airplanes, microchips, vaccines, lenses, lasers, windmils, solar cells, … the list is endless !
Cars… old cars were indestructible death traps. Crumple zones kill the car and save the human
Not even indestructible, just big heavy destructible death traps!
There’s a video floating around of a midsized sedan from the 60s and the 00s in a frontal offset crash and the old car is absolutely demolished.
This is a consistent argument I get into with my mother. She complains that cars are made of plastic now, and I try to explain that crashing a steel body car would mutilate your body but to no avail. This and her hatred of roundabouts.
I saw that one! A great visual of how much safety has improved
that’s the kind of positivity I wanted. it is cool how much laser tech has improved in the past few decades
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Sure, they had more legroom because the modern concept of economy class did not exist. They also crashed and killed everyone onboard much more often
It’s a fair point more affordable is also a kind of better, average Joe could only dream of affording flight. On the other hand it’s all new technologies and the price is bound to drop as adoption goes up. You could argue windmills have been around for a while, but let’s be honest - calling a windpowered electricity generating turbines windmills is a bit of a stretch.
You could argue that was more a function of training, policies & procedures, and maintenance than of construction.
It’s a combination of things to be sure. To give a simple example though, turbine engines are inherently much less likely to quit running than piston engines.
Airline comfort has drastically and steadily declined over the past couple decades, long after commercial airlines started using jets. Maybe not to the level of that first picture - cattle class has been around since I was a kid - but passenger comfort has been measurably squashed just in the time I’ve been travelling as an adult. Safety hasn’t correspondingly improved as a result of technology in that time.
Safety has improved considerably in the past couple decades in the USA.
There’s probably no causal relationship to declining comfort though. Comfort has decreased for two reasons:
- Anything that gets more seats on a plane increases potential revenue. An extra row in a 737 could be on the order of $2 million a year in revenue.
- Any discomfort the airline can inflict that doesn’t significantly exceed its rivals encourages customers to pay for upgrades.
But, again, most likely due to more stringent maintenance, training, and procedural regulations thank because of any technology improvement. American’s average plane age is 11y/o; United is 14 y/o; Delta’s average plane age is 17 years old. Despite bring nearly half again older, Delta’s safety record isn’t much worse than American’s. There’s little or no correlation between fleet age and safety, and it’s more rational that any increased accident rate of older planes is due to wear and tear and general ages of the planes rather than the technology in them.
I’d gladly trade leg room for a somewhat increased risk of death.
That would be “made better” to me.
Better is a useless metric.
I understand your sentiment. On the other hand, I would rather my son have an hour of slight discomfort but arrive safely than be a fatality statistic.
There is a feasible middle ground that is not realistically going to happen however. Slightly increasing personal space and comfort in the newer, safer planes without squeezing every possible seat in in the name of profit.
“Better” does need to defined to not be ambiguous. To me a good definition to use in this thread would be “the net changes over time are objectively an improvement for the use”. I think that my middle ground would firmly be “better” but in the current state it is only strictly better for those owning the planes.
They sold flight insurance, life insurance policies you bought at kiosks in the airport, into the 70s. No thanks.
Air travel was very expensive back then relative to the average household income. If you’re willing to pay for business class today, you’ll be basically in the same position as those folks in the first photo, and be paying about as much (relatively) as they did.
It’s still available, but you’re not going to get it for the price of a super saver economy ticket. It’s an apples to oranges comparison.
Fair points and nice illustrations 👍
I was mostly thinking about fuel economy and decreased noise levels.I’m having a hard time believing the first picture is a real airplane. Are you sure it isn’t a mock up? The width of the cabin rivals the 787 I flew on from Japan.
Batteries?
Beat me to it. Great minds, all that. :)
I’ve noticed the trend but if you know the fine details please feel free to share.
In common consumer batteries, we saw the following evolution:
- Dry-cell (zinc-carbon) batteries (late 1800s) - having a non-liquid electrolyte, these can be transported and used inside portable devices. They perform so poorly in sustained use that they led to the name “flash light” for the short runtime of portable lighting using them for power.
- Heavy-duty (zinc-chloride) (late 1800s) - an improvement to dry-cell chemistry that roughly quadrupled runtime under load. Still used today for ultra-low-cost batteries.
- NiCD (1940s) - a rechargeable substitute for zinc-chloride. Superior performance under extreme load, but otherwise low capacity, prone to memory effects, and a source of toxic waste.
- Alkaline battery (1960s) - a roughly eightfold improvement over zinc-carbon under load, still very common today.
- Lithium battery (1970s) - much more capable of sustaining high loads than alkaline, extremely shelf-stable, expensive
- NiMH battery (1989) - a major improvement over NiCD, offering a rechargeable substitute with similar capacity to alkaline under light load and far superior performance under heavy load without the memory effect and toxicity of NiCD.
- Low-self-discharge NiMH (2005) - Improvements in shelf-stability made pre-charged rechargeable batteries commercially viable, and allow users to store spare rechargeables charged.
And then there’s the lithium-ion rechargeable. You’re probably reading this on a device powered by one. It’s much lighter than NiMH for the same amount of energy storage, and a bit better on energy per volume as well. Since its introduction in 1991, Li-ion technology has dropped in price by a factor of about 25, which is why electric cars are commercially viable now and weren’t a couple decades ago.
Unfortunately, consumer devices powered by standardized, field-replaceable Li-ion cells haven’t really caught on outside of vaporizer hobbyists and flashlights.
compare a car battery thats lead based and heavy and not rechargeable, to the one in your cellphone that is more powerful and way thinner and safer.
The lead acid battery in your car is rechargeable
The battery starts the car and then the alternator charges the battery.
By what measurement is a car battery, at something like 75,000mAh and 500 or more cranking amps, less powerful than a cell phone battery?
energy density, depth of discharge, energy efficiency, lifespan
When you hear people saying that technology has stagnated, that person clearly isn’t following advancements in medicine. The medical tech I see now just blow me away.
I’ve heard of lab-grown flesh cloned from a burn victim’s own flesh replacing the need for an invasive skin graft retrieval, and a gold nanoparticle mixture placed into an old spinal cord injury to cause microscopic damage and force the body to resume healing the severed nerves. Those are the big two I like to talk about. I’m optimistic about things like whole working artificial organs in the next 50 years
It’s not about tech stagnating, but about it not lasting. They say “they don’t make it like they used to” for a reason.
That’s just an entirely separate matter. Definitely truth to planned obsolescence in some cases and lower quality materials used in many products.
But I have heard many people say technology in general has stagnated. Consumer tech keeps getting more powerful largely without major perceivable changes, and looking at developments in key fields is where we can most notably see developments.
Yeah, I know it’s an entirely separate matter than the one you’re talking about. But I think OP was talking about build quality, and not tech stagnating, haha
Oh wow you are totally right… I must’ve misread the question as I was starting to pass out last night.
Haha, it happens!
The advancements in gene editing, vaccines, and biologics is mind boggling. We’re looking at curing diseases that we couldn’t have cured until recently.
*the rich are looking at curing diseases. The rest of us will just die because we can’t afford a 7-figure price tag and the insurance companies just laugh at us until we croak.
Unless is Bio-rad. All my homies hate Bio-rad.
Computer hardware overall i more dependable then it used to be IMO. So is windows itself.
I’ve never really had an internal PC parts die on me, old or new, except HDDs I guess, but their MTBF is listed when you purchase, so that feels a bit different.
Did you guys have more parts dying?
I’ve had acouple video cards fail and a power supply fail. In all cases I was asking to much from them.
Engines. 300hp out of 2L is impressive. It scales even better. V8’s can put out insane numbers.
For real, internal combustion engines are made way better than they used to be. Both in terms of reliability and power output.
You can get a small, ICE only (non-hybrid) car that gets 40+ MPG. You can buy a new car with a warranty that makes over 800 horsepower.
The IC engine is at its peak. Electric is the future, but the current crop of ICE are incredible machines.
Not to mention the reliability is better now. Basic maintenance will get you over 100k easy with no major concerns
Ha ha laughing in 1.6 litre WRC cars kicking out 500PS 😂
No one is driving those past 100k miles with 10k maintenance intervals though.
The ICE is “only” outputting ~380hp, the rest is from the electric boost.
Sports equipment has benefited greatly from advances in material science.
I’ve been snowboarding since they weren’t allowed on the hills and a few years ago was finally able to buy a full new setup.
There isn’t a single component of my gear that isn’t a radical improvement over the prior setup from 10 years earlier.
Thermal form boots, fancy new strong and flexible plastics in the bindings, and who knows all the wizardry in the board itself.
It is all so comfortable and performs so much better I can’t imagine going out with my old gear.
I have to believe this is true across the board in football and hockey protection etc.
The first time I got to go to the slopes as a kid, I chose snowboarding (we were renting equipment). And I learned that it was rather recent that snowboards were fully-allowed to be used on their resort. Something about requiring the board to have a metal edge, if you brought your own? I don’t fully remember. I was too young to realize that snowboarding was not allowed on many ski slopes, or that the divide was ever a thing
Then Johnny Tsunami came out and it blew my mind a little that it really must have been a whole thing. I kinda came in, just as snowboarding was more universally accepted, like early 90’s.
No point to my story, I just always think about my first “ski” trip, anytime I’m reminded that snowboarding used to be banned
The metals edges were one main element, as you could buy cheap plastic boards without them and “ride in control” is a major mantra on ski hills.
There was also a big social “not on my hill” snob element, with snowboarders seen as bringing a “bad attitude” to the gentlemanly sport of skiing.
I skied for almost 10 years before snowboards hit the scene, so I saw both sides of it, and as an instructor in the early 90s made a big point of asking snowboarders “please at follow the saftey rules, don’t give them an excuse to kick us out”.
Having my lift ticket ripped and getting kicked out over building a one foot little jump on the same hill that has 20 foot gap jumps, hand rails, and a halfpipe today always makes me laugh.
don’t give them an excuse to kick us out
It’s like you unlocked some latent memory of mine lol. I took a little “begginer instruction” course and that was one of the major sentiments… basically, don’t act/seem reckless. It didn’t really apply to me at the time, as I couldn’t even stop without falling. I would gain a little speed, then fall, and repeat. Took a little bit to figure out the “carving” aspect. Good times. And very very sore afterward, but still good times
Pocket computers
Aka cell phones
My phone’s hardware is more stacked than my PC at this point and that blows me away
Houses. Mainly talking about asbestos and lead.
Unfortunately we’ve also mastered the art of putting a nice facade on shitty, shitty bones
It’s nice they’ve taken the asbestos and the lead out, but older houses used to be built of brick and stone, now they’re built of straw and sticks.
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In most ways, but they’re definitely more fragile than before.
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I can drop my modern portable computing unit (phone with a basic shell) with no worries but I would stress out if I dropped a Compaq Portable from the same height
My current phone is holding up the best out of any phone I’ve owned. With most of them, I’ve been ready for the upgrade after the contract was up on the last one. The last one I went for a little while, but was kinda in the market at no rush right away.
With this one, the only reason I’m thinking of a new phone is so I can root it and install an OS that isn’t so tied to Google. It still performs well and the battery is fine. No cracks on the screen, all buttons work, even the stupid bixby button.
Longevity compared to dumb phones that dominated the 20th century, ok, it’s probably not going to last like those ones. But compared to the early smart phones of the 00s? Way better.
A lot of beauty products. Nail polish, makeup, hair dryers, hairbrushes, you name it. Some terrible (and even ozone-destroying) chemicals have been removed, and with the proliferation of online reviews and images you can pick something that won’t burn your eyes and will actually work.
I miss radium
Cars. Some people like to talk about how sturdy cars used to be, but with all of the advancements in safety, if I were in a head-on collision between an old Plymouth and a Toyota Prius, I’d much rather be in the Prius.
Kids toys.
Back in my day, toys over promised and under delivered, especially if it had any kind of electronics. Everything required extra imagination back then, sometimes stretching it to a point of disillusion.
Not to mention the poisons
Having to use your imagination while playing is a plus on my book.
Yeah nothing wrong with imagination. Just sucked when a toy promised more than what it delivered.
Like we totally had fun with action figures that had no articulation, and we used our imaginations to make believe.
But then you’d get an RC car and the only steering you get is in reverse, in one direction.
I remember those RC cars. I don’t know of I was younger than you, but I thought they were the coolest things!
I do agree that some electronic toys were underwhelming in a sense*. Like “talking” dolls which just played the same recording over and over.
*Underwhelming in the promise, but it was fun to dissect that doll and discover that the recording was an actual tiny plastic disc! (Like a vinyl, but actual plastic and maybe 2 inches in diameter!)
I’m going to say “Motorcycles”. (At least bikes in the US.)
20 years ago, a lot of bikes still had carburetors with manual choke. Many of them had no pollution controls at all. ABS was basically science fiction. A significant portion of them were air cooled. (To be clear, there are still some air cooled bikes on the market.)
Now it’s rare to find carbs on street legal bikes, even the 125cc Grom has fuel injection. And basically any bike has at least a catalytic converter. There are bikes with variable valve timing. There are bikes made by Harley-Davidson (The company always the butt of “muh primitive motorcycle” jokes) that have water cooled engines with variable valve timing that make as much noise, and vibration, as the average Toyota. Most bikes have ABS on them now, and there are plenty with traction control and stability control. They’re safer now than they used to be. I recently sold a couple of bikes and bought one nicer bike, and it’s uncanny how smooth, quiet, and stable it is.
This thread is helping me realize what a curmugeon I am. Everybody’s like “such-and-such is so much better that it was” and I’m coming up with so many reasons why all of them suck way worse.
(Maybe that says more about me than about the state of the world.)
What has you grumping old curmudgeon lol? I can see both sides personally. Things are lesser in many ways, but also better. Electronics are way improved from a reliability and size perspective, but they are becoming closed off and made without repairability in mind. Cars are way more efficient, powerful, and reliable, but they are also affected by a lack of thought to repairability, and sometimes use a poor choice of plastic over metal.
Just to your specific examples…
Most of your electronics sell your personal data to a myriad of third parties. They mostly prevent you from replacing the whole OS or turning off anti-features. All in a way they didn’t at one time. And of course there’s the repairability issue. (I just discovered about a week ago that my phone with a non-replaceable battery is bulging. sigh)
We live in a world where our vacuum cleaners go down when some AWS service nobody has ever heard of has an outage and our robot vacuum puctures take pictures of us on the toilet that eventually get leaked to the internet.
Your car too. I bought a car recently. The car I had before was a low-end 2005 model. This one’s a 2021 Subaru. The backup camera is kinda nice I admit. But it’s got StarLink and a mic in the cabin. And the privacy policy basically says “we can record you and use the recordings for whatever we want.” I have half a mind to see if I can’t disconnect the microphone one day. And despite being impossible to disconnect from the internet at any time, the clock hasn’t updated for the daylight savings time change yet. (Having that happen automatically seems like about the simplest possible convenience.) And SiriusXM is spamming my mailbox now. And the tire pressure gauge is slightly off and it nags me in cold weather. And it tries to get me to accept the EULA every time I start the car. (I haven’t hit the accept button yet. Not that I’m under any illusion that affects my legal standing on any issue in any particular way. It’s just my own tiny little protest.) And the touchscreen I have to look at while driving instead of physical buttons I can use by feel seems less safe. Plus, this car has a lot more bells and whistles. I did go for one that had more manual things like a non-power rear hatch and manually/mechanically adjustable driver’s seat and a keyed ignition rather than push start. But still. Is the car going to brick and incur a big repair fee if the rear view camera (that wasn’t a feature of my previous car) breaks?
Finally, have you heard of Wirth’s Law? There are tons of memes out there about how in the nineties they crammed really impressive software into small amounts of storage and they worked on very low-power computers. Now the ads alone on a lot of recipe sites and news articles (previously seen as about the lowest power things one could do on a computer) will bog down a fairly powerful computer.
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You just listed most things mass produced in China. That’s pretty much true around the board. Back in the early days post WW2 Japanese products also were seen as dodgy cheap quality throwaway like mass produced products from China today.
