Irremarkable

I would say that’s an accurate description for a barbie doll that explodes personally.

I’m sure this varies a lot from district to district, but the districts that I have teacher friends in, they’ve been using Chromebooks almost exclusively for the better part of a decade now

The most common explanation I’ve seen, and imo it makes sense, is that things mostly just work now. Even XP required a helluva lot more troubleshooting and messing with stuff to make it work than today. So you not only have a bunch of people that have no troubleshooting experience, a large portion don’t even know how to properly search for things.

On the flip side, you have a lot more people doing insanely impressive stuff at a lot younger ages because if you have the drive to do it, there’s more material to learn than ever out there.

We tried banning booze once. It didn’t go over well

Cryptobros are mad people have realized they’re full of shit

Some people really don’t think before they speak do they

Yeah this is honestly an order of magnitude less that I would’ve thought

This relies on the assumption that everyone else, or at least a significant portion, in the office managed to do it.

I’m not talking about whether or not they’re actually physically capable of it, of course they are. Im talking about how people immediately shut down and pretend they can’t follow simple directions the second something relates to a compute.

You wildly overestimate the average person’s willingness to do that.

Maybe it’s just because I’m older and more jaded, but that really feels like the last truly good era for GPUs.

Those 10 series cards had a ton of staying power, and the 480/580 were such damn good value cards.

Considering the mining industries for many of the rare earth metals needed? Yeah he does.

Plus there’s the whole apartheid emerald slave mine thing, which is how daddy made the money he got to play with.

Plus at least part of the walls will be exposed to the ground, not the air, and since past the first layer the ground stays consistently relatively cool, that helps a lot.

True… However it does appear to be slowing a bit for both the US and Canada

And until the relationship between cost of living and wages reverses, not just slows down, we’re simply talking about things getting worse less quickly, not getting better

There is far less poverty in the world today than in the past.

Generally true, and this is largely from developing nations starting to have a growing middle class. Unfortunately, all signs point towards that middle class inevitably being consumed by the owner class, as we have watched and are watching the tail end of in the west.

Not sure what that has to do with the famines being caused by climate change though, especially as they are rapidly getting worse. Look at what’s happening currently in Madagascar. This is at a global temperature increase well below where we thought these things would start happening. That’s not even considering that all this is happening while Europe’s biggest breadbasket is currently the home of the 2nd worst war since WW2.

Probably true, but we also appear to be on the edge of a massive move away from fossil fuels to renewables with the cost of solar dropping, grid level battery systems replacing old coal / natural gas peaker plants etc and the move is no longer just about the “environment” these technologies are in some ways superior or cheaper as well which will accelerate adoption

While true, we are still accelerating our carbon production. Like the CoL/Wage thing, unless we see an outright drastic reversal, we are simply talking about things getting worse less quickly, not getting better. This isn’t an issue we can simply continue saying “oh science will just figure it out” on. We’ve been saying that since at least the 60s. Unless we get sweeping, drastic action from multiple large governments, and we get it very soon, nothing is going to change.

That’s also assuming we are actually “on the edge of a massive move away from fossil fuels to renewables”. We’ve been “on the edge” of that for seemingly forever now.

None of this even touches on the overt slide towards far right authoritarianism half the world seems to have taken.

Look, I legitimately try my best to stay optimistic about the future, but it is ridiculously naive to say the future looks brighter today than at the turn of the millennium.

Other than that MOST things seem better

This is obviously going to be a discussion that’s going to vary greatly from place to place and region to region, but I honestly what to know what you think this.

This is going to be pretty American-centric, and even then pretty specific to my region, but that’s certainly not the case here. Cost of living has skyrocketed, wages have hardly budged, and people are really, really struggling.

Now, we’ve obviously made some amazing progress in recent history. As fucked as it still is and as far as we still have to go, I think gay rights is probably one of the best examples of this. Even with all the bullshit we continue to see, we’re miles ahead of 20 years ago.

But the overall trend, even internationally, is incredibly worrying. People’s standards of living are decreasing, far right nationalistic populist movements are gaining momentum nearly everywhere you look, and we’re actively watching multiple genocides happen in front of our eyes. Famines are already being massively exacerbated by climate change, you just don’t hear about them because they’re happening in poor countries. Everything points to all our previous warnings about climate change being incredibly conservative. I personally have next to zero hope in the world’s government’s to do a damn thing about it.

Don’t get me wrong, there is absolutely still the possibility for a good ending. These are all problems than can be solved. We even know how to solve a good chunk of them. Just have to actually find the political to force it.