4 ms·

Ask HN: Do you think your life better or worse than it was 4 years ago?

• politelemon 2y ago
  It's difficult to give a blanket statement over it. Some ways are better and some are worse. I wonder if you look at specific parts of your life and compare it to the 'before' whether you'd see some things as better and some as worse?
• DamonHD 2y ago
  Better
• Cypher 2y ago
  worse. Lost decade for me.
  • playingalong 2y ago
    Don't give up. There are still 5 or 6 years in the decade. We are not even half way through.
• eesmith 2y ago
  Worse. The planetary-scale catastrophe is coming towards us. We are far from prepared and aren't taking anywhere near enough action, both in reducing greenhouse emissions and in increasing infrastructure resilience. Effectively every rich person has demonstrated conclusively that don't care for democracy or the well-being of others, while we give them yet more power. The tech field - I started in the personal computing era of the 1980s - has been effectively taken over by three OS companies, all based in the US. National and state governments are walking into a golden trap of Microsoft services. My options of living without a smartphone are increasingly curtailed. Ad-tech and automated surveillance systems are fucking everywhere, and the former is 100% focused on getting us to buy more. "Voluntary" user agreements and permission fatigue are the bane of the modern digital era. Local clubs (both bars and activity-oriented) have mostly disappeared as people stay home glue to their phones, so community bonds have faded away. The shift to apps, and the decontextualizing of labor, mean the only thing people get to decide on is sales price, not quality, nor environmental impact, nor the well-being of the employees. Four years ago was the dark time of COVID, but the first vaccines were on the way, offering a light. We are now even less prepared for future pandemics, COVID or otherwise, as anti-masking has been entrenched as a moral right for some. Furthermore, the pandemic showed our health systems are underfunded and ill-equipped for black swan events, which the recent mpox outbreak reminds us are likely not as rare in the future as we've planned for.
  • AbstractH24 2y ago
    It's interesting. I resonate with all of this. Yet I somehow feel confident that we're in the process of turning a corner and things are on the upswing. Something I don't get the sense you have.
    • eesmith 2y ago
      What is the basis of your confidence? When tech companies say the need more power, and want more coal plants, and more nuclear reactors, and promise the techno-fantasy of working fusion power in 10 years, why should they be able to out-compete the de-carbonizing the rest of the economy? When you look at the decades of promises to cut CO2 emissions, only to see them go by the wayside, what do you think has changed? When you read about coral-reef bleaching, and the warming of coastal waters causing lobster, scallops, and clams to die off New England, and continued massive over-fishing causing billions of snow crabs to go missing off Alaska - what will make things better? When there are only two main phone OSes, it's easy for the EU to consider requiring spyware on all phones ("ChatControl"). When there's tech lock-in to the US, such that reports from the UK and Germany are calling out the obvious data sovereignty issues, and even the US is saying Microsoft is too powerful to face real consequences for its security problems - how will that be fixed? How do you solve the Florida insurance problem? When will the Ogallala go dry? How long until the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation collapses? I could go on.
      • AbstractH24 2y ago
        I think the biggest basis is despite the fact that life felt bleak and problems insurmountable in 2020/21, by and large society has overcome and returned to normal. Not entirely, but as a Newyorker at least I can confidently say October 2024 seemed a lot more similar to October 2019 than October 2020. After experiencing that, I feel confident that on a societal level most things can be overcome and most people in society will find ways to adapt. Not always all, but a majority.
        • eesmith 2y ago