> None of this resonates with you on a personal level?
Not really, no.
Don't get me wrong, 5 years ago I was in the UK, I moved to Berlin towards the end of 2018. Visiting the UK again last December… it felt very broken.
But it was the same kind of broken that I saw in Portsmouth when I was a child. And Berlin still feels as good as it did on my first visit.
Landlords being greedy? Sure. That's one of the things Marx and (from what little I've read of him) Adam Smith agreed on.
People are loud? I'm remembering a neighbour in my mid-terrace place in Sheffield in 2009-10, the husband and wife yelled at each other every night loud enough I could hear the words. I'm remembering a biker housemate in Cambridge who openly discussed the motorcycles with illegal loud exhausts. I'm remembering the stories in my childhood about illegal raves being shut down.
Worker apathy, that's hard to gauge. Could therefore believe it if it came with evidence stronger than an anecdote.
Software development looks like it's much the same combination of fads, technical debt, and Peter Principles as it ever was. But that's anecdotes, the proof is in the pudding, and everything is more stable and less crashy than I remember — while I think that Apple's UI peaked a decade ago, that's mainly because I am deeply nostalgic for skeuomorphic UI.
Subscription models: well, if you don't like them, don't get them. We're getting Netflix for one month of the year because that's enough to watch what we want, and there's plenty of others with different stuff we can watch later.
I'm not going to get a Photoshop subscription, but I did buy Pixelmator, and if that hadn't existed I'd have used GIMP.
The police? BLM started in 2013, the word "woke" originated in 1938 in the lyrics to a song about racial injustice in the legal system.
I have become very cynical about the legal system as a whole, but for very different reasons: if you were fully enforce all the traffic laws the only people who would be allowed to drive would be people like me who don't, if you fully enforced the drug laws you'd bankrupt whichever country you were in, and so on. But none of this is new, as evidenced by Sir Patrick Stewart's stories about his father.
For rich grifters, I suggest Robert Maxwell. He's… mostly forgotten. Fraudsters often are, so the question should be: what's the fraud rate in your country?
Everything is poison? I grew up with acid rain (solved), a hole in the ozone layer (getting better), indoor public smoking (banned in the UK, doesn't seem to be here in Berlin), asbestos (banned), and leaded petrol (banned).
Do we still have problems? I assume so! But they don't appear to be worse, rather they appear to be milder.
> everything is more stable and less crashy than I remember
I can't begin to believe you're not trolling here. Seriously. "Everything" is more stable ?
Pick a random every-day operation ("rent an hotel", "book a flight", "pay your taxes", "order a pizza", etc...). We'll go to the first website that will come out of a google search, and try to follow the process from start to finish using a modern browser on a modern OS of a modern computer.
I bet we'll get at least 3 to 5 bugs (either in page loading, some server crashing, some page layout issue, some text display, some translation, some form field validation, some form submission, some confirmation email not being sent, etc...)
The most charitable view I can have is that software is "as bad as it ever was, but there is now new kind of bad software that lets you badly do things that were not possible in the past". But claiming an "improvement", especially in stability, seems like a stretch.
There was a distant time where those operations were done by calling a human being on the phone. Those were awkward conversations to have, and there were "bugs" in those too - but human interactions had had a few thousand years to iron out those bugs.
As a software engineer bringing my own set of (hopefully not too buggy and moderately useful) software into the world - I seriously miss those days.
> ("rent an hotel", "book a flight", "pay your taxes", "order a pizza", etc...).
I have literally never had any of those crash, which is what I was writing about.
> some page layout issue, some text display, some translation
Almost certainly on some of them, but that's not what I was talking about.
I have, 4.5 years ago, had an airline not understand how a + before the @ works in an email address. But it didn't crash.
And Ryanair's app and website sucks, but it didn't crash on me.
Booking hotels is reliable enough I've done a 1000 km cycle ride where I booked each hotel en route 2-3 hours before arriving because I didn't know which village or city I would reach before that point.
Taxes I can no longer do online because the UK won't let me do their bit online now I live abroad and I don't trust my understanding of German tax terminology for the other bit so I have an agent, but that's a legal issue not a website limit, and I can't remember ever having had a problem with HMRC online.
Likewise, the biggest problem I've ever had with buying a travel pass digitally was 5.5 years ago, because BVG didn't support iPad (not a typo, my phone was a Blackberry and I had an iPad).
I grew up with "System Error Type 11 (Restart)" on a weekly basis; nothing like that happens any more.
> I grew up with "System Error Type 11 (Restart)" on a weekly basis; nothing like that happens any more.
This probably explains why we don't understand each other.
I grew up with fairly crashy stuff too, don't get me wrong. I ordered stuff on a Minitel, for heck sake.
However, I suspect the fact we're old timers makes it even harder to sympathize with "normal people" confronted with unstable systems.
Because, a page not displaying properly on your phone, a form not liking your first name because it has a hyphen, a website suddenly switching to Spanish for half its content, a email that says "you'll soon receive " before not receiving anything, the message received in batch of 10 explaining that your subscription will now be "${sub}€", etc... All those things (that I literally encountered _this weekend_, on systems developped by big corporations and / or public service platforms): we hackers call them "annoyances" ; fancy people call them "bugs".
Real people call them "stuff that does not work".
And when your are forced, by law, to use stuff that does not work because the software got all the funding, and people are too expensive, then, some real people call it "barbary".
It's "death by a thousand cuts", for sure, in a world where so many die by actual bullets. So maybe it does not warrant a violent uprising.
But you'd be surprised how much I hear it contributing to the overall anger - being the rich "computer guy" trying to help the real people navigating this.
“ Everything is poison? I grew up with acid rain (solved), a hole in the ozone layer (getting better), indoor public smoking (banned in the UK, doesn't seem to be here in Berlin), asbestos (banned), and leaded petrol (banned).”
But now you have to worry about plastics in your food, leaching of chemicals from batteries that power new technology, depression and suicide, resulting from social media (especially amongst young children and teens), loss of privacy due to technological devices, dangerous side effects from new drugs that are pushed and marketed onto the public, dangerous chemicals and metals found in modern vaping devices, reduced quality of life due to income stagnation and exorbitant real estate prices, etc
Grew up vegetarian because my mum was worried about mad cow disease. The batteries were also toxic when I was a kid. So were more of the lightbulbs. Suicide rate is significantly lower in the UK today then when I was born.
Loss of privacy concerns me. Most people seem happy to over-share, presumably because the thing also allows more connections with more niche interests than most people can name.
Dangerous side effects of drugs? I remember seeing thalidomide victims in my local mall. We're a lot more cautious these days because of things like that.
Vaping is an odd thing to have a moral panic about, as the alternative for many people is to set fire to a tube of things known to produce carcinogenic smoke, and stick it in their mouth.
Stagnant quality of life is by definition not getting worse.
Exorbitant real estate prices are the only thing where I agree with you they're a genuine concern for the average Millennial and post-Millennial.
In US, suicide rates increased 36% between 2000-2018 and declined 5% between 2018-2020. Overall, a huge increase and we still have covid years to add to the mix.
What liquid? I know what tobacco is, but I don’t know what a “liquid” is. It could be anything and many of them contain dangerous metals, fragrances, and other mysterious chemicals. Hardly an improvement over cigarettes.
Stagnant wages over time, while they may have the same numeric value, result in far less purchasing power due to inflation.
Ridiculous real estate values are a concern for every generation.
Why did you describe what vaping is? This isn't a weird obscure practice, and the point was reduced harm relative to putting a burning cancer stick in your mouth, not a claim that that vaping is completely harmless.
> What liquid? I know what tobacco is, but I don’t know what a “liquid” is. It could be anything and many of them contain dangerous metals, fragrances, and other mysterious chemicals. Hardly an improvement over cigarettes.
Do you really know what tobacco is? Or do you take the mental shortcut that most people necessarily have to take with organic chemistry and mentally categorise "tobacco" as one single monolithic thing?
"""Of the more than 7,000 chemicals in tobacco smoke, at least 250 are known to be harmful, including hydrogen cyanide, carbon monoxide, and ammonia.
> In US, suicide rates increased 36% between 2000-2018 and declined 5% between 2018-2020
With:
> Stagnant wages over time, while they may have the same numeric value, result in far less purchasing power due to inflation.
Yields some combination of:
There was significant nominal growth in incomes in that group (USA) in those period (both 2000-2018 and -2020, only a brief dip in 2020 and more growth since then but that's beyond the scope of what I'm responding to here), it was only stagnant after compensating for inflation — and then mostly in the poorer half (which I'd say is really bad because I'm European and therefore so left-wing I think the Democrats are dangerously right-wing).
And:
The worldwide suicide rate didn't follow the USA's, and is down by about a third in that period: https://ourworldindata.org/suicide — This graph also doesn't support the CDC percentages you quoted, because it's saying USA +10% over the same period they're saying +36%. (I wonder what the difference is?)
And:
Worldwide income per capita, at purchasing power parity, almost doubled from 7.954 PPP dollars in 2000 to 17.038 PPP dollars in 2020.
And:
The CPI inflation index also account for housing costs.
Not really, no.
Don't get me wrong, 5 years ago I was in the UK, I moved to Berlin towards the end of 2018. Visiting the UK again last December… it felt very broken.
But it was the same kind of broken that I saw in Portsmouth when I was a child. And Berlin still feels as good as it did on my first visit.
Landlords being greedy? Sure. That's one of the things Marx and (from what little I've read of him) Adam Smith agreed on.
People are loud? I'm remembering a neighbour in my mid-terrace place in Sheffield in 2009-10, the husband and wife yelled at each other every night loud enough I could hear the words. I'm remembering a biker housemate in Cambridge who openly discussed the motorcycles with illegal loud exhausts. I'm remembering the stories in my childhood about illegal raves being shut down.
Worker apathy, that's hard to gauge. Could therefore believe it if it came with evidence stronger than an anecdote.
Software development looks like it's much the same combination of fads, technical debt, and Peter Principles as it ever was. But that's anecdotes, the proof is in the pudding, and everything is more stable and less crashy than I remember — while I think that Apple's UI peaked a decade ago, that's mainly because I am deeply nostalgic for skeuomorphic UI.
Subscription models: well, if you don't like them, don't get them. We're getting Netflix for one month of the year because that's enough to watch what we want, and there's plenty of others with different stuff we can watch later.
I'm not going to get a Photoshop subscription, but I did buy Pixelmator, and if that hadn't existed I'd have used GIMP.
The police? BLM started in 2013, the word "woke" originated in 1938 in the lyrics to a song about racial injustice in the legal system.
I have become very cynical about the legal system as a whole, but for very different reasons: if you were fully enforce all the traffic laws the only people who would be allowed to drive would be people like me who don't, if you fully enforced the drug laws you'd bankrupt whichever country you were in, and so on. But none of this is new, as evidenced by Sir Patrick Stewart's stories about his father.
For rich grifters, I suggest Robert Maxwell. He's… mostly forgotten. Fraudsters often are, so the question should be: what's the fraud rate in your country?
Everything is poison? I grew up with acid rain (solved), a hole in the ozone layer (getting better), indoor public smoking (banned in the UK, doesn't seem to be here in Berlin), asbestos (banned), and leaded petrol (banned).
Do we still have problems? I assume so! But they don't appear to be worse, rather they appear to be milder.