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Comment by guyzero | Hacker News Reader

I find it odd that he heads with the least defensible of all these examples: You've probably noticed things no longer work as well as they once did. For example, the store's online inventory says something is in stock and when you get to the store, it's not on the shelf. A small issue, but telling nonetheless.

This has never worked! And widespread online inventory systems date back, what, 10 years? This is a weird place to begin an essay about how good the good old days were.

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The point he's trying to make is that things used to be more reliable - there were no online inventory systems in the 50's, but whatever systems they did have back then were dependable.

He is, of course, totally wrong - back then they couldn't even make a reliable car, much less a reliable global supply chain management system. Computers are orders of magnitude more complicated than anything mankind had built as of 1970 so really it's more amazing that they work at all than that there are bugs.

The real difference may be one of intelligibility - in the 50's your car wasn't very reliable, but when it did break, you could understand and quite possibly fix what had gone wrong. Now, the world is way too complicated and nobody can possibly understand more than a small fraction of how anything works.

Of course you understood and could fix your 1950s car. Anyone who couldn't didn't dare drive. Thus you had incentive to learn. Cars today still have the same carnot cycle engines, with mostly the same parts. The controls are enough better that nobody cares about the air fuel mixture

And many car issues can still be fixed if you’re willing to learn. Maybe this is less true the further up you go on the performance scale, but in the ten years I’ve owned my Honda, I haven’t had a single problem I couldn’t fix.

Exactly. The only work I don't do is tires and paint/body. Those I could do as well, but the equipment and experience (respectively) required make them wildly inefficient to do personally.

In many places where people live in apartments/condos, and in many states (cough California), you need to have quite a bit of infrastructure to legally do many repairs for cars. Sure, you can get away with draining your oil into a pan, but in some counties and cities it is less than smiled upon.

Or if they weren't working they'd quickly fix them because people cared more. It's hard to have the same sentiment nowadays when all systems are changing so fast, we sortof learned not to care because there's really nothing we can do about it

I didn’t read the inventory part but the part about rising cost of infrastructure like bridges is extremely accurate. Also, the part about how culturally we’ve shifted to only looking out for ourselves is the zeitgeist of our younger generations which I postulate is due to TV and popular culture romanticizing machiavellianism.

Things work better than they ever had, but human's incompetence towards operating and fixing them is rising. Every "thing" is now a complex system comprised of numerous components delegated to various organizations and individuals, and once something breaks, you have no clue about what's going on.

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