There’s so much in life these days that’s suffering from Enshitification, that we sometimes miss when things actually get better.
I thought of this just now, because I just realized it’s been years since I’ve seen a “Reply All” mass e-mailing disaster, where one person “Replies All” to an e-mail, and then lots of people also Reply All asking, “Why was I included on this email?”, with the replies just bouncing back and forth, reinforcing each other until your inbox is overwhelmed with crap.
Someone in my office just did a reply all to an e-mail from January, which is what made me realize it’s been years since I’ve seen an e-mail mess like that. It seems most people have finally learned to just ignore such mistaken messages.
Not many people smoke cigarettes anymore, but to be fair a lot more smoke weed (including in public) and also we don’t know what the long-term effects of vaping/e-cigs will be, kinda.
Human beings actually do scientifically/factually speaking look younger in modern times than people of the same age did in the past; less smoking is one reason (as I mention above), but also chemicals and evolution of some sorts.
Random thing: I think movie theaters probably offer a much greater variety of candy and food than they did in the 90s when I was a kid. Nowadays the average AMC or REGAL has 50 different types of candy, plus things like caramel or cheddar popcorn, special stuff, slushie machines in the lobby (I first noticed the slushie thing in 2011- I was like ‘whaaa? Are the concession stand workers going to start saying ‘Thank you come again!’ now too?’ (Apu reference))
The number of motorists who die in car accidents per 100,000 drivers/passengers has gone down every year since the invention of the automobile.
And we just saw the other side of the moon for the first time, so yay
I can’t tell what you mean by that. Are you talking about the Artemis mission? The first photographs of the moon’s far side were taken in 1959 and it was well mapped with good quality photos by the mid 1960s. It was first seen directly with human eyes by the Apollo 8 astronauts in 1968.
There’s no question that no-smoking-in-indoor-and-sometimes-outdoor places laws have made things like eating in restaurants much more enjoyable.
“Dog-do,” as we used to call it, is not a thing of the past exactly, but it’s way, way down from what it was back when I was a kid.
Many cities now have bike rental stations. That’s pretty new. I’ve used them in San Antonio, Denver, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Boston, Washington, and Philadelphia, and they’re great.
I do urban kayaking, and the waterways I travel would have been…well, you’d have been seriously risking your health if you’d tried to paddle in the cesspools that were the Chicago River, the Cuyahoga River, Baltimore’s Inner Harbor… Very different today.
This goes back a little further, but I have Type 1 diabetes. If not for modern medicine…
You’re correct about auto safety. The per capital death rate from auto accidents is less than 50% of what it was in the early 1970s, when the raw number peaked at around 56,000; it’s now around 30,000 a year, in the U.S. Seat belts, car seats, and taking impaired driving seriously has accounted for a lot of that, on top of cars just plain old being safer.
And those cars get MUCH better gas mileage. My first car, which was almost as old as me when I started driving it in 1981, got 12mpg, and gas was about $1.50 a gallon, more expensive than now when inflation is taken into account.
Okay but this was the first fly-by we ever did there, right?, so that’s cool (that’s one small/giant flight for humans, baby! )
Yes, and many of them are “E-bikes”, which you still pedal like a regular bike but they have electric energy that adds a ton of power to your ride; the bad side: Kids nowadays are doing 45 MPH on these things and killing themselves/each other/pedestrians/motorists/et al.
“Per capita” Easy mistake to make
Not to mention: teens and everyone else kinda drive way less often than they used to (everything’s social media/online), plus we have ubers/lyfts/et al to pick us up almost anywhere we are…
No. Nine Apollo missions (Apollo 8 through Apollo 17 except for Apollo 9) flew over the far side. Eight of them (all except the ill-fated 13) orbited the Moon, so those flew over the far side multiple times. Not that Artemis wasn’t cool, but it wasn’t the first to fly around the Moon by any means.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding you. Since you alluded to Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap” quote, you’re obviously aware that humans landed on the Moon, so I’m not sure how you could believe that Artemis was the first to fly by it.
If you do any kind of library- or archive-based research, digitization and the internet have made all kinds of sources HUGELY more accessible than they were decades ago. The things I can now look at without leaving my desk, which would previously have required spending hours in libraries and probably several international trips to find sources in person…
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