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Comment by lujim | Hacker News Reader

Life before money was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". In fact I wouldn't choose to live anytime before the last 100 or 200 years. 1950 or later would have been my preference had I been given a choice. For how much we all like to armchair quarterback our current system (yes.. capitalism), it's easy to forget how bad 99.9 percent of the human experience on this planet would have sucked comparatively. That's not to say let's quit trying to fix things, but take a deep breath and look around. Things are pretty good. There is an unbelievably high probability that you and all your children live to old age. You won't have to be too cold, too warm, or too hungry during your stay. Not bad.

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Don't forget the vast majority of this has been built on the abundant wealth not found from capitalism but in the form of fossil fuel. This has been an enormous boost to productivity, food production, and general well-being.

The importance of coal and oil in modern society cannot be understated. It has been enormously transformative.

I'm not saying things aren't good, or that capitalism hasn't been a factor, but that if we're not careful we'll get stuck with terrible legacies rather than more opportunity.

For example: Undoubtedly we have access to more resources than ever before, yet these resources seem to flow up to the 0.1% at a rate that's unprecedented, and the rate of depletion of essential resources is increasing even as supplies are becoming more constrained.

One by one we're hitting "peak" everything: Peak oil, peak water, peak education, peak fish. We really need to radically re-think how we're approaching things when unchecked geometric growth is no longer an option.

So let's learn from our successes and failures and show a little forward thinking. In the 1900s people would go to work day after day for their whole life building things designed to last a hundred years. Today we smack together something over the course of a weekend and spin it off into an IPO a year later. A little long-term thinking would be nice.

> In fact I wouldn't choose to live anytime before the last 100 or 200 years. 1950 or later would have been my preference had I been given a choice.

1950 is the earliest that would be OK for me - I had cataracts. In a world before cataract surgery, I would be blind.

I'm pretty sure cataract surgery was around before 1950

A lot of surgery was extremely risky prior to modern anti-biotics.

Actually, I read of it being done in Europe by World War II. I don't know how much before that it existed. But I think (without concrete data) that it was much less common before somewhere around 1950.

One thing about the early European replacement lenses is that they were transparent at least some way into the ultraviolet. It turns out that the human retina can see a short distance into the ultraviolet, but the lens blocks it. The replacement lens let the person see further into the ultraviolet than ordinary people. The OSS used these people as guides on commando raids. There would be a parachute drop of supplies, for example, and they'd put a UV beacon on it. The commandos couldn't see the beacon, and neither could the German soldiers. Only the old person with cataracts (and surgery) who was guiding the commandos could see it.

From "A Short History of Cataract Surgery":

"Cataract surgery in its simplest form is at least 4000 years old. Couching for cataract was the earliest method at about 2000 BC, and even then was evidently practiced in the Tigris / Euphrates area, as well as India and Japan. The earliest records are from The Bible and The Red Sea Scrolls as well as early Hindu records of Susruta’s time."

http://www.rila.co.uk/issues/free/001/2001/v4n2/p61_65/p61_6...

"solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short"

Isn't this also our future? The future is unevenly distributed... Detroit hasn't reached you yet, but its only a matter of time.

No. Just no. The future is not Detroit. The future of a few places is Detroit, but not the future of everywhere.

Ha! Ironically enough I was born, raised, and currently live in Detroit (albeit the suburbs). I have worked in the city right next to Comerica Park (Maybe next year Tigers).

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