Of course everything’s a tradeoff, but something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently because I’ve been considering the whole “have a baby” thing is that it used to be a hell of a lot easier for a family to get by on one salary. Sure, now I have the option to work… but I also almost have to work. So it’s both more and less choice at the same time.
That is very true. I am a single father with a great job and I still find it hard to stretch that paycheck to cover everything that I am expected to on my job alone but I make it work. I have exceptional circumstances where I can never truly go broke but I do wonder how in the hell other people are making it especially when they make much less as a family than I do as as single. I guess they really aren’t. The math doesn’t add up and the credit card debt rate and the home foreclosure rate have been revealing all the posers who shouldn’t have been fronting the lifestyle they claimed.
There is a counterpoint that middle-class expectations have shifted so much higher since the 1950’s and 1960’s that it isn’t a valid comparison. Middle class people used to take vacations down by the local lake and the upper middle class ones may even have owned a cabin there.Now, everyone in the upper-middle class expects a lifestyle that was only the domain of the jet setters in the 1970’s and I am not sure if they had the money for either. They also had crappy houses compared to today, less choice in food, and just about everything else.
I do know for a fact that the math doesn’t work at all for a typical middle-class family that wants to buy a decent home in their 20’s or early 30’s, have two or three kids, save for retirement at 65, and simultaneously save for large part of each child’s college tuition all while paying for day care and other expenses associated with having two working parents. You simply can’t do that on the middle-class range of salaries in the $40 - $90K range without resorting to extreme stunts that wouldn’t work for most people.
The dying middle class phenomenon is very real and the retirement dream has already slipped out of the grasp of many Baby Boomers due to their own individual bad choices but it will not be a choice at all for Gen X and below and there is little anyone can do about it. The money simply isn’t there.
Strawberries
Privacy
Blue-collar status
Manufactured goods (they WERE better)
Civil discourse
And we just did not have so much bloody stuff
Yes, some things were much, much better when I was younger.
On the other hand, tomatoes have made an amazing come back and the amount of information at my fingertips astonishes me daily.
There’s something to be said for making friends from among the people in your general vicinity. I haven’t really had to learn to discuss things I’m not interested in or learn how to find common ground – and my stepdaughter certainly hasn’t.
Yes, all those are Good Things. Only fools think they can drive better than without them. Or pros, and even pros like ABS.
Strawberries- yes and no. They were smaller, and hwaaaaay tastier. But they had a very short growing season and shelf life. You could buy them maybe 3-4 weeks a year and had to eat them that day or the next. Otherwise make do with frozen, which aren;t so nice.
Some manufactured goods. By no means all. But yes, a lot of stuff was Made in America, was better but cost more.
Yes…buttt…
Back in the day if I went to the library and stayed in the non-fiction section I had a good chance that something I read in a book or a magazine or journal was generally right. Mostly because that info there took time, effort, and money to put ther and was reviewed by somebody that at least had half a clue.
Today, if I do a search for info on the net for info on something there is much more “right” info to be found than there was in the past. But there is also a buttload of random crap out there. And all it takes to put that random crap out there is some typing. And crazy/stupid people have plenty of time to type shit up.
If you are person that is not particularly bright, doesn’t know much about the subject you are looking into, or has a poor bullshit detector you’ll quite likely get sucked in a world of misinformation.
I think this problem is a major reason for the rise of whoooo and conspiracy theory baloney.
So, in short, IMO the signal to noise ratio in the modern world is not as good as it once was.
Not true. Amateur drivers can out perform ABS. Many race cars either either don’t have it or tune it to such a level that you might as well not have it.
That said, yes, the features are a fantastic benefit for the general public, which is why I used them as an example where there is some trade off, performance for safety.
I am an oldster but if you notice I did not talk about how cheap everything was in the old days but only about the cost of a Beatles concert and an appearance at a high school dance by a very popular singer of the day. I could not help but notice that you agree with me that concert tickets were indeed cheaper. I noted the price of a record album, not because it was cheap, but in relation to the cost of the concert ticket. What is interesting to me is that my opinion was on topic and was in no way countered by your verbal assault. Thanks for the inflation lesson though, first I heard about it.
I disagree that music was better.
IMHO bands like the Beatles are far superior to groups like Lady Gaga.
However, yesterday you could listen to the Beatles
Today, you can choose between listening to Lady Gaga, the Beatles or any number of acts that have came and went, but lived on through their recorded music.
Yeah, but the world can only experience listening to Sgt Pepper for the first time once. When was the last time that both musicians and fans could listen to something and go, holy crap, how did they do that? And more more importantly, holy crap, what will they do next? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t foresee anything else like that coming along.
Same with Elvis. Few people get him nowadays because they don’t understand how transformational he was. Even people who know, can’t really experience it.
The politics were better. Democrats and Republicans differed on policy, but we all watched the same evening news broadcasts and we all started with the same set of facts.
Women dressed nicer- it was at one time extremely uncommon to see bare legs and dresses.
Tattoos were something that sailors got.
If you wanted to play some baseball, you got on your bike and recruited players. You never got enough to play a full field of 9, so you made up rule modifications- the batter could choose either left or right field to be foul, if there was no first baseman then “pitcher’s hands” meant you had to beat the ball getting back to the pitcher, someone on the team at bat had to play catcher, you had “ghost runners” whose movements and scoring were known by all.
You could go to a game without spending a day’s pay on tickets and parking.
If you wanted to talk to a friend, you went to their house or called them.
The music was better. You could listen to the latest music and check out the girls on American Bandstand.
There were game shows on every network from 9-11.
There were no infomercials.
You did your banking without knowing a PIN or a password.
There was no designated hitter and no interleague play. Everybody cared about the All Star game.
Hockey teams were only located in places that gave a shit about hockey.
You could graduate from high school, walk into a factory and have a well paying job with a pension and be able to put your kids through college.
There were no Kardashians.
When you went camping, you pitched a tent and hiked and swam. You didn’t pull up an RV and hunker down inside with a DVD.
[hijack] I love comments like this. You have absolutely no clue about about this subject.
A good ABS/stability will out preform you by such a large margin it isn’t even a contest.
Picture this. You are driving on a road where your right two tires are in water/ or there is loose gravel on the pavement. You need to panic stop.
What is going you work better you applying the same brake force to all 4 wheels or the computer that can vary the pressure to each wheel individually up to 15 times a second to achieve maximum deceleration?
Or how about stability systems that recalculate what it takes to keep the car on the road that recalculate ever 7 milliseconds. No way you can think much less act even a tenth that fast.
With that said I have driven some crappy ABS systems from 15 years ago that pretty bad, but that was an individual model not the entire class of systems.
[/hijack]
You wouldn’t have liked the early 1950s.
You would not have liked the early 1950s. The cars looked like candy-colored woodchucks with chrome-plated braces, the president was a failed dirt farmer and suit salesman with all the charisma of a hot water bottle, youth culture consisted mostly of using words like zorch and giggling hysterically about it, and the music was all horns and string sections, much of it still on highly breakable, scratchable 78s. Also, if you had a television, it had a 12" screen and 20 of your neighbors crowding it.
Still more game shows on that you can shake a stick at.
But only during “Banker’s hours”.:rolleyes: Really today’s system is hwaaaaaay better.
Rick is our Car guy, he’s the expert.
Not so sure- you’ve got GSN which sucks ass big time. They show the post Dawson-Combs Family Feuds which are unwatchable plus some shitty games that they developed themselves.
On network TV, you’ve got new versions of The Price Is Right and Let’s Make A Deal, both pale in comparison to their heydays. Then in syndication, Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy are both aging poorly and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire with their seemingly weekly rules changes. The golden days of game shows are long long gone.
Whether this is a good thing is a matter of taste. I hate wearing pantyhose, so I think it’s a good thing that they are out of fashion. I don’t really like dressing up at all, so I like it that people don’t dress up as much.
But you had to go to a physical bank to do it. And the banks had limited hours. There were long lines at banks on pay days. With online banking, direct deposit, and ATMs, that doesn’t affect nearly as many of us now. There’s not much to like about standing in line at the bank. You also had to have a checkbook with deposit slips. Making sure you have one of those with you is more of a pain than remembering a 4-digit number or 8-character password, at least for some of us.
Mmmm, bush. A wonderful discovery for a teen boy. A thick, tangled, mystery to solve when allowed! Good times.
Traffic seemed better. Of course, Evansville, IN has never been the gridlock capital of, well, anywhere.
People were nicer. You dressed up to fly on an airplane. Now any shlub in a wife-beater and flip-flops can buy a ticket and bother you all the way to Miami.
Light pollution. When is the last time you looked up at night and saw the Milky Way stretched across a summer sky?
Fireflies. Where are they now?
Sportsmanship. In my day, when a high school basketball player fouled another, he knew it before anyone else and raised his hand. Sorry - that was me! and he’d pay the penalty. Young men then had honor and integrity. Now, they just throw elbows, deny any fouls, and curse the ref and the other team.
Telephones were better. Yeah Siri can tell you when your dentist appointment is, but you drop her and she’s toast. Ma Bell rented you phone made like a black box. You could actually kill someone with it. You couldn’t break it if you tried. Now that’s quality! AMERICAN quality!
Lead tinsel. Mylar strips as a replacement? An abomination.
Bright lights switch. Should still be on the floor where it belongs. Because.
You kids get off my lawn.