You could move to another country where education is more affordable. Some places even have schools where masters and PhD students are funded by the university (and work as TAs for a stipend), rather than taking on debt.
I can understand if you’re not able to uproot your life like that though, so I’m not saying you’re wrong to stay where you are and try to survive.
The 1970s are just as unrelatable to me as the 1930s. It’s all just “the before times” to me.
Also I think GenZers have no idea how bad everything smelled back then, due to the pervasive smoking in public and in everyone’s houses. I know this because public smoking lasted well into the 90s and I remember when it started going away.
I have a friend who is nostalgic for those times before he was born, and even claims to want to take up smoking, though he hasn’t had the guts to actually try. Really strange. I find smoking totally repulsive.
I’m sure you could find some kids like that, but 47%? That’s a lot!
If that’s the case, why prefer the last 50 years over the decades before that? In 1975 the average house price in San Francisco was 1/27 the price it was in 2024. That means you could have a $1.5m house for $55k. Adjusted for inflation, that’s $337k in 2026 dollars.
If you went back even further (to the 60s or 50s) it would be even more ridiculous.
Nearly half (47%) of adults ages 18-29 said if they had the option, they’d choose to live in the past, according to a new NBC News Decision Desk Poll powered by SurveyMonkey. One-third said they’d pick a time period less than 50 years in the past, while another 14% said they’d choose more than 50 years in the past.
Sort of, yes?
I was born in the 80s and grew up in the 90s. It’s natural for me to be nostalgic about the 90s. It’s absolutely strange to me that any significant group of people who grew up in the 2000s would actually want to go back to the 80s or 90s, which they never experienced first hand.
The only explanation I can think of is that these GenZers watch shows like Stranger Things or Friends and think that’s what we all lived like back then.
I don’t think so. I think AI cranks up the noise to 11, definitely, and makes culture hard to find. I think it spells the doom of search engines like Google for actually finding human-created stuff.
But that culture, that creativity, is still out there. It’s just hard to find. It takes word of mouth and effort to find it. It’s the Dark Forest stage of the Internet.
Temperature is a human invention, it doesn’t exist in nature. What exists in nature are particles with differing amounts of thermal and kinetic energy. Temperature is a measurement of the average kinetic energy of the particles in an area. But just like with the average height of people in a room, there’s no guarantee that any particular particle is equal to that average.
Now, having got that out of the way, the way our bodies work is that they seek a thermodynamic equilibrium. That is, they try to match the amount of heat (thermal energy) lost through the skin to the amount of heat produced internally by metabolic processes. One way to achieve this is through the evaporation of sweat. This requires good airflow, however, which heavy blankets prevent.
Drones can also drop mortar shells and there are already plenty of mortar shells with timed fuses. Then the drone can just drop the shell and have it land on the net and detonate above your head, blasting you with shrapnel.
Nets aren’t going to be a viable long term defence.
Remastering and remaking an existing game is much easier than making a new game that’s actually good. Why do you think so many AAA companies have become obsessed with remakes and remasters? They’ve lost the creative talent to be able to make brand new hit games. And they’re too risk-averse to even try!
If you want new games that are actually good and innovative, your best bet is indie games. Indie games are more innovative and less risk-averse, operating on a sink-or-swim model (many separate indie game devs all competing).
Right but we’re not talking about a war here, we’re talking about a dystopian society. Most people are just going about their business, trying to keep their heads down. Maybe you and your friends are engaged in guerrilla warfare, but then you’re living out in your trenches in the forest or the hills, not walking into town to grab a pizza slice.
You’re going to cover the entire sidewalk path between your house/apartment and the local pizza joint… with nets?
Be that as it may, I think the killer bot dystopian future is more likely to resemble Half-Life 2 than Robocop. That is, they’ll take you out with a cheap FPV drone from a thousand feet above rather than some big expensive killer mech robot. Your EMP isn’t going to be of much use when a grenade explodes on your head while you’re walking to grab a slice at the local pizza joint.
It’s all FOMO. These CEOs are totally clueless about how to actually improve productivity. They’re just chasing trends and hoping not to get left behind.
That’s a Steam issue with automatic updates. I much prefer games that distribute on their own and let you download any of the old versions you want. I’m not the type of person who plays old versions to exploit bugs in a single player game, but I don’t have any issue with people who want to do that.
I love jalapeños on pizza! Really nice!
It’s a specialist tool. You can say the same thing about any specialist tool. Why should CNC machine tools exist if they’re so hard to use and take a lot of training and are dangerous in the hands of untrained people?
That’s pretty interesting. I don’t think it works right now though. A billionaire could buy up all the land in town and kick everyone out, then being the only voter just get rid of the tax after voting himself as the mayor (or just give himself back the tax money he paid).
At a federal level it may be interesting, but that would require scrapping everything and redoing the entire structure of the levels of government, since normally cities have the power to set their own property taxes, not other levels of government.
What I like about land value taxes is that there aren’t any games to play with assessing the value of land incorrectly (too high or too low). Land is addresses value based on its location, not what’s built on it. That means a parking lot in the middle of Manhattan is assessed the same taxes as the office building across the street. This also means people can’t get rich by just buying land and holding it to sell at a later date. Their taxes go up while the land doesn’t produce anything, so they lose money until they sell the land or build on it.
Land value taxes. Other forms of wealth can be moved. There are too many different countries to move to and take wealth with you and hide it. Land can’t be moved.
Land value taxes also put a heavy cost on the most egregious forms of economic rent-seeking: collecting rent on people’s shelter. Collecting such heavy rent on mom & pop restaurants that they keep going out of business in a never-ending cycle of turnover. Destroying all kinds of small stores and cafes and restaurants which would otherwise build character in a community.
I doubt luck had much to do with it! This just seems like a convenient way to embezzle a few hundred million of investor money as a favour to a friend.
It definitely seems like a lot of people think the future is bleak, though most people feeling that way have no idea what things were like 100 years ago.
My grandparents grew up on farms with 10+ siblings and left school after grade 8. They lived in tiny houses with multiple kids packed into a single room. They worked heavy manual labour on the farm and in forestry. It was very common for young children to die of the flu or measles or the common cold. My grandfather’s little brother died as a child. They had no idea whatsoever that the future was going to be as good as things are now, so it’s hard to say they had any more to look forward to than we do now.
They also had 2 world wars in their future, and for all the war we have going on right now, we’re fortunate that it isn’t even close to as bad as the world wars of the 20th century. Climate change is definitely a legitimate thing to worry about, but it’s really hard to predict how much it will affect any of us individually.