OK, here's a thematical rant for you alls
One of the upsides of my job is that I read a lot of Bitcoin books (i.e., #1058230).
The downside is... that I'm reading books by Bitcoiners -- Bitcoiners who, it is widely known (#1015955), are some of the most stupid people around. My god, the desire to believe all manner of absolutely mind-numbingly insane things as well as credulity in NOT looking them up is pathetic.
Cue today, when I had to read a certain someone complaining about how the world is so much worse today (thanks fiat money) and that during the Golden Age of Flying, Americans had it so much better. LITERAL QUOTE =
During the Golden Age of Aviation, for example, in the 1960s and 1970s, we could have full-course meals, sit in luxurious wide seats with spacious legroom, and socialize at the piano bar on flights.
Instead, fast-forward to today:
Today, flights are cramped and expensive. Since the aviation industry has seen incredible technological progress since the 1960s, passengers should be receiving far more value for less cost.
For reference: we could have no such thing. The few (compared to today) flights around were accessible to a very select few! so "we" would most likely not have included you. (Personal anecdote: my grandma never got on a plane; my step-grandma flew once in her life... to visit my sister, a few years ago.)
To support these extraordinary claims, author cited... a travel YouTube video (my god...)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDozRwcbX5A
Nothing bad in the video itself, but thinking for some reason that it constituted anything but anecdotal, illustrative material is DERANGED. Besides, the video explicitly discussed how a Boston-LA flight would have been inflation-adjusted $1,000 bucks... and international trips to, say, Paris would have been some $3,000, inflation-adjusted. (that, all said, is in a much poorer economy!)
Put that way, you can still fly like that today! It's call first-class/business class; just pay a shitton extra for a flight and voaila, there's your fancy service.
Tony Morley to the rescue:
Echoed by HumanProgress, a site specializing in debunking stupid ideas and showing human (material!) progress for what it really is.
If you had to choose a moment in history to take a commercial flight between any two major cities on earth, and you didn’t know in advance which flight, which airline, or which budget or class you’d be flying — to paraphrase Barack Obama in a 2016 address, “You wouldn’t choose the fifties, or the sixties, or the seventies. You’d choose right now.”
Truth:
modern commercial air travel is safer, cheaper, faster, further-reaching, more comfortable, and more equitable — there’s never been a better time to fly across the country, or between continents.
Whether measured per passenger, or distance etc, flying is just unbelievably safe -- compared both to other modes of transportation and its past self.
HP, per Our World in Data, gives us 2.3 light-years the distance needed to be flown to statistically be involved in a plane crash. (Newsflash: that's a lot!)
Maxing out the cost idea:
COMFORTABLE, YOU SAY?!
Flying through much of the 20th century, presuming you could afford the privilege, was a loud, turbulent, rattling, poorly pressurised, smoke-filled, boring saga with only a magazine or book for entertainment. ... When it comes to the comforts of flying, our own hedonic treadmill has helped us forget just how much more comfortable the entire experience of flying today is compared with the recent past. Enter a large modern international airport today, and you’re entering an entertainment park filled with shops, restaurants, bars, convenience stores, and lounges.
Modern aircraft fly higher, smoother, and have improved cabin pressure, air conditioning and noise insulation, dramatically reducing fatigue and pressure-related discomfort, have improved radar and navigation systems to better avoid turbulence, and are frequently equipped with entertainment systems, high-speed satellite Wi-Fi and flight tracking, unimaginable to those flying in the primitive days of the eighties, nineties and early 2000s.
Here's one puff stat:
By 2027, Qantas plans to operate “Project Sunrise”, the world’s longest direct flight, from Sydney to London, covering 17,015 kilometers in approximately 20 hours non-stop, with high-speed wifi, and a fleet of amenities our flying ancestors of 1980 could scarcely imagine — all within the budget of normal people flying economy.
Yes, we all hate the hassles with flying -- a great number of them being unnecessary and artificial (= governments, borders, security screening)
but to ignorantly idolize a past you've never seen (and, had you been alive them, likely wouldn't have seen!) is just unconscionable. Fuck. Right. Off.
I fucking hate Bitcoiners talking shit.
I fucking hate ignorant people talking shit.
I fucking hate people talking up a past they have no idea about.
//drops mics; rant ends//