
Charlie Stross: Reasons to be Cheerful - bkudria
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/12/reasons-to-be-cheerful.html
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tajddin
You know what? He's right. With the world being a bigger, more communicative
place, it can sometimes seem like things are getting worse, but the truth is,
it's getting better.

I look forward to the years beyond.

~~~
pjscott
The bad stuff is more likely to make headlines, so it's easy to get a
distorted picture of the world. "We haven't been nuked this year!" is not
exciting news. It sure is nice, though.

~~~
kiba
Maybe we need a section of "good news" and a section of "bad news" that are
listed equally.

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iwwr
The ghost of Malthus will continue to haunt us, despite the constant
invalidations of his premises. The world can sustain more people, with longer
lifespans and higher standards of living.

~~~
pjscott
Looking back, though, it's kind of surprising how many times we seem to have
narrowly dodged the Malthusian bullet. Famine was coming... and then the
Haber-Bosch ammonia synthesis process was invented. Famine was coming... and
then new crops like dwarf wheat came along just in the nick of time. Most
recently, we're seeing a remarkable leveling off of the world population,
without needing any sort of coercive population controls.

Sometimes, the world really does work out surprisingly well. (This makes
sense, of course. If the world was always worse than we expected, without any
surprisingly good luck, we would just become more pessimistic until the world
started pleasantly surprising us again. Still, hooray.)

~~~
AndrewDucker
It's more that whenever a problem became serious enough, enough smart people
looked at it and a solution was found.

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blinkingled
Nothing like measured, well reasoned cheer to start the new year with!

But someone had to rain - a commenter points out a similar article Dave
Griffith posted on usenet in 1997 which he reread and found the difference
between '97 and now is actually rather depressing). I couldn't find the 97
usenet post he is referring to but that's a good thing anyway :)

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dctoedt
Gregg Easterbrook proposes a thought experiment in _The Progress Paradox_ ,
which went approximately like this: Would you agree to _permanently_ trade
places with a _random_ person who lived X hundred years ago? Chances are: no
you wouldn't.

(The book: [http://www.amazon.com/Progress-Paradox-Better-While-
People/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Progress-Paradox-Better-While-
People/dp/0679463038). Related essay that I did almost 5 years ago:
[http://www.questioningchristian.com/2006/03/progress_hope_a....](http://www.questioningchristian.com/2006/03/progress_hope_a.html.))

See also pg's 2004 comment: "… try living for a year using only the resources
available to the average Frankish nobleman in 800, and report back to us.
(I'll be generous and not send you back to the stone age.)"
<http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html>

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jfb
Thank Christ for the near extinction of dracunculiasis, which while far from
the worst plague afflicting the world is certainly one of (if not the)
_creepiest_. Let's get onto river blindness and pulmonary leishmaniasis next K
THX.

~~~
borism
Thanks, but no thanks, for calling Jimmy Carter Christ.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracunculiasis#Attempting_eradi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracunculiasis#Attempting_eradication)

~~~
jfb
"HE'S HISTORY'S GREATEST MONSTER!"

~~~
borism
good one!

(I had to google for reference :)

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jacquesm
Shades of Ian Dury :)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasons_to_be_Cheerful,_Part_3>

~~~
arundelo
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIMNXogXnvE>

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roadnottaken
_"My mobile phone today is significantly faster and more powerful — and has a
higher resolution display and more storage! — than my PC in 2000. "_

That can't be right...

~~~
jerf
The iPhone 4 display is 960x640. In 2000, I was living large at 1024x768 or
maybe 1154x864, but at the time I was a web designer and knew that I could
only really _count_ on 640x480, though 800x600 was possibly more common by
then. My rather nice Sony Trinitron 15" monitor could display 1280x1024 but it
looked like it was straining and I was afraid to run it that way for very
long, and my 2D graphics performance took a noticable hit. But that was my
desktop display. Given Charlie's history I would have a hard time thinking he
didn't have 1024x768+ on a desktop but laptops were still often at 800x600, if
memory serves.

It's at least a close thing. I can say the 3D performance on the iPhone at
that resolution blows away what I could get in 2000, for what it is worth,
though I can't guarantee it would blow away a state-of-the-art card. I've
always been behind on that front.

~~~
roadnottaken
Yeah, after my post I googled around a bit and found that, like you said, it's
pretty-close to true. Hard-drives in 2000 were ~10GB (iPhone4 is 16 or 32GB).
The screen-resolution part seemed the hardest to believe, but you're right: I
remember designing web-pages with 800x600 in mind. This is really just
staggering.

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rapind
Nice article for sure, but there's a lot of time frame inconsistency.

Comparing: This year to last, the last ten years, the last 23 years, and the
last 40 years... Why not also compare against healthcare in the 1400s?

