# What things were quantifiably better in the past? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [April 4, 2012, 7:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-were-quantifiably-better-in-the-past/617846 "2012-04-04T19:58:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 6
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2012, 3:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-were-quantifiably-better-in-the-past/617846/102 "2012-04-09T15:30:31Z")
> [@Lamia](#): > > I work at a university and saw many female students wearing long skirts about 2-3 years ago. It’s not something I remember seeing much of in the past year or so, but there were definitely a lot of girls in maxi skirts around here not that long ago. Yes, exactly. I wore maxi skirts a lot until 2–3 years ago, but in the fall of 2009 suddenly began to feel fashion-backward in DC and switched to more or less knee-length. In general, I figure you can’t go wrong with knee-length, which seems impervious to fashion fluctuations. Or maybe it’s just my advancing age. ---
**Author:** ![DKW](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dkw/32/3118_2.png) [@DKW](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DKW)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2012, 8:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-were-quantifiably-better-in-the-past/617846/103 "2012-04-19T08:04:06Z")
Shopping. What the hell happened? All the record stores, gone. JC Penney, gone. Circuit City, CompUSA, gone. Borders Books and Music, gone. Suncoast Pictures, gone. Blockbuster Video, all but gone (there used to be four within ten miles of my home, now there are none). And of course, all the local businesses that they ground to dust are long gone. Now I hear that Best Buy is taking a beating and shutting down stores. If it goes, literally the ONLY place I will be able to shop for a computer, (now that Sears no longer carries them, and the _hell_ I’m ever gonna mail-order one) is Costco. And frankly, I’m a bit worried about the future of Gamestop, especially as videogaming becomes more and more download-based. Time was I could spend the whole evening at Pearlridge. Now most weeks I’m all ready to go home by 9:30. Windward Mall, I’m lucky if I’m not bored five minutes past dinner. Frankly, I think I have plenty of company here. How much clothing, gag gifts, and freakin’ Hello Kitty merchandise does one person need, anyway? Oh, and traffic. Up to at least my high school days, a minor accident slowed traffic for maybe a mile or two and heavy backups were rare. Now even the tiniest mishap anywhere, ever, at all, results in a massive miles-long ginormo megasnarl that takes two hours to get through and about half a day to clear. And heaven forbid something truly serious happen, like that overturned asphalt truck not too long ago; the level of traffic will be what most parts of the country associate with natural disasters. ---
**Author:** ![salinqmind](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/3ec8ea/32.png) [@salinqmind](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/salinqmind)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2012, 11:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-were-quantifiably-better-in-the-past/617846/104 "2012-04-19T23:32:01Z")
The State Fair. I’ve been there every year of my long life, but the last few years I really haven’t enjoyed it much. I used to go three or four times, at least once a year by myself and do whatever _I_ wanted. (It all started when they decided to clean it up and make it all family friendly and stuff, trying to make it more like Disneyland.) And the prices for food and drink are ridiculous! Luckily, I guess, I can’t eat and drink like I used to! ---
**Author:** ![Ashley\_Pomeroy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c68b51/32.png) [@Ashley\_Pomeroy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ashley_Pomeroy)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2012, 10:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-were-quantifiably-better-in-the-past/617846/105 "2012-04-20T22:12:59Z")
The problem is defining “better”. Computery example: the fastest Pentium 4 CPU ran at a quantifiably greater clock speed than any modern multi-core processor (3.8ghz vs 3.6ghz), but of course it did much less, although as a bonus you could use it to heat your room. Or indeed cook sausages, weld metal, decompose elementary particles, it was _that hot_. If you looked at it, your face melted off. Like in _Raiders of the Lost Ark_. Early 20th Century army rifles used to fire bullets that were much more powerful than modern assault weapons, but they were big and heavy and overkill for human targets. Muscle cars of the 1960s generally wiped the floor with sporty models of the 1970s and 1980s - they had quantifably more powerful engines, sometimes quantifably lower drag coefficients - but they belched out noxious fumes and drank petrol like it was cheaper than bottled water. The F-14 Tomcat carried more powerful missiles over a greater distance, at a higher speed, than the F-18 that replaced it, but it had limited strike capabilities and was very expensive to maintain. Or, I dunno, portable computers used to have keyboards and large hard drives and could run desktop software. Now they don’t have keyboards, and onboard storage is limited to 64gb, quantifiably much smaller than the 1tb hard drive in my Asus eee. But they _do_ have Angry Birds. And you can touch them and pretty things happen. You couldn’t touch laptops. Well, you _could_ - but nothing happened. Unless you touched the keys. Generally the things that were quantifiably superior in the past were either relatively much more expensive, or limited, or over-engineered (and more expensive). Or there was a catch, e.g. the Commodore C64 booted almost instantly, but you had to wait ages before you could run _Uridium_ or _Paradroid_ because they had to load from tape. Photographers often lament the demise of all-metal lenses, for example, but modern plastics are lighter, cheaper, easier to adapt to autofocus and generally no less robust. Er, Playboy centrefolds used to come on large, high-resolution sheets of paper, whereas now they’re 1024x768 jpegs that you view on a landscape-orientated screen, which is silly unless the centrefold is lying down, e.g. Azizi Johari, just plucking an example out of thin air there. But then again you can wipe an LCD screen clean, you couldn’t do that with a paper centrefold. Coffee, I’m thinking coffee. ---
**Author:** ![nudgenudge](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/9f8e36/32.png) [@nudgenudge](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nudgenudge)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2012, 10:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-were-quantifiably-better-in-the-past/617846/106 "2012-04-20T22:48:27Z")
This is really UK-centric, but the switch-off of the last remnants of analogue TV (round here, anyway) reminded me of something:- teletext. The new “interactive” text thing they’ve replaced it with on digital TV is rubbish. It takes ages to load and there actually seems to be less information on it than good old teletext. Of course, they’ve both long been rendered obsolete by the internet and to be honest I haven’t used either of them for years, but you’d think the newer version would be better than the old one, at least. ---
**Author:** ![Molesworth\_2](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9dc877/32.png) [@Molesworth\_2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Molesworth_2)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2012, 12:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-were-quantifiably-better-in-the-past/617846/107 "2012-04-21T00:32:59Z")
I can’t find a decent toasted sandwich maker these days. Used to be they were deep enough that you could crack an egg in them and stick in a bunch of sliced tomatoes, and now you can’t. Hell, if you even stick a second cheese slice in them nowadays it just all boils out the side. Also, the standard of big-tits soft porn has majorly declined since the halcyon days of the late '90s. ---
**Author:** ![Leaper](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/4bbf92/32.png) [@Leaper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leaper)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2012, 9:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-were-quantifiably-better-in-the-past/617846/108 "2012-04-21T09:14:13Z")
Some of you people have a weird definition of “quantifiably”… ---
**Author:** ![AncientHumanoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ancienthumanoid/32/278_2.png) [@AncientHumanoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AncientHumanoid)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2012, 1:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-were-quantifiably-better-in-the-past/617846/109 "2012-04-21T13:32:02Z")
Quantifiably weird? ---
**Author:** ![Ms\_Boods](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5e9695/32.png) [@Ms\_Boods](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ms_Boods)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2012, 4:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-were-quantifiably-better-in-the-past/617846/110 "2012-04-21T16:16:07Z")
> [@An\_Gadai](#): > > I laughed a number of times when I saw vintage Singer sewing machines in museums. Most people I know who has a sewing machine has one of those vintage Singers. Seriously! I was offered a new machine, one of the cheaply made all-plastic ones being made out there these days, in place of that ‘old dinosaur’ I like to sew on. My ‘old dinosaur’ rolled off the assembly line in 1904, and it still runs like a top. I think I paid $30 for it from a junk store that wanted to get rid of it. If you have an old Singer and send them the serial number, they will send you a copy of the original manual that went with it, by the way. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-were-quantifiably-better-in-the-past/617846.md?page=5)