this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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Also that the average house was like 1/3 the size of new homes today and a large portion of families had one car or fewer.
I would happily buy a below average size house instead of living in a below average sized apartment if that were an option.
There were many many things that were worse about the "good old days".
Cars sucked, phones sucked, computers sucked, houses were smaller, appliances sucked (if you had them at all), clothes sucked (yes there were some cool outfits but they were expensive, uncomfortable and high maintenance).
It's not like work conditions were universally awesome either. Consider how many women were regularly getting raped as part of their job and we didn't prosecute the Cosbys and Weinsteins of the world until recently. Today, if your boss sends you a harassing text, you go public with it. Back then, if you complained about your boss calling you "sugartits" and copped a feel, your options were basically STFU or GTFO (because you almost certainly can't prove it).
If we want to strive for a better future, we're more likely to succeed if we avoid romanticizing the past.
cars, phones, computers, and appliances were serviceable. that's something we can lament changing.
Sort of.
Some people could service cars, if they had the space, equipment and skills to do it.
For much of that period the people who could afford phones were not the ones who knew how to fix them. Part of it is that phones do more now. If you get an old flip phone it's basically bulletproof and you don't need to worry about repairing it (although you can typically swap out broken pieces). The problem is that you'll be rockin an ancient flip phone. Once you start adding a bunch of stuff (capacitive touch screen, wifi, camera, bluetooth, etc) it's gonna be harder to fix.
My desktop today is designed to be more serviceable than early computers were. I don't need to solder anything, parts just fit together and there's far better standards support. Did you ever have the joy of messing with autoexec.bat and config.sys just to get your mouse working? Do you remember what a PITA it was getting an old Soundblaster to work?
I've had a guy come out to repair by boiler, my dishwasher and (twice) my washing machine. Appliances are still serviceable but (just like in the old days) it usually involves calling someone.