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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

This is a comforting thought, but I don’t think it’s true.

America did seem to have a golden age. Building the Golden Gate Bridge just took a few years and was very affordable when adjusting for inflation. Compare that to the new bay bridge. Or just look at how the US mobilized during WWII to produce an insane amount of weaponry in just a few years.

Think about the people that grew up when the telegraph was high tech. Then they got to see people flying in jets. Then nuclear energy. Then they got to see people walking on the moon. All in a single life.

The insane amount of progress in a short period does seem to have slowed. And I think a big part of it is our government is woefully mismanaged. It mostly seems engineered to help other people in government. This may be why so many of the richest counties in America are the suburbs of DC, compared to centers of innovation or industry.

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> Building the Golden Gate Bridge just took a few years and was very affordable when adjusting for inflation.

Yes, when you have low regard for human life and the environment you can move quite quickly.

> The insane amount of progress in a short period does seem to have slowed.

The phone I carry has more computing capability than all of the computers used in the Apollo program combined.

I’m able to reliably establish video calls with people on the other side of the planet while walking my dog.

My photos are grouped by person using facial recognition.

Shooting 120 FPS 4K video is built into my 200 gram phone (20 years ago you rented a camcorder from blockbuster the size of a briefcase to record effectively 320x240 onto a VHS tape).

The text contents of the library of congress can fit onto a micro sd card the size of a fingernail that costs less than $100.

The pace of technology innovation is astounding. It’s moved so quickly that we’re disappointed when the exponential growth of transistors slowed down.

And that's just tech. Materials science has moved dramatically. Just look at how planes, cars are built today.

We're entering the age of fully dynamic production lines. 3d printing's true strength here is not printing the object, but the molds.

Medical science, genetics specifically. We've come a long way, but this field is still like computing was in the 1940s.

We barely understand genetic expression as a whole process, eg how the entire genome is effected by modifications, and changes.

Yet when we do, the changes will be astounding. The end of most disease, the ability to use organisms to do our bidding, nanotech isn't going to be metal, but instead, bio.

We're about to set boots on Mars, in a decade we'll likely have permanent residency there. Our first new planet.

With that comes the potential to move industry to space, mining asteroids, power generation, and more.

There are endless, massive changes coming, we're merely in a period where they are all coming together.

The next 50 years will make the last 50 look glacial...

> And that's just tech. Materials science has moved dramatically. Just look at how planes, cars are built today.

Batteries, man. I am constantly astounded at how much power you can get out of a battery today. The fastest production car (0-60) ever made runs on one.

Batteries are a massive materials science success story. We are less than a decade away from 1000 mile range electric cars that do 0-60 in sub 3 seconds. These were Bugatti Veyron numbers a decade back, and that thing had a fuel efficiency of 4mpg.

> Just look at how planes, cars are built today.

To drive that point home, the metal in a new car did not exist a decade ago. To someone not intimately involved with materials, that was mind-blowing

What specific metal are you talking about?

Exactly. Look at mRNA. Nobody expected vaccines to come so fast, and be so good.

Are we talking America or globally? Because you're listing a lot of things that are now more correctly thought of as Asian innovations if we look at manufacturing and know-how.

The relative status of the US was very high at thr time.

Let me counter a bit of the heyday argumner.

During this so-called “heyday” destroyed many inner cities, their street cars and created incredible pollution.

The EPA was founded in 1971 and environmental regulations came into place then.

This is incredible. To this day, no country has better air than the US. And that includss Europe. Maybe the US did do something incredible in the last few decades—it just happens to be a repair of nature.

In the meantime because of oh-so-useful infrastructure built during the time of Mad Men, Robert Moses and suburbs US is still unable to implement mass transit as they once had and maybe now we will have global warming due to the infrastructure created when the US was “building fast and breaking things.”

I don’t disagree with you—but I wouldn’t embrace the heyday as the pinnacle of achievement either.

> To this day, no country has better air than the US.

Not to detract from your wider point, but this just isn't true. Here's at least one link that counters with data: https://www.iqair.com/world-most-polluted-countries -- the USA is 84th "most polluted" in terms of Air Quality Index on that list of 106 countries.

Also just anecdotally, nobody that's been to both, say, Norway, and the USA can possibly think that the air quality in the two countries is even close!

The link you provided shows the USA as the 84th LEAST polluted of 106.

Pedantically, not really -- it shows Bangladesh as #1 on that list, and Bangladesh is the "most polluted".

Pakistan is #2 and the "second most polluted" -- so extending that, USA is 84th on that list and hence the "84th most polluted", with country #106 being Puerto Rico, which is the "106th most polluted", and therefore the least polluted as per that list. So if you must reframe it as "least polluted", then USA is the 23rd least polluted on that list.

This is an incredibly misleading way to talk about this.

First, there are ~200 countries, not 106. Second, Puerto Rico IS the USA. Third, "84th most polluted" out of a list of 106, is just a weird way to talk. It's like saying the valedictorian of a class of 100 is the 100th most underachieving student.

Sure. Norway would be fantastic but it is such a different place that it would compare to being in Alaska or Montana. Major cities in the US, like NYC average around a 30-50 (probs more like 30) on the iqAir score. That is nuts. Barcelona has many, many days on 80-90.

The US, mind you, is not helped by the forest fires of the last few years in this ranking. They really skew things in California and the US as a whole. These forest fires though can be attributed somehow to the building of the interstate system and therefore sort of does add to the wider point.

Europe is pretty bad because of the diesel engine cars. If you change that, air quality will improve dramatically.

Well, OK then, the claim changes to "parts of the USA have better air quality than parts of Europe because reasons", and I can't argue with Internet strangers making such uncontroversial claims, can I? :-)

Yes but 11 construction workers died building the Golden Gate Bridge (which was actually pretty low for such a project at the time). How does that factor in to the story?

Not at all?

Tragic sure, but what’s the point? Think of all the lives saved by not having to ferry people.

What do you mean what's the point? Don't be intentionally obtuse.

The point is that those people died due to labor practices of the time, not some tragic fluke accident.

I like to imagine it's possible to build a bridge without getting any of your laborers killed.

Here is what is left out.

> Building the Golden Gate Bridge just took a few years and was very affordable when adjusting for inflation.

11 workers were killed building it. They estimated 35. [0] Can you imagine putting into a project proposal knowingly estimating X number of dead construction workers?

[0] https://www.ciconstructors.com/the-evolution-of-construction...

I don't know enough about the rest, but a cheap bridge isn't necessarily a great thing.

And I don't know that progress has necessarily slowed. A computer in your pocket happened in my lifetime, and indeed, within my memory.

Sure, but protecting workers doesn’t make a project cost 10x as much though, or take decades longer.

Protecting workers, considering the environmental impact, overall impact assessments (such as suicide prevention), public consultation, earthquake standards, wind retrofits, etc.

There are a lot more things considered now.

Don't forget all the endless nuisance lawsuits that try to stop every single project.

Honestly NIMBYism and lawsuits slow down things more than any government agency.

And also in all these we may be forgetting one thing. Maybe handcuffing the government is not a good thing? Grover Norquist style drown the government in a bathtub honestly has been a disaster for us, and it's time we wake up to that.

Yes let’s go back to killing people to make buildings rise faster.

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