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The difference in trans healthcare between now and 40 years ago is staggering. Partly the technology, but mostly the access.

40 years ago I met my wife… I realize that the number of people who have benefitted from this is low, but it has been of unparalleled benefit to me…

He’s so close

Cinemas. Movies and everything involved, including (in fact especially) the seats.

GPS

Technology such as internet, Bluetooth, gaming etc = better

bsky.app/profile/robo...

A great mantra I try to remember is: Things are bad. Things are better. Things can be better. All 3 are true!

The amount of smoking has dropped significantly. Cars are not death traps when in an accident. HIV isn’t a death sentence. Technology.

I was able to legally marry my wife. How is that for progress?

Maybe so, but it's also objectively true. So at worst it's "necessary but insufficient" to flip someone into reactionary mode.

My dad is 78 and is passionate that there are only two answers to this— TV’s Weed Anything else is worse

Our once revered airports!

Tucker Carlson’s voice came into my head instantly.

Dafuq is this guy talking about? I crossed the pond with three movies and four cocktails, done. There is literally a tv screen behind every seat, with hundreds of viewing options. He is out of his mind.

40 years ago, 1 in 10 children died before their 5th birthday. That's fallen by over 60%.

(freedom of speech guy)airline food and movie selection has significantly improved from when I was a kid. there used to be comedy routines about how bad airline food is but it’s not that bad now

Taiwan was a military dictatorship that murdered dissidents at home and abroad 40+ years ago. Henry Liu was murdered by the regime in 1984!

When I was a child, HIV/AIDS was a death sentence. A kid in my high school committed suicide because of a mere *rumor* he was gay. Another girl's parents kicked her out because she came out. Teen pregnancy is way down. Also I can watch basically any TV show or movie I want on demand.

Well, I can tell this guy isn't into board games.

Pediatric cardiology is about 100x better than it was 40 years ago.

Fun use of monotonically. Wrong, but fun. Not one single thing has gotten better at any time? Free in-flight entertainment is worse than no entertainment, or about a dozen audio channels just playing on a loop? When we got free audio, it was amazing. Planes without it were shunned.

How old is this idiot? What's better? EVERYTHING, as long as you don't manage to fuck it up.

Markers! Markers are better. I feel like a lot of things WERE better, but have worsened in recent years as the MOREMOREMORE philosophy seems to rule. More, bigger cars, more complicated phones, food, clothing,appliances, LLMs, media, leaf blowers. Bigger noisier and dumber

Motherfucker wrote this on his cell phone and poster it on the internet

Make America something something

Only because liberals don’t have an answer for why things at least feel worse? Do you think people generally have more agency over their lives than they did 30 years ago?

Dunno, enshittification is a real thing.

I feel moderately insane that the actual thing about air travel that's worse is the security theater and that's not what he's even talking about

He must've noticed how, over the course of his life, he has gotten progressively older

I was traveling 40 years ago. Pan Am was a wretched experience in economy. Airplanes were loud as hell for all the people not in them (and some in them, too (eg: back of a 727). Broke down way more often. Crashed more often (per million miles flown). Cost way more adjusted for inflation.

Is it true that vegetables have gotten more delicious or am I just older now

Ummmm. Just off the top of my head TV screens the variety of fruits and veg in the supermarket bars (women get hooks to hang our bags on now -hey, that’s not a small thing, let me tell you!) synthetic fibers

I had to make my own mixtapes to play in my Walkman and hope the batteries lasted while cutting the grass or taking a road trip in the family truckster as opposed to endless streaming options and charging plugs in my seat.

In communications, medicine, and computing, we have literal Star Trek technology now.

I really like how Eggo Waffles now come in a bag that you can seal shut to keep them fresh.

Once again, "I miss my youth" =/= "Things were better back then."

Luxury air travel, which cost an inflation adjusted number around the same as transatlantic business class, and everything smelt of cigarette smoke

"You bring the ambuguous grudge, we'll supply the villain"

You now have like 400 hours of movies to choose from. As opposed to one movie that they played at a fixed time.

I wonder what "monotonically" believes it means in this sentence

Back in the good old days, a plane 2/3 full seemed packed. I can recall being on large aircraft so empty people could stretch out on a row of seats. You'd need some pricey regulated fares to make that profitable. Airlines with ICC-regulated fares would compete on service/amenities. They had to.

The increase in healthcare costs are a genuine nightmare but also partially reflect massive improvements in tests and treatments.

Have you driven an American made mass produced car from the 80s? Not a great experience.

I mean, there's tons of medical things that have gotten better.

SICKLE CELL CYSTIC FIBROSIS AIDS

i’m afraid chaddrick there is right about air travel most certainly a blind squirrel/stopped clock moment for him but

Televisions have become better and cheaper

All sort of electronics are way better, not to mention stuff that exists now and didn't exist at all 40 years ago, but something that's much better that everyone had then and now are TVs/TV screens. 40 years ago you basically still only had CRTs or (bad) projectors. Large, heavy, low-resolution.

There’s less plane crashes. There’s your progress

Something something guy with a fetish of getting yelled at. I went farther back in my aircraft example for hyperbole but I can list a solid dozen flawed aircraft, the lack of knowledge and adaptation to microbursts, TCAS, engine reliability, ETOPS, HEPA, and of course the smoking.

I like watching movies and shows on the headrest in front of me. Compare this to watching LINE OF FIRE with my entire section at a horrible angle. Or boarding an old plane and realizing they had NO video and trying to read tiny print THE DISPOSSESSED with horrible lighting on a 8 hour flight.

Dentistry! Dentistry is better and less painful then when I was a teen. I think vaccines are also better. well, actually there are a lot of things when I think about it.

You ever notice how it’s not *exciting* anymore to look out the window when the big machine suddenly starts to go fast and take flight? What’s with that?

Cancer survivor here. The take of "the past was better" is something only idiots believe. Frankly, it shouldn't take a brush with a deadly illness to see that.

bsky.app/profile/sarc...

An airline seat has gotten better for the environment, safer, quieter, and less smoky; that has been worth the cost of some extra legroom which is still available for those who want or need, and a bit more inconvenience thanks to the patriot act, itself supported by many whining reactionaries. 

I was born in a dictatorship that is now a vibrant multi-party democracy

HIV/AIDS treatment has improved to an almost impossible-to-fathom degree since the era this dipshit is waxing on about.

The aesthetic of air travel is worse. But I doubt this person was having thinking about the philosophy of aesthetics in public spaces and more "we used to wear suits, now we don't. Ergo, worse"

Air travel might be better today than the 70s and 80s but it’s worse than it was 15 years ago. Customer service is worse, seats are smaller, you get nickel and dimed for everything, miles have and continue to be diluted. How does that make one a reactionary? Nobody likes this

I miss the old days when people weren't as susceptible to nostalgia

My beater car is a 2005, getting into a 2026 vehicle feels like a fucking spaceship comparatively.

love how half the things ppl are mentioning here is either entrainment or medical advancements I can’t have access to without healthcare

Tell me you’re a straight, white, able bodied, cis man. Without saying it out loud.

Willing to bet he refers to other people as "humans" in a disparaging voice.

Yeah, I think most mass media has improved greatly in quality. The era of "Three's Company" and similar shows is long gone. I couldn't imagine something like "The Good Place" airing on network TV in 1975.

Air travel has gotten worse since the 70s because of deregulation. Not sure why that would turn someone reactionary

The seats seemed a lot bigger back when I flew from Boston to Phoenix at age 12!

Weed costs $15 for an 1/8th

Honestly I think if you're willing to pay the equivalent of prior fares in modern rates the experience is still extremely good and quite probably better than it was back then. The top-end product from many airlines is *extremely* nice nowadays!

Food is unimaginably better than 40 years ago. TV programming unimaginably better. Cars, consumer electronics. I'm not the type of person to weigh in on fashion, but basic clothing options are so much more comfortable than they used to be, I remember the autistic hell of early 90s stuff.

I like being able to go out for a meal, to a sporting event, or even to a bar/nightlife venue and not smell like smoke for days afterward.

I think its just the entry point of getting old…

Precisely this. I made the same observations during my dalliance with libertarianism in the early aughts. Back when computers screamed at each other.

What he really wants to say is that he hates that air travel became available to *those people*.

40 years ago you couldn't get foreign football results ANYWHERE in the US. Not even in the agate type in the papers, which would sometimes even print partial scores, like "English soccer: Liverpool 1". You could only watch the FA Cup Final at 6 AM in a pub with a giant dish on a trailer.

Cycling in the city is vastly better.

RIP to everyone who succumbs to nostalgia not me though I don’t miss anything except my childhood when everything was better

When they banned indoor smoking.

That dude needs to drive a 40 year old car. I drove one that’s NOW 40 years old when it was less than 10 years old, and that thing ate clutch cables like they were sugary breakfast cereal. Terrible mileage, and not a single safety feature beyond a seatbelt. They’re so much more reliable now.

in the 1970s, if you has asthma, you were told to breathe in steam from a washcloth over your face with the window open. there was cigarette smoke everywhere. i was born in the '80s where "steam" got upgraded to "nebulizer and prednisone"; today i have meds that keep me stable and doing well

Just about every car on the road is better and safer than a mid-80s model.

2026: 99.99% safety record 1986: No successful landings

Where would he post this 40 years ago? On a Lyndon LaRouche pamphlet?

I can now check my blood sugar 24/7 without pricking my finger and bleeding on things. This has without any doubt in my mind, added years of complaining about movies on social media to my life. 😁

Food in America has become so much better. Availability, freshness, diversity. And specifically Brussels sprouts have become far, far better thanks to science

Automobiles have gotten massively more reliable across the board. Computers have gotten massively cheaper and more powerful. Cell Phones basically did not exist 40 years ago.

Beer. Beer is better. At least in the US. (Was obviously quite good elsewhere for centuries.)

Things that have gotten worse over the last 40 years (for him): income inequality Structural deficits greenhouse gas emissions Food on trains The normalisation of xenophobic rhetoric Comfortable seats Workers rights The quality of our political class, public services and government rich people

I believe safety features of many cars are better than ever before

I think this might be more about his age and memory and recency bias than things actually getting monotonically worse over his lifetime. Everything is much much better than the seventies. Most things are better than eighties. Somewhere in the nineties though progress started getting weird and uneven

Weed! Weed has got far better in my lifetime. When I started puffing, back in the 20th Century, the only place you’d find some fancy hybrid would be in a coffee shop in the ‘Dam. Now you can find fine weed everywhere. Which is cool, as the rest of the world has got worse, apart from video games.

Medical advancements, gay marriage and more Black people in lead roles on TV and the movies. Those are the only things I can think of that are better to me, and MAGA is literally reversing all those gains.

U.S. life expectancy has risen over the past 40 years, growing from about 73.7 years in 1980 to a record high of roughly 79.0 to 79.5 years. I'd take 6 years of extra life over "no more peanuts on planes" any day.

i love bsky labelers because they inform me he took no break longer than 4 hours yesterday, and the mystical randomizer that predicts all our demises says his will result from falling from a plane

dude who looks around 50: how come everything was so much easier and cooler and shinier and more impressive and exciting 40 years ago

An absolutely incredible amount of people look at the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall and go, wow, the past was just generically better than today.

Terrorists used to hijack planes so often it started to become a trope in media, but ok.

he has replies and quote posts disabled lol

My grocery store has two full aisles of different frozen pizzas to choose from

“Back in my day you barely had to work to bang a stewardess” vibe

What has improved in the last 40/20/10/pick a number years? Opens Our World in Data, basically everything actually.

But the plane seats felt so much bigger when you were 8 years old!

"So what have the Romans ever done for us," if the Romans weren't an imperialist force.

I just renewed my passport basically online and with no travel or waiting in line. There is a lot that sucks now, but that was neat. Also, I forgot to bring some pills on a trip and was able to fill it at a nearby pharmacy in the state where I was traveling. Improvement!

Airline food has gotten significantly better, even among the budget options

I think it's an age thing for certain types of personality. 40 years ago I was almost continuously dangerously depressed, so my hindsight vision is not rose-tinted. To me, all sorts of things are clearly better, especially medication! Other people seem to have differently-coloured filters.

Air travel absolutely has gotten worse, but in ways that should be blamed on unregulated capitalism.