A wonderful time to be alive!

That's pretty. But I didn't see a single non-white person, and the women then were mostly decorative drudges who were sworn to "obey."

Most people lived in sickness and poverty. Non-white people and women couldn't attend a good engineering school. Worldwide life spans were about half what they are now. And the 30's gave us WWII and organized megadeaths.

I remember some of the 1950s. Life was tough for most people. I prefer now.

We had to use slide rules and go to libraries hoping to find what we needed. The food was awful.

People now have so many more choices.

Photography and film equipment was significantly rarer and more expensive, so the imagery of e.g. 30s you do see tends to be heavily selection-biased, not the stream-of-everything that 5 billion camera phones tends to provide.

People were thinner on average then but of course most everyone is looking particularly good in pictures because that's the kind of scenes that were getting shot, the pics you end up seeing were staged and real candid photography was much rarer, at least until cameras got small enough to fit in a coat pocket..

Some not-so-pretty pics were taken:

now no doubt colorized and tuned. The relief lines and giant barren spaces were probably not staged.

Photography was a big deal, with expensive film and wet processing.

These are the good old days for most humans on the planet, other than perhaps if you live in the USA or a war zone. Forest fires come and go, this too shall pass.

The doom and gloom merchants would have us believing otherwise - they need to sell their story to keep the gravy train going!

If it isn't falsifiable it isn't science and calling it xyz Science doesn't make it a science.

John :-#)#

Perhaps too much choice. What is wrong with slide rules? I'm sure most of us here were weened on them. And libraries???? What is your problem? I know there are a lot of people here who hate America but I'd never have thought for a second you were one of them. Repent! Repent! You're sounding a bit like Bill Sloman!

I am non-white and non-women, but life was good in 80s in a good cheap engineering school. I did not attend my appointment for Regent's Scholarship because I didn't need it. I had enough grants without any loan. Someone told me it would look good on my resume.

Except things are so much more expensive.

But most of us make so much more money now. Food is much cheaper relative to income, and much better. My first scientific calculator, an HP9100, cost more than a Volkswagen. My HP35 handheld cost $400, over a month's salary. A 30 MHz oscilloscope cost about 4 months salary.

What's expensive now is housing in some big cities.

I think it's profound. A lot of angst and social damage is being done because people have too many choices.

Smelly cars were an improvement over horses.

They have 2-digit accuracy, can't add or subtract, and don't manage the decimal point. Do you still use a slide rule?

I used to take BART to the UC Berkeley engineering library, hoping to find what I needed. About 2 hours travel, round trip. Not being a student, I had to purchase an annual library card just to see books; I couldn't check them out, and they would have had to be returned in two weeks anyhow.

I used to mail in bingo cards to get data sheets in the mail, in a few weeks. Search engines are great.

Things are great. I like our little public library down the hill, but not for technical stuff. It is, incidentally, where the Silk Road guy ran his criminal enterprise using their wi-fi and where he was busted by the FBI.

No, No! Sloman would just tell you how stupid you are.

Try Stanford, rich kids don't care. I just asked a student there to check out a book for me. She didn't even think and did it. I could have kept the book, but I returned it anyway.

I read somewhere that the average person married someone born within

15 miles.

Universities and big-city jobs (and allowing women and PWMs [1] into both) bring smart people together, which surely changes our genetics.

[1] Persons With Melanin

It is again! I took these at the Intrepid in NYC with may late Dad's

35mm handheld, a Ricoh purchased about 1982. Still works fine but it's $22 for a two pack of 36-shot ISO 400 B&W, and $35 not including outbound shipping to process them.

For better or worse he days of drug store analog photo labs are at least about a decade gone at this point, even places that will send them out for you seem pretty rare, I wasn't able to easily find anyplace local that does B&W 35mm in-house.

It is nice to visit a university campus now and then. I was walking the UC Berkeley campus and saw a line, so I joined in. It was the Oxford Shakespeare Company doing Midsummer Nights Dream. That's when I decided to move to San Francisco.

Well, I know someone who declined to go to Berkeley because of the stories of the 60s. She went to UCLA instead.

Bad choice. UCLA is much less interesting. Berkeley is beautiful.

She said UCLA is newer and nicer, Berkeley is antique. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

None of that impaired anyone's quality of life, though. People back then were so accustomed to the smog and pollution they didn't even notice it. And I'm speaking from personal experience. Okay, a little bit later than the 1930s, but not much later - and certainly every bit as polluted.

[snip]

Nonsense. Would you rather spend a week in downtown SF now or 90 years ago? You'd be in that time machine in 5 seconds flat! You're simply in denial if you claim otherwise.

And he'd be right. Anyone who wastes time interacting with that troll is self-evidently some kind of idiot.