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                My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s

  A list of unheralded improvements to ordinary quality-of-life since the
  1990s going beyond computers.
  [8]history⁠, [9]personal⁠, [10]politics⁠, [11]sociology⁠,
  [12]technology⁠, [13]insight-porn⁠, [14]economics
  2018-04-28–[15]2021-08-12 finished [16]certainty: certain
  [17]importance: 4 [18]backlinks [19]bibliography
    __________________________________________________________________

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    * [21]Improvements
         + [22]Computers
         + [23]Technology
         + [24]Society
         + [25]Food
    * [26]External Links

    It can be hard to see the gradual improvement of most goods over
    time, but I think one way to get a handle on them is to look at
    their downstream effects: all the small ordinary everyday things
    which nevertheless depend on obscure innovations and improving
    cost-performance ratios and gradually dropping costs and new
    material and… etc. All of these gradually drop the cost, drop the
    price, improve the quality at the same price, remove irritations or
    limits not explicitly noticed, or so on.

    It all adds up.

    So here is a personal list of small ways in which my ordinary
    everyday daily life has been getting better since the late
    ’80s/​​early ’90s (as far back as I can clearly remember these
    things—I am sure the list of someone growing up in the 1940s would
    include many hassles I’ve never known at all).

  Progress is usually debated in terms of the big things like lifting the
  Third World out of poverty, eliminating child mortality[27]^1⁠, or
  [28]science & tech: discovering gravitational waves, creating world
  champion AIs, turning AIDS into a treatable rather than terminal
  disease, conquering hepatitis C, or curing deadly cancers with
  genetically-engineered T-cells. But as cool as those big things are,
  and matters of life-and-death for many, such achievements tend to be
  remote from ordinary people, and not your everyday sort of thing (or so
  one hopes). Small stuff matters too. What about the little things in an
  ordinary life?
  The 1980s Desktop The [29]1980s Desktop[30]^2

  The seen and the unseen. When I think back, so many hassles have simply
  disappeared from my life, and nice new things appeared. I remember my
  desk used to be crowded with things like dictionaries and pencil
  sharpeners, but between smartphones & computers, most of my desk space
  is now dedicated to [31]cats⁠. Ordinary life had a lot of hassles too,
  I remembered once I started thinking about it. (“The past is a third
  world country”, but America in the 1990s could also have used some
  improvement.)

  These things rarely come up because so many of them are about removing
  irritations or creating new possibilities—dogs that do not bark, and
  ‘the seen and the unseen’—and how quickly we forget that the status quo
  was not always so. The hardest thing to see can be that which you no
  longer see. I thought it would be interesting to try to remember the
  forgotten. Limiting myself to my earliest relatively clear memories of
  everyday life in the mid-1990s, I still wound up making a decent-sized
  list of improvements to my ordinary life.[32]^3
    __________________________________________________________________

[33]Improvements

  Roughly divided by topic:

[34]Computers

  With computers, it’s hardly worth trying to enumerate the improvements
  on every dimension, and it might be easier to list the exceptions
  instead—if I made a list of a hundred things, someone would chime in
  with another one I’d forgotten, like easy rental rooms through
  [35]Airbnb or food delivery apps. But nevertheless, here’s a few:
    * Cheap: electronics prices keep falling.
      These days, people whine endlessly online if a RAM or semiconductor
      shortage (something that happens every decade or so, as the
      industry has notorious boom-and-bust dynamics) means that they have
      to pay as much as they did a few years ago for something, but the
      long-term trends are dramatic.
      You can buy things like top-end VR headsets or smartphone, which
      will cost less in real terms than a Nintendo NES/​Famicom did on
      its [36]1983 Japanese release ($503^$150[1983][37]^4, or the USA
      “Action” release my family had, $398.84^$149.99[1988]) or a Sony
      Walkman cassette player in 1979 ($528^$150[1979]). Kids in 2020
      can’t even imagine having to pay $124^$50[1990] for a new copy of
      [38]Super Mario Bros. 3[39]^5⁠, [40]much less $117.26^$34.99[1983]
      for Atari 2600 Centipede—a far cry from paying $5 these days for a
      great PC game during a Steam sale, or nothing at all for many of
      the most popular games like [41]Fortnite⁠.
    * the Internet/​Human Genetics/​AI/​VR are now actually things
      Imagine dealing with the [42]2019–20 coronavirus pandemic in 1989
      instead.
    * VHS tapes:
         + Not Rewinding VHS tapes before returning to the library or
           Blockbuster
         + not worrying about Blockbuster or library late Fines
         + Not Watching crummy VHS tapes, period
    * not making a dozen phone calls playing Phone Tag, to set up
      something as simple as a play date
    * hotels and restaurants provide Public Internet Access by default,
      without nickel-and-diming customers or travelers; this access is
      usually via WiFi
    * Satellite Internet & TV are affordable & common for rural people
    * All-You-Can-Eat Broadband:
         + Faster
         + Indefinite: not worrying about running out of AOL hours,
           liberated from the tyranny of time metering and (mostly)
           bandwidth metering
         + All Day: because you won’t be yelled at for tying up the
           (only) phone line
    * Ethernet: not needing to know the difference between PLIP, SLIP,
      IRQ, TCP/​IP, or PPP to get online
    * 20xx is The Year Of the Linux Desktop: no, but seriously, Linux X,
      WiFi, & laptops now usually work
    * Hygienic Mice: no longer needing to clean computer mice weekly
      thanks to laser mice
    * Hearing Aids are a small fraction the size, have gone digital with
      multiple directional microphones (higher-quality, customizable,
      noise-reduction)[43]^6⁠, halved or more in price, become
      water-resistant, and even do tricks like Bluetooth
    * GPS: not getting lost while frantically driving down a
      freeway[44]^7⁠; or anywhere else, for that matter
    * Universal Cables: [45]USB cables mean that for connecting or
      recharging, we now only need to figure out ~10 different plugs
      instead of 1000+ (one for every pairwise device combo)
    * Universal Fulltext: most books and scientific papers can be
      (perhaps with [46]a little work) downloaded for free—the ‘universal
      library’ came to pass, despite many peoples’ best efforts
    * Universal Search: search engines typically turn up the desired
      result in the first page, even if it’s a book or scientific paper;
      one doesn’t need to resort to [47]‘meta-search engines’ to cover a
      dozen search engines which each index a different tiny fraction of
      the Internet, or gradually building up enormous 20-clause Boolean
      queries to filter out noise
    * Universal Storage: we no longer need to strategize which emails or
      photos or documents to delete to save space
    * RAM: programmers able to assume users have 4GB RAM rather than 4MB
      RAM
    * Microsoft Windows Hacking: consumer computers in the ’90s were a
      pain because they all ran Windows and if you ever connected them to
      the Internet, there were so many ways to get hacked or systems
      degraded. This is far less of an issue now.
      If you managed to never install a bad IE [48]toolbar (or get hacked
      by one of the countless IE vulnerabilities) and managed to track
      down the safe version of every application you installed (there
      being no kind of [49]package manager-based [50]app store as
      popularized in the ’90s by Linux distros), you would still get
      hacked remotely by a worm (this was the [51]golden age of Internet
      viruses/​​worms like [52]ILOVEYOU⁠/​​[53]Code
      Red⁠/​​[54]Nimda⁠/​​[55]SQL Slammer). At MS’s nadir, people were
      estimating that [56]botnets were so active in [57]portscanning the
      Internet for vulnerable Windows systems that a new Windows
      installation would be hacked before it finished downloading
      security patches!
      In [58]January 2002 [59]Bill Gates issued a memo and MS had its
      come-to-Jesus moment, making security a priority: switching to
      [60]Windows NT as a foundation (benefiting from [61]VMS designs),
      rewriting old code in [62]memory-safe programming languages
      (especially [63].NET), investing heavily in [64]static program
      analysis tools (some developed by [65]MSR), adding free
      antivirus/​​firewall programs to Windows, increasing bug bounties,
      monitoring hacking more actively, releasing more free updates &
      moving to [66]SaaS models (enabling continuous updates), [67]adding
      telemetry to phone home about crashes (resented for “privacy”
      reasons despite being necessary to create actually-private sofware)
      and in general investing far more money into security.
      [68]It succeeded.
    * Smartphones: far too much to list… (eg. GPS, and careless
      smartphone photographs are higher-quality than most film cameras
      from a few decades ago, particularly in niches like dark scenes
      where smartphone night modes can [69]achieve things few or no
      non-digital film cameras were capable of)
    * [70]Spaced Repetition has escaped the cognitive psychology labs,
      and has been a great blessing to foreign-language learners, medical
      students, and many others
    * [71]nuisance [72]Software Patents have been expiring (eg. [73]GIF⁠,
      [74]arithmetic coding⁠, [75]MP3)
    * Universal Media Availability:
         + Back Catalogue Access: catching the tail end of a cartoon or
           movie on TV and being able to look it up instead of wondering
           for the rest of one’s life what it was about. (I’ve looked up
           some series I watched as a kid, and I had some strange
           misconceptions about them due to my fragmented watching…)
         + having Fansubs available for all anime (no longer do anime
           clubs watch raw anime and have to debate afterwards what the
           plot was! Yes, that’s actually how they’d watch anime back in
           the 1970s–1990s when fansubs were often unavailable)
         + everything is available [76]Subtitled, not just TV
           (accelerated by legislation making subtitle decoder chips
           mandatory in TVs [77]~1991)
         + most programs have a usable FLOSS equivalent and in some areas
           FLOSS is taken so for granted that new programmers are unaware
           they used to have to pay for even text editors/​​compilers or
           that Linux is Communism

[78]Technology

    * HVAC: houses which are well-insulated & uniformly comfortably warm,
      and centrally-cooled, rather than leaky and using heaters or wall
      units running constantly creating drafts and hot/​cold spots
    * Showers: hot water heaters increasingly heat water on demand, and
      do not run out (while sometimes shocking the bather)
    * Stoves which are increasingly safe and clean, because
      [79]induction-based (rather than the perpetually dirty fire hazards
      of electric burners/​gas stoves[80]^8)
    * [81]Riding Lawn Mowers are affordable & common for rural
      people[82]^9
    * Power Tools (such as drills, leaf blowers, or lawn mowers) are
      increasingly rechargeable-battery-powered, making them more
      reliable & quieter & less air-polluting
         + speaking of Batteries: batteries last long enough that they
           are increasingly built-in—remember how advertisements always
           had to say “batteries not included”?—so no more mad scrambles
           at Christmas for [83]AA or [84]AAA batteries[85]^10 to power
           all the presents (which could easily add
           $12^$5[1990]–$25^$10[1990] to the immediate total cost, and
           would have to be replaced in a year).
           Given the exponential progress in battery costs & density, and
           wireless recharging becoming a consumer reality, it would not
           surprise me if within decades, small replaceable batteries
           become relegated to niches like extremely cheap disposable
           goods or specialty uses (eg. dollar-store toys, smoke alarms,
           flashlights), and young people start being confused what the
           difference between AA/​​AAA is or why one battery is
           rechargeable but another isn’t in much the same way that young
           people no longer know how to write a check. (In 2019, a
           bursar, whose college doesn’t take credit cards, showed me the
           giant sweepstakes-style novelty check she had to use as a prop
           to teach freshmen how a check is supposed to be filled out; it
           took coronavirus [86]to [87]force them to finally accept some
           alternatives.)
    * Cars:
         + Reliable & Efficient: cars last longer and get better
           mileage[88]^11
         + all cars have electrified Power Windows; I don’t remember the
           last time I had to physically crank down a car window.[89]^12
         + Electric Cars are feasible rather than follies, and will be
           ordinary things in 5–10 years
         + Self-Driving Cars not long after that
    * Air Travel Democratized: airplane flights no longer cost an
      appreciable fraction of your annual income[90]^13⁠, and people can
      afford multiple trips a year.
    * Laser Pointers are no longer exotic executive toys or for
      planetariums, they’re things you buy off eBay for $1 for your cat.
      (Go crazy and buy three, to get colors beyond red; [91]I suggest
      blue or purple⁠.)
    * LED lights are more energy-efficient, cooler & safer, smaller, turn
      on faster, last longer, and are brighter than incandescents or
      fluorescents
         + a particular boon for Flashlights (which have, oddly, become
           their own online subculture, perhaps similar to mechanical
           keyboard enthusiasts: smartphones replaced many minor
           flashlight uses, leaving just high-margin [92]collectors
           competing with each other)
    * Movie Theater Seats have become far more comfortable as movie
      theaters, forced to compete with DVDs/​home-theaters & Internet &
      video games, upgraded:
      In particular, they upgraded their uncomfortable school-style
      stadium seats to real seats; and concession prices seem like
      they’ve increased less than inflation, making them less of a total
      ripoff; going is more convenient, as I remember having to call the
      movie theater for times or check the newspaper to see which of
      several theaters might have a screening at the right time (crazy, I
      know); nor am I particularly nostalgic for film rather than digital
      projection, where damage to the film might be noticeable, and one
      had to wait on the projectionist (and is that where dirty film
      booth windows kept coming from…?).
    * EU: the European Union & single Euro currency make the EU easier to
      understand & travel in it much less tricky and expensive
    * Car Security:
         + Car Theft is rarer, and in particular, we [93]no longer have
           to worry about our car windows being smashed to steal our car
           radios[94]^14, or our GPSes
         + car Security Alarms no longer go off endlessly in parking
           lots. (It wouldn’t’ve been a normal day in the suburbs in the
           1990s without hearing at least one. I don’t know if the car
           manufacturers fixed car alarms, or if everyone mutually agreed
           that this was not working out & stopped buying them. [95]It
           seems to be a mixture of activism, consumer backlash, &
           improved physical security/​​reduced theft leading to alarm
           sensitivity being pared way back.)
    * Radios have minimal static
    * TVs no longer have rabbit ears that require regular adjustment
    * LASIK surgery has gone from an expensive questionable novelty to a
      cheap, routine, safe cosmetic surgery
    * [96]Plushies: teddy bears & other toys are [97]much more cuddly and
      silky
    * Clothing has become almost “too cheap to meter”, as the
      [98]Industrial Revolution in textiles never stopped; employment in
      the US textile industry has cratered while garment per man-hour &
      per capita GDP in new textile-heavy economies like [99]Bangladesh
      soars [100]as textile automation continues⁠.
      In the USA, this delivered huge benefits as people are no longer
      wasted on tasks machines can do better and reducing environmental
      pollution thanks to de-industrialization & eliminating things like
      dye contaminant waste (see the [101]environmental Kuznets curve &
      general improvement in US environmental quality)—eg the idea of,
      say, darning socks is completely alien[102]^15⁠, and clothing
      companies routinely discard millions of pounds of clothes because
      it’s cheaper than wasting scarce human labor reprocessing & selling
      them for a song, flooding Africa with discards.
         + materials science has produced constant visible-yet-invisible
           improvements in textiles yielding, among other things like
           plusher plushies, far better insulated (and cheaper) winter
           coats: instead of choosing between winter coats which make you
           look like the [103]Stay Puft Marshmallow Man or freezing (and
           if you get wet, freezing anyway) or exotic ultra-expensive
           garments aimed at mountain climbers, you can now buy ordinary
           (and much cheaper) winter coats which are amazingly thin and
           work even better to keep you warm—so much so that you have to
           be careful to not buy too well-insulated a coat, lest you
           swelter at the slightest exertion and be placed between the
           Scylla of overheating & the Charybdis of opening your coat to
           the freezing air to cool.
    * [104]Wheeled Luggage no longer expensive or rare, but cheap &
      ubiquitous

[105]Society

    * Lower Dysfunctionality: crime, violence, teen pregnancy, and
      abusive drug use in general kept falling, benefiting everyone (even
      those not prone to such things) through externalities
         + urban life: it is now reasonably safe and feasible to live in
           (most) big cities like NYC, Chicago, or DC—we’re a long way
           from [106]Taxi Driver and annual summer urban riots (outside
           California). This is a large part of why urban living has
           become so much more desirable (with the unfortunate
           consequence of urban inelasticity driving up rents, as the
           increases in desirability outpace the non-increases in
           availability).
    * War on Drugs Lost: with the gradual admission that the War on Drugs
      was never a good idea, marijuana has been medicalized or legalized
      in many states, and psychedelics research is enjoying a
      renaissance; other drugs are increasingly treated in a more
      appropriate medical/​rehabilitative framework
    * War On Smoking Won: somewhere in the late 1990s, the decline of
      smoking accelerated and it largely disappeared from public
      life—restaurants have gone from smoking, to smoking sections, to
      non-smoking entirely; and smoking in public outdoors has become
      rare. Aside from any health benefits, this makes everywhere smell
      and look nicer. (And to the extent smoking is stimulating and
      pleasant—see next point about [107]nicotine!)
    * Nicotine [108]gum & [109]patches no longer require, absurdly, a
      doctor’s prescription to buy, benefiting quitters and stimulant
      users alike (although moral panics & deeply irresponsible reporting
      about [110]adulterated black-market marijuana products have
      produced severe retrogression on [111]vaping)
    * Environment: air quality in most places has continued to improve
      (and considering the growing evidence on the harms of air
      pollution, this may well be the single most important item on this
      whole page), [112]forest area has increased⁠, and more rivers are
      safe to fish in
    * Intellectual Property Maximalism rollback: copyright terms have not
      and [113]probably [114]will not be indefinitely extended again to
      eternity to protect Mickey Mouse, and in 2019, for the first time
      since 1998, [115]works entered the public domain⁠; overreaching
      patents, both [116]software and [117]genetic⁠, have been rolled
      back.
    * Board Games have been revolutionized by the influx of
      [118]German /​ ​ ​European-style games⁠, liberating us from the
      monopoly of the [119]Amerigame [120]Monopoly
    * Logistics has become cheaper, faster, more reliable, and more
      convenient in every way:
         + Advances In Internet & Computers of course have superseded
           many logistical problems—the best-solved problem is the one
           you don’t have in the first place
         + USPS introduced [121]self-adhesive stamps in the early 1990s,
           and by 2010, licking postage stamps was almost nonexistent
           (and not a moment too soon to guard against [122]SF extortion
           plots!)
         + No More Coupon Scams: most people recognize rebates/​​coupons
           are scams, and the rise of discounters/​​warehouse
           stores/​​Internet shopping has largely obviated them
         + No More Mattress Scams: you can avoid ripoff mattress stores
           (typically owned by an exploitative oligopoly of mattress
           companies with massive margins) by ordering online, thanks to
           compact vacuum-compressed foam mattresses which can be shipped
           easily
         + the Shipping Cost of goods has plummeted
         + the Shipping Speeds have dramatically improved, especially for
           low-cost tiers: consider Christmas shopping from a mail-order
           company or website in 1999 vs 2019—you used to have to order
           in early December to hope to get something by Christmas (25
           December) without spending $56^$30[1999] extra on fast
           shipping, but now you can get free shipping as late as 19
           December! (“‘Same-day delivery’—what the hell is that?”)
         + the shipped Packages are also nicer: initiatives like
           [123]Amazon’s “Frustration-Free Packages” have led to a trend
           of fewer [124]clamshell plastic packages which can’t be opened
           [125]without cutting your hand
    * Finance: change comes slowly to consumer finance indeed compared to
      Wall Street, but we can note since the ’90s the (half-assed) shift
      to chip cards and [126]faster payments, cheaper remittances & free
      checking⁠.

[127]Food

  The quality of the average person’s diet historically appears to be
  greatly overrated by nostalgia and ignorance[128]^16⁠, and, for all the
  moral panics, we have things pretty good now. Bright spots include:
    * Beverages, particularly Tea/​Alcohol/​Coffee:
         + high-quality loose-leaf tea widely available & popularized by
           chains like [129]Teavana
         + [130]microbrews⁠/​​craft beers have revolutionized beer
           varieties & availability (similar things could be said of
           wine, cider, and mead)
         + safe McDonald’s coffee which doesn’t [131]explode in one’s lap
           while trapped in a car & causing disfiguring third-degree
           burns requiring skin grafts
         + mass market coffee in general (McDonald’s & Dunkin Donuts
           coffee in particular) no longer taste like ‘instant char-fee’
           (similar to Starbucks popularizing relatively high quality
           coffee)
         + [132]Keurig & other [133]Single-Serve coffee machines which
           heat the water separately from the coffee-making are
           increasingly common, especially in hotels; this means that tea
           drinkers (like myself) can make tea which doesn’t taste
           hopelessly like coffee due to ineradicable coffee
           contamination
    * Fast Food in general has gotten much better: much tastier (compare
      [134]McDonald’s post-2003 chicken sandwiches with before), and
      safer, as we no longer worry about getting salmonella or E. coli
      from our burgers[135]^17
    * even Mass-Market Grocery Stores like Walmart increasingly routinely
      stock an enormous variety of foods, from sushi to goat cheese to
      kefir; and if you don’t like those, you can probably find a more
      upscale one like Whole Foods, which behind the egregious (like
      shelves of homeopathy) host the exotic
    * [136]‘meat’ is a [137]fad diet—since most nutrition research is
      [138]B[139]S and most fad diets don’t work either, it’s good to
      have one which is at least delicious
    * [140]Sous-Vide cookers have gone from devices bought only by
      professional European chefs for thousands of dollars to a popular
      $70 kitchen gadget
    * Fresh [141]Guacamole can be easily bought due to pressure
      pasteurization (“Pascalization”), avoiding the inexorable spoilage
      of regular guacamole (and buying fresh avocados from the
      supermarket only to forget about it for a day and discovering it’s
      ruined)
    * Resealable Packaging on many foodstuffs reduces spoilage waste
      while also increasing convenience
    * Better Apples (not the computer kind): the tasteless mealy
      bitter-skinned so-called “[142]Red Delicious” apples are still
      dismayingly common, but now one can buy (in most supermarkets) far
      superior varieties of apples, such as [143]Honeycrisp apples
      (>1991) or [144]SweeTango apples (>2009), with fascinating new
      varieties like [145]Cosmic Crisp (ultra-long shelf life) or
      [146]Autumn Glory (caramel/​cinnamon flavor) coming out every
      year[147]^18 (thanks both to [148]improvements in breeding
      technology and [149]innovations [150]in the “club” business model
      eliminating free-riding & the Red Delicious’s fatal
      race-to-the-bottom)
         + Seedless Fruit: [151]Russ Roberts suggests 2 fruit examples:
           [152]seedless [153]grapes & watermelons.
           I am not entirely sure about this one’s timing or quality:
           seedless grapes apparently go back centuries in [154]Turkey
           and elsewhere, and were sold commercially in the USA well
           before the 1990s, with [155]red / black grapes in the 1950s⁠,
           and taste less strong than seeded grapes. And seedless (or
           [156]triploid hybrids) watermelon go back to 1939 in Japan
           (according to [157]Andrus 1971, citing Kihara &
           Nishiyama 1947/​​Kihara 1951, which are inaccessible), but
           commercialized perhaps around the 1970s–1980s in the USA.
    * Better Sausages: you no longer need to cook sausages to death,
      because [158]trichinosis is now rare.
    * Better Brussels Sprouts: [159]Brussels sprouts [160]no longer taste
      [161]quite so bad due to artificial selection

[162]External Links

    * [163]“The Problems the Past vs. The Problems of the Present”
    * Reddit: [164]1⁠, [165]2⁠; [166]HN: [167]1⁠/​[168]2⁠,
      [169]Lobste.rs⁠, [170]The Totebag⁠, [171]Twitter
    * [172]“Fifty Years Of Growth In American Consumption, Income, And
      Wages”⁠, Sacerdote 2017
    * [173]“What is economic growth? And why is it so important?”⁠, Max
      Roser
    * [174]“Ideas of India: The History of Textiles: Shruti Rajagopalan
      and Virginia Postrel discuss the development of textiles and their
      economic relevance in India and throughout the world”⁠; [175]“How
      Much Did a Shirt Really Cost in the Middle Ages?”
    * [176]“A Plea for Culinary Modernism: The obsession with eating
      natural and artisanal is ahistorical. We should demand more
      high-quality industrial food.”
    * [177]More Work For Mother: The Ironies Of Household Technology From
      The Open Hearth To The Microwave⁠, Cowan 1984
    __________________________________________________________________

   1. My grandmother casually horrified us a few years ago by going
      through the list of her dead siblings: 2 died as infants on the
      farm of ‘summer diarrhea’ ([178]bovine tuberculosis from
      unpasteurized milk), an unremarkable fate in the area, and then 3
      died in their teens–20s after moving to the city to work in textile
      factories. The rest died later. For comparison, she lost 1 child
      thus far out of 5 (stillbirth), and 0% of her >12
      grandchildren/​great-grandchildren.[179]↩︎
   2. A similar example [180]with a 1991 Radio Shack ad⁠. Incidentally,
      there was a little-noted sequel to the [181]original video:
      [182]“Evolution of the City”⁠.[183]↩︎
   3. Now, imagine if I could have extended this back another decade.
      Then another decade. Then another few decades… For broader metrics
      of increase in global well-being such as political freedoms, life
      expectancy, income, pollution, slavery, poverty etc, see [184]Our
      World in Data⁠, the [185]Performance Curve Database (handy for
      looking at [186]experience curve effects), the work of [187]Hans
      Rosling like [188]Gapminder⁠, [189]Human Progress.org etc.[190]↩︎
   4. Price Formatting
      I suspect that one of the challenges in understanding improvements
      over time is negligence in using inflation-adjusted prices. People
      tend to greatly underestimate cumulative inflation, and thus do not
      understand how many real prices have declined over time.
      So prices here are presented using my [191]Inflation.hs plugin with
      the current year real price first, and the (misleading) nominal
      price suffixed.
      [192]↩︎
   5. Part of why I never got an SNES or Super Mario Bros 3, despite
      enjoying it a lot whenever I could play it with my friends. (The
      specific reason was that we had spent several years collecting soda
      cans to [193]recycle for the deposit⁠, and when we’d finally saved
      up enough quarters to purchase something as expensive as a video
      game console, I somehow lost the big jar at our church, and no good
      Samaritan turned it in.)[194]↩︎
   6. I expect even greater things as more advanced signal processing
      technology becomes possible within battery life constraints, with
      [195]deep learning⁠, and I find it intriguing how many hearing
      people eagerly took up Apple [196]AirPods, which could do on-iPhone
      processing (benefiting from specialized ASICs & large phone
      batteries). Could hearing aids/​​earphones in the next decade
      become better than natural hearing, even among the young?[197]↩︎
   7. People like to harp on cases of GPSes giving bad routes, but I
      wonder how much GPSes contribute to long-term improvements in car
      safety? It seems like GPSes must contribute to lower accident
      rates: I recall people arguing over maps or making insanely
      reckless last minute swerves as they suddenly realize that they are
      about to blow past the turn, or just driving around distractedly
      going “where am I‽”[198]↩︎
   8. Fire safety, it is worth remembering, is an issue that affects
      other people, not just the cook. An anecdote: a local woman a year
      or two ago was frying food one windy day with her windows open for
      cooling—perhaps AC was (still) too expensive?—when a freak gust
      splattered the oil, which immediately was set on fire by the gas
      burners. Perhaps because of improvements in the flammability of
      building materials, only the corner of the building burned before
      the fire department arrived and put it out—but that was too late to
      save her bedridden mother.[199]↩︎
   9. Given our acreage, I’m not sure when, if ever, [200]robotic lawn
      mowers will be an option, as much as I would love to stop mowing.
      For people with small lawns, I understand they work well, and have
      since at least the early 2000s.[201]↩︎
  10. Incidentally, I was shocked to learn that AA/​​AAA batteries were
      introduced in 1907/​​1911, respectively. Hunting for a fresh
      battery of the right size is an old problem![202]↩︎
  11. This sort of reliability gain seems like it might be widespread.
      People love to complain that “they don’t build them like they used
      to”, but I am suspicious because most such comparisons appear to
      reflect [203]survivorship bias or are selective, and ignore
      improvements such as pollution or safety or variety—assuming they
      don’t ignore inflation entirely. I understand this applies to other
      things like mowers and tractors and boats; I would swear my uncle
      spent more time maintaining the boat & tractor than we ever did
      using them.[204]↩︎
  12. [205]Tim notes the many other improvements to the creature comforts
      & safety of using a car, gradually trickling down from luxury
      markets: remote keys, heated seats, motorized doors, backup
      cameras/​​proximity alerts, automatic headlights (even with
      [206]GPS)… Reading about how much car safety has improved over the
      past 20 years is cheering, but also makes me anxious—apparently my
      beater car from 2000 is much more dangerous than I realized![207]↩︎
  13. Where do you think all the money came from for those pretty
      stewardesses & elaborate meals in those glamorous Pan Am flights?
      Even much more recently, that $717^$289[1990] [208]average airfare
      in 1990 is not such a bargain when you inflation-adjust it to
      today.[209]↩︎
  14. Remember when [210]physically detaching your car radio to avoid
      leaving it in the car was considered a 100% normal thing to do?
      (For my younger readers: car radios/​​CD players used to come in
      two parts, the main body and a detachable “faceplate” which
      contained the display & control buttons; you would detach the
      faceplate and put it in a purse or something when you left your
      car, in the hopes that the endemic property crime everywhere would
      pass over your car as the main radio would be much less valuable on
      its own.)[211]↩︎
  15. Have you ever noticed how much time even ‘middle class’ mothers
      used to spend sewing up pants or darning socks or organizing family
      clothes banks as recently as the 1970s or 1980s? Somewhere around
      then, mothers stopped teaching their daughters how to sew or make
      clothes—I think less because of any feminism and more because it no
      longer seems like a particularly worthwhile skill to learn,
      especially given pressure from other uses of time like sports or
      homework. My grandmother in the 1950s routinely made whole
      outfits—dresses and pants and socks—for her family, while my mother
      only sewed under considerable duress, and my sisters couldn’t use a
      sewing machine at all (until one of them took up jewelry as a hobby
      as an adult). When I’ve asked about other families, this has been a
      common pattern.[212]↩︎
  16. Historical height time-series reflect poor nutrition, and things
      like [213]dental records and iodization shocks are difficult to
      reconcile with the idea that the pre-1950 USA or UK were some
      prelapsarian paradise of delicious foodstuffs stuffed with
      micronutrients & eaten only in moderation; the scrawny,
      [214]rickety⁠, [215]moronic [216]1915 American⁠, for example, could
      look forward to a diet of lots and lots of lard & canned food,
      little fresh fruit/​vegetables or meat, and all at the low low
      price of twice as much what a 2016 American would pay for more &
      better.[217]↩︎
  17. Consider how you no longer see deaths from regular E. coli
      outbreaks. As far as I can tell from US statistics, the total
      number of fast food-related E. coli deaths in the 26 years since
      the [218]1993 Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak still do not exceed
      the number of deaths from that single Jack in the Box incident. In
      particular, despite the enormous amount of attention paid to
      [219]Chipotle’s food safety⁠, there appear to have been 0
      fatalities. Fast food is [220]pretty safe⁠.[221]↩︎
  18. The rate at which new apple varieties come out is absurd. It seems
      every other time I do my grocery shopping at Walmart/​​Aldi, I find
      a new variety on the shelves due to new varieties, staggered
      seasonality, and spreading availability. At one point, bemused, I
      went around to every grocery store I could find just to check their
      apple selection: at the 6^th store, I was still finding a variety
      the others did not have! (In 2021 alone, I found “Cosmic Crisp”,
      “WildTwist”, “Ruby Frost”, and “Rock-It”.)
      The availability means I can’t easily do blinded comparisons like
      [222]I did for mineral water⁠, but as of August 2021, I rank the
      eating apples I’ve tried thus far as (in descending order):
      SweeTango, Honeycrisp, WildTwist, Granny Smith, Golden Delicious,
      Juici, Ruby Frost, Cosmic Crisp, Pazazz, Braeburn, Smitten, Kanzi,
      Jazz, Fuji, Kiku, SnapDragon, Ambrosia, Cripps Pink, Envy Rck-It,
      Lady Alice, SugarBee, McIntosh, Cameo, Paula Red, Ginger Gold, Red
      Delicious.[223]↩︎

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178. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycobacterium_bovis
179. https://www.gwern.net/Improvements#fnref1
180. https://www.gwern.net/docs/www/www.trendingbuffalo.com/edd9a9684f2aee1019b9430e981761a8ef3b1664.html
181. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGI00HV7Cfw
182. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YBOn-Fxg_4
183. https://www.gwern.net/Improvements#fnref2
184. https://ourworldindata.org/charts
185. http://pcdb.santafe.edu/
186. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects
187. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Rosling
188. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gapminder_Foundation
189. https://www.humanprogress.org/
190. https://www.gwern.net/Improvements#fnref3
191. https://www.gwern.net/static/build/Inflation.hs
192. https://www.gwern.net/Improvements#fnref4
193. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container-deposit_legislation
194. https://www.gwern.net/Improvements#fnref5
195. https://www.gwern.net/docs/www/spectrum.ieee.org/144c3abe35396e58d278e2fccd911aef0c757c8c.html
196. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirPods
197. https://www.gwern.net/Improvements#fnref6
198. https://www.gwern.net/Improvements#fnref7
199. https://www.gwern.net/Improvements#fnref8
200. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_lawn_mower
201. https://www.gwern.net/Improvements#fnref9
202. https://www.gwern.net/Improvements#fnref10
203. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
204. https://www.gwern.net/Improvements#fnref11
205. https://nitter.hu/darthtimothy/status/1361343608662630402
206. https://www.gwern.net/docs/www/jalopnik.com/65ea7387acca41db1d853d2bcb3c64d928ec4de6.html
207. https://www.gwern.net/Improvements#fnref12
208. https://www.gwern.net/docs/www/www.airlines.org/52e05e30c253d591eafb76620aff9bdfd146ed0e.html
209. https://www.gwern.net/Improvements#fnref13
210. https://www.vice.com/en/article/qkjmgq/the-decades-long-quest-to-design-a-car-stereo-that-cant-be-stolen
211. https://www.gwern.net/Improvements#fnref14
212. https://www.gwern.net/Improvements#fnref15
213. https://www.gwern.net/Beauty
214. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickets
215. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goitre
216. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2016/article/the-life-of-american-workers-in-1915.htm
217. https://www.gwern.net/Improvements#fnref16
218. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Jack_in_the_Box_E._coli_outbreak
219. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipotle_Mexican_Grill#Food_safety
220. https://www.gwern.net/docs/www/www.statnews.com/eeec5abba028f0a55577741c2bef909e35ef2ea5.html
221. https://www.gwern.net/Improvements#fnref17
222. https://www.gwern.net/Water
223. https://www.gwern.net/Improvements#fnref18
224. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd7uqL7B_l1HFIfXc8D_nZyumaOv58msK7jhl4XzQjWODWKdA/viewform

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