More than anything else, I think the modern American super market would blow the minds of anyone born before 1900 more than any other marvel that exists.
You have blueberries for sale in January??? A variety box of tea from 7 different countries? A wall of spices? Pineapples? Packaging made from aluminum that is just thrown away? The bread isn't full of sand and grit? And it's sliced!!!
All relatively affordable and accessible to the average person.
It's refreshing to see a rare openly optimistic article about the world here first thing in the morning.
I also like to occasionally appreciate how someone from even just the recent past would see our current world as one full of manmade wonders.
Another one of these would be microwaves, although conceptually simple as a box that heats stuff, it'd be pretty mind bending that it does it essentially wirelessly.
Adding on to the point about going to the Moon being universally mind blowing, I think it would be (and still is) even more mind blowing that we stopped doing that and didn't bother trying for 50 years, in large part because the people of the time lost interest...
Considering that it's staggeringly expensive and there's not much to see there, it seems like the right decision to hold off once we'd established it could be done.
Except in a parallel world where we continued forward making advances in space we could already be a defacto post-scarcity species (as far as materials are concerned at least), exporting our heavy carbon producing industries to the Moon - simultaneously helping create an atmosphere there, while avoiding any climate impact here, have effectively infinite land to expand outward into, countless high paying jobs perpetuating all of this across the entire solar system if not beyond. And so on endlessly.
Instead we're sending toy rovers to Mars, unable to solve climate change in any way that has any chance of actually moving forward, trending rapidly towards WW3 as nations' schemes invariably turn towards each other, with no grand outlet for expansion/growth to otherwise occupy themselves. And so on endlessly. I think it's quite a poor direction we've chosen.
And I'd also add that this is assuming there are no revolutionary discoveries out there awaiting discovery. It's basically impossible to imagine something like electricity/electromagnetism before its discovery. As we live on a single planet in a virtually endless - and ever stranger - universe, one can only imagine how many other revolutionary discoveries, things we cannot even really imagine today, await our eventual discovery. It's hard to know what we don't know, but I think there is probably a rather tremendous amount. And it seems reasonable to expect that exploring the cosmos is one way of taking us closer to it.
exporting our heavy carbon producing industries to the Moon
Never study rocketry, it wil ruin your whimsical innocence.
It's very fortunate that rockets are not the only way to get stuff into space, and more importantly, that we don't need to literally bring a whole factory and the input materials up on a rocket but instead use resources available in space.
Even if we actually had to bring everything from Earth, Starship is cheap and powerful enough to build an orbital ring which would make orbital lift nearly too cheap to meter.
It's very fortunate that rockets are not the only way to get stuff into space
I don't see any of the alternatives ever being competitive.
It's even worse than that. A space elevator, the only thing that could conceivably replace rockets, requires materials so strong that they don't exist in our universe.
Space is like the internet. You can communicate through it, but sending matter is nigh impossible.
Not true - an orbital ring doesn't require any scifi materials, though the engineering is not yet there. And you can build magnetic accelerators, that's fully possible with current knowledge of science and engineering.
I don't see that kind of macroengineering as plausible.
I don't see it plausible in our today's social and political situation, but that's not set in stone. Technically and economically it's possible.
Assuming you're hitting on carbon stuff. There are simple solutions even with rockets. For instance liquid H2 / liquid O2 rocket engines are a thing - this is what the Space Shuttle Main Engine used. [1] Reacting hydrogen with oxygen is, counter-intuitively, an extremely effective propellant! And the exhaust is literally water vapor.
Some reason SpaceX decided on methane based propulsion are because it's more safe/stable than liquid hydrogen, because Mars is the goal, and the Sabatier reaction! [2] You can create methane + water from reacting CO2 + hydrogen. And Mars has practically infinite CO2 + hydrogen, which translates to practically infinite fuel + water. Add in fully reusable rockets and you have one heck of a nice starting framework for colonization, that in some ways almost feels too convenient.
Someone needs to hurry up and build a von Neumann probe already.
It remained staggeringly expensive because the Space Shuttle was a disastrous design to follow up the lunar rockets. It held up the space program half a century in some ways.
It reduced the manned program to Earth orbit, was supposed to be highly reusable to reduce launch costs, but didn't work out that way. And of course, it was supposed to be reliable and safer.
If we had continued going to the moon, even infrequently, or aimed further, we would have had no choice but to actually achieve reusability, safety and reliability much sooner.
(In the meantime, ... NASA's current manned program isn't better. Multi-billion dollar throw away rockers. Good thing someone validated reusable first stages and space craft, and is working to eliminate non-reusable second stages.)
It's also possible that materials science (and others) were too immature and could not be rushed without innovations in a million other areas. The tradeoffs needed across all fields may be worse for society, or just impossible until the global population could produce enough skilled workers.
Nope. The Shuttle was a catastrophic strategic blunder. Why do you think NASA is so adamant on chasing a second vehicle to go to the ISS when A) The ISS is nearly over; and B) Space X's vehicle is awesome?
Because of the Shuttle. Initially, and they actually did it for a couple of years, EVERY satellite launched into orbit by the US was supposed to use the Shuttle. Inevitably, when the Shuttle proved inadequate at all its jobs, they had to revert back to rockets. That's not a failure of materials science. That's a strategic mistake that could have been avoided.
I wasn't defending the shuttle. I was taking issue with this point:
If we had continued going to the moon, even infrequently, or aimed further, we would have had no choice but to actually achieve reusability, safety and reliability much sooner.
Foolish short-sighted take. Imagine if the same opinion held during the age of sail. There's literally more resources than are currently controlled by our entire planet in the asteroid belt, and a lunar colony (at least a refueling station in space) would be a huge boon to anyone who wants to go explore further.
If that's not good enough, how about outsourcing our shitty resource extraction and polluting manufacturing to space, where there's no life to care about the waste and disruption?
Not to mention that if space flight were commonly available and cheap today (more feasible than you seem to think - remember computers were once phenomenally expensive and now they're so cheap as to be thrown away), more could experience the overview effect, the cognitive shift that comes when you see Earth hanging in the void of space. That would probably make humanity better to each other and our planet.
Or what about the fact that the Apollo program basically launched our discipline of computer science? Surely there was more to be learned and discovered from striving to make spaceflight routine. If only we had a generation of scientists and engineers working on hard science problems rather than ad-tech, the world would be a much better today place.
The problem with arguments by analogy is they inherently assume the analogy is valid. It's a circular argument.
The "cognitive shift" thing is just BS some space fans made up to sell their cult.
And no, Apollo did not launch "our discipline of computer science". Talk about spinoff inflation!
Apollo did feature a bunch of interesting first in electronics. We would have gotten there, and we did, but the Apollo program had stuff like the first fly-by-wire vehicle. That's a great invention!
While I can understand that as a reason for not sending crew there, we didn't even send uncrewed landers. The result being that now our technology has changed so much that we have to relearn how to autonomously land there. If we had been sending the occasional lander, we would've smoothly transitioned from the technology of then to the technology of now.
Re: Moon landing -
It had very little to do with people losing interest. In 1972 Nixon defacto completely cancelled the human space program, which he had been rapidly stripping away since Apollo 13. He was paranoid that a catastrophic failure was imminent and would negatively affect his 1972 election campaign. Interestingly when he signed off on the final stripping down in 1972, he remarked that we may never set foot on the Moon again this century. That would've sounded quite absurd at the time, but was ultimately completely correct.
It's kind of ironic that the stereotypical context of the space race was it supposedly having been a proxy for an ideological battle between capitalism and communism. Yet the US space program existed solely and exclusively due to a large and heavily centralized governmental effort. It's only in very modern times that private companies can take to the stars, completely independent of governments, which is why we've been able to make vastly made more progress in the past 10 years than we did in the 40 prior.
A good starting point off for going down this rabbit hole would probably be here. [1]
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canceled_Apollo_missions
It's only in very modern times that private companies can take to the stars, completely independent of governments...
Are there any private companies putting humans in space without huge government grants, launch facilities, or ex-gov talent?
The 'huge government grants' thing is doing a lot of (excuse the pun) heavy lifting, as are launch facilities and ex-gov talent.
The government is a customer on Crew Dragon, it's a government 'grant' if you consider it a grant when the government pays money to a company for stationary specifically designed for the government (say, with the respective agency's logo on it). Similarly, the launch facilities are being leased and heavily customized by private companies for their requirements. You can't just prop up a launch complex anywhere, and the best spots are where the government owned ones have been built already.
Ex-gov talent is similarly complicated because there is obviously a lot of exchange between NASA and industry, especially since the space industry is growing rapidly and has high barriers to entry constraining talent availability. For example, a lot of smaller new space companies are founded by people who have previously worked at SpaceX, but it'd be weird to say that those companies are not independent of SpaceX just because that's where their founders previously gained their industry credentials from.
The important point in terms of independence is that during Apollo, NASA dictated the design in detail to companies, the company's job was to build what NASA told them to, then NASA would take ownership of it all and be responsible for running the show. The companies couldn't choose to do whatever they wanted with the designs. Now, with independent private space exploration, NASA just presents its requirements (safety, destination, crew, payload, availability etc). Companies present their proposals, NASA decides which ones fit its requirements best and promises them fixed payments for achieving specific milestones. The risk of cost overruns, failures etc is entirely on the company. The design is developed primarily by the company, and it belongs to them, NASA is essentially just along for the ride like any passenger.
I'd still say that's not "completely independent". One might even say it's just outsourcing NASA's once many teams to different companies.
Also I doubt these companies would be as numerous or as big without the promise of fat government contracts looming on the horizon.
In 2023 SpaceX launched commercial (in other words excluding experimental/starship stuff) 96 times including 7 times for NASA. NASA played a critical role in SpaceX's early founding, where their first contract with NASA is effectively what enabled the company to exist. But I would also emphasize that such wasn't just serendipity. SpaceX's entire initial concept was built around said NASA contract, because it existed. If it didn't then they obviously would have been pitching to e.g. telecoms companies or whatever. But since then they've increasingly just become another customer, though certainly a VIP customer!
As for talent, launching stuff is not really NASA's competency in modern times. After the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011 until SpaceX entered the picture in 2020, the one and only way we got to the ISS was by relying on Russia. The SLS [2] was NASA's effort at creating a new launch vessel and it's just been a complete failure that was already been obsoleted by the Falcon Heavy years ago. SLS's expected cost per flight is $2billion+. So you're looking at up to twice the theoretic payload for 20x+ the cost. If not for corruption/graft, that rocket would have long since been cancelled and would certainly never fly a single mission. And I'm completely ignoring Starship here!
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...
This is all deeply hypothetical (and I'm super biased), but I think it's important to distinguish two different questions:
- Is it possible for a private company to make it to space without government money?
- Is it possible to do that while competing with other companies that do get the money?
Observing that "company ___ would not have succeeded without government money" is answering the second question but maybe not the first.
That covers the cancellation of Apollo, but the fact that we didn't even put an uncrewed lander on the Moon within the 50 years in between is indicative of a lack of general interest, since we've had several presidents in these 50 years.
Still, this did lead me to the discovery that apparently the often made claim that viewership of the landings waned after Apollo 11 doesn't seem to have any clear evidence besides the point that Apollo 11 had the highest live viewer count until apparently the most recent Superbowl. The EVA camera was damaged in Apollo 12, and 13 was just poorly covered by the media until the crew encountered trouble.
I don't think what happens in politics is a great proxy for interest. Lots of things with high interest levels never happen - federal digital privacy laws or federal right to repair laws for instance. And, vice versa, lots that are exceptionally unpopular get passed with exceptional rapidity - spying laws and copyright lasting until the heat death of the universe laws are a couple of examples there.
Most polls since the end of the Apollo program have shown strong and growing interest in space. Here's [1] the most recent I could find - a 2018 Pew poll. 72% consider it essential that the US continue to be a world leader in space exploration, 80% agree that the ISS has been a good investment for the country, 63% consider it important (45%) or top priority (18%) to send astronauts to Mars, and so on.
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2018/06/06/majority-of-a...
it supposedly having been a proxy for an ideological battle
More than anything, it was a proxy for developing ICBMs and other space capabilities (e.g. satellites) for fighting the cold war.
NASA had only contracted for 15 Saturn V stacks, and in 1968 declined to start the second production run. That was still under Johnson - although Nixon was doubtless happy with the decision it had already become obvious that Congress wasn't going to approve sustaining the NASA budget at that level once the moon was in the bag.
This reminds me of how the sad state of fiber broadband in Germany is ultimately the result of 1990s chancellor Helmut Kohl (the one who saw over the reunification, consequently selling off the East German public property to private investors for scraps) thinking that public TV was too hostile to him and wanting to empower private broadcasters by publicly funding cable television, which delayed the investment in fiber broadband by repurposing cable for broadband as a stop-gap solution.
Basically a long-running chancellor in the 1990s wanted to push media that presented him more favorably and that's why thirty years later our Internet is slow.
Yet the US space program existed solely and exclusively due to a large and heavily centralized governmental effort.
That's not quite the right conclusion to draw from this. The US could afford to put a humongous amount of resources into its space program because of the productive output unleashed by capitalism and a market-based economy. For example, the US spent a lot of money on a brute-force approach to fixing the combustion instability problems in the huge F-1 engines through trial-and-error; the USSR could not afford to do this, and was forced to go with a much larger number of smaller engines (which due to budgetary constraints couldn't be tested together before the actual launch, with catastrophic consequences).
I am just glad to see I am not the only one making up imaginary scenario where I bring people from the past to have them marvel at our world.
My favorite "one of these" is the idea of taking a Raspberry Pi, or ATtiny, or modern Macbook Pro back to the ENIAC guys. Can you imagine how they'd have reacted to see these tiny little devices which pack orders of magnitude more computational power than their warehouse-sized computer? The mind boggles.
I tend to always play the cynic in these games. And I think one little way to easily do that is to reverse the roles with an example you are giving. So for your example, imagine somebody from the future came and showed you a pinhead sized device with countless exabytes of computational power projected onto a holographic screen. While I'm sure you'd be impressed and have plenty of questions, I don't think there would be any particular shock. Evolutionary progress - even at absurd scales, is still just evolutionary progress, and easily 'graspable'.
That's because you have witnessed the decades of exponential growth. It's not hard to extrapolate that growth further, albeit it still blows my own mind when I see a disk that looks like a RAM, is way faster than my RAM was 15 years ago (2 GB/s? You must've forgotten to take your crazy pills), and has 2000 times more storage.
But show it to a guy working with electromechanical or vacuum tube computers and I'm sure it would be a very otherworldly experience for them.
I'm actually not sure what would blow their mind more - a very big and unimaginably fast computer, or a by today's standards very slow computer that fits on few millimeters. Things like payment cards or SIMs are just incredible too - enough compute power to land on the Moon hidden in a piece of plastic.
Read SF of the era. You probably have some very far futures where the computers running everything are essentially invisible. But SF authors for the most part are not imaging miniaturized supercomputers woven into the fabric of everyday life.
I would agree if we were talking about, say, a team in 1970, but it's worth pointing out that we're talking about a team working during the very infancy of computer engineering (the late 40s/early 50s). Just off the top of my head, you had solid-state hardware, stored-program machines, and the Von Neumann architecture all just popping on to the scene. This is stuff that would definitely have been on their radar, but I think they'd be fascinated to realize how directly and fundamentally those inventions would affect computing.
Perhaps more importantly, I think they would be blown away by how directly and fundamentally computing would change the world. Doug Englebart and his team are the ones who really developed the idea of using computers for something other than performing calculations for scientists. They started that research in the early 60s, and didn't drop the Mother Of All Demos until 1968. So if I were one of the "ENIAC guys", and someone asked me how my work would affect the world, I'd probably just shrug and suggest that the computers I was building would help perform computations that would let other scientists make discoveries more quickly.
1950s was the era of Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Heinlein, etc. Give people a spark and we naturally will create a flame, even if only in our minds. Take something current - many people are already envisioning futures where LLMs will not only be running on basically every device, but also integrated into each and every aspect of life. Some even envision them eventually replacing humans in politics, working as caretakers, and more.
It's easy to imagine it - even with absolutely no basis for it whatsoever. Go back millennia to the first men making ships able to embark deep into the oceans, and these people would also have already been envisioning the Titanic. The moment the Wright Bros proved flight viable, many were seeing the Hindenberg. It's just human nature.
Agreed, I think if you showed me as a kid that a tiny microSD could store every game I ever played and still have room for every TV show I ever watched without getting remotely full, and was affordable, it'd be impressive. But it wouldn't blow my mind as something inconceivable, I had already known floppy disks both shrunk in size and increased in capacity.
Plus, I'd imagine "the ENIAC guys" would quickly realize all the things that were computationally infeasible in their time had more or less been done along the way to modern computers.
I don't think they'd necessarily have some sort of existential crisis, or even have their minds blown - but I'm positive they'd be impressed.
I'm 40 now, but I'm still blown away. It's amazing that we can just keep installing web-servers into random things like wall switches, power outlets and control them wirelessly and just treat is a business as usual.
I just got a WiFi enabled ESP8266 with a thumb sized OLED display for like $10.
I can't really keep track of how many computers are in my home :)
Hedonic adaptation. See even the other threads about ChatGPT where people are complaining that it's still not good enough, even though nothing like it were possible a mere few years ago. People will adapt to anything over time, and so like the other commenter, I too would not be shocked to not see much shock on their faces if you showed them such a miniature computer.
I do this with music, and measure how good a song is by what fraction f of the words I would need to change for me to send it n years back in time to be understood by an older audience.
I have a small community (n=1 or 4?) where I write this up:
Which one would require the most explaining, according to you?
https://lemmy.ml/comment/5509793
Otha Fish by Pharcyde has tons of references ranging from 50s-90s. Scroll down to the main comment to see them explained.
Not OP but it's likely some modern rap. A lot of the language used deviates significantly from what we would consider to be standard English and derives from cants that are not very old (80s/90s maybe).
It's the end of the world - R.E.M.; One Week - Barenaked Ladies. That's just off the top(ical) of my head.
me> in my pocket contains a device that gives me access to all of the world's information almost instantly
person from the past> wow! what do you do with it?
me> look at pictures of cats and argue with people i don't even know
/i think that's from an xkcd
Benjamin Franklin: "So you're telling me there are hot single women in my area that are looking to date?"
Known for his womanizing, this is kinda funny
Xkcd having a joke for every occasion might be a true modern marvel.
My made-up imaginary scenarios are usually about scientists of the past that had to do everything by hand, and today's Desmos Graphing Calculator[1].
I do when I'm driving to the airport in the DC area. I imagine that I'm actually picking up Abe Lincoln from the 1860's and what I'll show him on the drive back.
It's fascinating to imagine how people from the past might react to the technological advancements and societal changes of the present day! I love to imagine my great grandpa exploring the world now.
A related thought-exercise I sometimes engage in, inspired by Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" is this:
Ok, so I have a university education and know lots about computers. If I traveled back to the Middle Ages -- actually, make it the (inaccurately named) Dark Ages or even more ancient times, say the Roman Republic -- how much of my modern day knowledge would I be able to use to impress the natives?
The telephone? Nope. I cannot even explain how the telegraph works.
Electricity? Sort of. But how would I use it?
Hm... computers are completely out of the question, I wouldn't be able to explain how they differ from an abacus or why they are so novel.
TV? Not without an example.
The... um, steam machine? Look, I cannot really make anything with my hands, so I understand the principle but wouldn't be able to replicate it.
The... um... the printing press maybe?
Or tell them to wash their hands thoroughly before/after touching an open wound?
In conclusion: I suck.
You may enjoy the novel "Lest Darkness Fall" by L. Sprague de Camp, who explored this idea back in 1939.
Thanks for the recommendation! It seems I will enjoy it; it belongs in the same theme as Mark Twain's novel, only it's not humorous.
On that note, Wikipedia took me to "The Man Who Came Early" by Poul Anderson, which fits what I'm saying exactly: a modern day man is taken back to Viking-age Iceland, where his knowledge fails him catastrophically as he is unable to explain it or put it into practice, to disastrous results.
Assuming someone would take your word as gospel your amateur medical knowledge is probably worth more than most of your knowledge of engineering which just requires too much of a tech tree.
Maybe if you’re a gunsmith on the side or something.
You could calculate stuff, just by using arabic numerals rather than roman. You could calculate even more stuff with calculus. Between those two, you could solve lots of impressive problems. (Again, though, they'd have to trust you, because they wouldn't understand the answers at all.)
I think this post is right that Franklin would've been impressed by GPS. The author doesn't call it out, but the Longitude Problem was a significant area of scientific and engineering inquiry in Franklin's lifetime, with special focus on the difficulty of doing so at sea. I haven't looked into it, but given his research mapping the Gulf Stream it seems likely he spent time on the problem himself.
If only Ben Franklin had access to https://ciechanow.ski/gps/, he could’ve invented GPS to solve it!
this reminds me of that site linked here last year that explained and diagrammed the inner workings of a wristwatch. I used singlefile to save the page, as i do with any page that impresses me (or is noteworthy or newsworthy or needs to be saved as proof, etc)
Would that be this one? https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/
I’d love to know that those pages are offline-archivable!
singlefile does not archive the animated parts, unfortunately. At least not by default.
I believe GPS also uses multiple wavelengths to allow estimation of signal delay from passage through the ionosphere.
The way Martian meteorites are identified is from isotopes of inert gases (neon, argon, for example). Mars has a particular pattern of these that's been measured by landers there. Meteorites from the moon are identified by oxygen isotopes, which are on the same line on the oxygen isotope plot as Earth rocks (this is also a strong clue about the origin of the moon.)
The gps thing is even more amazing that what he said in the article because it turns out that the receiver doesn’t need an accurate clock of its own for it to work
That's right, you get rid of the requirement of its own clock, and instead accept that you need to "see" one more satellite than you'd need otherwise.
The (oversimplified) mental model is this:
If the receiver knows the exact time, and sees a signal from one satellite, it knows its position in one spatial dimension.
For each satellite signal you add, you can determine the position in one more dimension. Once you get to the 3rd satellite, you have no more dimensions to add. Instead, the 4th satellite lets you drop the requirement for your own (absolute) time keeping.
After that, each satellite you see improves the overall precision.
If the receiver has some internal sensors that can also help (gyros of various kinds).
I remember as a kid my father was working on the first version of the Air Combat Maneuvering Range (this was back in the late 1960s.) This involved dogfights with simulated missiles and guns. To work, the system needed to accurately track the position of the aircraft. Radars on mountains around the range would give good positions in two dimensions, but poor vertical position (this axis was nearly perpendicular to the line from a radar to a plane). The solution was to add a pod to each aircraft with various gyros and incorporate this information via a Kalman filter. Nowadays such a system would just use GPS, much simpler.
On top of that, with modern surveying and an RTK GPS base station you can get centimeter accuracy for very precise measurements of land, all by carrying a stick with a receiver on it. Most populated counties in the US already have a network running so you usually just need the receiver.
An obvious winner, something sure to blow Franklin's mind is “yeah, we've sent people to the Moon to see what it was like, they left scientific instruments there and then they came back with rocks and stuff.” But that's no everyday thing, it blew everyone's mind when it happened and it still does. Some things I tell Franklin make him goggle and say “We did what?” and I shrug modestly and say yeah, it's pretty impressive, isn't it.
I hate this sort of writing - 'WE did this or that', 'shrugging modestly'. It has this arrogance about it. Pride for being part of something that the individual had nothing to do with. It reminds me of the kid at school that joins the winning team to get a medal, but can't even play the game and only gets in the way.
See every sports fan, political armchair pundit, etc. "what we need to do is..."
It's more like a kid who is really proud that the current champion at their sport was an alumni of the same school. It's inspiring without doing any harm.
Perhaps you're being too bitter about life if you think that the only things people are allowed to feel a connection to are the things they've personally played a role in.
In this specific example, considering that most of us are under 50 and thus weren't even alive to be able to participate, and thus can only see it as part of our collective history as a species.
I felt the same, during a low period in my life. Now that I am older, more experienced, and recognize my own contributions to society, I no longer feel this guilt or project it onto others.
Medicine is magical and magical is art Think of the boy in the bubble And the baby with the baboon heart
And I believe These are the days of lasers in the jungle Lasers in the jungle somewhere Staccato signals of constant information A loose affiliation of millionaires And billionaires and baby
These are the days of miracle and wonder
I also appreciate the marvelous rhythm of the modern world, more miracles per square foot than the life of any saint.
Yeah that's sure to blow past peoples' minds: how many of those marvels there are all around us.
Few everyday objects that did NOT result from a production+logistics chain 100s of nodes long.
Hate to be a downer, but the bomb in the baby carriage is wired through the radio.
“The future is going to be boring.” - J. G. Ballard
Writing to you from several decades into the future of my own past, I can confirm that this is definitely the case.
Is it the future that's boring or do we just lose our sense of wonder as we age and become jaded about the world?
"Scientists are saying the future is going to be far more futuristic than originally thought" - Krista Now
There's a Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal about the fantasy of explaining current knowledge to leading lights of the past, but I can't find the link. Anyone?
Yes, that one. Thanks!
Minor nitpick:
A past what-the-fuck was that we know exactly how many cells there are (959) in a particular little worm, C. elegans, and how each of those cells arises from the division of previous cells, as the grows from a fertilized egg, and we know what each cell does and how they are connected, and we know that 302 of those cells are nerve cells, and how the nerve cells are connected together. (There are 6,720 connections.)
We have no clue what most C elegans neurons actually do, we only know how they are connected. The behavior of most individual C elegans neurons (and by extension the brain) is basically a mystery, and it might take a few decades of experimental advances to figure it out.
Not to downplay the coolness of this. But a lot of people seem to think "we know the C elegans connectome" means "we know how the C elegans brain works." In fact it tells us very little about the brain - an analogy I like is that it's akin to understanding a complex circuit purely by wires and solder, without knowing if you're connecting to a capacitor, an inductor, etc. The information is necessary but far from sufficient.
no one but sebastian seung and his gang of hacks actually thinks this. the connectome is but a very useful, _very_ expensive tool.
and, actually as of writing, we have a connectome for the _adult_ drosophila brain (more than one actually). two orders of magnitude larger, 200,000 neurons.
neuroscience discussions on orange website are always a sight to behold but, uh, even more so than the connectome (we spent $50M peeling atomically thin layers off the most important fly to have ever lived and then hundreds of man years annotating it) the techniques of modern neuroscience would blow people away. we routinely image from the entire drosophila brain at several hertz, while it is running on a virtual reality treadmill using biological sensors genetically engineered to be expressed in a specific subset of neurons.
"What I cannot create, I do not understand." - Richard Feynman
"It's a bit fiddly because time isn't passing at the same rate for the device as it is for the satellites, but we were able to work it out."
that just knocked my brain down.
The fact that we worked it out before sending out those satellites is a minor miracle in of itself
Yeah, the idea that you can triangulate from the delay in receiving timestamps that are synchronized within (40ns? seems high, see below) isn't that mind-blowing. If you have synchronized clocks and a mechanism that records timestamps from various locations with those clocks when you get a voltage spike on an antenna, you can triangulate lightning strikes to within several hundred feet - from practically anywhere in the hemisphere (blitzortung.org).
But i like pointing out that it was the relativistic part that was impressive, for sure.
40ns seems high since you can have an "error" after many hours of receiving of less than 10ns, and on a good, clear day, you can get to within 1ns, on cheap hardware. My GPS drift is 10 feet over a week, gradually getting smaller. If i put my good receiver in the center of my kitchen, the points converge to within the confines of the walls within 48 hours.
However this may just be error correction, and the satellite clocks may be inaccurate to 40ns, i am unsure.
I hate to play the pessimist here, but I wish we could balance these amazing technological advances with the wisdom on how to use them.
Phones are awesome to look up information or video chat family members on another part of the planet. But staring at them for emotional regulation while avoiding real people around you is a mistake.
I wonder how we're going to solve this problem culturally. I'm trying to change my own habits, but it's hard.
I hate to play the pessimist here, but I wish we could balance these amazing technological advances with the wisdom on how to use them.
This article left me with the same feeling. Technology advances so fast we're simply unable to collectively process the power we have. We're the equivalent of a toddler finding daddy's gun.
Or this quote from Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars:
"We're like dwarves in a waldo[.] One of those really big waldo excavators. We're inside it and supposed to be moving a mountain, and instead of using the waldo capabilities we're leaning out of a window and digging with teaspoons. And complimenting each other on the way we're taking advantage of the height."
We don't even realize what is possible with our current technology.
You also need to take into account what isn't there: How do you think Franklin would take it that we went to every single corner of the earth and killed Smallpox dead?
Like every tiny hamlet in India?
In fact, let him by the grave yard and note the ages of the dead.
let him by the grave yard and note the ages of the dead
Suggesting what? That people live longer? That is a modern myth. Socrates died in his 80s. The average lifespan being low was because so many children died. People have been living 70-90 years for thousands of years, likely longer.
The Internet? Well, again yes, but no. The complicated engineering details are complicated engineering, but again the basic idea is easily within the reach of the 18th century and is not all that astounding.
I get that this is a set-up to the more astounding inventions discussed further on, but I think this one is a stretch. I buy the paragraph as a description for why telegraphs would not have been astounding, but I think there are a few step-changes from there to the global broadband packet-switched internet that exists today. I don't think this is the same "basic idea" as telegraphs.
Yeah, I think the idea of a single interconnected network across the planet would be astounding, even if the idea of using wires for communication is not.
and because the GPS device also has a perfect clock
The smart thing about GPS is that the GPS device doesn't need a perfect clock. It's comparing the phase of signals from multiple satellites, so avoiding an absolute time of flight measurement, which would require an accurate clock.
Came here to post this comment. It's a common misconception even among people who sort of know how GPS works.
We can feel superior to the past, but by the same logic, how will the past judge us? I suppose it depends on what problems we manage to solve in the future; i.e. the future will have a lot of the same problems we have today, but which ones?
Computers. Franklin had none of them and if he'd see ours, he'd had is mind blown.
Agree with the comment "Trying to handle the stolen use case but not allowing nefarious tracking seems to be at odds with each other."
We've convinced sand and various metals, at the nano-scale level, to allow us to remotely view - in real-time - things that are out of sight.
Time-machine back to 1900 and tell someone that. You'd be burnt at the stake as a witch (not really, but you'd sound insane).
Nice article! I used to have a similar "friend" I liked to chat with and impress him with our modern marvels, not quite Benjamin Franklin though, I read a ton of pirate books and this particular Malaysian gentleman was pretty impressed by what modern artillery could do, and lately about those insanely fast hydrofoil sailboats/kitesurfs/windsurfs
There are emergent processes that would make people from some centuries ago wonder how they ever become to be. And it goes beyond technology. Pervasive internet, information and social networks, are technologies, but how that has changed us, how we relate to others, wherever they are, and how we see the world should be something to marvel about, for good and bad.
Ribosomes. People are filled with 10^20 little printing presses whose typeface contains four letters, and whose newspapers conduct microscopic commerce. All of life is based on ribosomes.
Don't forget about our terrible marvels. We have a red button in Washington and if we press it, within 15 minutes we can turn half of the cities on the planet into a burning hellscape.
The big science news on Friday was that for the first time we have done this for an insect brain.
If I’m not wrong, the Drosophila connectome was released last year.
That's nothing.
The thing Benjamin Franklin would have marveled at is how many things we refuse to do.
If you told Franklin that within 9 months of us getting hit by a new virus we would start mass-producing a vaccine, he would be impressed, but not all that much. But if you told him hundreds of millions of people refused to take the vaccine, he'd then be truly astonished.
If you told Franklin that only 65 years after first flying an airplane we landed humans on the Moon, he would give an appreciative nod. If you told him we built and tested a thermal nuclear rocket engine and it was working better than one could hope, and then we completely shelved the project, he will admit that his brain is too small to comprehend that.
Make sure you do not mention GMOs to Ben Franklin.
I’d like to imagine explaining e-sports to a ye olde person. Alright so we invented computers, cool I guess, but then we made video games, which are like movies you get to drive yourself with a human interface device (we just call it a controller). We then developed competitive skill based games over time, and the ability for many humans to play at the same time in the same video game world. Then we created leagues and tournaments, to the point where it’s a serious career.
We love fantasizing about what future sports would look like in sci-fi, but… we kinda already have them now! Way more interesting than “football… but in space!” Fun to think about, loved this article :)
My threshold for marvel is much higher. I feel we're in an age of un-marvels. Nearly every technological "improvement" feels worse than the thing it replaced. I'm not even that old, but things were once much, much more simple before the Internet controlled us all. Except when it comes to healthcare related advances, I feel we'd be much better off without all this technology we've slaved ourselves to.
There's so much cool stuff these days, like interstellar iron: https://physicsworld.com/a/antarctic-snow-yields-interstella...
“That’s all really amazing, but I’m having trouble with the thing you said about how despite all of this half the country thinks things are terrible?”
“Yeah, but get this, the half that thinks things are terrible regularly flips and vice-versa.”
“Really? What’s changing so drastically?”
“Nothing. Let’s talk about microchips.”
For real existential-crisis-inducing marvels, you have to go with evolution. Once Darwin worked out natural selection, and it was combined with Mendel's genes, a whole host of primal questions were suddenly answered: Who created us? Why are we here? What is our purpose?
If you were to give Franklin a copy of "The Selfish Gene", I'm curious if he would believe it. Would he reject it and become (remain?) a creationist? Or would he accept that everything he believed about why we are here is wrong.
It brings to mind the story of how when Boris Yeltsin was visiting the US, he took an impromptu detour to a random American supermarket to try to catch them off guard, only to be blown away that Americans really did have supermarkets everywhere practically overflowing with food. The story goes that the experience played a big role in shaping his vision for Russia when he went on to become its first freely elected leader a few years later.
https://www.cato.org/blog/happy-yeltsin-supermarket-day
Or similarly there's the story of the Lykov family, who lived life cut off from humanity for 40 years but still somewhat understood what the new, moving "stars" in the night sky must be: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-rus...
Edit - Plus, this quote: “What amazed him most of all,” Peskov recorded, “was a transparent cellophane package. ‘Lord, what have they thought up—it is glass, but it crumples!’”
Although, Yeltsin was already a liberalizing reformer. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was playing it up a bit.
There's still a difference between the stores having meat on their shelves and the stores having every kind of meat on their shelves. And every kind of vegetable, every kind of drink, every kind of cheese as well.
If you think the average American supermarket has every kind of meat, cheese, drink, and vegetable, you are in for a big surprise traveling the world.
In many ways American markets have fallen behind relatively poorer countries in variety. Most of what is sold are monocultures and packaged foods. The selection of fresh produce (or any produce) is often disappointing.
Yep. For example, one staple dish of Cajuns is called "rice and gravy." Essentially, you sear thinly cut 7-steaks, remove them, cook down some trinity, then add the steaks back with some water or broth and seasonings. That's it. The steaks simmer in the broth for hours and create their own gravy. We serve it over rice, usually accompanied by some roux peas (tres petit pois cooked in a roux with onions and bacon) and cornbread. Simple, easy, flavorful.
But I live in Texas now, home of all the cattle, if you believe the marketing. And I can't find 7-steaks unless I go to a Mexican meat market, because the DFW area is so bourgeois nowadays that the steaks simply don't pass muster for the local market. Hell, I'm more likely than not to end up in a Mexican market simply because the produce is better and cheaper.
Same with beef shank. Osso bucco is traditionally made with veal shank, and oxtails are all the rage, but I can't find beef shank unless I go to an HEB. Most places don't carry the cut. And if I couldn't find beef shank, I could always go with beef neckbones, but uh... HEB is the only place around me that sells that either.
As someone who’s not American, I’m unclear; is going to a butcher not an option? Have they been competed out of the market by supermarkets?
from a google search: "A 7 bone steak is a cut of beef from the chuck section of a cow's front shoulder, which is considered a tough area of the animal.". You're not going to find that in a regular grocery store because not many people will buy it. You will find every other cut of beef, pork, and poultry considered edible though.
You can go to a butcher but they're less common than a regular grocery store. Also, butchers usually have less selection since they're a smaller operation.
EDIT: i live in Dallas, Texas and "HEB" is just another brand of grocery store so "having to go to HEB" just means having to go to the grocery store.
lol Dallas is the only major city in Texas where "going to the store" doesn't almost always means HEB, too
also, complaining that you can't find Thing unless you go to a Mexican meat market is a weird way to boast that your area has specialty grocery stores.
Yes, exactly. Because when I want to talk about food issues, I "boast" by talking about the scarcity of what is perceived to be a lower quality cut of meat near my location, and how I'm driving to find a shop in a poorer neighborhood to meet my food demands. You nailed it, champ.
I didn't take what they were saying as a slight.
HEB "just another grocery store". Hoo Lordy, better not say that in the South! HEB is ultimately a corporation, but as far as corporate ethics exist, they're a good place and the stores are great.
That’s curious; I’d have thought you’d have more selection since the butcher is, y’know, doing the butchering, so any cut is possible. In the past if I’ve needed an “exotic” cut, the butcher would be where I’d go.
In most places I've lived, including Seattle, butchers typically buy the whole animal. They move smaller quantities but every possible cut of meat is available, you just have to ask. They may run out of a cut, since availability scales with the number animals they butcher and demand is uneven over the entire animal, or you might want something unusual outside the scope of their default breakdown of the animal, but you can always ask them to reserve that part from the next animal and they've always been happy to oblige in my experience.
Boston here. Market Basket always has 7bone, Costco never does.
Different stores, different clientele.
I don't have many butchers within 30 miles, and their selection is almost always a subset of what I can get at the larger grocers.
The selection they have pre-cut and on display is a subset.
But unlike a supermarket, you can just ask a local butcher to save you some of whatever off-cut the next time they're trimming it. Normally they'd just throw it away.
And you can explicitly request that they some particular cut in for you and they'll oblige. Might take a few days.
That might be possible in some supermarkets.
Yeah, I was going to say, it's worth asking.
There are butchers in the supermarkets (at least the one I go to)
Walmart is 25% of grocery sales in the US and they only have pre-packaged meat because 22 years ago, some butchers tried to unionized.
I won't buy meat at Walmart. The couple times I have, it looks great in the package, but when you open it, half the weight is a big fat cap on the bottom. I've seen it happen several times. It's often cuts that should go to a grinder or other use, but not fit for use as a steak.
I avoid fresh produce at Walmart as well, mostly in that the selection usually kind of sucks. There are more and better options around. As to Butchers, there isn't really a dedicated one near me, have to drive halfway across town. But a local grocery chain does have Butchers, but special cuts usually take a few days to get in.
Butchers are less common than supermarkets, and generally more expensive, but most places have them.
I have looked a few times in Walmarts and not found duck breast, which is something I eat in Australia once every 2-4 weeks. And also noticed particular cuts of beef that I'd expect are missing. I have been to the US 10+ times, usually 1-9 week roadtrips, and can't remember ever noticing an independent butcher (though sometimes there is an equivalent within a non-Walmart grocery store).
Duck just isn't commonly eaten in the US. You probably won't find it at butchers either.
Independent butchers aren't all that uncommon. Though, for example, my town has 3-4 grocers that sell meat without having a counter (but I expect you could talk to the butcher at a couple of them), a grocer that does have a counter, and then a couple of independent butchers.
Duck probably isn't eaten here all that much, but at my local supermarket there'd be breasts, Peking Duck flavoured breasts, confit legs, and another Peking Duck kit.
In that not-overly-large shopping complex, there are two supermarkets (one of which has loads of European smallgoods, like 40+ types of cheese) and also: independent greengrocer, butcher, fishmonger, bulk grains store, bakery chain, etc. Used to be a poultry-specialist butcher too. Most shopping centres I can think of here will have an independent butcher, plus more separately outside those. There'd be dozens of butchers in a city of about 1 million.
My (relatively large in area) county has about 35000 residents.
Your best bet for duck related products in the US is probably either an upscale grocery store or an Asian grocer like HMart. They tend to carry a lot of meat and offal products that most groceries in the US don't normally carry.
I've never heard that term; does it refer to mirepoix?
Yes. “Holy trinity” locally.
Close. It substitutes green pepper for the carrots. It serves pretty much the same culinary purpose as mirepoix.
Are 7 steaks the same as hamburger steaks? e: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/7-bone_roast
I guess I’ll know now what it means to miss New Orleans when I leave. And here I was worrying about not being able to find collards and turkey necks.
Yeah, that's a 7 steak. I guess most people sorta see it as a trash cut, but it's got enough fat in the spaces between muscles that it ends up being a nice gravy. Collards and turkey necks are not hard to find out here. Just don't ever expect to find any good hoghead cheese. I tried some Boar's Head recently and that reminded me of the 1970s era images of stuff suspended in aspic.
If it weren’t for HEB (CM) and La Michoicana the earth would be a food desert.
https://www.lamichoacanameatmarket.com/en/our-company/
I think we’re backsliding on choice, if anything.
It gets even worse if you look at packaged stuff. “Look, twelve brands of coffee!” but actually it’s three because some of them are owned by the others, or by the same parent company.
Even though the choice is impressive in any supermarket you go, unfortunately, it's very far from having every kind of drink/cheese or almost anything else you mention. Perhaps that's being pedantic, but I believe a lot of people seem to actually believe that what's in their supermarket is all there is (not talking about you specifically)... all you need to do is travel around Europe for a little while to quickly realize how much the supermarkets do not have.
That's probably because supermarkets tend to stock those things that sell in reasonable volume. So if you're in an area where sheep's brains (to pick a contrived example) would sit on the shelf for months, they're unlikely to stock it.
I had a classmate whose father was posted to Yakutsk with Strategic Rocket Forces, and he encountered a warehouse full of cow lips (presumably shipped in from all over the Soviet Union)
I’ll take the limited local selection we’ve got in the US, if the alternative is all-you-can-eat cow’s lips.
It's not only that. Some products are expensive and just unknown to the locals, so it wouldn't sell... others are just a nightmare to store or transport long distances. So you're very unlikely to find them in the supermarket in the USA, though it may be extremely common in Italy, or China etc. You can still probably find those rare items if you go to specialty shops... for example, I was able to find "Stracciatella di bufala" cheese in an Italian shop in Stockholm (even in Itally, I think it's hard to get that outside its native region of Puglia). Maybe I'm wrong, but I could swear you won't find that in your local grocer?
That's not my experience of American supermarkets in North Carolina when visiting on business ten years ago. Even in supposedly upmarket supermarkets like Harris Teeter the fruit and veg was really not very good and the selection of cheeses (and other dairy products) was downright poor.
I was exaggerating a bit, but by the late 80's the food situation in the USSR had deteriorated to the stage where you would have a meat (if you were lucky), a cheese or a vegetable available at any given store. We would go to the kolkhoz market for vegetables and my parents had a literal backroom deal with a grocery store manager to get beef, but the shelves were conspicuously barren.
Going from this to a country where any random supermarket would have chicken, several cuts of beef, several cuts of pork, tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes, onions, several sorts of cheese and was not at risk of running out of any position would have been a shock.
I don't think so. People don't realize how bad it was in the Soviet Union.
There's a story of two hockey players that came to the NHL. One went to the grocery store, he was completely taken back by how much was there, especially meat. He thought it was a mistake and didn't want to miss the opportunity so he bought it all up. He called his friend who also recently defected to the NLH, and his friend said "Same thing happened here!"
People used to tell stories of visiting Russia and having people try to buy their blue jeans off of them while walking down the street.
Yes, can confirm. I personally know multiple people who have had that exact experience; one just mentioned it last weekend. If they knew in advance they traveled with an extra suitcase full of jeans to sell, not so much for the money, but to make/help friends.
It was also not uncommon for Soviet residents to queue up for whatever anyone was selling when it became available — Size 14 galoshes that will not even close to fit you? Get in line, buy as many as they'll sell you. You can sell/trade them later for something else.
I've also been in situations with live hyperinflation, like 10% per week. The strategies people came up with to deal with that were also amazing.
In the modern western societies, most people have literally zero idea of how far (or fast) things can go off the rails, or what that looks like.
It is a great privilege to live in such profound blissful ignorance, and it is not appreciated.
I don't know if it's because I have experienced it, but 10%/week inflation doesn't sound anything near as bleak as "basic necessities are only available every other month".
maybe it's because cash is just one asset.. at least if goods exist, you can barter for them, if the cash isn't any good
if the necessities just aren't there because, oh I don't know, you took the farms from the farmers because they owned land and owning property was deemed evil, and then the crops failed[1], then they just aren't available and it doesn't matter how much money or gold or any other commodity you might have to exchange for them
1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
it's always odd when people latch onto that as an example, because the west has definitely had politically-induced holodomors caused by over-export of staple crops as well. classically, the irish potato famine comes to mind.
you can probably objectively calculate the relative importance of pre-capitalism serfs and post-capitalism serfs by volume of political discourse and online discussion and citations - the peasants are precious right up until we get them to adopt capitalism, and then they can starve to death after getting their hand ripped off in a mill while we ship all their potatoes off to india.
it's sort of like the abortion thing, where fetuses are the most precious thing in the universe until they're yeeted through a cervix and then they can starve to death on the street corner.
Anyway, it's just a weird argument in general. Authoritarian systems are bad, of course, but authoritarianism cuts across planned-vs-market economies, and the hallowed corporate boardroom is the epitome of central planning. What matters is not markets vs state charter, but being allowed to fail, and without it (say) Boeing is no different than the stuffiest soviet OKB, despite the fact boeing is a "free market" company. And when these arguments eventually devolve into people citing the dead nazis who died attempting to annex other countries as "victims of socialism", well...
and again, you can say "tu quoque" all you want, but if a practice is so widely accepted as to be unremarkable then it's unremarkable. And the victims of capitalism are never brought up quite as readily - there's no PR machine spinning for the dead irish peasants, or someone who dies of a treatable chronic illness, or who spends their life in an american gulag for a trivial offense, etc. We got plenty of authoritarianism here too, and it sucks here too, but that's not the angle people bring it up in... literally ever. It's just our elites winding us up against whatever elites our elites are opposed to this week.
The fact of the matter is that as automation displaces not just physical but also intellectual labor to greater and greater degrees, we are going to have to move away from the idea that people's intrinsic value is only what they contribute to the economy (market or state). Non-authoritarian socialism is pretty great and yes, I'll happily take the ticket to Norway and leave you alone.
Such a patina of reasonableness to your comment but your comparison of the Irish famine to the Holomodor is way overwrought. Holomodor was deliberate and largely not caused by bad harvests. Irish had the potato blight; and in the beginning they were given a large amount of charity.
WRT authoritarianism, govt have a monopoly on violence that individual companies will never have.
Not to disagree with you but to add context, the monopoly on violence has not always been as straightforward as one might imagine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
The British East India company’s operations are another example.
I completely agree with you but my point stands as is.
I'd only change 'never have' to 'almost never have' and most probably won't again.
Not to pat ourselves on the back to hard, but the reasonable state of today comes in part as a reaction to previous tragedy.
The expansion of government sponsored enterprises with organic police forces is concerning however. Examples in my mind are school districts, transit and other agencies without law enforcement as a core component or competency. To the extent that those forces are bound to the proprietary interests of the enterprise, the bounds of the monopoly are blurred.
In defence of the comparison - it is not at all a consensus that the Holodomor was deliberate from the beginning, that’s an active debate with prominent experts on both sides.
In both famines, there was a refusal to intervene to alleviate the famine once it had begun, and in both cases that was unequivocally a deliberate choice of the British/Soviet leadership.
Further - there are many cases through history of companies steering the state violence, from Colonial India to Blair Mountain to Aaron Swartz.
The broad point here is that the Soviet Union is constantly used in our Western discourse for our own brand of whataboutism.
Our systems fail people constantly and brutally. Our supermarket shelves are stocked, but most of the Anglosphere is in the grips of an unprecedented housing crisis.
There’s absolutely lessons we can learn from the Soviets in housing policy, but we won’t if any mention of them ends up reduced back to their worst failures. They didn’t get their shelves stocked by talking about MKUltra or smallpox blankets all day.
You can argue that the grass is greener overall, but there’s still dead patches all over our lawn. That’s the broader point.
Either you're being deliberately dishonest or haven't read enough of the details. Yes, there is debate on what percentage of that gargantuan human tragedy was started by tyrannical incompetence and how much of it was done through deliberate vengefulness by the Stalin government, further moved forward by local initiative, but virtually all experts agree that at least deliberate indifference allowed things to grow monstrously and prolonged them too.
The leaders in Moscow (especially Stalin) and local commissars could soon clearly see that the collectivization policy was practically extinguishing all human life in the Ukrainian countryside, yet they continued to pursue it and even block all avenues of escape, while at the same time exporting grain they'd confiscated from people who were by then dying in their millions.
The British viewed the Irish through Malthusian theory, whose moral and cultural failings they attributed to the cause of the famine. They effectively blamed the Irish peasantry for having too many children while living in a state of poverty, which they viewed as irresponsible. Despite this being as a direct result of their occupation and sectarianism.
The monoculture of potato was solely due to the tenant system imposed on Irish subsistence farmers by the British ruling classes. Ireland remained a net exporter of food during the famine. The supposed 'charity' mainly took the form of workhouses - which were effectively Hospices
https://irishworkhousecentre.ie/
One incredible exception was the Choctaw Nation who, fresh off the trail of tears, were so moved by the plight of the Irish peasant that on March 23, 1847, they donated $170 for Irish Famine relief. This was at the height of “Black 47,” when close to a million Irish were starving to death.
To put it simply, Malthus' theory states that famine is caused by overpopulation. Thus the British, by their own basis of justification, deliberately reduced the Irish population. The people targeted were deprived of culture, security, health, and life. They were targeted for reasons of ethnic and cultural intolerance. Ergo constituting Genocide.
The alternative? The aforementioned Workhouses or the aptly named 'Coffin Ships'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffin_ship
Regarding the history, here's a good post [1] on getting small farmers to pay rent and/or taxes. This goes back to ancient times and money wasn't required, though it made it more efficient:
...
...
[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/08/21/collections-bread-how-did-they...
Give it six months and you’ll understand. Basic necessities are available for money, until they aren’t because money stops working.
Edit: Six months of 10%/wk hyperinflation, I meant, not that some crazy hyperinflation is going to hit you personally within six months.
What are you talking about? Hyperinflation is the one I have experienced.
Yes, while I did not go to the USSR, the accounts I've heard from friends definitely sounded worse than hyperinflation. While hyperinflaion did rapidly make necessities rather difficult and required daily juggling, I didn't see the kinds of deprivation I repeatedly heard reported from USSR. Heck, even today, 20% of Russians have no indoor plumbing, as in they have to use outhouses [0]
[0] https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/04/02/indoor-plumbing-st...
Econ teacher who went to Russia a lot used to talk about this a lot.
Reminds me of a friend who taught 6th grade at a low-income school in LA-County. Before, she was rationed two (2) reams of paper a month. Upon transferring to a much more well-funded school, the other teachers had to talk her down from hoarding the unlimited reams in the break room.
My wife is a teacher and gets one ream per semester. In total, for all classes she teaches. It's geography for 10-14 year olds, so a lot of practice and tests of map usage and so on.
Being a teacher here is definitely a mission, not a career. You just have to have a "sponsor" to participate (often this means husband), you can't just live on your salary.
There is a story about a man who goes to a shop in the Soviet Union, and finds the shelves empty. "Don't you have any meat?" he asks the clerk. The clerk responds, "No, here we don't have any fish. The store that doesn't have any meat is across the street."
Two stories I heard recently; the Soviet Union tried some propaganda by showing people the movie 'Grapes of Wrath' and also saying people had to eat cat food to live.
Actual Russian reactions: 1. even the poor own trucks?! 2. they have special food for .. cats?!
Also, it's easy to take basic necessities for granted. Only when you experienced hunger you realise how having plenty of affordable food is a luxury.
The meat thing was not an isolated incident.
Finland had close enough relationship with the USSR that for the duration of the cold war, there were constantly some Soviet students and research scientists doing exchange programs in Finnish universities. When they first arrived in Finland, they were assigned a translator/guide whose job was, among other things, taking them grocery shopping. Because if they did that alone, a lot of them would end up buying their fridge full of meat. Because "meat days", meaning the day the local store happens to have meat, just were a normal thing that everyone adjusted to in the USSR.
Yeah, I do take it with a grain of salt since it's a very convenient propaganda story, and it'd be a stretch to say that he formed his political platform just 2 years before actually being elected.
You can think something is better without believing that they are as much better as they claim to be.
I'd consider that to be implied. Put differently, the 'grain of salt' is that I consider the effects to be overstated, not non-existent.
It's hard to appreciate how much we take for granted the things we are accustomed to.
Many in Yeltsin's circle believed it had been set up, and was not actually used by everyday Americans, similar to how many Soviet PR setups had been undertaken
Potemkin supermarkets.
The word you want is “pokazukha”
Both are valid.
“Pokazukha” is more of a modern term (modern as in, i dont think it even hit the 80 year old mark) and is a bit more generic (refers to “showing off” or “for show” in general).
“Potemkin supermarket” is a reference to “potemkin village”[0], which has been around as a term since late 18th century, and it is a bit more specific (refers to a construction that provides a false facade to a situation, with the origin of it being an actual fake village constructed to impress the empress).
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village
Also in English, "Potemkin X" is the standard phrase, even when referring to post-Tsarist times (and sometimes even to refer to non-Russian cases like Potemkin villages in North Korea to fool visiting Japanese of Korean descent as to quality of life in NK). I have never seen "Pokazukha" used in English at all.
No, GP wanted to use potemkin referring to the villages allegedly built on the Dnieper for the Russian czarina (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village)
Yeltsin visit is to put in contrast with Tucker Carlson visit in Russia.. where he somehow tried to do the same in reverse (without knowing he was actually visiting a french retail chain brand but anyway). Very odd.
Yeah that was very weird, but was also probably more convincing to his target audience of people who've never lived in even another town let alone another country.
Unless they've been to an Aldi, which is massively exploding in popularity everywhere in the US right now since they're a perfect fit for the current economic environment.
Aldi has carts you put quarters in, and Mr Carlson tried to play up seeing the same thing in Russia like it was some kind of brilliant Russian innovation.
It was truly bizarre. So weird how far that guy has fallen, much like the also once-respectable Giuliani. Back in the 2000s or 90s, he used to just be the dorky bowtie guy on an old CNN show about a rightist and a leftist having a civil and friendly debate, if I recall. Now he's... trying to hang on making a living by... shilling for Russian despots and for Snu brand sniffable tobacco (really). It's pathetic.
He was completely pathetic twenty years ago, just respectably so.
If you think those stories charaterize USSR production/planning system, they do not. Specially the historical period when Yeltsin took power, at that time, they already had market like elements of production. If interested, there is a few books on planning, f.e. Cockshott. I think it is important since we as humans capable of conscious transformation of production relations. In some parts of production may be it is ok if it is done by independent agents, in some parts it could be better if agents could communicate not just by market, but directly, as with free softwere/GPL where you can directly work on it, not though market. What is good about USSR, is that you could likely get any schematic of any device. I do not like proprietay things so this huge market of phones and etc, is not really for me. Some ICs used do not have datasheets. The many supermarkets, it is 10 or so in radius of 1-2 km here. I'm ok if it is 7 and one lab equiped with electronics, etc equipment. There is a clear by now bound of what individual agents communicating only over market, can do.
For a wonderful scene that mirrors exactly something like Yeltsin's real trip to the supermarket, i strongly recommend the (generally wonderful) movie "Moscow on the Hudson" with Robin Williams.
A friend of mine in college around 2002 was from Russia and had lived under communism.
He told me his grandma cried the first time she entered an American grocery store.
It was interesting to hear.
Good links, thanks. I had read the Houston anecdote before but never seen this photograph.
It really is amazing, that's why we really need to appreciate and protect what we have. The incredible abundance we currently have is not the norm. It was not even 100 years ago that people were starving in the US during the great depression.
Think about this every time someone promotes extremist violent rhetoric.
But at what cost? How much should we sacrifice so that blueberries exist year round?
My problem with it is that not only are we paying the environmental cost to have berries all year round in the grocery store, it's that they're also just shit quality. Like not just passable, but are bitter and sour and not worth it at all. And it's sort of at the expense of really good, local berries when the real season hits. For example, I live in Brooklyn and the grocery stores last summer barely had any local blueberries from New Jersey. Everything was Driscolls branded berries, and they're always bad. They look like berries, but they taste awful, or at best like nothing, 95% of the time. I don't know much about the market, but I wouldn't be surprised if they had a year long contract and the local producers get shut out during the real season. Luckily there are farmers markets and CSAs near me.
This so much.
People who live in Western cities have no fucking clue what fruits and vegetables are supposed to taste like.
It’s like a running gag that my father complains about supermarket tomatoes, but after travelling through rural places in Eastern and Southern Europe and a little bit in Central America, I totally get it.
Oh, same with my father. He would tell stories about going to the markets in Algeria when he was a kid and how it was totally normal to have fruit sellers cut into a melon right then and there to give you a sample. If it sucked you just wouldn't buy it, so there was always competition for having the best produce in the market. And this was him complaining to me about poor quality produce in the US when I was a kid in the 80s and 90s -- the quality has only gotten worse since then.
Food just tastes better in other countries.
This should be corrected to fruit and vegetables taste better in regions where they are grown. Which is obvious, because picking them before they are ripe and transporting them thousands of kilometers for days or weeks is going to yield a less tasty fruit or vegetable. Also, plants bred for longevity of their fruit will obviously not be optimizing for taste.
Sure, maybe! Although I've generally found that the overall quality of ingredients tends to be better in the places I've traveled compared to the US. That's not to say I haven't picked up great figs at a bodega in the mission, or don't get good berries at the farmers markets near me in NYC. But if I walk into the produce aisle in most grocery stores in the US these days there is abundance, yet a lack of quality.
Personally, when it comes to fresh produce, I'd rather only be able to eat mostly what can be grown in season somewhat close to me (which would include greenhouses), rather than be able to get anything all year round and having it suck.
As a general rule, fruits and vegetables are much better quality on the US west coast because so much of it is produced locally. The difference in produce quality is quite noticeable. In the parts of Europe where I've spent a lot of time, the average vegetable quality and selection is noticeably worse than e.g. Seattle, but that mostly reflects the Pacific Northwest being a major high-quality producer of surprisingly diverse fruit and vegetables.
Absolutely, west coast has better produce in general than we do here in NYC. No argument there.
Tomatoes are probably about the worst example you could pick. Fresh tomatoes can be excellent (though I'm really not a tomato aficionado) during the short period when they're in season locally in much of the US. Outside that period, the recommendation for cooking tomatoes is generally to use canned because tomatoes are an example of something that doesn't ship well.
That’s why they’re the best example.
Grow your own and the difference is extreme between that and a mealy, flavorless storebought
That assumes you care enough about tomatoes to grow them. My local farmstand probably does a better job than I could when they’re in season which is true of most of what they sell.
When I worked for an indoor-ag company whose big deal was picking varietals for flavor, rather than ability to travel across the country, I always pointed to how much tomatoes had changed in my lifetime as to why travel-ready produce was a problem.
Remember when toothbrush advertising demonstrated how the brush was so soft it wouldn't affect a tomato, let alone your gums? That demonstration makes no sense now.
By "Western cities" do you include the San Francisco Bay Area, when you shop at quality grocery stores? I keep hearing we are supposed to have some of the best food in the world.
Of course Westerners know what fruits and vegetables are supposed to taste like. We can in fact grow them and do.
Where the problem lies is the changes made to fruits and vegetables to make them last the long journeys that they have to make from places that have longer growing seasons or cheaper labor.
Try a locally grown heirloom tomato in the summer in the American Midwest and you’ll get a phenomenal tasting fruit. More interestingly, try a bunch. It will be hard to say what a tomato is supposed to taste like because of the variety in flavors that come from location and breed.
You really have to define what you mean by "supposed to taste like." As in "supposed to taste like what occurs in nature without human intervention" is very different than "supposed to taste like after humans have spent generations cultivating them to be the sweetest variety" which is different than "supposed to taste like when they are cultivated to optimize for logistics."
I suspect what you're referring to with the tomatoes is the last example, because they have been grown and picked to best withstand transit.
What gets me, is people don't understand.
Stuff is often in season in the US, and at that time, it's generally good in the supermarket. Then there's when it's not in season.
Contrast green beans shipped from 1500km away on a boat, arriving 2 weeks to a month later at the store, kept "fresh" by all sorts of waxy residue, and other "agents" sprayed on them with .... green beans canned within 2 hours of being picked.
Where I grew up, in a rural area, we had a local canning plant. They'd get farmers to plan to harvest on a schedule, and they'd literally be canning as the farmer drive trucks up with produce. No joke, they were canned within 2 hours, often faster, and that's how it's done these days.
Which has more vitamins? Which has more nutrition? I'd lay a bet that the canned stuff is far better, far better than something that has artificial stuff sprayed on it so it looks good (artifical 'wax', and various chemicals to keep it "fresh"), and spent weeks getting to the supermarket.
Oddly, I've seen people dump out the water in the can. What? That's where a lot of vitamins live!
Americans shop with our eyes, not our mouths.
To be charitable to people who shop with their eyes, the people who shop with their mouths usually get tossed out of the store :P
We can both recognize that it's amazing AND that we can do better. Is the solution to stop carrying blueberries or to demand better?
Personally I’d say stop carrying fresh blueberries until they’re in season. I use frozen ones in my vitamix the rest of the year and they’re great!
What is the cost we are paying that you imply is too high?
Shipping blueberries around the world can’t be great for the environment.
For sure the cost of carbon and other pollution should be factored in. But I don't think the externalities are that large really. I would be surprised if the cost would go up more than 20% if we had a proper carbon tax in place. At least after the market adapts.
The externality of a locally grown blueberry is incredibly higher than industrial farmed blueberries
lol, what? I have blueberry bushes in my yard, they were like $5. i put them in the ground and then ignored them for years. It is true that not every piece of land can do what i did here, but these sweeping "marvel at the advance of farming" ideas are silly to me. I had a peach, plum, orange, and fig tree in my back yard growing up in california. When we sold the house the new owners tore them down. I think that's sad. Fresh, free fruit every year?
Now, growing enough of one thing to be able to sell it to turn a profit might have "greater externality" but even that might not be true depending on the methods used. There are composting farms where people bring their refuse - specifically "anything that was alive recently" can go in the compost, and this will provide nutrients and soil amendments in a sustainable way to that farm, which can then provide nutrition to the community it serves.
You can't feed the planet with a small, self-sustaining farm. But this idea that it's a net negative needs to DIAF.
Yeah, a carbon tax is the way to go. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you are right that the externalities aren’t huge on this one, but it would be good to take them into account regardless.
Why not? Bulk shipping is really efficient, local farmers markets can easily be worse for the environment than going to a supermarket. A Semi moving 35 tons at 7 MPG is 25 times more fuel efficient vs a ford F-150 moving 1/2 ton at 20 MPG and trains or boats are even better.
In the end fuel costs money so more efficient logistics is often good for the environment. Buying local makes a lot more sense if you live in a farming community than a port city.
Replacing shipped blueberries with locally farmed ones definitely could be a wash or a loss, environmentally, for sure I agree there. But we have relatively efficient industrial scale farming in the US as well, if we admitted that blueberries are seasonal we could grow them in big efficient farms and then just ship them less far.
A lot of fruits freeze pretty well too. When I'm in Maine at the right time of year and big boxes of "wild" local (low-bush) blueberries are for sale, often they're already frozen. I agree that local fruits during their short local season can be pretty good but stuff that's shipped in or frozen isn't necessarily bad. Depends on the produce.
In a previous job, I did the math for shipping goods from Melbourne to Perth here in Australia via freight train. It worked out to be 1 litre of fuel per ton moved 500km. In imperial, that is 1 ton at 930MPG! That efficiency is mind blowing but it does rely on a lot of goods to be moved to gain that scale efficiency.
This is where the last mile problem comes in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile_(transportation)
Look at the price to ship something.
The cost of fuel burned can not be greater than the shipping cost, and it is probably much less.
The cost of fuel could be higher than the shipping cost, if we include things like:
* the cost of cleaning up all the carbon we’ve spewed out
* the cost of fossil fuel subsidies
* the political cost of doing business with oil producing countries, many of which seem to be fairly hostile
There's no intrinsic reason why it can't be.
It entirely depends on how many externalities are created as debt to the future in order to ship blueberries around the world. Internalize those externalities and the grinding force of the market will eventually eliminate or mitigate them.
The future we should all be striving for is one of extreme abundance for everyone, not forcing everyone into hair shirts.
People mention environmental costs. There are also geopolitical costs. I write this from Guatemala, where 70 years ago, a budding 10-year-old democracy was destroyed so that Americans could continue to get cheap bananas. And the country never really recovered.
Of course, from technology and "globalization", I think the abundance of American supermarkets would still have occurred, but this has been optimized at the expense of human rights and wages of people throughout the world.
Worse, they mocked it and still do with terms such as "banana republic". They haven't even learned any better.
Look at the price tag on the blueberries. That is the cost.
The opportunity cost is that the money could have neen spent on something else.
The great thing about a free market is that if you think resources should be allocated elsewhere, you can do that. Your labor is your resource.
I find greenhouses to be wonderfully environmentally friendly, and do not understand why someone would object to them.
We're absolute garbage at including externalities like pollution or long term effects into prices. Look at incredibly cheap plastic. It's a massive danger to everything yet a plastic bag costs cents.
No. Price is an amalgamation and approximation of a lot of different factors rolled into one.
Concepts like cost and value are much deeper and richer than economic cost and economic value.
This is fine and a good exercise (like a gratitude journal). The problem is that this is often used to tell people indirectly that they should stop with their political complaints, which may be well-founded. Like...
Like this?[1] I don’t know what extremist means here but there are real political problems out there, and some of the solutions are “extremist” (like e.g. some of the solutions to climate change).
Violence is less debatable and should be reserved for when it it truly necessary.
[1] If you make vague gestures I in turn have to guess.
As far as I use the term, extremists are people who advocate for tearing the system down via revolution and rebuilding from scratch. They have no idea what it takes to build this modern world, but they love the idea of guillotines.
Some people complain about taxation on tea or the lack thereof instead of appreciating how privileged they are to have access to Oriental tea.
Not having a representative vote in parliament was kind of annoying, but what do I know
Nitpick & a tangent, but:
Being properly represented in a democratic system is not the same as being able to vote for someone.
Fair enough, the chant as we learned it was “no taxation without representation”, so you win this one. But my point was that it wasn’t just childish tantrums about taxes, it was also about being forced to buy into a monopoly, not getting any say in the matter, having local business blockaded, etc.
For what it’s worth: I wasn’t at all disputing your general argument, just wanted to elaborate on a pet peeve of mine. Cheers!
Sometimes you actually do need to rewrite the whole project in a new language. FORTRAN just isn't the tool for the job anymore. But you'd still benefit a good deal from being highly suspicious that any person suggesting that course of action is naive to how much time and suffering it will entail.
Arguably, the American revolution wasn't even necessary. A lot of people died as a result. England would have potentially ended slavery decades earlier if the US was still a colony. Canada and Australia wound up in roughly the same spot without a revolution (though possibly as a second order effect of the American revolution).
This underscores the problem with generalities. I know of some applications that would be considered high-speed (both literally and figuratively, since they are related to rocket testing) that still rely on FORTRAN. So I think your statement needs some qualifies (what kinds of jobs?)
I guess I should have put quotes around that. It was intended as a specific example of when that decision might make sense; you're using the wrong language for the job because it was the best choice when you started the project decades ago. I didn't mean to suggest that FORTRAN is not the tool for any job.
Why is modern Fortran no longer the right tool for a job?
Those people didn't have abundance at that time, there were many better systems they could pick that they knew about at the time.
I think most people would consider liberalism rather mainstream.
Depends on your point of view, and what you're referring to.
The word means two different things, depending on your side of the spectrum.
Weird vague-posting.
Are you aware of some mainstream liberalism that didn't kick off with guillotines or muskets? Then make it clear.
What do you call people who attach speculative pejorative labels to those who dare to suggest that action should be considered because the status quo may be similarly risky?
Don't forget: the status quo is what got us into our various pickles in the first place.
It's a tell that you conflate political complaints with extremist violent rhetoric.
Like I said, when you vaguely point to something in the Zeitgeist I have to guess. I made my assumption clear so don’t try to make this into a gotcha.
Specifically extremist, violent, political[1] rhetoric is subsumed by political complaints in general. So if you mean conflate as in draw an equivalence then that is clearly a wrong inference on your part.
[1] This adjective wasn’t in your original comment hence my guess.
You don't seem to be following the site rule of "charitable interpretation" here. This reads more like "legalistic nitpicky interpretation" - that is, like bad faith.
(Yes, good faith/charitable interpretation can lead to misunderstandings when some things are left unsaid. No, I don't think maximum nitpickiness is the answer to that.)
I have no idea what you’re talking about.
I would say that in this forum we try to be charitable to each other and it's certainly the way I like to conduct myself.
The poster you're replying to has so far merely provided you with an opportunity to clarify or expand on what you would consider "extremist violent rhetoric".
We're all pretty curious people here, and I would say reasonably opinionated, so I don't think it's unreasonable for someone to ask you to clarify your position.
We're not going to get to the high level of discourse we like and expect in this space without a bit of curiosity and generous assumptions to our fellow posters =)...
I was intentionally vague and not picking sides. Extremist violent rhetoric encompasses communists and fascists and anyone else willing to kill people to tear the system down.
If you think I'm talking about the Israel / Palestine thing. It was not what I was thinking about. I was thinking about the US specifically but it also applies to other nations with strong personal freedoms, rule of law, and general economic prosperity. Advocating for revolution in such places is very dumb.
Are you aware that the system we have today needed people willing to kill to tear the then existing systems down?
Yes, for freedom. What would a modern day American revolution be for?
For freedom, what else? The communist revolutions were also fought for freedom.
It seems that at the end of the day you are not against anyone willing to kill people to tear the system down.
I understood the "extremist violent rhetoric" to refer specifically to accelerationists (in the states, we have the Boogaloo boys, but there are others), whose explicit goal is to accelerate the (from their perspective) inevitible collapse of the current order, to replace it with their own order. Often times, but not always, this is married to a both a doomsday-prepper I-can-go-it-alone mentality, as well as a libertarian theory of government.
There are currently many different extremist groups out there. So I don’t know why you went with that.
Because unlike other kinds of extremist, violent, revolutionary political movements, those from the accelerationist + prepper mindset are explicitly opposed to modern life. Think Ted Kaczynski (that is, the Unabomber).
Not all violent extremists are focused on tearing down the modern technological order. ISIS, for instance, is only interested in the end of modern morality, but (evidently, based on their PR/recruiting arm) have no special qualms with modern media technology, industrialization, etc. The Red Army Faction was only opposed to the modern (at the time) government of Germany and a poorly defined concept of capitalism. But there is a specific kind of violent extremist who thinks that computers and mass production and factory farming are the problem. And I understood the GP to be referring to them.
The Haber–Bosch process also played a major role there. It was around 100 years ago that cheap nitrogen fertilizer manufactured from fossil fuels started to become widely available. That greatly reduced starvation, at least in countries with functional governments.
This was then combined with the Green Revolution, where crops were modified to truly take advantage of abundant artificial fertilizer. Before that, too much nitrogen would make wheat (for example) grow so tall and top heavy it would fall over, reducing yield in a process called "lodging".
The fact that would amaze Franklin is that only about 1% of Americans are farmers.
Franklin would also be puzzled that there would be many people that are nutrient deficient despite calorie abundance.
The dietary problem in the US is overconsumption of macronutrients, particularly carbohydrates, not underconsumption of micronutrients, and certainly not underconsumption (of all nutrients) as could be seen in Franklin's time.
Franklin would be amazed at how little of household budgets could go to food now.
It was actually common in Franklin's time for poor people with limited diets (mainly a single grain crop) to suffer from nutritional deficiencies despite getting adequate calories. Think of conditions like pellagra, goiter, anemia, etc. Of course they didn't fully understand the root causes.
Think about how this standard of living is enabled by centuries of colonial exploitation, mortally dependent on continued extraction of non-renewable resources, and propped up by an insanely profitable military-industrial complex.
If you're on the outside, watching fools burn it all so they can drown in excess they don't appreciate.. yes, the rhetoric is bound to get violent.
It's a classic leftist narrative that gets very foggy on the facts when you dig closer to details. Modern prosperity and modern market economies are definitely not based on centuries-gone colonial extractive empires and while extraction of non-renewable resources is still big in the modern global economy, it applies to the needs of all states and societies, not just the apparently evil capitalist west. Or do you think the USSR and its socialist cousins along with the majority of countries that used to be European colonies all live in harmony with nature, eschewing all possible attempts to modernize through resource use?
As for the military industrial complex, pray tell, of which country? Tangibly benefiting which countries and by what mechanisms to make it so "insanely profitable"?
I find it hard to believe your comment is in good faith, but let's give you the benefit of the doubt.
All the wealth and resources plundered from colonies over centuries enabled the European powers to maintain power and more easily develop technologies on which this modern prosperity so relies. One entire continent, unimaginably wealthy in a broad variety of resources, was taken over just in the most recent history.
Mostly the US today, benefitting primarily the US, and by proxy many of her allies. War is extremely profitable: taxpayer dollars pay for materiel which you immediately destroy, the demand/supply ratio is fantastic. The sustained violence guarantees access to the energy resources required to continue this strategy -- the rotten mess in the ME over the past near-century being just one of the more glaring examples.
>I think the modern American super market would blow the minds of anyone born before 1900 more than any other marvel that exists
Mate, the 7-Eleven Big Gulp, the Walmart 5-gallon bucket of Snickers and the giant Costco bulk bag of peanut butter M&Ms blows my present day European mind, let alone someone from 1900.
The quantity of chocolate for sale in bulk certainly is surprising. Unfortunately I find American chocolate to be borderline inedible.
That's like saying you don't like American beer because you tried Bud Light, Coors Light, and Miller Lite and didn't like any of them.
There are a lot of great chocolate makers in the US.
And cheese too! but you will hardly find good cheesemaker at a piggy wiggly (or even in SF more reputable supermarkets). The best i had was one from Hungtinton's Farmer market (WV), easily a top4-top3 goat cheese.
As someone from Wisconsin, I can say with certainly that you can in fact get great cheese at Piggly Wiggly. I have no idea if they exist in other states though, and if they do the cheese is no doubt worse.
Ghirardelli are decent, but I've been relatively hard-pressed to find decent American chocolatiers otherwise. In general, European chocolatiers are in a different league.
You won't generally find the best in the supermarket--probably either in the US or Europe. There are actually some pretty good more artisanal chocolate bars you can get in many supermarkets to my tastes. But they're still by definition mass market and (often) not as good as what some specialty maker with a small store has.
You're thinking of the cheap stuff like Hershey and other candy bar crap. It's all sugar.
I don't think it's just the sugar, Hershey uses butyric acid in its process and some other manufacturers copy them because that's the taste US consumers associate with chocolate. To people used to chocolate made without butyric acid, it tastes like vomit.
More accurately, Hershey is thought to use milk that is partially lipolyzed, and this process generates butyric acid -- which, according to the wikipedia page, is also found in Parmesan cheese. Does that taste like vomit?
I find European chocolate tastes sickeningly sweet, so to each his own.
I don't think it does taste like vomit, but it does smell like it.
I promise we have good chocolate here, just stay away from anything labeled Hershey's or Cadbury because it's the malk equivalent of milk.
Best not to think of it as “chocolate” similar to how cheese whiz is only loosely related to cheese.
You only really see kids eating m&ms. There's good American chocolate too, american chefs can read and follow a recipe just fine.
Those are the ones that scared you?!?
Walgreens/CSV literal buckets of medicine like Advil and whatnot were some of the scariest things I've seen, and worst of all, people DEFENDING them.
How old are you?
Old enough to realize that mass selling buckets of medicine isn't sane (no matter what they are, hint, Advil expires too), especially since I have doctors in my family. Also it kind of confirmed what statistics say about America being over medicated. It's just a small whiff of the disease that ends up with mass fentanyl addictions.
And not old enough to have the constant, chronic pain of old age, when your bones are grinding against each other at your worn out joints, particularly if you've had a life of physical labor. I think without the privilege of being relatively pain-free you'd change your tune.
I'm sure that the solution to that is not 1 ton of likely self prescribed Advil, it's proper treatment.
Doctor recommended ibuprofen can be at considerably higher dose rates than what's listed on the bottle at your pharmacy.
This whole "too many painkillers are prescribed" thing really annoys me. It leads to cancer patients suffering because of the risk they could become addicted. So f-ing what?
I can't find the study anymore but the US already consumes more medicine per capita than other developed countries.
Anyway, it's a cultural thing, other countries seem to be able to manage this at comparable levels with a fraction of the spending and without chucking these into every store:
https://www.walgreens.com/store/c/walgreens-ibuprofen-200-mg... (1000 pieces)
Instead having something like this:
https://moncoinsante.com/mcs/en/ibuprofen/3173-nurofen-200mg... (30 pieces)
I'm trying to figure out consumption rates for the first one. I think Ibuprofen should expire in max 2-3 years after it's opened, so that would be... 700-1000 days. That's at least 1 pill per day for the entire period.
I'm not against them being available per se, but last time I was in a CSV they were all over the place (and other similar ones with huge quantities numbering in the hundreds, at least), which means that there is demand and widespread usage like that.
I highly doubt most people buying them are using them correctly (either overdosing, taking them when they're not actually needed, or taking them past their expiry date).
I'm curious why Advil is scary to you.
The downvotes are just silly and show a bit of a lack of medical education.
Hints: any medicine expires, any medicine has side effects. I understand that there are some contexts where selling literal kilos of medicine are valid but MASS selling is just stupid. Nobody, not even somewhat large families, should be popping even Advil such that they need to consume kilos of it within the 1-2 years until it expires. And Advil was just an example, I saw those buckets for stronger stuff with more side effects. Medicine should be used like a laser, only where it's needed and sparingly.
And if many people really need to be popping even Advil like candy, it's a symptom of healthcare system failures.
See, sometimes silly things hide much deeper problems, and just because you're immersed in the culture you can't see it.
There's tasteful advancement of civilization. And then there's mountains of trash food.
Modern American supermarket would blow the minds of anyone from the Warsaw Pact countries ;), up until probably mid 1990's.
There is a video where it literally blows the mind of an immigrant from Cuba:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBA41QgIty8
Literally literally, or metaphorically literally?
Literally, in that he is unable to process things, just in the same way my fuse blows - it is resettable.
Not literallly in the cartoon sense.
"It literally blew his mind" doesn't mean what people nowadays think it means :D
...but you repeat yourself
on top of it all, they took him to an Aldi which is pretty small/basic. They should have taken him to a large Central Market.
Still current for some countries: 2 weeks ago, a shopper clearly confused half to death barely manages to make themselves understood to me in 3 words of english: They are asking what is the price of the bag of oranges.
Because there were 3 different prices on that price tag. The price, the one if you have the card, the one if you have the app or some other deep magic. (They were not stupid - presumably they could understand on their own the additional price per unit - but most likely not which price this was based on and why...) What a world we live in /s!
I think there are two aspects to this. I think anyone who's ever been to a food market in the history of time would conceptually understand it's possible to have a bigger market, and perhaps even a faster horse or mechanical bird to bring the items there. Commerce bringing you items from the other side of the world is millennia old. So I think it would be more of a case of "how did u mad lads actually pull this off", rather than a true mind-blown situation.
True mind-blown'ness I think comes from other examples he brings up, like GPS, and making items apparently hover a hundred miles above the earth and transmit information from above there, instantly, silently and invisibly. That's supernatural stuff, and the realm of the holy or the uncanny. You can't go back very far in time without talking about that stuff getting you accused of heresy / talking to the devil.
The real progress with the supermarket is the availability and ubiquity.
Maybe 80% of US Americans now have access to a larger variety of fresh fruits than even most nobles had 200 years ago, and it's not even a big deal to us.
Project that kind of progress another 200 years in the future... it's hard to imagine how that would even look like.
Tea, earl grey, hot.
I think people would have a deeper appreciation for what a super market is because they could understand it since it's exactly the kind of thing they would imagine a utopia would have. Throughout most of history people have spent most of their time worrying about food.
Air conditioning, satellites, and CAT scans are just too far beyond imagination that I don't think it would be fully appreciated.
Food security remains a critical issue in certain parts of the world still I think
Yeah that's what I was thinking of when paying at the supermarket. Try explaining contactless payments to someone from 18th century.
And yet a lot of people go hungry in this age of marvels. We have enough homes to house all the homeless, we have agencies, money, social workers. And yet we somehow can’t seem to figure it out.
We can. It's just uncomfortable to admit. For example, making housing an investment steals from the poor to give to the rich.
You can frankly tell when something is bullshit when it involves defining new increasingly fantastic and phantasmal forms of theft. It inevitably devolves into some sort of bastardization of voodoo.
Just looking at the number of houses and the number of homeless is itself deeply misleading for what should be fairly obvious reasons. If someone operated a model simplistic enough that concluded there should be no deaths of dehydration in Africa given the flow rate of the Nile river is more than sufficient to hydrate them, you would call said hypothetical person intensely dim for believing that conclusion or model of reality. Yet when it comes to housing suddenly that incredibly over-simplistic to the point of being idiotic model it becomes a political rallying cry.
Would you take the concept more seriously if I'd used 'taking' instead of 'stealing'?
We, as society could easily "figure it out", but there are so many misaligned incentives for those that are in charge or in power.
Why build more housing when it would only work against the value of your own properties? Why give out free food that's "spoiling" when you risk getting sued for potential food poisoning?
Rules are made up in the name of "safety", and they pass because yes there's an element of truth, but what goes unsaid is that much of the time it's maintaining the status quo and blocking competition.
And why would bread be full of sand and grit?
Thresh a bushel of wheat by hand by tossing it in the open air outdoors, and let us know the results of your experiment.
Why would that encourage sand or grit?
Because using millstones to grind grains into flour leaves traces of sand and stone grit in the flour.
It's really hard on the teeth long-term, IIUC.
Keeps the ol' colon moving right along tho'
Well, aluminum was supposed to be luxurious and everything... But I think before that they'd pick a piece of plastic packaging and be without words to explain their marvel.
bakelite was patented in 1909 - i understand franklin was before 1907, but the idea of "plastic" as something separate from wood, metal, and glass has been around over a century.
Bakelite also wasn't very good though. Stiff, heavy, brittle.
Modern sheet plastic packaging gives the impression of a soap bubble that we've somehow frozen in time and made solid.
It seems utilitarian to the person who doesn’t understand the concept of microplastics.
They didn't have plastic back then, it would of been paper or cloth
I think supermarkets hide a bit of a scary thought though. It sends this signal as food always being available, but it sits atop a very tightly "balanced" supply chain that is quite fragile. A few major supply chain disruptions and food scarcity becomes real very fast (a few days at most).
Also exposed when thinking about hardware stores. If you need to build/repair part of your house and the supply chain for wood or steel is gone, are you going to wait for tall, straight trees to grow? And then if you don't have milling hardware? Know how to create and extrude steel roofing or angle iron or similar?
Yea, our supply chain fragility and dependence really scares me sometimes. I try not to think about it, to be honest.
Our supply chain is not fragile at all! It took an enormous, global pandemic to cause a disruption and even then, goods kept flowing. Don't forget, Everyone braced for an economic downturn and all of a sudden demand for transported goods shot up. That's what caused the congestion, hugely growing demand. Containers never stopped moving, demand for transport was simply greater than supply. Prices rose, sure, but that's what's supposed to happen right? After the pandemic was over prices plummeted even faster than they climbed and are now under pre-pandemic levels.
Right now containers ships have (largely) stopped transiting the Suez Canal, passing the Horn of Africa instead. Adding weeks to their transit time. This is a mayor disruption and, while freight rates are once again rising, no one notices. Goods keep flowing, stores are stocked.
I work in logistics, so I'm somewhat biased, but to me it's amazing how robust supply chains really are
Walmart. Walmart is totally the winner in this category. It has all of the grocery store things you mentioned plus mountains of clothing, household goods, mind blowing technology, medicines...
Show them all of these wonders - then tell them that this is where poor people shop.
Last year I read some fan fiction in which a young woman comes isekai-style from a medievalish fantasy world to present-day Nevada. To make a long story short, one thing she concludes during this experience is that God wishes to bless everyone with ... a CostCo!
Do you remember the title? Would love to read it myself
Yes, it's called "in His strength, I will dare and dare and dare until I die"¹ in the Glowfic Constellation. There are a whole bunch of people there writing about characters and settings from the RPG Pathfinder (which I haven't played), most often in an isekai scenario (people from our world enter the RPG world, or vice versa).
Although I was fascinated by some elements of this story, it was actually abandoned incomplete last September and it's unlikely to ever be finished, so you may be disappointed by that if you get into it.
(Some people who play Pathfinder also complained that they didn't feel the characters were faithful to the originals, which I can't really evaluate.)
¹ A quote from Shaw's version of Joan of Arc, which is pretty thematic, although the "He" in question for the title character of this story is a particular god from a polytheistic pantheon.
This is still mind blowing and a huge luxury for most of the world
“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed” - William Gibson
It's so pity that it is hard to create a future that is truly inclusive and sustainable for all
It is hard, but we've proven to be really fucking good at doing hard things. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-populatio...
I sometimes think that modern American super market would blow the minds of a lot of people nowadays too
There's a reason some people celebrate when Wegmans opens near them.
We moved from nowhere Montana to North Carolina and when our teenage kids stepped into Wegmans, you would have thought they had never seen a grocery store. The vegetables section alone had their eyes bulging. One kid actually teared up. Best produce we had had in years. A couple years onward and the novelty is absolutely gone and the oldest thinks wegmans is too expensive with too little variety
Can you explain the sand and grit part?
Poor quality grinding of grains and adulteration can leave sand and grit in the flour. Still happens sometimes in places like India at least.
And a whole aisle full of splinter-free toiler paper![1]
[1] https://www.historydefined.net/splinter-free-toilet-paper-di...
Is that whole site just LLM-generated crap? About the only thing that link has to do with "splinter-free toilet paper" is that those words exist in the post, and yet telling me nothing about the topic. I cross-checked another post (because everyone has a bad writing day), and yup, more of the same.
I agree with you on the other points but this. People too often try to make the present look better by hyper focusing on bad things in the past.
Bread was sometimes adulterated with sand or sawdust, but it was not the norm.
I don't think that a past peasant (who would bake his own bread and eat it fresh out of the oven) would be impressed by supermarket bread. People who think sliced bread is good have never tasted real bread.
Kind of rough for those of us that prefer sand and grit unsliced break though..
I remember when I was a kid reading an old fairy tale, perhaps from Grimm's, about a girl given the "impossible" task of getting "strawberries in winter" or face some horrible consequences, but she was helped by a fairy. This was considered literal magic not that long ago.
I agree that a modern grocer or butcher might wow them, but it's way less given that contemporary supermarkets would.
Those supermarkets are a product of a far more modern and culturally specific consumerism, which is not so innate as you might think. Many of us have been raised into and it's been gradually exported around the world, but it's the food equivalent of free to play MMO -- overstimulating, manipulative, confusing, and in many ways far divorced from the far more universal basics of buying food to cook and eat.
Sliced bread is a step in the wrong direction though ;)
I think stores have become much more welcoming.
The doors automatically open for you, the interior is nicely arranged, everything is brightly lit, and food is chilled, refrigerated and frozen.
Also, cold coca cola.
This would blow many people's minds, but *more than* the magical rectangle in our pockets that plays endless moving pictures and sounds and all the world's information? Oh and talk (with live images) of people instantly across the globe? Not even close.
There are tradeoffs of course, its not all a direct upgrade. The deli section has certainly gotten a lot worse than 100 years ago. No capicola anywhere that I've seen. Cheese offerings leave a lot to be desired now that they've been reduced to the same half dozen usual suspects. All the food in that deli might be entirely monopolized by boars head or dietz and watson. Pickles, same thing with the vlassic/mt olive race to the bottom. I'm not even sure we can really honestly say the bread situation has improved other than the fact a machine now slices it.
The mind would be perhaps be not quite as blown but the modern large urban area supermarket would be pretty mindblowing to someone from the 1960s. You could probably get a lot of the stuff the random gourmet-ish cook might want but it would probably involve some combination of Saturday farmer's markets--which might have other things like beef--(which my mother did with some regularity), maybe a separate fish market (ditto), a specialty gourmet store, ethnic market, etc.
And, as you say, things like out of season fruits and vegetables or the variety of things like spices and teas would be largely unavailable outside of maybe specialty stores in the largest cities.
Anything that stems from _protocol_, to me, is astounding.
Yes, the internet is predictable in a sort of “yeah I think people will eventually all want to be able to communicate with each other easily.”
But if I said to Benjamin Franklin — the ambassador to France during the American revolution — that the internet only works because every country in the world agreed to do internet the same way, he would’ve said “fuck you, no way”
Reminds me of the story of the VERY early German settlers in Louisiana. They didn't have work animals such as horses or food / sustenance animals such as cows for the first decade of their time settling here (and to be clear, cows were used ONLY for milk... killing cows was a crime in early colonial Louisiana). Clearing the land for farming? The Company des Indes gave them each a pickaxe, a hoe, and a spade.
The progenitor of the Folse family in particular cleared the land, then became ill with malarial fever all summer, and then a hurricane flooded his property. 2 years after his arrival, he managed to harvest an entire 7 barrels worth of rice, which he had to hand-transport from the Hahnville area of modern day St. Charles Parish to New Orleans for sale.
One of the reasons the people there had such good relationships with the local native Americans (and why Creole Louisiana is such a melting pot to this day) is that they didn't have time to focus on procuring meat, so instead they would trade their crops with the natives, while the natives went hunting for meat and taught the children how to hunt, too.