to-day life. Airport security got much stricter, but that's an annoyance a few times a year. Things definitely changed for anyone Arabic-looking, at least for a while, and for people in certain countries (or the military). It probably changed a lot for various aspects of immigration, which I suspect had downstream effects I don't recognize as being due to 9/11. But overall, I continued to live my life as normal. COVID is pretty much the only event where I see real, lasting changes. Are there things I'm missing about 9/11? Or other big events?
- hobs 3y ago
  Being able to continue your life as normal is just a calculation of how insulated you are from the real world. The department of homeland security and basically everything snowden brought us. The war in Iraq. The war in Afhangistan. Millions of refugees and impacted soldiers and families at home. The bringing back of militarized equipment and approaches into the cops at home.
  - lkbm 3y ago
    This might shock you, but life and the world I live in is actually as real as the ones other people live in. You don't become real by serving in the military, or having a family member in the military. It affected people in the military a lot—I mentioned that. It massively effected people in certain other countries, as I mentioned. But for the majority of people living in the US, what changed?
    - phone8675309 3y ago
      > But for the majority of people living in the US, what changed? Everyone of a certain age knows at least one of their schoolmates or college friends that died in the war. The US government used the occasion to assassinate American citizens abroad with drones with no due process. Everything you say or do on the Internet is tracked not only by advertisers but by the US government itself. Trillions of dollars spent and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani civilians are dead thanks to the war and sanctions conducted by the US. This ended up being a complete waste in Afghanistan due to the Taliban immediately retaking the country. If you can't see these as impacts then it's because your separation from them is a privilege.
      - lkbm 3y ago
        > Everyone of a certain age knows at least one of their schoolmates or college friends that died in the war. What age? As I said, I was 19 at the time. For Americans, we're looking at ~2500 for Afghanistan and another ~5000 for Iraq. That's several times fewer than the number of high schools. A lot more were wounded. There's a good chance most people knew someone wounded in one of the wars. But "someone I know was killed" is true with or without the wars. If the number of fatal car accidents increased by 5%, would you say this was a major change to our day to day life? That would take about three years to exceed the total US deaths from both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars over their entire many-year time span.
        dgfitz 3y ago
        It’s not about just the dead. Think about all the people who deployed, leaving family and friends behind. Kids didn’t see their parents for months to years at a time. People got divorced. PTSD is a very real thing. To couch your arguments in a death count is quite lazy.
        lkbm 3y ago
        Reminder: this is the thing I'm responding to: "Everyone of a certain age knows at least one of their schoolmates or college friends that died in the war." I didn't come up with deaths as the metric. Notice that only one comment mentions people being wounded: mine.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- dgfitz 3y ago
  Yeah, the war. The impact it had on countless lives, directly and indirectly.
- phone8675309 3y ago
  9/11 brought back the US Imperial Presidency, the effects of which we are still feeling today Edit: Downvote me harder, fascists
  - lr4444lr 3y ago
    You are likely being downvoted just as much for the inaccurate implication that US Imperialism only started after 9-11 as the explicit accusation of US imperialism at all.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      The "Imperial Presidency" is a term that is entirely orthogonal to US imperialism, though I suppose it is possible that people are ignorant enough to downvote for both of the reasons you suggest.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > 9/11 brought back the US Imperial Presidency The "imperial presidency" was pretty much a linear progression for decades before 9/11; 9/11 didn't materially impact it, and definitely didn't "bring it back" as if it had gone somewhere between when it was first identified and 9/11,
  - Mountain_Skies 3y ago
    Centralization of power in the presidency had been going on for a long time before 9/11, motivated by two things: nuclear weapons and a semi-permanent Congress. Because of the need to be able to respond quickly during a nuclear attack, much of Congress's oversight in military matters were transferred to the presidency. Also, because congress critters tend to be cowards who want to avoid doing things that would upset the voters in their district, the presidency has been given lots of regulatory power it shouldn't have. Congress critters love giving presents to voters far more than they enjoy slapping them with a bunch of regulation and restrictions. Let the president and the Executive Branch's bureaucracy take that heat. 9/11 gave the government, especially the federal government, much more power than it had before, which means everyone's slice of that power grew, but I'm not convinced that it's all that responsible for the slice for the executive branch having grown to be such a large share as it was already there before the attack.
- vikingerik 3y ago
  Try taking a photograph of any piece of transportation infrastructure since 9/11. If any law officer sees you, you'll be drummed out of there posthaste. (Even if it is in fact legal, in which case you might be able to stay after an extensive argument.) Or try entering any New York City subway - there are random bag checks and inspection points created as a direct response to 9/11.
  - lkbm 3y ago
    > Try taking a photograph of any piece of transportation infrastructure since 9/11. If any law officer sees you, you'll be drummed out of there posthaste. (Even if it is in fact legal, in which case you might be able to stay after an extensive argument.) I think this was medium-true for a couple years, and now very rarely true, though depends exactly what you mean. People take photos and videos inside airports and subways all the time—I've never been accosted when doing it. I see videos of trains stations, subway stations, and railroad tracks all the time. > Or try entering any New York City subway - there are random bag checks and inspection points created as a direct response to 9/11. There definitely is much more surveillance and random security nonsense than before. It's a valid point that it's not something you only come across with the TSA. A lot of this security nonsense should be rolled back, obviously, but the reason people don't rebel is because....it mostly doesn't affect most people. Helps to be white, of course. As I said, Arabic people, and anyone who even looks possibly-Arabic, had a really hard time for a while, and are still facing a lot of unearned abuse.
- shaftway 3y ago
  Militarization of the police was a pretty big change. It's less noticeable in most rural areas, but some places the police have unexpected access to hardware. Think of towns of ~1000 people that have anti-riot vehicles. That kind of access came after increased security spending after 9/11. A lot of police departments saw it as money from the heavens and were worried that if they didn't spend it, they wouldn't get more of it. There has also been an increase in police officers carrying gear that used to be restricted to SWAT teams. I've worked in a couple major cities where every day I had to walk past cops that were basically just standing around with an M4A1 strapped across their chest and their hand resting on the grip. --- The mortgage crisis around 2008 completely changed the way that homes are bought and sold. If you bought a home before that time you had to do way less paperwork and way less work to prove that you can afford the McMansion you just bought. --- The dot-com crash in the 90's fundamentally changed how startups are funded and valued. Before that crash startups didn't need to have any plan to profitability. VC decks were basically: 1. Steal underpants 2. ??? 3. Go public 4. Profit VCs still invest in bubbles, but you need a much clearer picture of how you'll become profitable one day. Amazon is a notable hold-over from those days. They've never technically turned a profit, and have no real plans to.
  - shaftway 3y ago
    https://www.nationalpriorities.org/blog/2020/08/27/small-towns-dont-need-military-helicopters/ https://www.nationalpriorities.org/blog/2020/08/27/small-tow... > Winthrop Harbor, Illinois, with under 7,000 residents, received 10 helicopters, a mine-resistant armored vehicle, two Humvees, and other equipment worth over $6.5 million. Officials claim these transfers help with “counterterrorism” operations, but it seems unlikely that Winthrop Harbor has a terrorism problem that requires 10 helicopters to address.
    - wglb 3y ago
      I live in Winthrop harbor and would love to know where this stuff is. I am reasonably familiar with the area and it would be a significant challenge to find anywhere safe to land a helicopter and nowhere to store them. I am highly skeptical of this claim.
- lr4444lr 3y ago
  I was the same age. The military police with fully automatic weapons that to this day patrol Penn station still give me the creeps.
- atq2119 3y ago
  > I don't think there was any lasting change that directly effected my day-to-day life. True, but only because you misspelled "affected" ;)
- cykros 3y ago
  The KYC/AML stuff got stepped up a lot -- more just a time waster for a lot of people, and a drag on the financial industries, for better or worse (and hey, militant groups still get funding!). I think more of what 9/11 did is change the trajectory of the many systems that didn't yet exist at the time it happened. And it's hard to say what would have been had it not happened, and had we not seen the rise of the surveillance state. But you don't end up with the apparatus that Snowden revealed without at least some of that underlying architecture affecting the end-user experience.

Der_Einzige 3y ago

I feel like outside of the AI advancements, 2019 is a timeless year, and not much has changed from 2019-2024. Has it felt like anything has significantly changed since then? 2024 is just 2019 with ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion.

kvonhorn 3y ago
It feels like everything is noticeably more expensive now than in 2019 and I'm seeing far more homeless people and their tents. Finding a job seems way tougher now, too, even though they're claiming a 3.7% unemployment rate.
- eropple 3y ago
  > It feels like everything is noticeably more expensive now than in 2019 Yup. The BLS suggests about a 20-25% increase on food between 2019 and 2022, and that's backed up by independent estimates. That said, we've seen much larger spikes in the past; in the 1970s you can see spikes in that ballpark in one year. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1hsGr https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1hsGr > Finding a job seems way tougher now, too, even though they're claiming a 3.7% unemployment rate. Maybe in tech (chiefly on the more junior or on the more support-ish side, from what I can tell), but that doesn't mean that "they" are describing something incorrectly--just that perhaps you're on the wrong side of an average. I mostly run in circles that are of not-tech-people, and while the jobs may suck, I get the feeling that finding them is not the hard part right now.
  - kvonhorn 3y ago
    > I mostly run in circles that are of not-tech-people, and while the jobs may suck, I get the feeling that finding them is not the hard part right now. I moved out of tech a few years back. I'm responding to ads that claim to be desperate to hire people, yet I'm not getting replies.
    - eropple 3y ago

seydor 3y ago

I'm often struck by how quickly we went back to old inefficient habits

recursive 3y ago
I went back to my old efficient habit. I went back to the office as soon as I was allowed. I'm more productive there, and I prefer it.
- Xeyz0r 3y ago
  I also prefer working in the office. I am more productive there. There are many distracting factors at home, such as pets, for example
- slooprad 3y ago
  The office should be an option, if it’s preferred and possible. I’ve never worked in an office, and hope I never have to.
zer00eyz 3y ago
Are they inefficient? They feel that way because you know where your local maximum is. But that isn't the maximum for a whole organization. If the people on the factory floor have to show up for work every day why should you get to stay home? If the business you're in has lots of gray legal risk, working from home means more things in writing. There are good interactions that can happen in bullpens and hallway and (I hate that I'm using this word) synergy from overheard conversations. I don't think the office as it was (open floor plan) helped any one. I don't think that we all need to go in all the time. There is a happy medium that would give us "the best of all worlds" and we should be looking for that!
- hardware2win 3y ago
  >If the people on the factory floor have to show up for work every day why should you get to stay home? Different jobs, different pros and cons?
- 3y ago