alt Hacker NewsWe are living in the best times in human history. 200 years ago, the wealthiest kings in the world didnt live in such luxury.
We are pulling people out of poverty like no other era has ever been able to do.
In my lifetime I expect we create a food factory that takes clean water, atmosphere, and electricity in. Automation happens, no humans, and it produces foods. We can simply build as many of these as we please, anywhere.
Literally everywhere I look things are going fantastically.
Replies
cindyllm • today at 7:52 PM
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You must be very lucky.
My grandparents were not rich at all, but they still owned houses and land that I will never be able to buy from the salary of an engineer or programmer. I own my apartment, but its true value is far less than of the big houses and ample lands on which my grandparents lived.
Moreover, while there is an abundance of cheap and reasonably healthy food around me, I cannot find at any price food with a comparable quality with that which I could eat at my grandparents, which was produced by themselves, from their cultivated land and from their animals.
There is an abundance of cheap clothes, cheap enough that there is no need to worry about repairing them, like in the distant past, but anything that I can buy in a normal shop has a much worse quality than the clothes that were available many decades ago. At least unlike with food, I can still find good quality clothes, but only if I order them online from various countries and from a different country for every kind, as there is no place where everything is optimum (e.g. I buy some things from Sweden, others from Scotland, others from Ireland, others from Austria, and so on).
There are of course things that are much better, mainly those with electronic components, but there are already many years since the prices of these have been growing almost continuously, so they have become less and less affordable.
In conclusion, while there are plenty of things that are much better than when I was young, there are also a lot of things that are much worse. It hard to say which is the balance between bad and good, especially because the things that have become worse are essential necessities, while those that have become better are mainly optional things, useful for research or entertainment.