Comic Strips

The sad thing is what they really miss is reasonable restrictions on industry and capitalism, a viable chance to support a family on a single full-time salary, and upward mobility, but rather than getting mad at the greedy capitalist assholes that have stolen these things from them, instead they let these exact same greedy assholes trick them into thinking that minorities and disempowered peoples are somehow the ones stifling progress.

The yearning for better days isn't inherently wrong, it's the conclusions they draw where they go astray.

How about the parts where wealthy were taxed at a 90% rate over $100k and you could comfortably live on a single income with a family of 4 in a home you fully owned after 15 years while not needing medical insurance because even a broken leg was gonna cost you like $20 out of pocket.

How about that portion. The one when government corruption would get you thrown out and was seen as shameful. Don't ignore the good parts of the old days and just focus on the bad parts.

Well.... there are actually a lot of things we could've taken from the old days. Atmosphere without excessive co2 for instance

Back then you could buy expensive products that were made to last. Today we can mostly choose between cheap products that don't last and expensive product that don't last either

Here's an actual good one "i just miss when it was possible to buy a house with a single income at minimum wage"

You can talk shit all you want about fuel efficiency but fins on cars was the peak of pure automotive design.

And I will fight you over this.

OK but put a modern engine in those boys and the esthetics were pretty sweet

I'm going to guess good old days is probably more possibility of getting a job that provided you with enough income to also buy a house and live comfortably. Maybe not have to take out decades long loans if you are able to get a mortgage and not get into massive debt if you decide to pursue education, and it actually made you stand out due to there not being a huge over saturation of university grads.

Assuming based off what is considered a failure according to The Simpsons during the early seasons. Homer the big failure making enough single income to have a two story home and car and kids and a dog and cat off a high school education with a regular salary man job. And the baby boomers with their properties.

When a house wasn't impossibly expensive and you have time and money to raise children?

Oooh, an opportunity for a little bit longer of an article, don't mind if I do.

I think it's interesting to what extent people miss reasonable things about the past, but also, don't really understand why things have changed and moved in the direction that they've moved in. They just kind of lament the slow death of the past, and that's about it. There's no through-line, it's just a series of disconnected events.

Like, the affordability and popularity of the middle class in yesteryear. Sure, this was partially due to latent new deal economic reforms, that were slowly stripped back in the years after, that's true. But it was also due to a larger managerial class needing to exist, for capitalists, due to a lack of automation. We also can't really minimize the amount and scale of exploitation that was still going on back then, even to a larger extent than today. Banana republics existed back then, just as they still are kicking around today.

Partially, right, these new deal regulations have been stripped back, that's true. Partially the middle class has suffered from automation, which has extricated them from their labor, alienating them further, and shrinking their labor pool (programmers are the new managerial class, my man). Partially, it is the case that we are engaging in slightly smaller, or less direct, forms of interventionism.

So there are more reasons why the middle class has shrunk, and some of those, I would say, are kind of good things, some of those are progressions. It's not to say that things always have to get worse, for them to be, like, equitable, right, which is what I think people are prone to believing in a cynical, idiotic, immoral kind of way. We just don't walk in a straight line. Humanity walks the path of a total blackout drunk with two bum legs. It's fits and starts, and there's tons of piss.

I see this shit on tiktok all the time, where stupid retro flippers take, like, a fridge from the 60's, and convince everyone it's the bees knees and the cat's pajamas so they can sell it to some rich freak for 4,000 bucks. I think, maybe, sure, average build quality is going to be higher than it is in the present, right. But we're also experiencing survivors' bias, so the higher quality stuff lasted longer, and we're experiencing a decrease in value over time with those older products naturally, so you're going to be able to get a higher quality thing, for maybe cheaper.

Especially if it's mostly a "solved problem", like a fridge. Which isn't even to say that older fridges are solved problems, really. They're going to have worse thermal coefficients from running all the time, having shitty thermometers, having shittier insulation. It is seen as higher quality because the evaluation of the product is done on almost a purely aesthetic value, rather than in any practical sense. Nobody really needs a fridge that's capable of holding up to an atomic bomb. That's a sense of quality that is totally external to the actual practicality of the product itself. It's an aesthetic tactility.

We're also going to be seeing shittier products as a result of a shrinking middle class, who's no longer able to spend as much money on these sorts of luxuries. I dunno how many cool kickstarter gadget projects I've seen, that have to kind of, warp themselves in order to be bought up by techbro sensibilities, or else die. To the point where the original project intention often ends up suffering or being in some way misaligned with reality, and the project as a whole becomes shitty. But that's also maybe just a point you could make about capitalism and society kind of, as a whole.

I dunno. I struggle with it, because I like old cars, they're very cool. If you're looking at it right, you can get 50-60 mpg, you can get something that has all your little simple tactile buttons, is easy to work on, and you can get that all for about 10,000+ dollars cheaper than your newer hybrid piece of shit. Which isn't really something you can buy for cheaper used, since the batteries tend to start crapping out on you after the second owner, you gotta get more lucky to get those for cheap. But then we're also in a weird transitional period for the used market so ehhhhh. At the same time, a super old car is gonna have worse safety standards, potentially worse reliability and drivability as a daily car. It's going to have no features. Is it worse, or better? I dunno, it's just kinda different. Really, I just want a higher quality honda civic vx. Maybe a little smaller, though.

I dunno, in summary. I think uhhh. Every present reality kinda sucks, probably. I will say also, as an addendum, that I think the past exists within the rose-colored stranglehold of the present. These simplified versions of the past that exist only in the mind, that exist apart from the present, with no chain of causality, that is a construct. It is unnatural, and it serves a purpose.

This pretty much sums up the state of things. The entire past has now been labeled as “the dark ages”, from which we’ve just recently crawled.

Everything an old person says is instantly ignored and “handled” by formulaic responses invoking the pure evil that is all things past.

Want to discuss poetry? Don’t forget our emergence from the oppression of the past.

Want to discuss recipes for chocolate chip cookies? Don’t forget our emergence from the oppression of the past.

Oh were you talking about old cars? Don’t forget our ongoing emergence from the oppression of the past.

It’s a broken record posing as a heroic worldview.

As a more progressive guy who owns solar panels, drives an EV, and been moving over to plant based meat substitutes a few times a week, yeah, I do miss the era of the old cars, they had style along with their absolutely crap gas mileage.

Don't miss the overt racism that went along with it of course.

Nostalgia is a trick of the mind to make you ignore the fact that one day you'll be dead and no one alive would remember that you even existed, and they'll go on as if nothing was lost.

I miss the good old times before rampant enshittification...

When Russia seemed like it could become a sane nation.

When each decade had a distinctive style in clothing, music, etc.

When movies had feelings.

When social media wasn't.

When each new generation of computers doubled the performance.

When Donald Trump was just a washed up businessclown.

When Israel hadn't been created yet.

When the population crisis in west was just a future problem.

When men wore wigs and pantyhoses.

When the climate crisis was just a future problem.

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Plenty of reasons to yearn some parts of yesterdecades in 2024.

I miss pre-google internet. I wish I had todays hardware and connection to what I used to access via dialup.

The gas, mileage sucked, but old cars definitely had more personality. I hate that all the new cars look like every other car on the road.

Don't overpolitizise everything. Everyone romanticizes the time of their youth.

I'd live in the 80's forever if I could.

What if the old cars a Geo Metro getting 50mpg? They don't make em like they used to! All that modern safety equipment really weighs a car down and ruins the potential mileage.