Everyone thinks everything has gotten worse
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@Elizafox lmao weather forecasting is a wild way to start off this list, ever since the defunding of NOAA the forecasts are absolutely worthless and a barrage of tornado watch notification fatigue, I agree with you on the rest of the items though
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Everyone thinks everything has gotten worse
Here’s some things that actually haven’t:
- Weather forecasting: it’s better than ever (outside of the US)
- Solar: cheaper than natural gas
- Coal: essentially dying from not being cheaper than natgas or solar
- Timekeeping: now accurate over galactic timescales
- Flash storage: surpassing spinning rust
- Public transit ridership in the US: Amtrak is posting the best numbers ever
- Union membership in the US: rising
- Murder rates: falling in the US and worldwide on average, believe it or not
- CFC’s: essentially abolished and gone, the biggest environmental win of our lifetimes
- Acid rain: increasingly a nearly-solved issue
- Electrical access: still rising worldwide
- Internet access: most people are now connected everywhere
- China is leading the way in green tech and actively working to get off fossil fuels
- You can charge an EV from 0 to 80% in 15 minutes with the newest chargers and tech, and it’s still getting faster
And so much more. Lots of quiet wins that people never hear about because all they do is doomscroll.
@Elizafox Thanks for this!
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Everyone thinks everything has gotten worse
Here’s some things that actually haven’t:
- Weather forecasting: it’s better than ever (outside of the US)
- Solar: cheaper than natural gas
- Coal: essentially dying from not being cheaper than natgas or solar
- Timekeeping: now accurate over galactic timescales
- Flash storage: surpassing spinning rust
- Public transit ridership in the US: Amtrak is posting the best numbers ever
- Union membership in the US: rising
- Murder rates: falling in the US and worldwide on average, believe it or not
- CFC’s: essentially abolished and gone, the biggest environmental win of our lifetimes
- Acid rain: increasingly a nearly-solved issue
- Electrical access: still rising worldwide
- Internet access: most people are now connected everywhere
- China is leading the way in green tech and actively working to get off fossil fuels
- You can charge an EV from 0 to 80% in 15 minutes with the newest chargers and tech, and it’s still getting faster
And so much more. Lots of quiet wins that people never hear about because all they do is doomscroll.
@Elizafox Weather forecasting in Tokyo was astonishingly good a couple of years ago. More recently, climate change has made it more unpredictable. Still surprisingly good compared to the bad ol' days.
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Everyone thinks everything has gotten worse
Here’s some things that actually haven’t:
- Weather forecasting: it’s better than ever (outside of the US)
- Solar: cheaper than natural gas
- Coal: essentially dying from not being cheaper than natgas or solar
- Timekeeping: now accurate over galactic timescales
- Flash storage: surpassing spinning rust
- Public transit ridership in the US: Amtrak is posting the best numbers ever
- Union membership in the US: rising
- Murder rates: falling in the US and worldwide on average, believe it or not
- CFC’s: essentially abolished and gone, the biggest environmental win of our lifetimes
- Acid rain: increasingly a nearly-solved issue
- Electrical access: still rising worldwide
- Internet access: most people are now connected everywhere
- China is leading the way in green tech and actively working to get off fossil fuels
- You can charge an EV from 0 to 80% in 15 minutes with the newest chargers and tech, and it’s still getting faster
And so much more. Lots of quiet wins that people never hear about because all they do is doomscroll.
@Elizafox
In many countries, life has become much better for women in some ways.I'm not saying it's perfect, or problem solved. But I am heartily glad I was born in the 20th C and not in the 15th.
If all we do is say that everything has gotten worse, then there is no response but to shrug our shoulders and suffer.
When we recognize where things have gotten better, we can point to that and say I'll have more of that please.
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@Elizafox
Flash storage is more expensive than ever and only improving in quality because it supports the AI bubble. When the bubble pops, the storage will briefly become near-worthless and manufacturers will stop making it, which will only make the crisis worse in the long run.I straight-up do not believe you about Amtrak. You're telling me more people are riding it now than in any of its first 10 years? And the per-capita statistics have got to be very different.
The unions we have are useless. Everyone in my store is unhappy with their job, the company keeps cutting our hours and taking it as a sign to keep doing it when it doesn't immediately kill the store. Yet nobody seriously believes we have the power to stop or reverse it.
Murder rates may be falling but have you considered that people being murdered by stochastic terrorism are generally not being counted? We're caught in the middle of several genocides brought on by public figures who affect societal behaviors in such a way that it makes their targets suicidal. Not to mention, victims of bombings during wars (and "illegal military operations") are also counted separately. The crime isn't going away, it's just centralizing to those with power.
We may have to create entirely new infrastructure to escape the corporate internet, access to it today is much less useful than it was 10-15 years ago thanks to corporate meddling like ads, generated content (AI), social media algorithms (AI), and age verification (AI). So long, and thanks for all the technological progress!
@halotroop2288 @Elizafox
Many more people take Amtrak than fly between NY and Washington, DC; and between NY and BostonObviously this has been the case before, up to some time in the 20th century, but it's been a while
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Everyone thinks everything has gotten worse
Here’s some things that actually haven’t:
- Weather forecasting: it’s better than ever (outside of the US)
- Solar: cheaper than natural gas
- Coal: essentially dying from not being cheaper than natgas or solar
- Timekeeping: now accurate over galactic timescales
- Flash storage: surpassing spinning rust
- Public transit ridership in the US: Amtrak is posting the best numbers ever
- Union membership in the US: rising
- Murder rates: falling in the US and worldwide on average, believe it or not
- CFC’s: essentially abolished and gone, the biggest environmental win of our lifetimes
- Acid rain: increasingly a nearly-solved issue
- Electrical access: still rising worldwide
- Internet access: most people are now connected everywhere
- China is leading the way in green tech and actively working to get off fossil fuels
- You can charge an EV from 0 to 80% in 15 minutes with the newest chargers and tech, and it’s still getting faster
And so much more. Lots of quiet wins that people never hear about because all they do is doomscroll.
@Elizafox A couple of years ago I'd have agreed with you about the flash, but it costs 3x what it did then.
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@YinYinFalcon @aburka @Elizafox Thank you! I knew I couldn't be the only one who thought weather forecasts have become terribly unreliable (and I'm also in the EU)! Could it be that they haven't updated their models for climate change yet?
@eobet @YinYinFalcon @aburka @Elizafox They *can't* update for climate change. More energy in the system means more random factors leads to more unpredictability. There are more butterflies in play.
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@codeofamor @Elizafox And yet, at the same time, somehow increasing production of coal power plants
@mihamarkic @codeofamor @Elizafox ... which are being used less and less.
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@Elizafox Yes thanks for reminding, some things got better. As Max Roser puts it: "The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.
It is wrong to think these three statements contradict each other. We need to see that they are all true to see that a better world is possible."
https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better
#owid #ourworldindata@WaardRichard @Elizafox It is also valuable to remember that the world can also become much worse, and that losses are more easily attained than gains.
For example, undoing the damage done by the current US administration to science over the past year will most likely take a decade or more.
This is one of my gripes with longtermism. The long arrow of time might point toward progress but glosses over significant (preventable) regressions.
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Everyone thinks everything has gotten worse
Here’s some things that actually haven’t:
- Weather forecasting: it’s better than ever (outside of the US)
- Solar: cheaper than natural gas
- Coal: essentially dying from not being cheaper than natgas or solar
- Timekeeping: now accurate over galactic timescales
- Flash storage: surpassing spinning rust
- Public transit ridership in the US: Amtrak is posting the best numbers ever
- Union membership in the US: rising
- Murder rates: falling in the US and worldwide on average, believe it or not
- CFC’s: essentially abolished and gone, the biggest environmental win of our lifetimes
- Acid rain: increasingly a nearly-solved issue
- Electrical access: still rising worldwide
- Internet access: most people are now connected everywhere
- China is leading the way in green tech and actively working to get off fossil fuels
- You can charge an EV from 0 to 80% in 15 minutes with the newest chargers and tech, and it’s still getting faster
And so much more. Lots of quiet wins that people never hear about because all they do is doomscroll.
@Elizafox Rain? What rain? There is a drought here. The rivers and springs are drying up. You are a dreamer.
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@aburka EU weather forecasting is good!
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@WaardRichard @Elizafox It is also valuable to remember that the world can also become much worse, and that losses are more easily attained than gains.
For example, undoing the damage done by the current US administration to science over the past year will most likely take a decade or more.
This is one of my gripes with longtermism. The long arrow of time might point toward progress but glosses over significant (preventable) regressions.
@koen_hufkens @Elizafox Yes, I agree. There are problems with longtermism as well and there seems to be a relation between owid and effective altruism, the latter I absolutely do not support.
The context is that Max Roser says this in response to what the newspapers are presenting us and that is mostly very negative news. -
@koen_hufkens @Elizafox Yes, I agree. There are problems with longtermism as well and there seems to be a relation between owid and effective altruism, the latter I absolutely do not support.
The context is that Max Roser says this in response to what the newspapers are presenting us and that is mostly very negative news.@WaardRichard @Elizafox I think that a lot of these discussions also don't account for a floating baseline. Improvements are measured in relation to the system you occupy. So, even if things "improve", depending on inequality, things can still feel like a regression to you. Many of these statistics gloss over this reality, your personal experience is not population sized statistic.
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Everyone thinks everything has gotten worse
Here’s some things that actually haven’t:
- Weather forecasting: it’s better than ever (outside of the US)
- Solar: cheaper than natural gas
- Coal: essentially dying from not being cheaper than natgas or solar
- Timekeeping: now accurate over galactic timescales
- Flash storage: surpassing spinning rust
- Public transit ridership in the US: Amtrak is posting the best numbers ever
- Union membership in the US: rising
- Murder rates: falling in the US and worldwide on average, believe it or not
- CFC’s: essentially abolished and gone, the biggest environmental win of our lifetimes
- Acid rain: increasingly a nearly-solved issue
- Electrical access: still rising worldwide
- Internet access: most people are now connected everywhere
- China is leading the way in green tech and actively working to get off fossil fuels
- You can charge an EV from 0 to 80% in 15 minutes with the newest chargers and tech, and it’s still getting faster
And so much more. Lots of quiet wins that people never hear about because all they do is doomscroll.
@Elizafox Something else that still works in the UK:
* Phone up and report a gas leak. Someone will probably come and fix it, for free, within not very many minutes.
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