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Why is that better? Because you read about it in a sci fi book?
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Granted “we” are billionaires.

Not only you didn’t get the point, but you still hold on to your delusions:

> life for our kin will only be better.

Right? In this subscription economy? Where you have just limited time to watch the movie you loved? You can’t afford to rent the house you loved let alone buy it? (previous generations could afford) the list goes on and on.

Maybe stop spreading lies and see things more objectively?

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Being objective doesn't mean laser focusing on the negatives. For instance:

> Where you have just limited time to watch the movie you loved?

You know how many movies the average peasant watched in the 1800s? 0. The closest equivalent was live theatre and that was an expensive luxury. You'd also likely get see one or more of your children die to diseases that are trivially treatable or preventable today.

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you know there's more to life than just subscribing to services meant for the Lowest Common Denominator right? and of those people literally billions are happy to pay for them.

edit: not LCD the screen… if you thought thats what i meant then… nvm… not even gonna say it lol iykyk

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Mine is OLED, perhaps this is the reason I am not among those billions :(

EDIT: You edited your comment after I submit my response. You cannot put arbitrary abbreviations and expect people to read your mind. Anyway, there is no point in arguing with you.

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And for what?

For a planet which gets warmer and warmer.

When did you became that compliant?

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..you good bro? Anyway, things are improving but that doesn’t mean people can’t have a say in what tradeoffs they are willing to accept in return for progress.

A lot of progress has externalities and the benefits and downsides of progress are rarely equally distributed.

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Uhhh, I don't know what you're reading, but the comment I was replied to was complaining about the "subscription economy" and not having enough time to watch movies as evidence why life is getting worse.

> A lot of progress has externalities and the benefits and downsides of progress are rarely equally distributed.

The vast majority of humanity has benefited from progress, compared to most decades and certainly centuries in the past. So I don't really know what your point is here?

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Of course life now is better than 100 years ago.

But do you really think life has been getting better in the last 10 years say?

Do you think trickle down economics works?

Are you happy with the way things are going under this administration, which favours those BILLIONAIRES you mentioned, but couldn’t really give a damn about the rest of us or the commons?

Are you OK living in a future where there are zero checks and balances and the .1% fully controlling and owning the political and policy space, i.e. the return to the Robber Barons era?

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> But do you really think life has been getting better in the last 10 years say?

Uh, yeah. My TV's much better, my video games are better, programming is easier and more fun with these new AI options added on top of better frameworks than we had in the past, there are way more restaurants serving better food, way more great shows and movies, there's mainstream awareness of the ills of social media, I can take driverless taxis around my city, I can tap to pay pretty much everywhere, wayyyyyy more of my friends work remotely. I'm 40 now, and myself + most of my friends + family are making more money now than we were at 30.

> Are you OK living in a future where there are zero checks and balances and the .1% fully controlling and owning the political and policy space, i.e. the return to the Robber Barons era?

You sound like you've been reading a bunch of gloom and doom scenarios. Get offline. Go outside. Touch grass. Breathe. People are still going out to eat at restaurants, they're still playing intramural sports, they're still going to the beach with their friends, they're still watching plays, they're still visiting family and hosting movie nights. Stop reading so much negative news that's telling you the sky is falling and that everything is going to shit.

Of course there are massive problems and inequities we're solving, of course! But that's always been the case. Relax. Breathe. Put it in perspective.

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All those things are not necessities of life. Food, shelter and energy have become more expensive and poverty rates have barely shifted and are currently getting worse.

Your response is basically 'Works on my machine!'.

And speaking of touching grass; what do you think the recent change of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) under this administration will mean to our commons?

I'll tell you, it means the new rule will make it easier to legally destroy wildlife habitats. And this on top of all the climate protection policies this administration is eagerly rolling back, because solar is woke or something. I guess you're OK with that too, since it doesn't impact you (yet).

Even though living standards have improved in the last 100 years overall, it's not a guarantee it will continue like that, if we let the Robber Barons take full control again.

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> Of course there are massive problems and inequities we're solving, of course! But that's always been the case. Relax. Breathe. Put it in perspective.

You're just not someone who has to deal with these problems. Are we solving them? Not sure what you're being that of.

> Get offline. Go outside. Touch grass. Breathe. People are still going out to eat at restaurants, they're still playing intramural sports, they're still going to the beach with their friends, they're still watching plays, they're still visiting family and hosting movie nights.

I suggest you stop touching grass and go and talk to a few less fortunate people. Maybe that can broaden your perspective

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> You're just not someone who has to deal with these problems. Are we solving them? Not sure what you're [basing] that of.

Almost every major measure of human progress and prosperity over time?

What are you basing your doom and gloom beliefs on?

> I suggest you stop touching grass and go and talk to a few less fortunate people. Maybe that can broaden your perspective

I would wager my perspective is much broader than yours. Being so anxious and pessimistic that you only focus on the negative, to such a degree where when people point out real positive progress you feel COMPELLED to say something negative, doesn't mean you have a broad perspective. It just means you're miserable.

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10 years ago I couldn’t buy self driving, zero pollution, zero maintenance supercar for next to nothing.
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Which self driving supercar is that?

But I'm not talking about luxuries like super cars that most people couldn't afford.

I'm talking about the necessities of life. Food, shelter and energy have become more expensive and under this administration's policies it's not getting any better.

Poverty rates have barely improved and under this administration desire to reduce SNAP budget heavily, what do you think this will do to child poverty rates?

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The one that drives millions of people every day
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>watching their children die from easily curable infections, enduring routine tooth extractions without anesthesia, working six-day weeks around lethal machinery, watching entire neighboring towns slowly starve to death in famines, living in huts that were crawling with insects, subject to the brutal whims of whoever their local thug ruler happened to be with no human rights at all, and often being enslaved by the millions and worked to death in brutal conditions. Those softies just couldn't possibly imagine how truly hard we have it today.

A significant portion of the human populace still lives like this in various degrees today. You are just blind to it because you'd rather live in your delusion for comfort.

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What's your point? Progress is not perfection. There will always be human suffering. Acknowledging that there's progress is not the same thing as ignoring the fact that there's suffering. I don't know what sort of cult mindset got everybody to believe that those are the same thing, but it's horrible and delusional and incredibly illogical.
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I think the point is: some people will be left behind while reaching the described space era, just like the way it happened with many previous leaps and left behind those populations that are suffering from now-easily-curable diseases. And this time around, it seems like only a minority that are billionaires will be able to move forward, and we all will be left behind.

I believe it should’ve been possible to not leave so much people behind and so much behind. Requiring those at the front to not leave people so far behind (and forcefully funneling away their riches if they do) would’ve been enough.

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Life is better for the poorest in society than it's ever been, thanks in large part to the nonstop proliferation and cheapening of technology in the past 200 years, esp. the past 100. I can't for the life of me understand why you people are so focused on trying to drag down the top when you could be focused on further bringing up the bottom. It's just such a miserable negative perspective on life, like crabs in a bucket.
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> And this time around, it seems like only a minority that are billionaires will be able to move forward, and we all will be left behind.

I don't think this is true. Of course, rich people will always benefit the most from any technological advances. But there is no indication that the average Joe will be worse off in say, 20 years, compared to today. Medical advances alone coming down the pipeline will likely tip the scales towards future average Joe being better off compared to today. If I have to make a choice, for example: do I want to cut the deaths from diseases by half and fill the sky with Starlink satellites, or do nothing? I am picking the better medicice and Starlink-filled sky.

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dude i dig your sarcasm and i agree with your point
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Buddy our anceostors were able to see the night sky.

I don't need a space station with space tourism only the richest can afford and will be still very dangerous to see the stars right now.

What you will see is how Starlink satelites will poisen our atmosphere at re-entry.

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so what's the alternative? just don't make any progress?
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In the mid 20th century some people believed urban motorways were "progress" and wanted to build them everywhere, see for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurama_%28New_York_World%27s...

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Thank you for sharing this.

This vision is absolutely horryfying, yet at same time incredibly interesting.

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If you wanna look into another example search for the Abercrombie Plan in Edinburgh: it was a very ambitious urbanistic plan to "modernize" this city. For instance they proposed to demolish all of the historical Georgian and Victorian buildings in Princes Street and replace them with brutalist buildings and a motorway.
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People have different definitions of progress. I have found that people who are "progressive" on one axis can often be quite conservative on another. Look at the SF Bay Area. While it is quite progressive in the political-ideology sense, we oppose construction that would cause literal progress in the material conditions of the citizenry. "Manhattanization" has been a word used for decades to oppose the thought of densifying SF. My neighbors here in North Bay come out in arms to oppose light bollards on a public footpath. We cannot even progress our footpaths. Rather than build a larger, more inclusive, and cheaper city, you will find countless proponents for rent control - a solution to the question of, "how can I use the law to keep my apartment cheap while refusing to accommodate any more people in the city?"

You are seeing this in this thread. I doubt anyone likes to be described as contra-progress. But nevertheless people would rather conserve the current night sky than see it transmute into a shimmering sea of a million artificial satellites. It's not really obvious to me why one state should be preferable to the other.

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Yes? We don't have to blindly and constantly be making progress on everything at all cost. Look around you, look at what all this progress did to the world we live in.
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Then our descendants will talk about how they were held back by our greedy ancestors who just wanted to be able to look at the night sky and see only natural stars, and they'll be right.

Also let me guess, you have high speed internet avaiable at your house so starlink isn't your only high-speed option right now?

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I resent my recent ancestors for tearing up all our cities in favour of motorways, and grateful only that it wasn’t worse. They thought that was progress though, and that cars were the only way to move into the future.

I’m not against advancing in this area, but there is nuance. Progress can be short sighted.

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Progress is a very human centric view. But if you consider earth as a whole system, we have over optimized the system for our benefit while the other parts of the system hugely suffered (other species, environment etc.).

We need to ensure our progress is balanced taking into account the whole system instead of just one part.

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The alternative to Starlink already existed before Starlink. I'm using it right now.
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my alternative was dial up or a 10 Mbps flaky wireless ISP. Is that what you're using right now?
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I remember when I first had 10Mbps at my desktop at work. It was amazing. I wonder how slow that would feel today?
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It's pretty painful, and makes a lot of work from home impossible between meetings, image pulls, etc. Until starlink I had to do development on a cloud vm
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African here living under and shit hole government who has no interest in improving the lives of the people. Starlink has been a game changer! An absolute game changer. I do not support Elon Musk but just putting out there that Starlink is helping kids in remote areas with no electricity (they use small solar panel) to access the Internet.
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Hopefully they don't part with books—the way kids in the U.S. have. Hopefully they don't spend all their free time on Tik Tok…
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Most people cannot afford to have it in their home. They will get access at school or shopping centre. Most kids don't have phones either but I really do get your point. The other danger is they tend to be susceptible to fake news and stories made up using AI. I have had cousins from the village send me a picture of a mermaid claiming she was caught in one of the rivers.
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> I have had cousins from the village send me a picture of a mermaid claiming she was caught in one of the rivers.

For what it's worth, this also happens with printed books.

I wasted the latter half of my teens taking New Age occultism and magical powers as a profound topic rather than a literature and culture topic, thanks to a combination of a bookstore chain near where I grew up and a mother who also took this all very seriously.

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I wasn't suggesting that books are some kind of paragon of "truth". But as I think most HN readers would agree, there's just something… tangible about them that seems to stimulate the brain in a way that ephemeral images on a screen don't.
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what about being a better parent?

i feel like all these problems people come up with stem from the fact they suck at parenting and have to project.

i and most people i know don’t have these problems. we actually care, and our parents cared about us.

when i was growing up it was kids who drank or smoked (we didn’t have smartphones).

just avoid them.

these days if kids are glued to the phone that’s the parents fault. bad parenting.

take kids to the museum or get them to a classical show or something.

if parents make excuses why they can’t, again L parents.

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Hopefully they don't part with books—the way kids in the U.S. have.
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In some places.

Starlink is a global phenomenon, good ISPs were at best a local phenomenon.

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Polluting the sky with junk is not "progress".
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Colonizing space is progress.
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Yeah, how is that mars colony plan going realistically. have they figured out the bits about how humans are going to survive in a toxic irradiated environment for months on end? I want it to happen, but I honestly havent heard much from spacex about it other than we have to be allowed to develop cheap rockets. There's a lot more involved in a journey to mars than just cheap launch costs.
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The word 'colonization' has become rather toxic, though. Maybe we need a new word for occupying barren planets where there's no native life being displaced?
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Not toxic unless you subscribe to the lefts redefinition of the term. Most people wouldn't be here if we didn't colonize the new world.
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The indigenous populations probably would.
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they were also going around killing each other and ripping out hearts from living people as sacrifices, so given enough time they would have done the same thing.

and they would have been 100x more brutal.

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Its highly unlikely that an indigenous population would adopt the colonizer's term. If you look at demographics of those who use that definition of term its mostly people of Anglo-Saxon decent. And its the same people who are living on stolen land.
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No-one is “colonizing space”, you’re just being conned by a man who figured out he can make a lot of money by convincing people that such fantasies could be real.

The US spends up to $4 billion a year just to keep a few people alive on the ISS. And they can’t stay there too long because it’s too dangerous to their health. The idea that we’re going to “colonize space” in the foreseeable future is laughable.

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Sending robots to space is still a form of building presence there. Not every colonist has to be a human. In fact, they are probably coming last, into pre-prepared positions and bases.
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Airplanes?
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