Have you ever wished you were born decades later?

[Mendi]

I think I actually would have preferred to be born thousand/hundreds of years ago, to some culture (any will do), which valued transgender people.

I don't want to sound pessimistic, but predicting future is difficult. It might be that society is more accepting within next hundreds of years...or then not. I would rather not take the risk, even when medical options would be more better and probably more options available.

[FinallyMichelle]

I would put most scientific "breakthroughs" of the past few decades in that category. Modern science either runs on corporate money or the cool factor - stuff we do just because it's effing cool without a care in the world about whether it ought to be done or not. Eff yeah, let's make corn that glows in the dark. Why? Well eff you for even asking why! Eff yeah science! -guitar riff-

Modern scientism seems awfully allergic to discussions about philosophy and ethics though, strangely enough. Because let's face it, newer and shinier and sexier is what sells. Forget that nobody genuinely believes, in their heart of hearts, that the iphone X is better than the iphone 7 or whatever came last. They'll put that $800 bill on their credit card, chuck it in the garbage in a couple years, and conveniently ignore the depression/anxiety/opiate addiction/suicide epidemic happening in spite of all this "progress" and "technology" making our lives "better".

Hahaha, funny and astute. If you learned that kind of distinction or eagle eye insight from riding your Jeep I may have to re-evaluate my stance on jeeps. Nah, just kidding, my family and friends have terrorized me with off road vehicles for as long as I can remember. I kinda want to puke if I sit in a Wrangler. I may be a hillbilly but I don't have to be happy about it. ☹️ Sorry, I am just a serious wimp.

Follow the money, that is the rule. If you want to know where everything went wrong, follow the money. That is not entirely true though is it? Look at Rwanda in the eyes of the world they are the same yet they slaughter each other over their microscopic differences. This is what we are.

I have begun to believe that we are not a viable species. We are broken on a evolutionary level. It is so easy to point to men in this but women have to accept some responsibility. The macho, chest thumping, crotch scratching mentality might lead us to ruin, but whatever that leaves us women unable to see the the reality and benefits of contention is just as ruinous. I am being vague on purpose, it would achieve nothing to put everyone on the defensive. Please, no one take offense, I am not pointing fingers so much as pointing out that evolution has finally failed. It's up to us to move past this.

I understand, probably that is my curse, I understand all sides all the time.

Seth, I think that you are awesome and I seriously want to talk art with you one day but... what do you see as an alternative? To science I mean. We are failing, or actually maybe not we are not the first. The Romans could not make it past this point we are going to hit that same wall unless something changes. How do we get past this point? If we fail now and make a go at it in another thousand years, what then?

I don't know. We are experiencing growing pains on an unprecedented global level, somehow we have to make that next step. I am not saying that science is the answer but all the other answers we have come up with were less than stellar.

I submit to you this dearheart, science isn't broken, we are. Please convince me I am wrong. Can we survive without help? Help that science could perhaps offer?

[AnonyMs]

I submit to you this dearheart, science isn't broken, we are. Please convince me I am wrong. Can we survive without help? Help that science could perhaps offer?

I tend to agree and I don't feel particularly positive about the outcome. The key change from the past is that we have the means to destroy ourselves and keep coming up with new and easier ways to do it. There's not too much chance of anything happening any particular year, but the years do stack up one after the other.

I'm concerned technological advances causing serious social instability. There's going to be massive changes in jobs coming and jobs that once seemed safe may not exist much longer. I've no idea what I'd do if I were planning a future career right now. There's no stopping it, and I'd not want to if we could, but its is a bit worrying.

Ignoring my personally situation I'd rather be growing up now than when I did. The world is a better place, or at least my part of it and I greatly prefer the advances in technology that have come. I sometimes wonder how I lived before Internet, and for the life of me I can't work it out. And there's endless other advances. Socially things are much better, though recent events do have me wondering about the future.

On the subject of obsolescence part of it is because the costs of goods these days is so low and the constant drive to reduce it further. Using computers we now have the ability to design products that trade off cost against reliability. I recently bought a new washing machine, and the brand famous for lasting decades is still available - but several times the price - I bought the usual throw away when it breaks brand instead (i.e. all the others). Other factors are disposable income and entertainment - most people don't need a brand new phone, but they can have it anyway.

I believe its highly likely self driving cars will change the world. People won't own cars, it will be cheaper to just call one when you need it - like Uber, but without the driver. A few companies like Uber will own vast fleets of cars and have their own service networks (putting all the current ones out of bushiness). Car design will change to emphasize reduced cost for this purpose - at a guess longer life and more reliability. Driving speed will go up and congestion down as computer control allow cars to be driven with full knowledge of what every other car on the road is doing. Current jobs related to commercial driving will be eliminated and fewer different jobs created. Safety and lower costs will eventually lead lead to human driven cars being banned from the public roads.

[V M]

I think it would have been better if I were never born at all

[Aurorasky]

I never wish I had been born decades later but I often wish I had transitioned much, much earlier, and I transitioned socially when I was 18, two years and a half ago.

I feel blessed that I'm going to live the rest of my life as a woman. But I look at childhood pictures and such, and I cringe that that was ever me. I actually had a really cute, pretty look as a child and everyone told me I looked so adorable and I just wouldn't stop talking. Lol. But it's painful to think nobody allowed me to dress how I would like, or buy the toys I wanted, or have the haircut I wanted. I know it seems like superficial stuff. But even being a teen was very hard and isolating. I actually think the times without all the technology had somnething of magical to them. I would have loved to grow up in the same era, but in the right gender. I look at old photos from the 90s and early 2000's and think the photos have something different to them. It's just so beautiful. Photos today have much better quality technically, and so much more definition, yet there's something in me that makes me gravitate towards those old photos.

To V M, aww! I have felt like that before. I know it's painful. Let me hug you right now. ((((HUG))))

[Gertrude]

Several things to consider there:
1) Rapid turnover of electronics are largely unnecessary, and the "new versions" are contrived to sell, not actually substantial upgrades the way they used to be. This particularly true in the case of phones, as because of market penetration of older versions most apps/games/etc. will be developed for the largest installed user base anyway, and not the recent models. If only 1% of people have a Galaxy 8 or iPhone X, there's no money in it for app developers. It is all pure hype designed to sell the phones by highlighting a few features that would work just as well on older processors, they just parcel them out over time to make things seem innovative.

2) Rapid obsolescence also exists in cases where there is no clear upgrade, or the upgrade is unattractive, such as PC power supplies or routers (at least upgrades as far as 99.9% of users are concerned), but still must be replaced because of purposefully shoddy construction. Somehow I doubt you are itching for the newest TP-Link model.

3) Such replaced devices are a massive, MASSIVE, environmental hazard. They waste precious resources, and often suffer from severe disposal issues.

4) Planned obsolescence can cause secondary effects beyond simply replacing hardware, such as important data loss. Not everything is sync'd to a remote server, and in fact by encouraging things to be we are creating yet more environmental damage (if anyone wants to drop your carbon footprint, delete those pointless extra photos of your brunch from 4 years ago off of any cloud storage and get your friends and family to do the same).

I would add the lack of the ability to fix or refurbish stuff easily or at all. Throw it away and start over. Couple that with quality and quality fade issues and we own a lot of crap. In some cases, like with modern cars, some maintenance and parts replacement can't be shockingly high. Turbochargers, timing belts, etc. to have timing belt done on some vehicles approaches $3000. That turbo died? More than that. Engine replacement can be $6000 to almost $60000 depending on the car.  Give me a or odb II truck and I can do an engine for less than half the cheapest. The real costs of ownership are rarely considered and with loans going out to 96 months now, one could still be paying off something that doesn't work anymore and is too expensive to fix.

As far as carbon footprint, not my religion. Then again I don't have a religion.


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[Chloe]

Why would anyone want those old records . . . No static or anything like that.

         Had to have been there I suppose! Click link within your quote - there's a song about it!! We always had FM and now there's XM! Vacuum tube analog still maintains better sound quality which is to point: newer is NOT necessarily better, just more "convenient'?

Oh, and btw, XM's Classic Vinyl station deliberately adds "the static" in prior to playing each selection! What's with that! ?

[Roll]

As far as carbon footprint, not my religion. Then again I don't have a religion.

Same for me, I was being a little facetious with that part. A lot of people I know who talk about their "carbon footprint" while yelling at me for little things are incredibly unaware of the million things they do that send theirs way above mine by orders of magnitude. They still haven't learned the cloud is not some magical thing that exists in the ether, but rather a ton of energy hungry, giant server farms in the middle of New Mexico that have to be expanded daily because people won't delete the 37th video they took of their dog being weird that day.

[Roll]

         Had to have been there I suppose! Click link within your quote - there's a song about it!! We always had FM and now there's XM! Vacuum tube analog still maintains better sound quality which is to point: newer is NOT necessarily better!

Oh, and btw, XM's Classic Vinyl station deliberately adds "the static" in prior to playing each selection!

Technically speaking, due to the way digital and analog data and signals work, it is true that analog sounds more faithful. Analog (actual instruments) to analog does not alter the waveform, whereas analog to digital will. But the clicks and hisses and pops of old records or the flaws with stuff like crinkled tape? The longing for those are just nostalgia due to years of acclimation, they aren't actually meant to be there!!

Though it should also be said there is a point that digital vs analog is entirely indistinguishable by the human ear, and it is no longer physically an issue that analog is technically more accurate. It's something we can easily do today even, not like an "in the future thing", it's just not practical in terms of file size (or bandwidth utilization when it comes to streaming).



The smooth continuous line is analog, and when converted to digital its amplitude will be approximated at a regular time interval, creating the step pattern of the digital signal. Increase the bit rate high enough, and you can't even see the "jagged" steps of the digital at all (exactly how the continuous analog waveform in this image looks curved, but of course is just a series of pixel "steps" itself in this representation, which would be completely visible if you zoomed in), and the human ear certainly can't tell the difference since everything we see or hear are just rough approximations by our brain anyway. (Conversely, this is also why lower bit rates, meaning less points in time and "broader" steps, sound absolutely horrible.)

[KathyLauren]

Vacuum tube analog still maintains better sound quality

Yes.  The best sound quality I ever heard was AM radio on the vacuum tube radio in my 1938 Packard.  Man, that thing was clear!

And recording studios still use tubes in some components.  The signal from a microphone needs to be amplified before it can be digitized, and the preamps used for that often use tubes for the cleanest sound.

[kitchentablepotpourri]

Being born later may or may not benefit you, but lets consider that you being here in the first place was a miracle in itself, since your birth depended on some chance encounters; first your parents had to meet, then the sperm and egg that made you you was a chance encounter, and the odds of replicating that are probably slim to none, so being here at all is something to be thankful for. And if you were born later, you probably wouldn't be trans, and you would also have a different nature and nurture set of circumstances, which could be good, or could be bad-really bad; so all things considered I think we should be happy being who we are in the here and now, and make the most of it, and if there are things we want changed we can affect the change in various ways. 

[BT04]

Hahaha, funny and astute. If you learned that kind of distinction or eagle eye insight from riding your Jeep I may have to re-evaluate my stance on jeeps. Nah, just kidding, my family and friends have terrorized me with off road vehicles for as long as I can remember. I kinda want to puke if I sit in a Wrangler. I may be a hillbilly but I don't have to be happy about it. ☹️ Sorry, I am just a serious wimp.

Good lord, I'm sorry about that experience! I know a lot of wheeling-types can be outright jerks. So I do not blame you one iota! My rig, however, is hardly a "rig" at all - I'm a fan of the Cherokee, and I plan on keeping mine clean and driveable for at least another decade. The restoration, if you will, of a classic car. With the occasional rip out into the dirt. :9

I have begun to believe that we are not a viable species. We are broken on a evolutionary level. It is so easy to point to men in this but women have to accept some responsibility. The macho, chest thumping, crotch scratching mentality might lead us to ruin, but whatever that leaves us women unable to see the the reality and benefits of contention is just as ruinous. I am being vague on purpose, it would achieve nothing to put everyone on the defensive. Please, no one take offense, I am not pointing fingers so much as pointing out that evolution has finally failed. It's up to us to move past this.

Theorists, political philosophers, and historians sometimes try to figure out when our "fall from eden" happened in evolutionary terms. Some blame capitalism, some blame the nation-state, some see it fit, once they start down that rabbit hole, to go all the way back to the taming of fire itself. I think human cognition itself is fraught - our ability to think in terms of "what if"s and possible futures might have been what did it.

Seth, I think that you are awesome and I seriously want to talk art with you one day but... what do you see as an alternative? To science I mean. We are failing, or actually maybe not we are not the first. The Romans could not make it past this point we are going to hit that same wall unless something changes. How do we get past this point? If we fail now and make a go at it in another thousand years, what then?

I don't know. We are experiencing growing pains on an unprecedented global level, somehow we have to make that next step. I am not saying that science is the answer but all the other answers we have come up with were less than stellar.

I submit to you this dearheart, science isn't broken, we are. Please convince me I am wrong. Can we survive without help? Help that science could perhaps offer?

Thank you, I think you're pretty awesome too. It makes me feel a little better to know that others are thinking about these things. As far as science goes, there is no alternative; but it shouldn't be an ideology either, the way it is now. Science is but one tool for understanding the world alongside a host of others, including emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence. There are things the hands know that the waking, thinking, mind will never understand. My body, even, knew I was trans long before my head did.

I'm skeptical of people who have answers anymore, so I offer none. I, personally, do not experience long-term hope, but nor do I especially experience long-term dread. Come what may - in the meantime, I'll be working on my car and going fishing. Though if you read authors like John Michael Greer, and his inspiration, Oswald Spengler, you'll come away with the understanding that faith in science, or science-like structures follows a pretty reliable pattern over the course of histories and nations. If the two of them are to be trusted, which I think they are as they've done their homework, then the current state of science is a natural stage in the life cycle of civilizations, and it will soon be met with an overwhelming opposition party of religious zealots that will come to dominate the political landscape for some time to come. Rome went through this, I believe, as well as a number of Asian civilizations over the past few thousand years. I think asking if there's an answer or alternative to this is like asking if there's an answer or alternative to growing old - there is, but it's just that you must learn to age gracefully, rather than spend your years trying to find the elixir of life.

I don't believe we're broken - most species are designed to reproduce into overshoot, and reorganize the conditions of their environment to suit that goal, which is precisely what we've done on a mass scale. Science was just one tool to get us there, and it's done a spectacular job. The alternative to that, however, isn't pretty. Try Jared Diamond's Collapse and you'll see what I mean. Unfortunately, these measures certain societies have taken over the course of human history to manage themselves and their pesky "carbon footprints" can be difficult to read about. But at the same time... they work.

Either way, terrible things are probably coming for most people on Earth (the people, that is, who are not billionaires), and and doing what needs to be done to take care of those around us and survive and seek happiness is no original sin.

I, however, would not bank my emotional well-being on lab-grown anything. It's a resource bubble waiting to burst.

[Gertrude]

Same for me, I was being a little facetious with that part. A lot of people I know who talk about their "carbon footprint" while yelling at me for little things are incredibly unaware of the million things they do that send theirs way above mine by orders of magnitude. They still haven't learned the cloud is not some magical thing that exists in the ether, but rather a ton of energy hungry, giant server farms in the middle of New Mexico that have to be expanded daily because people won't delete the 37th video they took of their dog being weird that day.

Engineering problems a shouldn't be moral ones. Once we assign morality to a belief, it becomes a religion. After 8 years of parochial school, I've had my share, whether the deity is god, the planet or science. It comes down to trying to control people socially, which is a coercive force. I try to skip those exercises.


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[Roll]

Engineering problems a shouldn't be moral ones. Once we assign morality to a belief, it becomes a religion. After 8 years of parochial school, I've had my share, whether the deity is god, the planet or science. It comes down to trying to control people socially, which is a coercive force. I try to skip those exercises.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

I just meant in that I hate the hypocrisy of those complaining while taking actions in direct contradiction to their complaint due to shear ignorance. (Ie: Complaining about eating a hamburger due to cattle grazing C02, while eating a bowl of rice which creates far more.) Though I do also lament impracticality. (Going back to the server farms, so much of the data is just 100%, absolutely, without question unwanted and unnecessary and often times people don't even know it's there when it syncs to cloud storage automatically or whatever. That is just simply waste, and my OCD makes me detest even harmless waste. Which plays into my originally mentioned peeve in the iPhone/etc. marketing cycle, as it serves no practical purpose beyond increasing so and so's stock price by .2% once in a while.)

[Chloe]

. . . our ability to think in terms of "what if"s and possible futures might have been what did it . . . Come what may - in the meantime, I'll be working on my car and going fishing.

        OMG you sound just like one of my FAV author's character Candide!
And, LOL an ole' habit, I couldn't resist!

Total words: 635
Genre: Informal
  Female = 588
  Male   = 1433
  Difference = 845; 70.9%
  Verdict: Very MALE (my emphasis)

         By way of explaination (in case not already familiar?): It begins with a young man, Candide, who is living a sheltered life in an Edenic paradise and being indoctrinated with Leibnizian optimism (or simply "optimism") by his mentor, Professor Pangloss.[7] The work describes the abrupt cessation of this lifestyle, followed by Candide's slow, painful disillusionment as he witnesses and experiences great hardships in the world. Voltaire concludes with Candide, if not rejecting optimism outright, advocating a deeply practical precept, "we must cultivate our garden", in lieu of the Leibnizian mantra of Pangloss, "all is for the best" in the "best of all possible worlds".

[Janes Groove]

I'd say that self driving cars are actually one of the few things that would be a massive, practical benefit to the world. Fully automated transportation would be far more efficient in every way: speed (traffic issues could largely be eliminated), fuel (optimized everything else means optimized fuel usage), time (think what you could accomplish in the time you spend driving each day), and most importantly, safety (fatal collisions would drop to a fraction of what they are now, if not become virtually non existent). Perhaps most importantly though, it would open up access to the larger world to people who previously did not have it. People who are handicapped or suffer from other issues that prevent them from driving, and I speak from experience on this (I didn't have my license until 2 months ago because of severe anxiety and phobias surrounding driving). Of course, it is pretty much an all or nothing scenario, and none of the benefits can be fully recognized without complete conversion to the driver-less model. (Also, it doesn't mean there can't be separate areas that are driver-less with additional areas that allow for human control for those who actually enjoy driving. But think about the daily city commute, does anyone really "enjoy" that? That is the area where they are needed.)

And what are the social ramifications of eliminating millions of jobs that lower to middle income people depend on?  Face it, for millions of workers this IS their level of competence.  No amount of retraining (which is never provided) will ever change that fact.  Amazon has already completed fully automated warehouses. No more warehouse employees.  They are in a race with Uber now to produce driverless cars putting their billions to work to bring about that reality to a near future.   What will that future look like?  Millions of people in a permanent state of unemployment.  A massive underclass with no work and no prospects.  What lies at the end of that road? Despotism?

[AnonyMs]

And what are the social ramifications of eliminating millions of jobs that lower to middle income people depend on?  Face it, for millions of workers this IS their level of competence.  No amount of retraining (which is never provided) will ever change that fact.  Amazon has already completed fully automated warehouses. No more warehouse employees.  They are in a race with Uber now to produce driverless cars putting their billions to work to bring about that reality to a near future.   What will that future look like?  Millions of people in a permanent state of unemployment.  A massive underclass with no work and no prospects.  What lies at the end of that road? Despotism?

Probably.

[MeTony]

Both yes and no. Yes for internet being the thing that made me know about this. I found out at age 30 that there is something called transgender. I wish I had found out much earlier.

And no. The self confidence I have now can not be compared to the insecurity I felt as a teenager. I feel more secure and sure about who I am now at 40.

I am happy the doctors and scientists find new ways to correct people's bodies. I am happy for the kids that realize at an early age who they are and can get the new treatments. But I would not want to be a teen now, at the age of internet bullying.


Tony

[Roll]

And what are the social ramifications of eliminating millions of jobs that lower to middle income people depend on?  Face it, for millions of workers this IS their level of competence.  No amount of retraining (which is never provided) will ever change that fact.  Amazon has already completed fully automated warehouses. No more warehouse employees.  They are in a race with Uber now to produce driverless cars putting their billions to work to bring about that reality to a near future.   What will that future look like?  Millions of people in a permanent state of unemployment.  A massive underclass with no work and no prospects.  What lies at the end of that road? Despotism?

You are conflating issues. The only industry who would develop structural unemployment because of driver-less cars would be taxi services, which is an extraordinarily minute section of the economy, and a fairly broken one at that (see: taxi medallions, the million Uber issues, etc.). It is not the same as factory automation in the slightest, the two forms of automation share little in common in what is required of them even.

Also, when it comes down to it, say that it was the same and led to large scale structural unemployment. Well, that is inevitable by nature and inherently temporary (long term structural unemployment is a failure of government and corporate management, which is a different issue altogether). But the benefits? 1.3 million people die per year in car accidents. You would trade 1.3 million lives for half a million jobs?

[AnonyMs]

There appears to be 3.5 million truck drivers in the USA. Presumably there's a lot of people working support services for food and rest as well. I'd guess they will be out of work.