Yes. I had an early version of a battery mower, and it had some advantages over gas, but it had so many problems that it wasn’t a net gain. The new stuff is amazing and better than gas in every way.
Yeah, there was a Reddit thread a while back where some dopey, mopey Gen-Zer claimed that “literally EVERYTHING” is getting worse and more expensive. I countered with the examples of cars being more reliable, more durable, faster, better handling, safer, and not more expensive when inflation and PPP are accounted for. That’s an example of something that’s pretty much better all-around than they used to be (go to shit at 100k miles, rusted out like crazy, handled like a river barge, etc…) when I was a kid.
My other example was televisions. Dramatically larger, more reliable, higher resolution, higher dynamic range, better sound, dramatically better power efficiency, and better interoperability are all things today’s TVs bring to the table, and they’re considerably cheaper than they were say… 25 years ago in the bargain.
In both cases, the tradeoff is maintainability and repair; modern cars require more specialized fluids and parts than older ones did, and often have fairly invasive regular maintenance that I don’t recall ever being a thing in the older ones. Plus repairs often take a degree of know-how that you can’t get under the shade tree with your uncle or whatever, as well as a sophisticated code reader (not the $20 bluetooth dongle from Amazon). Modern televisions are essentially a black box- there’s not much of anything that can actually be fixed on most of them, and they’re cheap enough that between labor and parts, it’s usually not even worth it.
Another thing that is dramatically better is maps. Mostly because Google and other providers actively update their maps, but also because there’s a lot of interactive content - what is at a location, Street view, and so forth. That’s a far cry from the ca-2000 ultimate in consumer maps, which was one of those books of 1 mile square maps that made up a metro area (MAPSCO in Dallas, Key Maps in Houston, etc.) Those were the best there was for finding say, someone’s home, but at best, they put you in a square a few hundred yards on a side, and you had to then still figure out what house was there, what shopping center the shop was in, etc… Now that’s all right there when you’re planning your route. And it’ll tell you how to get there as you drive too. And it doesn’t cost a damn thing, unlike a MAPSCO, which was somehere in the 30-40 dollar range IIRC back in about 2000.
Absolutely. I remember noticing the coffee can shrinkflation back before 2003 sometime, for example.
I’d like to add another conditional improvement - in that the technology is incredible and great for people, but far too expensive and restricted:
And that’s a lot of surgical care. My 85 year old father has had multiple heart episodes, which in the 80s when I was growing up would have been difficult to treat short of the most invasive surgery.
Now? He’s had his arteries all but roto-rootered as a ONE DAY SURGERY.
This is fucking amazing. Yes, our healthcare system is broken in terms of costs and billing and other bullshit. But what they can do is simply fantastic.
And laser eye surgery? And other non-invasive treatments? MRNA vaccines?
Again, lots of problems about how we got there, and how it’s abused (looking at you prescription drug speculators and your ilk!), but the capabilities are amazing.
Full agree–my wife’s neurologist basically said degenerative MS is no longer really a thing due to the modern (crazy expensive) drugs. Yes, they’re $50k a year, but they work!
Definitely, many medical advances are absolutely astonishing.
Had my hip replaced. It was out-patient. I was kind of like ‘What, seriously?’
I had my cataracts/lenses replaced. Took about 15 minutes an eye. My vision is now better than it has ever been in my life.
One that I wish would get worse is the mailing list at a university I attended 50 years ago for about 2 years, did not graduate from, and have never donated to. They continue to send me unwanted newsletters begging for money. Despite the fact that I’ve had at least ten different addresses since then and lived overseas for a number of years, they always find me, the latest being yesterday, when once again I received a mailing. So I guess the postal service has improved over the years.
Speaking of deliveries, the rapid shipment of packages from companies like Amazon, Chewy, etc., via FedEx and UPS or in-house transport has drastically improved things.
Televisions are the best example. Bigger, better, safer and something like 90-95% cheaper, adjusting for inflation. But the flip side is expensive cable services, to those who still subscribe.
Cars have become dramatically safer and more comfortable. Not necessarily cheaper. And of course traffic has not improved over time.
Frozen food used to be very tasteless. It still isn’t my favourite, but the quality and selection are dramatically better than before. A moderately tasty frozen curry beats any olde style, unspiced, microwaved TV dinner with random meat, corn, pertaters and that odd dessert square.
I remember when the only ethnic restaurant in my city was Italian. When the first “Chinese” places opened. Then places serving Korean, Indian, Szechuan, sushi, Vietnamese food… Now very good ethnic restaurants are everywhere, well loved and often very busy. Similarly, it used to be hard just to find the ingredients to make these foods. Now any big Canadian grocery store has most of them, and even tiny stores in tiny towns in the hinterlands have some of them.
For that matter, I’ll guess the number of products carried by your average grocer has tripled over not that much time.
Amazingly, this article claims the number of items for sale in a grocery store has increased by a factor of six or seven in only thirty years or so.
It doesn’t appear that anyone has addressed this gripe by the OP.
I have yet to experience any negative consequences personally from data gathering by businesses on my preferences. Most companies use this information to improve their service and products. It is a way for them to receive feedback on how their products are performing so that they can improve them…that should be a good thing right?
Can you provide examples where you have actually been harmed by data gathering? Not some ephemerial feeling of having your privacy violated, but where you have experienced actual consequences.
It’s been my experience people in this industry take a lot of pride in their work. So this doesn’t surprise me in the least.
We at the Dope are a contrarian bunch, which I like on the whole. It leads to good debate and sometimes changing of minds. But it also means that whatever stand one takes, there’s probably going to be pushback. If I had started a thread saying “Everything is great with goods and services these days, prove me wrong”, I have no doubt we’d have a lot of people trying to do so with all kinds of horror stories.
So I’m going to be contrarian here and assert:
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Even if I were to list ways in which I have been personally harmed by data collection, people would counter (correctly) that I’m just one person and anectdote doesn’t equal data.
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I’m comfortable taking it as a given that data harvesting is a bad thing, at least the way it’s being done in the U.S. One cite is the recent thread, Is your car’s computer spying on you?. The first post covers a lot of it, and then there’s this link at the bottom.
I think you’re giving businesses an awful lot of benefit of the doubt by assuming they are using our data merely to improve goods and services. If a thread were started with that assumption I’m guessing we’d have a pretty lively debate.
No, we just like to make sure that all sides are covered. If this place was anymore of an echo chamber, none of the interesting people would show up.
Perhaps. But I think it has more to do with the fact that the time required to cut someone’s hair hasn’t changed over the past… few decades? Centuries? Ever?
See, you’re doing it now! 
I don’t know, the introduction of electric clippers was great dispruptor to scissors, especially for men’s haircuts.
Domestic beer quality has improved with decent microbreweries crowding out the larger swill beer producers.
I absolutely and utterly reject this formulation.
It’s my data. If the business wants to use it, they need to concretely show that such use provides a net benefit to me, sufficient that I agree to share it. Absent that, they have no right to it. Period.
Further elaboration would be best suited for a different thread.
Yeah, I even had a Leica from my Grandfather, and some cell phones today take better picture.
Yep. I actually rode the much lamented LA red cars- they were really slow. We waited at a corner, and just hopped on.
Yep. I had a scratch on my eye, and the specialist said that just a few years ago, I would have to spend a week or more in a hospital , getting hourly eye drops. I was sent home with eye drops and an eyepatch. I was asked to apply them every four waking hours and keep the patch on at nite- I suppose now it’d even be easier.
My Prostate cancer procedure was out patient, and I go to even keep that rascally organ.
Yeah, my eye doctor seys I will need that in a year or two, but after she explained it, I was no longer fearing the procedure.
I was actually quoted as saying “Do you know what we call mexican food in California? Food.”
And they would be wrong.
Globally, I think the combination of relatively affordable solar panels, water filtration, and LED lights is changing the world.
Those same parts of the world got connected via cellular technology, where landline infrastructure was/is prohibitively expensive.
Which may or may not nail the OP directly 