by Rocky Mountain Stepmom
Gwern has a post where he lists all the big and especially the little things that have improved in his lifetime. I’m sure you won’t agree with all of them. What would you add or subtract?
My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s
A list of unheralded improvements to ordinary quality-of-life since the 1990s going beyond computers.
Yay, a light diversion. This cracked me up: “‘meat’ is a fad diet—since most nutrition research is BS and most fad diets don’t work either, it’s good to have one which is at least delicious”
Really, safety. More/better vaccines and drugs. Massively improved car design and safety features (I’m old enough that my mom was a major outlier insisting that I be in a carseat instead of a lap baby). More consciousness of safety concerns in all sorts of product manufacturing and building design (remember the whole “kids getting heads stuck in XYZ” issues?).
Luxuries in general. We have the “mass-market” luxury stores like Coach that didn’t exist back when I was a kid. Even Safeway has fancy foreign teas and jams and such. And services — my mom didn’t have many options for daycare; we had tons. The only people who had lawn services had last names like DuPont and Vanderbilt; now every UMC college grad family has one. Practically anything I want available at my doorstep within a week; if I find the tea selections at my local Safeway too pedestrian, I can have my froofy teas sent from San Francisco and at my doorstep within a week. Trading money for comfort and convenience has never been easier.
The other one that strikes me — and I’m probably jinxing myself — is car reliability. I grew up with breaking down being a fairly standard, if annoying, part of life. That was the huge revelation of Japanese imports in the late-’70s — wait, you mean they just sort of drive and drive? Even things like service is easier/less frequent, with oil changes extending from every 3 months to even 15,000 miles with new synthetics, no need for the constant tune-ups/changing spark plugs/checking the timing, etc. It seems my parents were always dealing with something on the car, whether it was a mechanical issue or just maintenace. Pretty much all I do is fill mine up and switch between my summer/winter tires, and then I go in for maintenance when the little light tells me to.
Outside of technology, I do think one of the biggest changes that is really noticeable in day-to-day life is the decline in smoking. When I was a kid and even a young adult, smoking was commonplace in both homes and public places.
I hadn’t thought about clothing but man – he’s right about that. I tell DS, who is obsessed with “comfy” clothes – how screwed he would have been in past eras before the time of wicking fabrics and everything being ‘so soft’.
Food really is different too – so many things that were impossible to get outside of urban specialty/ethnic stores now are commonplace. That’s true.
On-line shopping. I hate the physical act of driving to a store, walking around finding things, trying them on, standing in line to check out, driving home. It exhausts me. To be able to place an order and have it arrive at my doorstep is heaven.
Speaking of, for those who also like Lands End sheets, everything is 50% off right now. I’m ordering a few new sets.
LfB did you go see the house?
@Lark — see my post at the end of yesterday’s page.
@Ivy — totally with you on the smoking. As a kid who was deathly allergic to cigarette smoke, that change is probably the most significant in terms of freeing up my life. And not just comfy fabrics, but easier-care fabrics. I can’t remember the last time I ironed something, but that was a regular part of looking even halfway presentable not that long ago. I actually remember the advent of polyester — you really couldn’t wear anything comfortable and easy-care unless it was so obviously plastic-ey.
LfB, I agree 100% on car reliability.
And I apologize for my horrible grammar. Let me restate: As a kid who was deathly allergic to cigarette smoke, I benefited tremendously from that change.
the technology change in delivery format for “TV,” beyond just making viewing more convenient, has made the quality and depth of the content so much better. It used to be that TV was mostly silly and the deeper stuff was in movies. Now it’s the opposite, even though the movies haven’t changed much.
Tech enabled DW to keep working with young kids, which she wouldn’t have done otherwise. That’s made a big difference in our overall financial picture.
More reliable engines don’t just make our cars run longer, they make powerboats affordable and simple for someone like me. We had a bowrider (speed boat) in the 90s with a 5 liter, 200 hp Volvo stern drive that was an absolute nightmare to keep running (although fun when it was). We eventually got rid of it and I definitely did not think I would ever want another. My dad’s philosophy at the time was a boat’s engine was good for about 500 hours, and after that, you shouldn’t expect much.
Modern engines, particularly outboards, can easily run 5,000 or 10,000 hours with nothing but regular maintenance (annual in my case, and that’s minimal).
Car reliability is at the top of my “tangibles” list. Grocery and produce variety a close second, although New England is still located in the wilderness, not the garden. (Learned those terms from landscape architecture friends).
But the life changing difference to me is that medical advances, and robust electronic communication/media, and ride share, and logistics/delivery, and now telemedicine have made aging in place not only viable, but desirable.
Milo can correct my math but cars are also a lot cheaper than they were in the 90s. A 1994 Lexus ES 300 had a base price of $31,400. Adjusting for inflation that would be $54,715. An ES 350 today starts at $39,900 and it’s a much bigger, faster, safer, more comfortable car.
As similarly equipped as possible a 1994 Civic was $15,920 ($27,918 today). Today $19,850 and again much bigger, faster, safer, more features, etc.
@ Ivy “the decline in smoking.”
In October 2004 NY had already implemented no smoking in workplaces, but Illinois hadn’t.
I took our 3 guys to Chicago for a long weekend, meeting DW who had been there on business. The cab (remember those?) from ORD had ‘no smoking’ signs in it. But when we walked into the Hyatt Regency downtown I was BLOWN AWAY by the smoke from the very crowded bar at happy hour. Just such a difference from what I was used to in NY, and the NY law couldn’t have been in force for that long.
LfB, if DH really cant stand good enough or a touch of shabby chic, it may be impossible to find common ground. It is just really hard when a chance comes to own the specific house on the hill of your childhood, not just one that evokes that house. At least you know that you don’t want to finance by selling off lots. If that were expected to be easily approved and feasible, a developer would have snapped it up months ago.
Rhett – I distinctly remember the transaction price of $18,900 for a fully loaded 1993 Taurus (but not the SHO). That’s about $33k today*
It was our first car with power windows, a moonroof, a key fob, the key code on the door (I wish they still made those). It was about twice as expensive as any car my parents had bought previously.
And yeah, by today’s standards, a 3.8 L V6 with only about 140 hp. Died around 140k miles, already on its second transmission, iirc.
* that’s another modern development: the relative lack of inflation
Telemedicine and restaurant delivery for those of us outside urban areas. A big one to me is the recognition that education isn’t one-size-fits-all, and that with a nominal amount of effort, lots of kids that once struggled and potentially dropped out can be successful.
FaceTime and other video chat is huge. I remember when we first moved to middle America my mom can only call her mom or her twin sister once a week. They took turns calling because it was so expensive. In between my mom and her twin would talk into a cassette recorder and mail the cassettes back-and-forth. Life would’ve been so much easier on her as a stay at home mom with three kids in a new city if she could’ve talk to people more frequently. Now with FaceTime she can see us and talk to us multiple times a week and talk to her sisters across the country essentially for free as often as she wants
I concur with the convenient entertainment, shopping, low inflation and free communication observations.
I’ll add changes brought to buildings and curbs for wheelchair accessibility, mandated by ADA but already starting to happen before then. I’ll also add the many technological advances (fancy hearing aids, voice-activated computer stuff) for people with disabilities.
It’s been over a year and I’m a convert to Walmart grocery pickup, because “grocery” includes almost everything Walmart sells. Amazon doesn’t want to sell me 21 cans of stuff this week for under $1/can.
the key code on the door (I wish they still made those)
They still do. Go to 1:05 for an example. It’s hidden under the glass b-pillar trim and I believe it has a proximity sensor so it only lights up when you move you hand close to it.
* that’s another modern development: the relative lack of inflation
Which we don’t really know is a good thing. I’ve seen some convincing arguments that 4% might be better than 2%.
* Can you believe that year 2000 was 20 years ago? My God where did the time go?!?
Can you believe that year 2000 was 20 years ago? My God where did the time go?!?
You spent it arguing with people who were wrong on the Internet.
The article was improvements since the 1990’s. But I don’t see a ton of dramatic improvements since the late 90’s My first kid was born in the beginning of 2000 and I think about how we lived life right then, and honestly, I don’t see a lot of difference. In 1999, I did all my baby-crap shopping online, I participated in a due-date mailing list, where we endlessly chatted and exchanged photos. We still exist, although it moved to Facebook. The experience is still the same, though. I was on a lot of closed mailing lists in the 90’s, everything from professional CS lists to a list devoted to a particular rock band I liked to a list on Native American literature (Sherman Alexie, who I really like, was a frequent poster so I was interested to hear what he had to say). Cars were already very safe and reliable by that point – most of the gains were made in the 80’s. OK, internet access was still dial-up at home, but since I was on a fast Ethernet connection most of the day at work, it didn’t affect me much.
I think the biggest change was probably smartphones. I had friends with PalmPilots at the very end of the 90’s, so they were on the horizon, but I did not get my first Palm device until 2002.
Now, if you ask me about changes since 1980, I could give you an earful.
Access to a wide variety of interesting ethnic food is definitely a big improvement, but again, I think most of that happened in the 80’s, at least in urban centers. And judging from my visits to my sister, there still isn’t good access in many non urban areas.
So give us an earful, Mooshi. The article was just a discussion prompt. Go ahead and talk about the improvements since the 50s and 60s or however far back you remember.
The biggest difference, between now and 25+ years ago, that I noticed is the availability of different types of foods in a regular supermarket. I wish the supermarket would stock paneer.
On smoking – here a lot more people than I expect smoke, especially in their cars. This has surprised me.
My kids tell me that vaping is rampant in their age group.
Sorry, RMS I was trying to be a good girl and follow the prompt so I wouldn’t have points taken off.
You spent it arguing with people who were wrong on the Internet.
Someone’s got to do it!
I think I got my first cell phone c. late 1990s. It looks like Windows didn’t come with Internet Explorer until 1995. I’m trying to imagine how a generic officer worker lived in 1992. I guess watching whatever happened to be on TV at the time and reading the paper were about it.
Actually, I just realized that the list, which I thought was really extensive, omitted [widespread civilian use of] GPS.
Navy ships had it by the time I was in college, of course, but during freshman and sophomore year, maybe two semesters total, I forget, we were learning charting and piloting on paper charts, and the basics of celestial navigation. Piloting near the coast, for those unfamiliar, means you have a small team of people, one person recording data and two or three people on these special compasses with sights. So one person announces that it’s time to take a fix, and the people with sights all have specified targets, like water towers or a lighthouse or a church steeple to get a true bearing toward. Each one of those bearings gives you a line on your chart that logically your ships is somewhere along. Where two bearings cross, that tells you exactly where you were at that moment. Where three lines cross, if they cross at the same point, that proves* you didn’t make a mistake (*don’t, Finn). As long as the little triangle is small.
I don’t know to what extent any of this is still taught and practiced. I remember reading after the collisions that they were going to make a big effort to get back to basics, including celestial, because the understanding had been lost.
I was on Spring Break sophomore year when I rode in my friend’s stepdad’s pickup with an aftermarket GPS Nav system that folded down from the ceiling like a minivan DVD player, except for the driver. I was blown away.
Louise, you live in a state where tobacco was king!!! It was one of the last places in the country to stop smoking.
I hate smoking. My mother used to smoke. One of the best days of my life was when she finally quit. I tried to describe to DD what it was like when people could could smoke on planes. I had to fly to LA in late 80s with my colleagues. It was a TWA flight and I thought I would die in the smoking section. Four of us were traveling together and I was brand new, so i just had to suck it up and I didn’t say a word. I can still remember the stink on my clothes.
We are replacing our garage door. The choices for the door and motor/opener are awesome. We’ve had to replace our motor, but we never replaced the door. This new door will be insulated and it is almost impossible to hear the door when it is moving. Also, we will get alerts if it is still open. We can open/close it from any where in the world with wifi. I can’t believe that I am this excited about a garage door and motor, but I think it will be life changing for us because my basement will be so much warmer in the winter. The technology that went into making this insulated door and the new motors with LED lights for my garage etc., – it is awesome.
Milo,
Don’t subs use inertial navigation? That’s what planes used before GPS. Was that not a thing on surface ships? Too much motion?
Oh, he did say GPS a couple times. Nevermind.
CTRL-F is another great invention.
Shoes are much better—more comfortable dress shoes for men & women, less expectation that women will wear heels.
My son ate fresh blackberries all winter, but I’m still mindful of the external used costs of just in time production of everything, global sourcing of food, and assembly of one T-shirt in multiple countries. We are seeing one outcome now with the increase in food prices as soon as there is a wrinkle in food production in the US. There is an ongoing debate over whether workers’ lives are actually improved in global factories.
LfB, how much of that is that cars are better and how much is that you can afford an entirely different class of car than your parents had?
I totally agree about the cigarettes!! Yuck, yuck, nasty. They are less common here than they used to be, but we encounter them more frequently than we did in the US.
In extremely short-term improvements, gyms are now open here. Appointments are required. I didn’t know if there would be a place to change, so I wore my gym shirt, shoes and socks with shorts I needed to change out of. As I stood in front of a locker doing that, a guy stroller into the locker room. I told him it was the women’s locker room & pointed to the door. He didn’t respond, so I asked if he worked there. No, he doesn’t work there. They had closed off the shower sections of men’s and women’s locker rooms and taken out the dividing wall so the current traffic flow is enter through the “women’s” door and exit through the “men’s”. Still, just by being away from the main exercise floor, there was more privacy to change clothes than the pool offered, and obviously most people don’t get as naked changing into/out of gym clothes as swim suits. Most of the machines were blocked off, but I could use the leg press. I can’t remember if that gym had kettlebells in Jan or not. I think it did, but I couldn’t find any yesterday.
Another further opening—many stores at the mall are open, masks are optional, stores are limiting the number of concurrent customers and there are pathways marked on the floor (& generally ignored).
DS’ school will be four hours every morning and some afternoon things online now through July 10. I had a long conversation with a very chatty administrator.
I can really only talk about changes since I was an adult, since we tend to see things so differently as children.
One thing that no one has mentioned yet is the widespread acceptance of gay and lesbian people, and the sort-of acceptance of other ways of looking at gender. I think this is something that really started in the 80’s, again, in urban centers, and then trickled outwards. There was a lot of gay fashion in pop culture of that era (remember Boy George?) as well as in real life in certain milieus. It was pretty common for guys to wear eyeliner, earrings, and dye their hair strange colors at my urban campus. For a reminder, just look at the teen boys in the latest season of Stranger Things – lots of eyeliner. And open lesbians, and people declaring themselves bi merited barely a shrug. Yes, I know, it was a college and different from “normal” places. And pop fashion was just pop fashion. But even that level of acceptance wouldn’t have existed in the 50’s, I am pretty sure. And it started a seed that grew, quietly. In the 90’s. as older people started seeing so many famous people, like Rock Hudson, die from AIDS, I think they started realizing that gay people were all around and that it wasn’t that weird or scary. And just a decade later, people were debating gay marriage.
Rhett, in 1992, you had 300 cable channels and a VCR. Everyone recorded shows. You also went to Blockbuster
That reminds me I meant to give a ginormous +1 to Becky on kids who would’ve been in “special ed.
Actually, Rock Hudson died in 1985. So the changeover probably started a bit earlier. The AIDS pandemic went from the mid 80’s through the mid 90’s
Blockbuster!! Of course. I had totally forgotten about that.
Milo,
Honda had in car navigation in 1981. It used a inertial navigation and a system of transparencies. Starting at 0:44 for the money shot.
I will agree on the smoking. It was on the way out when I was in high school in the 90’s — teachers were banned from smoking in teachers lounge my freshman year. They would go wander the neighborhood on breaks. Even in the 90’s, it was weird for people to smoke in their homes — I remember one family I babysat for did, and it was odd.
Asthma medicine has come really far, too. My uncle has it, and we always were worried about him living alone (perennial bachelor) and having an attack. My dad got several phone calls when I was a kid having to rush him to hospital (we lived really close). He’s over 70 now and it hasn’t been an issue for a while.
I being able to look up anything….when I was a kid, we had to go to the encyclopedia to find answers. Now just google it, and there are answers for anything.
Vaping is rampant. I know many middle-aged guys who do it.
I love not having an ignition key. I don’t have to dig around in my purse for a car key. I feel much safer.
I like the idea of subscription boxes….I’m doing an art one during pandemic, but have also done BirchBox, Hello Fresh, and StichFix in the past.
S&M, there was a huge fad for spike heels in the 00’s. I always hated getting stuck behind women in their spikes going down the stairs into the subway. They always had to go really slowly.
And if you look at the women who work for Trump, you might think they never went away
“Don’t subs use inertial navigation? That’s what planes used before GPS. Was that not a thing on surface ships? Too much motion?”
Yeah. Submerged, because you can’t get a GPS fix underwater. But every time you stick a periscope up, they fix by GPS and the inertials electronically say “OK, got it. I was a little off, starting from there now.” But they are amazingly accurate, considering.
I don’t know if surface ships used it before GPS. They had things like LORAN — basically distant radio waves.
The piloting aspect comes into play only when you’re in sight of landmarks, obviously, but because that’s when other pre-GPS methods wouldn’t be nearly accurate enough. And you could incorporate other things, too. Radar range to a point of land combined with a visual bearing, that sort of thing. There’s a whole art and style to it, in how it’s drawn and the symbols and the arrows. And then you could plot danger bearings, like “NLT 305” (nothing less than) would mean that a direct bearing to that particular object should never be less than 305 if you want to avoid the rocks. you might even assign one person for a period of time to do nothing other than watch that particular lighthouse and make sure that its bearing never goes below that.
And all this stuff had to be planned in advance, on many paper charts, all the proposed tracks drawn out, the intervals of the fix. And then reviewed and signed off up the chain. It’s a lot of work.
I’m doing an art one during pandemic
Oh! Where do you get it?
Rhett – my favorite Onion video:
Rhett – Oh wow, they had you manually inserting plastic overlay maps? That’s incredible. Talk about something to make me feel old.
Milo,
And it only cost an inflation adjusted $8,000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electro_Gyrocator
I remember how exciting it was that my dorm room had a T1 line…. we had dial-up at home. Now I have faster internet at home… and Wifi…
The cost of electronics just amazes me. Mearly 10 years ago, our flat-panel TV was nearly $800. We got a bigger TV with a better picture/refresh rate/smart TV blah blah blah and it was less than half that cost.
Did you all see this? https://twitter.com/even_kei/status/1263474205502423043?lang=en people went along and fell for it. OMG! I loved it. I do miss overboiling eggs just to have a clean mouse ball…
And, I’m amazed that kiwi fruit were really only introduced to the Northeast US in the late 70s.
That would explain why I never saw one.
Plus, it seems mostly useless. “You’re roughly here along this highway.”
Great. The mile markers can tell me that, though. Hard to imagine the sensor, and the maps, were accurate enough and available for turn-by-turn in the sort of places where you really need it.
Medical advancements is a big one for me since my life would be completely different had I not benefited from treatment that became available in the 1990s. An older cousin with my disease spent many years in a wheelchair before he died.
I remember simmering office disputes about smoking before it was prohibited. And flying was less pleasant, with nonsmoking sections being something of a joke.
I agree with most on the list and there are so many others.
“The other one that strikes me — and I’m probably jinxing myself — is car reliability. I grew up with breaking down being a fairly standard, if annoying, part of life. That was the huge revelation of Japanese imports in the late-’70s — wait, you mean they just sort of drive and drive?”
Interesting. I must suffer from car malfunction PTSD because I still worry too much about my car breaking down.
Milo, that Blockbuster video is a treasure. Thanks for posting it.
We were big fans of the show 24 BITD and enjoyed this parody of the unaired 1994 pilot. http://shortfilmsblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/24-unaired-1994-pilot.html
Pay phones, AOL dialup, phone pickup interrupting internet, bike messengers….a blast from the past
Plus, it seems mostly useless. “You’re roughly here along this highway.”
It was developed and sold (almost exclusively) in Japan because most streets don’t have names so it can make it very hard to navigate.
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/04/most-japanese-streets-dont-have-names/
You all don’t know what we went through trying to get from Point A to Point B! It was a nightmare, I tell you. We used Thomas Guides. I actually really miss Thomas Guides.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Guide#:~:text=Thomas%20Guide%20is%20the%20title,%2C%20Tucson%2C%20and%20Baltimore%2DWashington
@Rocky — remember Triptiks? I gotta say, my map-reading skills were on point by about 8 yrs old.
“I’m trying to imagine how a generic officer worker lived in 1992. I guess watching whatever happened to be on TV at the time and reading the paper were about it.”
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Let’s see, I lived in my hip condo downtown, near the projects they blew up a few years later. Ate breakfast and read the newspaper at home for a leisurely morning, because mornings such. Walked to work because I didn’t want to pay $8.25/day parking. Had to do the stupid C:\\ and remember 800,000 entirely miscellaneous combinations of letters and symbols to do anything. Mostly hand-wrote stuff and gave it to my secretary to type in, and hand-wrote edits. Got my first actual laptop and modem a couple of years later. Worried about ever getting my student loans and car paid off and didn’t see how buying an actual house would ever be possible. Read books and magazines. Went out to dinner periodically. Rented Blockbuster periodically. Went to movies in a theater a fair bit. The occasional concert. Wrote letters and talked on the phone to connect with people.
@SM — yeah, of course, but I was really thinking about the big changes in reliability from the late-70s through about the 80s or so. Then in the 80s and into the 90s, some of the earlier fancy tech gizmos in the cars tended to go really wonky (like the electronic window things that would get stuck, or my electronic control unit that gave my car vapor lock). It just feels like things have really smoothed out over the past 20 years or so, not even including my current car.
I think rental houses, like the proverbial OBX beach house, are a lot more affordable than they were 25 years ago. I know that we never did it as a kid, but that could have been due to the fact that my parents don’t tend to value travel at all.
But my FIL, in these sort of discussions on the topic, will recall that if you wanted to get an OBX beach house for a week, you might call the agent months in advance and they’d mail you these big binders of their portfolio of properties, and you’d look through the binders at pictures and information, and call back.
I’d have to think all that churn and friction would have increased the price, and probably kept a lot of houses off the market, which would also increase the price… (OTOH, maybe the easy option for the casual middle class owner to rent it out through VRBO has also raised the prices of real estate, so I don’t know)
Widespread digital photography. When my boys were born in the early 90’s, we used to shoot a role of film, take it to the one hour photo place (which in itself was a revolution), get double prints, mail second set of prints to Grandparents. Time between birth of my first kid and when Grandma saw his picture – 7 days.
Oh, yeah, digital photography is a good one.
I also appreciate interstate banking. We have moved around a lot. It was so much easier after 1995 when banks could acquire out of state banks and become national banks. Before that, if you moved to a different state, you had to close your account in the first state, carry your certified check to a new bank in the second state, and establish an account at that bank. Then they gave you starter checks with no address, which no one would take. Once you got your new checks in the mail a few weeks later, you could pay your bills. Banks that work across state lines – priceless!
Before anyone corrects me, role should have been roll.
HFN, that was definitely a change. By the time my first was born in 00, I had a digital camera (which kind of sucked at the time) and posted all my photos on Ofoto. Being still kind of old school, though, I also got prints made, which would arrive a week later.
Six years later, we went to China to adopt the youngest. By that time, I had a digital SLR. I wanted to be able to post photos and and updates every day for family and a slew of friends and have them be able to reply. At the time, Facebook was just seeping into the popular consciousness, and no one I knew was on it. So I set up a private Yahoo group, and had everybody sign up for it. You could get Gmail in China, so every evening I uploaded photos and wrote up a little commentary and posted it.
I miss this kind of city map. Every road and building is shown, and the way they are folded means they work sort of like a book, except besides going back and forth you can also flip up and down to look at any part without ever having to unfold the whole thing. They were really cool.
Rhett and Milo’s talk about overlaying plastic maps for navigation reminds me of some 1990s office supplies I jettisoned in the move: transparencies for teaching (some with pix, many with printed-out power point bullet points), magic markers (for writing on the overhead projectors), shiny silver tape that was used to crop parts of the 2” slides used for conference talks, and a carousel to put them in.
I love TripTiks! And ya, I could read a map pretty early in life. My mom still prefers maps.
I actually miss film photography. I think it’s kinda like that vinyl/digital thing with music. A well composed and processed/printed photograph looks very different from a digital one.
“you might call the agent months in advance and they’d mail you these big binders of their portfolio of properties, and you’d look through the binders at pictures and information, and call back.”
Milo (and Rhett) – like how they bought their house in the Money Pit. :)
I need to see that movie
@Fred – Yeah, smoking was legal in bars until Jan 1, 2008. I remember because at the beginning of my pregnancy, you could still smoke in bars, but by the time DS was born, you couldn’t.
@MM – I think you are WAY undervaluing the impact of the smartphone and Google (aka a search engine that worked followed by an explosion of interesting content to read). Non-CS people weren’t doing any of that stuff in the 90’s. Even in the later 90’s when I started working – killing time at work was more chit-chat, solitaire, reading the paper, and hiding out in the bathroom.
@Rhett – I think we are about the same age, but even in the late 90’s – one of my coworkers used to pick up a NY Post everyday at lunch in order to keep up his basketball fantasy league stats. He did them in excel (or maybe Lotus), but then he mailed out weekly updates to the league. USPS!!! Most people had email, but there wasn’t a good way to share documents outside of an office setting. (that’s for regular folk, MM) Very little productivity was lost to the internet until much closer to 2000. One of my old bosses used to listen to every Red Sox game on the radio while staring out the window. (In his defense, that was a job where we were busy 30% of the time and really not busy the other 70%.) I also had the sales douche who told me that his favorite tactic was to pretend he was going to the FedEx office and to take an empty FedEx envelope to the bar. LOL. I also had an older coworker who refused to use Excel & did everything in giant green ledger books that took up his entire desk. That gets back to the “huge, cluttered desk” part of the OP. He retired in 1998, so I guess he must have started working in the 50’s or 60’s. Weird to think that I have been in the workforce long enough to work with so many generations already. (“already” as if I haven’t been working for pay for 30+ years, in my field for 25)
Texting/messaging is huge too, even as a sort-of precurser to social media which has really changed people’s day-to-day lives too.
Has anyone mentioned luggage? I’m still amazed at how easy it is to wheel your luggage these days. So smooth! So sturdy! I remember when suitcases didn’t have wheels at all. Or in the early days of wheeled luggage, how you had to pull the suitcase with a strap, and it was hard to keep the bag balanced on the tiny little wheels, and it was always tipping over.
And I went to the eye doctor the other day, and I was reminded of how much more stylish eyewear is now than it used to be. So many choices for shapes, styles, and colors!
Mooshi, that’s such a sweet story about the daily updates! Anymore we have a thousand pix and no* descriptions.
Banking has gotten harder for me. I’ve had a USAA account for decades. It was no problem to move from state to state, and even to Europe and back. Now, as discussed previously, that bank has gone downhill. Besides that, the EU has introduced IBANs and BICs. What used to be a simple transfer is now a $45 international money order. It may be that this will be better in a couple of years—I see lots of ads for banks and transfer services that make it much easier and less expensive. I tried one, at the suggestion of my cell phone provider. It was a disaster. I recently clicked to comment on one of their ads—there were TONS of other complaints there! I don’t know how to evaluate the other services, expect i could block out a couple days and maybe figure something out, but idk.
*exageration.
Vacations in general, especially finding a hotel and you can forget about a rental house. Growing up we would get to the desintiation and drive around to find a hotel. Occationally my mom would pull our her Days Inn or Holiday Inn guide and find reserve a room for our arrival day. If the hotel was nice, we’d extend our stay. If it wasn’t nice, the next day we’d pack up and look for another hotel.
As for Rental Housing – I can’t recall anyone I know vacationing to a home of someone that was not a friend or a relative.
And speaking of rentals – I just booked a week up north on vrbo for July. Easy peasy.
“Wrote letters and talked on the phone to connect with people.”
I will say that although life is so much more awesome in so many ways now than it was in the 1990s, I do miss letters. My best friend from college and I still communicate by letter. Not often, but a handful of times a year. I love getting her messages in her handwriting.
And do Kids Today ever write love letters? Even all these decades later, I still remember the uniquely delicious thrill of receiving a love letter. Maybe I’m just old, but I’m hard pressed to imagine that a “love text” would be the same.
I think “improved” depends.
1. GPS – It is much easier for a single person in a car to use GPS than a paper map or even googled directions, especially if something (accident/construction) requires you to change course. But, I find that some people never even learn their home city because they rely on it so heavily. When I ask my DDs if they know where they are going, the answer is I’ll just put it in the GPS. If they are without the phone (GPS) they are the same as lost.
2. Cars – I remember the every 3-5K miles rule for car maintenance. My car is more in the 10-15K miles before it needs much (tire repair excluded). And, reliability has greatly improved. I disagree with someone up thread (S&M maybe) that it is directly proportional to the price of the car you can afford.
3. Food – I agree that selection is much more varied, especially in smaller cities, and affordable prices (percent of income spent on food).
4. Availability in General – Days and Hours you can buy things both in person and online. Blue laws used to mean almost no shopping on Sundays. Many stores, even grocery stores, in my area closed at 9 pm. That has crept up to midnight and even many are 24 hour.
I have old Triptiks stored in the attic. I loved those things. Hello, my name is July and I am a hoarder.
I used to take paperback books and slice them into 200 page sections for ease in reading them on my train commute. And for music I had a Walkman. So much better today!
“Has anyone mentioned luggage? I’m still amazed at how easy it is to wheel your luggage these days.”
Spinners were already common in Asia 20 years ago. It just took a while for them to become popular here.
“And speaking of rentals – I just booked a week up north on vrbo for July. ”
First read had me thinking you’re July’s travel agent.
Travel is definitely a change too. We used to use travel agents for any overseas trip. Even the trip to France in 01 was done through a travel agent. Actually, the first two trips to China were done through an agency that specializes in family trips to China, but that was because it is really hard to set up trips in China with lots of moving parts if you don’t speak Chinese. My last trip to China, though, was for a conference and only involved one city so it was easy to do myself.
In the 90’s, we always had a big book called Woodall’s Guide to Campgrounds. We would use that to plan camping trips.
OK, I know I was weird because I was in CS, but no one in my family was using phone or letter by the late 90’s. It was all email. Even my art teacher mother used email constantly.
“car reliability. I grew up with breaking down being a fairly standard, if annoying, part of life.”
I remember always keeping an extra quart of oil, some water for the radiator, jumper cables, some tools, and a repair manual in all my cars in case of some sort of breakdown.
But to Mooshi’s point, by the late 90s most cars had already gotten much more reliable. The main improvements since then have been reduced maintenance requirements and more safety features.
it’s probably worth mentioning that this blog, and what resulted, is an obvious difference that I never would have predicted. I’ve certainly learned about different career fields and lifestyles in a way that I never would have in the ’90s.
What a marvelous ability we have here, among this group, to expand our horizons of knowledge and familarity to a practically boundless variety of introverted, upper-middle-class professionals.
“We used Thomas Guides. I actually really miss Thomas Guides.”
Besides the Thomas Guides, we also used to keep phone books in our cars.
Milo, back in the 90s there was something called Usenet that facilitated similar discussions.
My employer had a bunch of internal Usenet groups that we’d use to discuss work-related topics, and there were external groups. E.g., I used to frequent some of the bicycling groups.
Besides the Thomas Guides, we also used to keep phone books in our cars.
Oh yeah, we did too! The phone books at the pay phones always had a ton of page torn out of them.
“I also appreciate interstate banking. We have moved around a lot. It was so much easier after 1995 when banks could acquire out of state banks and become national banks.”
Cell phones have also made it much easier to move around. Remember BITD when you’d be trying to arrange for things like utilities, but that was very difficult until you could get the phone company to turn on your service?
RMS, I am subscribed to letsmakeart.com’s watercolor box. I’m actually looking forward to doing this week’s tutorial tonight. I found it on Instagram when the pandemic was starting, and got a gift box to have for some entertainment. I really like it. You can watch without subscribing, but I had no supplies. Since I subscribed other crafting boxes have found me to advertise — knitting, crochet, and paint by numbers.
Do kids still carry around Lonely Planet/Lets Go books when travelling? Those were so great to read and use when I was backpacking around.
“I’ve certainly learned about different career fields and lifestyles in a way that I never would have in the ’90s.”
To this point, last night I was watching one of my favorite shows, Air Disasters, and I was telling DH that if this show existed in the 90s I may have had a completely different career. I’d love to be one of those guys investigating why planes crash. Step one would have been to focus my efforts on Calculus, and not take British Lit instead of Physics.
Since I’m no longer gated by the year 2000, I’ll add computer aided design (CAD) for drawings to the improvement list. At Deere, there were still vellum drawings used occasionally and the people who had created on vellum still worked there. I had to take an engineering drawing class that didn’t involve computers and I did poorly. As a lefty, I had to letter everything backwards to avoid smearing the pencil lead. Such coursework definitely made me view freshman/sophomore engineering classes as “gatekeeping” and not “essential skills for engineers.”
Finn, I first started on Usenet in 1987, with unix-wizards. It is funny to look at Reddit now, which is so similar that it makes me feel nostalgic. The topics still seem to be pretty much the same…
I never had a phone book in my car because you just called a special number and gave them the name and they would look it up. As the service got more sophisticated, it would put the call through for you too. This was in CT, MA, and NY
Internet rental listings is another improvement. When I took an interview trip here in 1997, I bought and saved a local newspaper, even though I didn’t think I’d move here. If I *did* move here, there was no other good way to get phone numbers for local apartment complexes.
Moving definitely required complex planning.
“The phone books at the pay phones always had a ton of page torn out of them.”
By the late 90s we’d had cell phones for a while (our state, at least back then, seemed to be early to embrace a lot of technology advances), but they were dumb phones, thus the phone books.
The addresses, in combination with the Thomas Guides, were also very useful.
One other thing I just remembered – we got married in 1996, and had an online registry. I forget which store it was through. Online registries were getting common even then, and none of the relatives had any trouble dealing with it.
“I’d love to be one of those guys investigating why planes crash.”
One of my jobs back in SV included investigating why electronic components failed. It was fun work that involved a lot of cool tools.
To this point, last night I was watching one of my favorite shows, Air Disasters, and I was telling DH that if this show existed in the 90s I may have had a completely different career. I’d love to be one of those guys investigating why planes crash.
I love that show! I will also read NTSB reports for fun.
I just remembered, some of those cool tools also gave me a chance to do some reading. A lot of them required a vacuum, so after mounting the sample in the chamber it’d would take a few minutes for the vacuum pumps to work, and since I had to stick around during that process, I’d get in a bit of reading.
Without mobile phones, the phone numbers part of the phone book in the car was useless—the addresses are what it was there for.
Btw, PBS is showing docus and movies about racism and police https://current.org/2020/06/pbs-to-broadcast-documentaries-and-specials-on-racism-and-police/?fbclid=IwAR0D178SGXYwQFKtjW36qXp3gklzC2Em2-_-z3on-i4q2tquxzqP7Mi0hVM&wallit_nosession=1
BITD, OBX rentals were arranged via a brochure and a realtor. They were not that expensive (or we never would have done it) but you did have to plan way in advance. Those big expensive homes simply didn’t exist. Everything north of Kitty Hawk on 12 was basically sand.if you found a decent house, you just booked it again for the same week the next summer. “Our” house had one story, no a/c ( but who wants a/c at the beach), no tv and no dishwasher. But it was right on the beach, near those giant creaky ancient original homes that are probably all gone now.
And I think my parents paid for it with travelers checks. Remember those?
Finn, I first started on Usenet in 1987, with unix-wizards. It is funny to look at Reddit now, which is so similar that it makes me feel nostalgic. The topics still seem to be pretty much the same…
Likewise the flame wars.
Without mobile phones, the phone numbers part of the phone book in the car was useless—the addresses are what it was there for.
And the yellow pages. If you didn’t know a specific company name, you could use the yellow pages to find it. And you could also find nearby companies that were similar, even if you didn’t have the name.
I never had a phone book in my car because you just called a special number and gave them the name and they would look it up. As the service got more sophisticated, it would put the call through for you too. This was in CT, MA, and NY
Girl, this was a national thing. 411. And you got to talk with the Operator about whether you were looking for the number for Kroger on Peachtree or Piedmont.
And the yellow pages. If you didn’t know a specific company name, you could use the yellow pages to find it. And you could also find nearby companies that were similar, even if you didn’t have the name.
I actually miss the yellow pages. Do they still exist? I need a wallpaper hanger in our beach town, and internet searches are surprisingly imprecise for this sort of thing.
Yep, 411 was in the Ohio hills too. I’m sure also existed in KY. I also remember making bogus attempts at collect calls, & then he’d call me back at a cheaper rate. But somehow we got busted. I don’t remember the details.
I blew my son’s mind recently by telling him about our local Time and Temperature and by reciting the complete text of a Dail-A-Devotion message, which I believe was located in Arkansas.
Yes, they do exist, Lark, but they’re not what they used to be.
Thanks, qqqq!
“What a marvelous ability we have here, among this group, to expand our horizons of knowledge and familarity to a practically boundless variety of introverted, upper-middle-class professionals.”
ROFLMAO
“What a marvelous ability we have here, among this group, to expand our horizons of knowledge and familarity to a practically boundless variety of introverted, upper-middle-class professionals.”
Gosh, we could use a prayer of gratitude. RMS?
REALLY stupid question: how in the world do you plug in the new Mac desktops? I got a thing for my desktop that will go up and down so I can stand while working. I didn’t realize DH had wrapped up all of the excess cordage, so when I went to raise it to the standing position, the plug pulled out of the back of the computer. Here’s the thing: I see a set of holes in the back of the computer that looks like you’d plug in a three-prong plug there. I see a cord that is plugged in to the wall socket with an empty end that looks like it belongs to the computer. Except that it’s also an innie instead of an outie: it has three holes that look like you’d plug in a three-prong plug there. But I don’t see anything with the actual three prongs. Help? I am feeling particularly stupid here.
OK, I wasn’t sure if it was national or not. I couldn’t even remember the number – amazed that you guys did. I used to use it with payphones before I had a cellphone. I think I had my first cellphone in 1994. I had a long twice a week commute and felt more secure with it, although I still found myself stopping at rest stops to use the pay phones when delayed.
Crap now DH is home and he’s going to be PISSED that I F’d with his computer — really really wanted to get it fixed before he got home!
Also I’m seeing the house Friday and will of course provide an appropriate update after. ;-)
“Without mobile phones, the phone numbers part of the phone book in the car was useless—the addresses are what it was there for.”
Yeah, we started carrying around phone books, mainly the yellow pages (a lot of books had separate white page and yellow page books) for the addresses as well as just to be able to look up businesses by their businesses.
But they became much more useful when we got cell phones, which for us was the mid-90s.
Also, we always had a pile of state highway maps in the glove compartment. They were almost like souvenirs, a record of where we had travelled to. My parents had maps for states like South Dakota, Idaho, Kansas, Colorado, Ohio, Arkansas…
I just remembered we did rent one house. It was on the same lake as a family member’s cottage, which explains how my parents knew about it. I was pretty rustic, but I remember having fun. My mom will occasionally bring that cottage experience up as one of her least liked vacations. The cottage was small, dark, and filled with bugs. The family member’s cottage was this huge new modern house.
O Lord God, from whom comes every good and perfect gift, we give Thee most hearty thanks for Thy love, grace and tender mercies. We praise Thee for everything, whether joy or sorrow, that brings us closer in union with Thee and our brothers and sisters here on Earth, including greater understanding of the differences between computer science and computer engineering, litigation and transactional law, tax accounting and financial accounting, applied math and theoretical physics, HPYS and the lesser Ivies, and AP and IBS classes. Though Ecclesiastes tells us
“For in much wisdom is much grief,
And he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.”
nevertheless does wisdom also increase smugness, and in our smugness we do rejoice.
In nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti, because we all took Latin,
Amen.
The migrant workers were using GPS on their cell phones to walk home. The magnitude of the issue became clear almost immediately but yet the government didn’t arrange for transportation till much later.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/05/30/asia/india-migrant-journey-intl-hnk/index.html
I love you RMS! This one might be your best yet.
I agree with Lemon Tree. The Latin seals the deal.
RMS – IBS classes :-) classes causing that condition I suppose.
“I love not having an ignition key. I don’t have to dig around in my purse for a car key. I feel much safer.”
OTOH, my family was recently discussing how the old advice to get out your car key before walking to your car, and hold it in your fist with the business end protruding between your middle and ring fingers, no longer applies.
The newer keys don’t give the same level of protection.
LfB,I looked in the back of DW’s iMac, and there’s only one place where a power cable could be connected. It’s in the back, lower center, so that the cable can easily be threaded to the hole in the stand.
RMS – IBS classes :-) classes causing that condition I suppose.
Ha! I of course didn’t catch that til I hit “post”. IB classes. You don’t need IBS classes, IBS comes naturally to some of us.
@Finn — thanks, I did find it finally — I was looking by the USB inputs, it was hidden by the post. And luckily DH went right outside to finish cleaning off the deck, so I got the computer back up and running before he noticed anything was wrong. ;-)
@MM
Online sales in 1996 were minuscule, and if you managed to have all your friends/family navigate online registries BITD then you are all part of a rare group.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ECOMPCTSA
I worked for a retailer that did registries from 2000 to 2006, and that was the time frame when the mail-order business went from being almost entirely catalog/phone order to being almost entirely online. Even when I started there, a critical mass of customers would call the call center and talk through the registry with a customer service person to complete a mail order. That was almost entirely gone by 2006.
I just don’t think you realize how on the leading edge of that stuff you & your circle are.
Ivy, the store that did this was Penney’s, which was hardly a groundbreaking trailblazer in the online world. I suspect what made it work was they fulfilled the stuff using their regular mail order setup. It was probably a weird hybrid and for all I know wasn’t even counted yet as “online sales”. It didn’t feel much different from ordering from their catalog. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had some kind of in-store computer so you could go there, in kind of traditional format, to choose the stuff. But lots of relatives used it, including older folks, and they all told us how much they liked using it
” I wouldn’t be surprised if they had some kind of in-store computer so you could go there, in kind of traditional format, to choose the stuff. ”
Kinda like if Service Merchandise replaced those handwritten sheets of paper with a computer that would print those sheets of paper.
So I just took at look at The Knot’s list of best online registries, and they list JC Penney, and it sounds like it is still exactly how it worked in 1996, including the scanners. No app back then, however.
“JCPenney has a registry system almost anyone can agree on. You can manage your registry online, in store, and through the JCPenney Wedding Registry app. In fact, as you walk through the store, you can simply scan items with your phone to add them to your list”
https://www.theknot.com/content/complete-registry-store-guide
@MM – Ah – that makes sense. Some of those were probably more phone order/mail order in my example then – and yes, the registry would have been integrated with in-store sales like the retailer I worked for. The retailers with a large catalog presence really had a head start on the internet boom in the late 90’s 2000’s since they already had the fulfillment infrastructure. (even compared to the Pets.com of the world)
Praise our smugness.
DS had his orientation today. He said it probably too much different than it would have been in-person aside from not being able to see anything on campus. He is registered for chem, calc, and two environmental science classes. He wasn’t planning on taking calc at all but it’s required for the accelerated master’s program.
They have an interesting twist for calculus. The first three weeks are a 1 credit pre-calc class where they assess your readiness for calc. Then if you pass, calc is the rest of the semester.
“but who wants a/c at the beach”
Ummmm. We’re talking about North Carolina here, not Cape Cod. :)
So I started wondering if I had hallucinated this, especially since Wikipedia claims Penneys started its online shopping site in 1998. But I Googled, and found this reference to it from 1997 in New York Magazine, in a listing of online wedding sites. It is p. 142
https://books.google.com/books?id=KegCAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA142&lpg=PA142&dq=JC+Penney+history+of+wedding+registry&source=bl&ots=qwSx79kkUh&sig=ACfU3U3r8fKFZQGp_tERguOa8GGUezjCFg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiysbflz-bpAhWegXIEHUxvAgwQ6AEwGnoECAwQAQ#v=onepage&q=JC%20Penney%20history%20of%20wedding%20registry&f=false
DenverDad, my kid did his honors orientation last week. Even though it was online, I could tell he got really excited by it. He could see the other kids in his cohort. He has his advising appointment for registration on June 10.
So I mentioned that we’ve been promised the airfare refund. 10-12 weeks.
And now, in a final victory, DW has persisted and persisted at hounding Booking.com over our nonrefundable hotel reservation in Copenhagen. To briefly summarize a lot of repeated chat and email exchanges, first they said “Screw you, not refundable.”
DW was like “But we can’t even get there if we wanted to!”
And the hotel/booking.com then said “we’ll give you a credit to use within a year.”
(not bad, but the problem is that I’m not sure we’re going to do that cruise because the whole reason we were willing to spend all that extra money was because the grandparents wanted that location, and I don’t see them getting on a cruise within a year)
But in the past couple of days, DW noted the news reports that Denmark was only slowly opening up to visitors from Germany, maybe a couple other European countries, but not Americans.
And DW contacted booking.com and said “Look, we had a contract with your organization that you would arrange this hotel for us to stay in. Now the country in which it is located will legally not permit us to go there. Not your fault, but come on, there’s no way that either of us can uphold this contract.”
And they finally just now said “Enough already! Christ! We’ll give you your refund.”
We’re talking about North Carolina here, not Cape Cod. :)
And it can easily be stifling hot on Cape Cod in the summer as well.
I wonder if orientation will just remain online When Things Return to Normal.
Freakanomics did an episode recently about the future of college. The president of Arizona State was really interesting. I was particularly interested to hear they had a lot of kids still on campus because they had nowhere to go. “Its our job to take care of them, so they are living with us.”
In the vein of opening things up, the home country is not allowing international travel but by August they may have to allow people to leave since there are a ton of students who study in the U.S. I hope my parents can leave too.
RMS, that prayer is one for the ages. It’s like the Totebag equivalent of the Lord’s Prayer or Psalm 23 – it will stand the test of time.
RMS. I bow down to you. Amazing.
He could see the other kids in his cohort.
DS was not impressed with the other kids in his. He said there were a lot of stupid questions.
Freakanomics did an episode recently about the future of college.
I listened to it when they put it up. Very interesting.
I drove from the coast to the middle of the country to a wedding in 2000. We stayed in a campground in Nebraska and called JCPenney (thankfully no one had torn that page out of the yellow pages) to find out where we could stop the next day to buy a wedding gift. The operator was shocked! My computer says there are no stores within 100 miles of you!! There was a sears catalog store (I think) a few hundred miles away, but on our route, so we stopped there. We bought some cute kitchen accessories that were definitely not on the registry, because we couldn’t get to a JCPenney to use the registry. Even though I had just finished college and had (ostensibly) used the internet a lot, there was no technology cure for this problem. In the end we showed up with an appropriate present at a cornfield and saw a JoP marry our friends and then went to a church for a potluck dinner, so I guess it wasn’t really a problem after all.
Finn — I recently friended a couple of girls from high school (so okay, they’re 60-year-old women now, shut up, they’ll always be girls to me) who were in orchestra in high school. Flipping idly through their pictures on Facebook, I gotta say, I think orchestra people partied as hard as the band people. A violin is no shield against sin, I tell you what.
RMS, my sister was in All County orchestra, and I can guarantee you they partied. She was shy and not a partier but she told me a lot of the stories.
These two women grew up to be professional musicians, and the partying continues! Even in chamber orchestras and the like.
I thought I would post this here as well as the politics page
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/03/covid-19-surgisphere-who-world-health-organization-hydroxychloroquine
Ada, the JCPenney story is kind of like the national map of Whole Foods stores.
Rocky, you should be saving these prayers so one day they can be compiled into a book, or a 365 day calendar for Totebaggers.
With due respect to the favorites noted by others, this line sealed the deal for me:
“…HPYS and the lesser Ivies…”
In my mind, I heard your blessings in Michael Palin’s voice reading from The Book of Armaments in Monty Python and The Holy Grail. Though I’m sure you don’t speak like him, I prefer to read it with that lilt to the verse.
*hear, not heard
RMS – never leave us!
RMS – you are amazing.
“In nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti, because we all took Latin,
Amen.”
No Latin, but 12+ years of Catholic school and church means I know that one! Ha!
JCPenney registry – they were one of the first retailers to offer a wedding/baby/gift registry. And when you went to the store to start a registry, a consultant helped you through everything. They walked through each portion, and helped you choose your items. Also offered etiquette tips and suggestions. My mom ran one of these departments at a JCP back in the day.
Pray for me folks. Starting tomorrow, I am facilitating a 3 day fully virtual conference. I’ve been spending all day today getting presenters up and running, finishing my talk, and organizing little stuff. And I need to write a few formal emails to our potential interns tomorrow morning before the conference starts. Too much to do and not enough Rhodes to go around.
Good luck Rhode! I’m sure you’ll nail it!
I went out to dinner with a friend today. It was almost just like the old times aside from them having all the indoor seating closed off. They had online menus – you scan a barcode and it pulls up the menu on their website. I thought that was pretty neat, I assume they have physical menus if people need them.
“I think orchestra people partied as hard as the band people.”
Did they both pull from the same gene pool?
At my kids’ school, there are a bunch of band kids from the same gene pool as the orchestra, but there are also a bunch of kids from a different gene pool.
OTOH, DW and I are from the same gene pool as my orchestra kids, and we both partied in HS. So I assume it’s more peer group than genetics.
Louise, how can they prevent people from leaving? If your parents don’t have residency permits for the US, they might not be permitted to enter, but that’s a US thing. And if they do go to stay with you in the US, they will be able to go back to the country where they have citizenship. It’s part of the UDHR and a backbone of international law. They might be required to quarantine or something, but part of what citizenship means is that when you go there, they have to take you in.
Milo, well done by your wife! Booking.com can be tenacious.
Mooshi, I remember taking that wad of maps out of the glove compartment and wondering what I was supposed to use the space for them. It filled up with other stuff pretty soon.
Ivy, it took me a minute to compute the “FexEx envelope to the bar” story. At first I thought that was how he tried to pick up women and wondered if we had ever been that lame, lol.
Denver, a lot of those classes sound like they’d have labs. What happens if campus is closed this fall? The 3-week pre-calc thing sounds like a smart way to deal with kids realizing about that far into the semester that they are in over their heads & need to get out.
SM – in the home country international travel has been stopped except for evacuation flights bringing people who are jobless/stuck all the world back home. No, regular international flights means no one else can leave.
Also, the government there has banned people with lifelong visas (home country origin like myself) with a different citizenship from entering. This has caused a lot of hardship to families where some family members especially children have a lifelong visa for the home country but a different citizenship. This has been a major let down for the diaspora. We had assumed same travel rights as citizens. This means many families can’t avail of the evacuation flights because some of them just have a lifelong visas and not citizenship.
The life long visa is a pain both in terms of documentation required and processing times. A lifelong visa gives you all rights except right to vote and own agricultural land. The pandemic has exposed many faults and this is one of them.
I would say find out what you can and cannot do in Germany with a different citizenship. I don’t know whether they have dual citizenship there and what that entails.
Denver, that calculus twist sounds like a smart way to screen students. And how fun to go out to dinner. My cleaning lady is coming back today. I’m feeling optimistic about a path to a new normal.
“No Latin, but 12+ years of Catholic school and church means I know that one!”
That’s how I learned my Latin, but I’m surprised in your era Latin was still a thing in Catholic schools. And good luck with all your juggling!
I’m not sure when self-defrosting freezers became common, but I remember the job of having to manually defrost a freezer. PITA. I’m reminded because we actually own a free-standing freezer that is not self-defrosting and my H will be handling that chore in the next few days.
I do not miss the days of defrosting a refrigerator because it was a lot of work. I had to do this in college and in my first apartment after college. I used my blowdryer even though my mother warned me to be patient and stop using the blowdryer.
Defrosting the freezer and cleaning out the fridge was a monthly (I think) chore of my childhood. There weren’t that many items in the fridge because we shopped frequently for food but it was still a pain. There was a lot of ice formation in the freezer.
In the 80s we got a Sony fridge and it was a marvel having a big no frost freezer.
Denver, a lot of those classes sound like they’d have labs. What happens if campus is closed this fall? The 3-week pre-calc thing sounds like a smart way to deal with kids realizing about that far into the semester that they are in over their heads & need to get out.
Chem is the only one with a lab. I’m sure they will have a contingency plan set up if they have to move online, but the school president has been very adamant that they are going to be on campus this fall. They do keep pushing back the dorm selection because they haven’t worked out the housing plan yet.
They said that’s the intent with the calculus set up – to make sure people are in the right appropriate math class.
How does AP Calculus AB and AP Calculus BC equate to Calculus 1, 2, 3 etc ? Kids school offers these AP classes in addition to Honors Calc. I am lost figuring out the sequence.
Did they both pull from the same gene pool?
…yes? They were all white, if that’s what you’re asking. They were all affluent. White and affluent, that’s my old high school. Now it’s much more mixed, because there are far more Asian students. And I think a lot are flat-out rich, rather than merely affluent. The affluent can’t afford Palo Alto.
OTOH, DW and I are from the same gene pool as my orchestra kids, and we both partied in HS.
I’m going to have to lie down with a cold compress and eau de cologne. This revelation has shattered my entire worldview.
So I also got married in 1996, and I actually remember the limited internet-based registry options, because all of DH’s family’s friends were still in the greater NYC area, and I had to make sure to choose someplace where they could find stuff. So I went to Bloomingdales (which, at least at the time, had a store nearby), because I knew they were from NY. I had to set up an appointment and walk through with a person to choose stuff. But after I did that, the registry was available online, so his side could see it.
OTOH, 5 years later when we had DD, we went to Babies R Us and did the wand thing to choose what we wanted and it was added to the registry. Now that was GREAT fun.
Louise: now that is a Rhett-worthy conman. It still amazes me that you can pretty much say anything, and if you’re charismatic and say it with sufficient confidence, a significant number of people will believe you.
Milo, I am about to start a similar process with British Airways/Expedia — when I pull up the BA record locator, they show only our return flight. I am not looking forward to hours on the phone going back and forth between the two. Feel free to send your DW up this way to manage things for me. . . .
Louise,
“AP Calculus BC is an extension of AP Calculus AB: the difference between them is scope, not level of difficulty. AP Calculus AB includes techniques and applications of the derivative, the definite integral, and the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. It is equivalent to a semester of calculus at most colleges and universities. AP Calculus BC includes all topics in AP Calculus AB, plus others such as parametric, polar, and vector functions, and series. It is equivalent to one year of calculus at most colleges and universities.”
This page might be helpful to you:
https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-calculus-bc/course/frequently-asked-questions
Finn — What are the “gene pools” to which you are referring??
LfB, the JC Penney registry had the wand thing even in 1996. That was the best part!!
“and we both partied in HS”
what does “partied” entail?
what does “partied” entail?
He had a beer in 11th grade. If not for that beer, who knows the heights he could have achieved? But ’twas not to be, and all because of the band peer group.
“He had a beer in 11th grade.”
Slow starter. I was drinking beer with kids, age range from me to ~16yos, in the park up the street when I was 12, Coors. (note: legal age for alcohol purchase never went below 21 in CA).
Rocky, you are on a roll. Don’t ever change.
@DD — glad the orientation went well. That’s a tough courseload — good luck to him!
I agree with that three-week pre-calc course ONLY if they teach it fairly, instead of deliberately threatening people with the old “look to your right” one of you won’t be here HA HA HA you’re all morons! routine.
Challenging coursework is fine. Making a big production out of how YOU’RE ALL GOING TO DIE AND WE’RE GOING TO LAUGH AT YOU isn’t.
Not the right topic for this, but DS, DD2 and I are going to the teenager’s funeral today. He had only been a teenager for a few days. He died in a farming accident. I’m dreading this. I’ve talked to DS about his memories of the boy. Little boys love big boys who pay attention to them. DS and his lifeguard buddies made this kid their little mascot last summer. In time DS will share some of those memories with the boy’s parents, but probably not today.
This is the second time I have taken my children to a teenager funeral. At my high school, every year in the yearbook, there was a memorial page for the kids who had died that year. In the past eight years, there have been three kids who died. So maybe things are getting better.
Thanks RMS !
Cassandra — I’m so sorry, and so glad you can be there for this family. The more you talk about your DS, the clearer it becomes that he’s a really special kid. I’m glad he was there for that boy, and that he will be there for the boy’s family as time passes.
That’s heartbreaking, Cass. I’m sorry.
Stanford plans to allow the equivalent of two classes of undergraduates to return to campus in each quarter of the 2020-21 academic year including summer 2021, President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Provost Persis Drell announced on Wednesday in an email to faculty. They wrote that online teaching will remain “the default” option next year for undergraduates.
Under the tentative plan, all undergraduates would be offered two quarters of campus housing, and would be expected to complete at least one additional quarter remotely. First-year students would reside on campus in fall, and seniors in spring, but no other decisions about which undergraduates would be on campus for each quarter have been made. In addition to each quarter’s designated students, those with special circumstances would be permitted to live on campus, as was allowed this quarter.
Milo beat me to it: Finn will have to define partying before RMS retires to the fainting couch.
Cass, I’m so sorry. My thoughts are with their family.
Louise, Calc AB covers calc 1 and BC covers calc 1 and 2.
So sorry to hear that, Cass.
Cass, I’m so sorry. I hope your thought about farming getting less dangerous is correct.
Cass, that is terrible!
I would completely encourage your DS to share those memories when he is ready. A letter from your DS describing a part of their son’s world that they may not have seen would brighten their day.
Louise, my understanding is that there are three parts to AP Calc– A, B, and C.
AP Calc AB covers parts A and B. AP Calc BC covers all three.
It would probably be easier to understand if AP Calc BC were renamed AP Calc ABC, or if they combined A and B, and renamed the classes AP Calc A and AP Calc AB.
AP Physics is also confusing.
Cassandra, that is awful. I agree that the family would treasure your DS’s memories as part of their own.
RMS – can we put the prayers on a separate tab or something on the home page? ;)
Cass – sorry to hear about your DS’s friend