Annual growth rates during the Industrial Revolution where way lower than 10%. In the 18th century it was well below 1%, during the 19th century it was on average at 1-1.5% (the highest estimates go up to 3% annual growth for certain decades close to 1900).[0][1][2]
Some regions or sectors might have experienced higher growth spurts, but the main point stands: the overall economic growth was quite low by modern standards - even though I don't think GDP numbers alone adequately describe the huge societal changes of such sustained growth compared to agrarian cultures before the Industrial Revolution.
I feel Uber is the outlier here. For every unicorn company there are 1000s of companies that don't need to scale to millions of users.
And due to the insane markup of many cloud services it can make sense to just use beefier servers 24/7 to deal with the peaks. From my experience crazy traffic outliers that need sophisticated auto-scaling rarely happens outside of VC-fueled growth trajectories.
I use Gnome on multiple PCs and my first thought was they use a bitmap font or a 720p screen because everything looks off. The screenshots are not representative of how Gnome's font rendering looks like with a font like Inter & HiDPI.
The numbers are in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) USD so they already measure how many goods in the local market basket can be bought per working hour (on average, as these GDP numbers don’t account for income or wealth distribution).
For healthcare it might be getting to the point where the numbers are nearly incomparable. PPP seems like it'd be more inappropriate than usual for measuring a particular industry. US healthcare is known to be quirky.
Although there doesn't seem to be any obvious evidence here that the US could be lagging behind. Per-person the US is still a bit of a productivity outlier to the upside. When they aren't legislatively restrained they tend to work hard and in an organised way.
How much buying power does this income provide for goods & services that the younger generation wants/needs to buy?
For example: Over the last decades housing prices, college tuition & stock prices have significantly outpaced the average inflation rate. Older generations could buy up these assets at a discount (at least compared to Millennials & Gen Z).
In the 1990s and 2000s, it was very rare to travel abroad - a Eurotrip or Japan trip was a once in a lifetime experience. Nowadays, my entire friend group in the mid 20s-early 30s have traveled to Europe and Japan multiple times, as well as further afield, and an Amex Gold or Platinum card or a Chase Sapphire is very common among 20 year olds now.
Travel, quality of housing, etc have all risen among our cohort compared to Gen X or older millennials at a similar age (millenial hipsters were living in Brooklyn in the 2010s because they were broke. Gen X grungeheads were living in CapHill/Mission in the 1990s because they were broke).
Gen Z is at most 25. Give them 5-10 years and they themselves will end up buying property, especially because a lot of Gen X parents and Boomer grandparents do help out.
The article also takes your point into account:
“Some Gen Zers protest, claiming that higher incomes are a mirage since they do not account for the exploding cost of college and housing. After all, global house prices are close to all-time highs, and graduates have more debt than before. In reality, though, Gen Zers are coping because they earn so much. In 2022 Americans under 25 spent 43% of their post-tax income on housing and education, including interest on debt from college—slightly below the average for under-25s from 1989 to 2019.”
This is an important anecdote because it illustrates the stark divide between "making it" and "not making it" in the current era. The people who make it get unprecidented luxury but the people who don't make it live in slums.
People who "make it" often feel like their path was trivial. While people who haven't "made it" often feel like finding the path to success is impossible because it lies in their past or was never accessible to them.
It's easy to maintain your habits and it's extremely hard to change your life's course.
You're ignoring one of the biggest things in the divide between the 'haves' and the 'broke': many of Gen-Z are deciding not to have kids, despite the negative effects that this profoundly selfish act has on society. Much easier to live a luxury lifestyle if you're not spending $50k/year on childcare, buying an extra 500-900sqft of housing, buying food for an extra 2-3 people, buying a car with a third row, and buying a never-ending stream of car seats, clothes, toys, diapers, shoes, books, gadgets, etc.
These same selfish people will be angry when any break at all is given to a colleague do to family circumstances (daycare closed for the day? kids have the flu?), but will expect to be taken care of just like the rest of us when they get old, despite the fact that they didn't contribute any children into the labor pool to provide for that care.
Very selfless of you to have children you didn't actually want in order to improve the labor pool for society. Do you tell them you only had them to keep the economy running, or do you keep that information to yourself?
Expectations of "middle class" life have inflated.
We can afford a single family house with the picket fence - but it won't be in Fillmore or Brooklyn anymore, because they are now luxury neighborhoods.
We can afford multiple vacations, but it needs to be abroad, not the Catskills or Redneck Riviera.
We can afford to eat out, but it's not going to be McDs or fast casual - it has to be fancy and instagram worthy.
> finding the path to success is impossible because it lies in their past or was never accessible to them
Exactly.
A subset of Gen X and Boomers did very well in the 1980s-2010s. Their kids are Gen Zs who rail against boomers but will gladly take their parents help to buy a condo or townhouse in SF or Manhattan.
Intergenerational wealth is now a thing, and isn't going to change.
I'm sorry for people whose family is not in a position to, or chooses not to, help them, but I think it's always been pretty common (albeit not universal) for parents to support their offspring.
I agree, but I think a lot of Americans never had that kind of a strong family unit helping each other out.
Until the 2010s, it was fairly socially expected that you'd move out of your parents house at 18 and either find a job or go to college, and do all that on your own dime.
It was always a weird concept for me coming from an immigrant family where we all pitch in together to help each other, but a relatively large minority of Americans (maybe 15-20% actively chose not to) and a large majority (maybe 20-30%) didn't have the means to.
Based on what my American friends told me, I think it was only a couple of generations of Americans where that was true. Before that, Americans too had stronger familial bonds. No first hand knowledge though.
If you're in your 20s-30s, best case your grandparents grew up in the 1950s-60s - which absolutely wasn't a walk in the park, but the average American was miles away the richest person on the planet back then, and the "nuclear" family was the structure of choice (that's why it's called the nuclear family - 1950s techno-optimism a la Fallout)
On the other hand, if your family immigrated then the familial ties based system continued to exist.
American society now has the same kind of "me-me-me" mentality I see in Asia (both developed like Japan or Singapore, or developing like China and India), the Americas (Mexico, Brazil, Colombia), or Eastern Europe (Israel, Ukraine, Russia, Romania, etc).
The only way to succeed in this kind of a society is to be ruthless. Most Americans are NOT. You even see that here on HN, with people complaining about educated Immigrants doing better than educated Americans.
You need to be ruthless in a low trust society, and it's the same now in the US.
People like to blame immigrants or the "other" but at the end of the day, society has specialized.
Either you build the skills to specialize, or you don't and wither away.
This has happened in every country from Japan to Jordan.
The difference is, lots of people in countries like Japan or Jordan still remember how actual poverty feels like, and will work their hardest to prevent something like that.
Most Americans have now grown up with 3 generations of surplus.
It was always the immigrants that did the dirty work and eventually assimilated - look at anti-Italian, anti-Mexican, anti-Japanese, anti-Armenian, anti-Jewish, anti-Slavic .... sentinment in the US.
Their kids eventually assimilate and also lose that ruthlessness.
>Either you build the skills to specialize, or you don't and wither away.
Or you can coast on the wealth built by the hard working generations before you and let the immigrants specialize and work hard while you rent seek them. This goes for people and for countries.
Traveling abroad can be cheaper than traveling in the U.S. Sure, you spend more money on flights than you might on gas, but you can afford to stay for a month in, say, Thailand for what you might spend on 3 nights of accommodation in the U.S, and you can eat out for all your meals on $30/day if you're savvy
That, and people in their 20s and 30s are much less likely to have kids than people of the same age group in the '90s, so the logistics around traveling abroad can be much easier. The increasing interconnectedness of the world has similarly provided much more exposure to the international world, while technology (including things like airbnb and google translate) have removed many of the barriers.
I don't think more "elder gen z" and millenials are traveling abroad because they're overall more well-off. Housing is much less affordable and I think this is part of the reason we're seeing a decline in birth rates.
> you can afford to stay for a month in, say, Thailand
That's why I gave examples of Western Europe (London, Paris) and Japan (Tokyo).
The prices on arrival are the same as traveling to Austin or Dallas.
I love traveling to Thailand or Vietnam, but most American travelers aren't going there.
> That, and people in their 20s and 30s are much less likely to have kids than people of the same age group in the '90s
Aka, higher disposable income compared to their peers in past cohorts.
This is actually a good point and something I don't think was brought up in the article - my parents had me in their 20s. I probably won't have kids til my late 30s.
London and Paris are two of the most expensive cities in Europe (maybe the top 2 if you ignore Switzerland) so I agree if you're talking about people going there.
But the majority of Europe is cheaper than the majority of the U.S. (think Greece or Spain or Portugal or even most of Germany)
Japan also is much cheaper to travel in than the U.S.
Personally most people I know who do international traveling have avoided London and Paris due to the high cost of travel.
True! And don't take my statement as an assumption against parenthood. It just requires good planning and maturity, and some people (rightfully) recognize they don't have the maturity needed yet.
“Some Gen Zers protest, claiming that higher incomes are a mirage since they do not account for the exploding cost of college and housing. After all, global house prices are close to all-time highs, and graduates have more debt than before. In reality, though, Gen Zers are coping because they earn so much. In 2022 Americans under 25 spent 43% of their post-tax income on housing and education, including interest on debt from college—slightly below the average for under-25s from 1989 to 2019.”
The author is using a poor metric to compare. It is not the % of income spent on housing that matters, but the % spent per unit housing quality. If you compare a boomer and a gen Zer, both spending X% of their income on housing, what quality housing is that getting them in comparable areas?
My girlfriend's parents could each afford their rent on two shifts of waiting tables when they were young, and they lived in nice areas of San Diego. Trying that today will have you living in a bad area with roommates.
This is not a proxy war, neither EU or US are interested in Russian territory. They made it clear that no Western weapons are to be used outside Ukraine. This is defensive support for a sovereign state, not a scheme to topple Putin (who is the sole aggressor in this conflict without any formal declaration of war).
Furthermore, I’m having a hard time understanding your reasoning regarding US aid.
Currently, Russia is paying an enormous price while the US risks no lifes and gets to send its old weapons to Ukraine. This might not be a winning strategy for Ukraine, but it sure sounds better than an open war between 2 major nuclear powers which puts billions of lifes at risk or draconian Russian occupation of large parts of Ukraine.
>neither EU or US are interested in Russian territory.
But the west is interested in depleting and weakening Russia, which we can accomplish by prolonging this war as long as we can by supplying just enough aid to keep Ukraine from losing but not so much that Ukraine would win.
>Furthermore, I’m having a hard time understanding your reasoning regarding US aid.
You know what is worse than war? An unnecessarily protracted war. The longer a war goes on, the exponentially worse the civilians caught in the crossfire suffer.
I want Ukraine to win for reasons already stated, but I also do not want to see this war go on any longer than it has to. The west is more than opulent enough to supply enough equipment to end this war sooner, and if we go as far as to send in our own boots we can end this war overnight.
But we don't. Instead we provide just enough aid to keep Ukraine afloat. It's now over 2 years since Russia began its invasion.
As an aside, the military industrial complex is making a killing (pun intended) selling new gear to replace the ones donated to Ukraine.
What the fuck.
So no, no more aid unless enough is provided to end this war in Ukraine's favor as soon as fucking possible. I do not agree to aid that is any less and would keep prolonging this war at great cost to civilians.
I'm not so sure that your theory is a fact. There are a lot of plausible explanations for the course of this war. I follow this conflict closely and personally I think the West never had a coherent strategy and there would have been better ways to decimate the Russians.
I still don't see how letting Russia conquer half of Ukraine minimizes civilian cost. Russia has a long history of deadly deportations and it has already established systematic torture in occupied Ukranian territory. A landlocked Ukraine will be very hard to stabilize. And will Russia stop or will it continue in Moldova, Georgia or Kazakhstan?
There's also the question if the link between Western aid and warmongering holds up. All aggression comes from Russia and it alone is responsible for this destruction. As long as the victims, the Ukraine people, ask for help to defend themselves the West should deliver. The current aid is not enough but it surely is better than fighting Russia alone.
The US is not trying to prolong the war; quite the opposite, actually.
The US has consistently advocated for a different strategy than what Zelensky is doing. If anything, it is Zelensky who is still trying to figure out how to fight this war.
It's the backlinks that allow it to rank. Getting them requires a lot of knowledge & work, like publishing articles on Medium or receiving links on HN.
Unsurprisingly, it looks like the creator is an SEO-expert with years of experience and dozens of projects.
When it comes to Weird Niche Sites, the co-hosts really capture the weirdness of the web. Spencer reveals his ‘90s-looking website, Disk Prices[link to the site], which is essentially a list of hard drive prices and their different characteristics.
It is a good site and I've used it before to purchase a drive or two.
However... What I've found is that it is not always 100% accurate and if you really want the cheapest TB/$ (and you can wait) you should be setting up alerts on slickdeals or another deal website.
As a data hoarder, I try to just wait for deals and not use this site.
The other thing is that they consistently allow MDD / Max Disk Deals or whatever their name is to occupy the New disk listings, despite every Amazon review of them being full of "this disk is lightly used". So if you're buying new disks, avoid that whole vendor.
There are only three vendors of hard disks: Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba. (HGST used to be a fourth, but they're now WD.) Anyone else is a shady refurbisher to be avoided.
Diskpriced has a lot of organic popularity because it actually is extremely useful. The lesson here has nothing to do with UI design. There is real value in aggregating, cleaning, and providing structured access to information that helps people make decisions.
I'm looking for disks and this is exactly a tool I'd like to have, bookmarking this one. If this is an SEO play, good job. If all SEO linked to treasure, it wouldn't be so reviled.
I dislike these lines of thinking, because they seem based on conspiratorial thinking. Our imagination lets us always think something is lurking, something is deeper & scarier than we imagine.
This site is popular because it's organic & good & a fine service, one without peer or equal. It asks nothing of the user, and helps them make good informed decisions effectively.
Imagining there's some secret agenda is all too popular in way too many areas in the world. Fear Uncertainty & Doubt (FUD) can have some basis, but letting it get in the way, letting it obstruct or out shadow simple good as it comes lets us miss out on understanding value and positivity, and with those basis undermined we (society) are screwed.
All business sans the most basic is based on schemes, theatre, magic.
It’s way more fantastical to believe in some supreme meritocracy.
Off course a good chunk is based on talent but the “there’s no conspiracies” seem like libertarian propaganda to me after a life in business where politics, marketing, law and nepotism were the real lessons.
The world actually runs on conspiracies - that’s how the human social mind works.
People mention other products where that might work. So yes, jump in.
The issue with sites like this, I feel, is staying power. Even with some reasonable SEO awareness and legitimate presence on the corresponding technical forums, it still takes years to accumulate links (but perhaps mostly bookmarks) to your product discovery site. Including organic HN mentions - if that's the right audience. Same for any other old-style web site. And people want a quick buck. So that they get impatient and give up the entire thing, or they give up mentioning the site in the right places. Or so that they sell ads or product placement - which then kills the organic effort.
Product discovery in general is a mess. It's not a particularly high bar you have to pass in order to build something that's better than your average online storefront when it comes to product search and comparison.
Jeans are probably top 3 worst products to shop for.
Mens sizes are literal measurements in inches, ostensibly. However when you look at the sizing chart on brand websites you realize they all have varying levels of vanity sizing - across brands, across fits within a brand, and across years within a fit.
Then you have all the confusing nomenclature for fits - skinny, slim, straight, classic, standard, relaxed, boot cut, baggy, flare, athletic, etc.. And then hybrid ones like "slim straight" or other nonsense. Finally, some brands offer different inseams/lenghts for a given waist, while others have fixed ones per waist size so you have to get them tailored after, etc.
The shopping experience for me in jeans is to trying multiple brands/fits/sizes every 5+ years, and then keep buying that exact model until it is no long available, then reset.
Also if you've ever done a deeper analysis of Lucky jeans, the same exact model is wildly different depending on where it got produced. Different material composition, fit, flexibility/softness (due to the difference in materials), different country it was produced in (and IIRC, it's not even consistent. Mexico is not always 100% cotton for example. There was no discernible pattern)
I try to find products I like and then buy a bunch of them (in case they stop making them, etc) and I wound up making a spreadsheet once after becoming frustrated with the inability to trust the same "model number" means the same thing there.
Unfortunately, it doesn't let you filter by aspect ratio, so you cannot get e.g. all 16:10 monitors which is something I'm always actively searching for and it's so difficult. The page also doesn't list the unique Dell U3023E and its predecessors which are 2560x1600, i.e. 16:10 monitors, and perfect for design & development both in portrait and landscape mode.
If the developer of that website is on HN, I hope they can add a filter for aspect ratio and more 16:10 monitors as well.
It is, it was very useful in narrowing down exactly what I wanted (how Amazon fails to provide decent filtering is beyond me) but it doesn't work well on mobile which is a shame.
I don't understand Amazon either. They actively neuter their filtering and sorting. Obviously they think they make more money that way, but it is an absolutely insane choice to make if you have any self-respect.
2024. Everything is slow. Search doesn't work. Ad infestation is even more invasive than the popup spawning days of old. Product quality is rock bottom. We have done ourselves in. But it's no wonder third party sites with basic functions are on the rise.
Newegg is still decent. The actual product selection isn't the best nowadays, but the search interface mostly still works, and they aren't shoving ads in your face.
Can anyone specify how the author approached this with respect to SEO. Paying for backlinks is tough, and writing your own articles seems tedious. Any hidden tactics in use perhaps?
How's writing articles tedious in the era of large language models? I'm not a SEO expert, far from it, but for my understanding you can just rewrite any article out there by having an AI focusing on specific keywords. Rinse and repeat.
I can see why recommend this book as an example of human cruelty, but I think you should be aware of the author’s past when you recommend his work.
Jürgen Thorwald was a real former Nazi propagandist.
The German version of Defeat in the East was written only 10 years after another of his books has been published with a foreword of Hermann Göring in it. It is interesting as a contemporary document and Thorwald changed his public attitude after the defeat of the Reich - but it is by no means a reliable account of the war.
A modern work like Timothy Snyder‘s Bloodlands shows human cruelty in the same impactful way while being far more accurate. Again, my intention is not to put any agenda in your mouth but to give some (in my opinion very important) context regarding your recommendation.
Germany has been lacking a coherent security strategy. They neglected the Bundeswehr for decades and in recent years doubled down on their dependency on Russian fossil fuel (one could argue this was a mutual interdependency as German companies were crucial for the Russian arms industry).
Apart from the far right/left everyone in Germany (that I know) is thankful for America's support in Eastern Europe. Most of these people had no goodwill towards the US military before this war - mainly due to the shameful campaigns in Afghanistan/Iraq. But they also realized that the German/Western European security 'strategy' regarding Russia was a big failure.
If that is a thing that bothers you, one of the people that made sure that the Bundeswehr never recovers was that corrupt von der Leyen. She was MoD, funnelled a bunch of money to her McKinsey son, and then went on to become the head of European Commission. With someone like that at the helm of the EU, you don't need enemies.
The sibling comment mentions Germany's nuclear policy. It's worth noting that Germany at the EU tried to lobby against nuclear to deprive France out of EU support for Green energy. They have an irrational hate for nuclear energy, but it's not limited to nuclear energy. Somehow the once antiwar Green party has become the party of warmongering and coal lobbying.
Germany during the Kohl administration shut killed fibre optics infrastructure projects to fight the influence of public TV and promote cable TV. [1]
So this is at least 4 decades of ideological mismanagement. I'd say the respect for German infrastructure is the work that has been done after the war up until then.
Nothing is a big failure if the problem is too complex. With such probs, the only success is not getting pulled into a deep hole and wasting resources.
It's not a bad strategy cuz no one believes Ukraine can fight forever without someone else paying the bills. Let the US pay the bills till they can't.
The US is a dysfunctional society, and the strategies that come out of it, are what you expect out of a mental asylum. All this nonsense about sending weaponry over (which takes years of training to use effectively) is one example of the mindlessness.
Also good for Germany that Russia is going to be in such an economic mess after this, the energy from there is going to be very cheap.
I'm writing this with buyer's remorse on my Framework.
It's a huge step down from my previous Thinkpads. The battery life is atrocious - a night in modern standby drains the battery from 80% to 35%. Outside the office battery life is a constant worry, I mostly use it docked these days.
The display hinge is wobbly - when I lift my Framework from my lap on a table it often folds back 180 degrees. Very annoying.
In general it feels less durable than my old Thinkpad X1.
Linux support is better than on most laptops and worse than on Thinkpads, e.g. no BIOS upgrades out of the box (only beta firmwares for months). Additionally, I experience rare kernel loops, sometimes the laptop doesn't shut off properly etc. Overall Thinkpads seem to be more stable.
Key section: "However, we identified that for a period of time last fall, our hinge supplier shipped a subset of hinges with forces below our accepted spec range. We’ve since added additional tests both at the hinge supplier and at our laptop assembly site to prevent out of spec hinges from shipping out. If you have a laptop where the lid angle drops on its own while the laptop is stationary, write into support with a video of it, and we’ll send you a new Hinge Kit."
Thank you for the link. Apparently I received a batch where this problem has been fixed.
The hinge is not very wobbly when typing and won't move if I lift the laptop carefully. However, it won't stay in position when moving it quicker.
Maybe this is by design so one can open the lid with a single hand. I prefer the sturdy hinge on my old Thinkpads though - it's difficult to open them with one hand but they stay in position when I move them.
Ah, it really did sound like you got one of the defective hinges. Though, you still do have the option of buying the 4.0 kg hinge kit for $24 and installing it. Having to buy a part isn't ideal, at least it's available.
This is because modern Intel processors don't support S3 sleep[1], they instead only have Microsoft's Deep Sleep (s0ix). The only alternative is laptops with ARM or AMD(?) processors, but I haven't got a good recommendation for one.
Lenovo offers old S3 on modern CPUs. Linux also supports the new sleep states. Get a better distro if you're having problems. This is a solved problem for like 5 years.
I don’t own a framework, but will probably get one at some point. This issue, at least, has been fixed. You can swap the hinges out for the new ones— not sure if it’s a free fix or not, though.
Don't worry the new ThinkPad batteries are just as good awful.
And... It's not actually the batteries, it's just the newer CPUs. If you want good battery life on intel you simply have to downlevel the CPU as much as possible or go back a few generations to an i5. My old x260 still gets 8 hours of coding on a charge. But my recent X1 is lucky to get 3 hours.
Some regions or sectors might have experienced higher growth spurts, but the main point stands: the overall economic growth was quite low by modern standards - even though I don't think GDP numbers alone adequately describe the huge societal changes of such sustained growth compared to agrarian cultures before the Industrial Revolution.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20071127032512/http://minneapoli... [1] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/explainers/how-has-growth-ch... [2] https://academic.oup.com/ereh/article/21/2/141/3044162