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A lot of good games came out on the PS2. That was good.
PS3 too. I have to say, video games have gotten worse since that era ended. Not immediately, though.
Videogames stopped being good when they stopped making sly cooper
My dude, only 24 years have elapsed in this century https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_century, the 25th year has only just started. Try again next year.
God when are people going to get tired of this disgusting, useless, tween angst attitude toward life?
When there’s less shit to be angsty about.
Really? In the history of the world, there hasn’t been a time more safer, healthier or better for mankind then now.
Don’t stare yourself blind only on the scary stuff. That’s what the media wants, to make you obedient, scared and consuming.
Instead, why not engage and talk with people? For every ugly person in the news, there are 100 good people in real life.
Break the cycle of negative echo chambering. Please.
It depends on what you mean by “ugly”. Seeing so many people worldwide vote for harsh xenophobic policies made me realize that I consider most people sort of ugly.
Perhaps they are just afraid, but it paints the real world picture. I don’t think people are good or bad inside, just egoistic. Me included.
Still I try to see the good in people and I tend not to whine, but I do understand the pessimistic views.
I feel this negative outlook isn’t very healthy. Yes there are problems, as there have been at any point in history. That doesn’t mean nothing good happens or can happen.
Go make some nice things happen to yourself or someone else.
Lord of the Rings came out this century. Let’s give credit where credit is due.
JRR Tolkien would like a word.
I know the sorts of words he likes, and I just haven’t got that kind of spare time right now.
Boomers 401k and McMansion values exploded
Their rich owner daddies got richer
Rest of working people gonna need to work harder so they can live their best lives!
Extreme poverty worldwide is down from 38% to 8.5% since 2000. Global median income has doubled in that period. And yes, that’s adjusted for inflation.
Oh, and renewable energy generation as share of the global energy mix has consistently beaten expectations during that period, too. Solar, specifically.
Bullshit. Global inequality is on a constant rise. The extreme poverty crap is propaganda by the world bank who lowered the poverty line for no other reason than to make capitalism look good.
That stuff about renewaple energy is simple greenwashing. The only year since 2000 when CO2 emissions went down was in 2020 thanks to COVID.
Bullshit. Global inequality is on a constant rise.
You are one of the many who has equivocated the ‘wealth gap’ with the incidence of poverty, when there is no direct casual relationship between them at all.
All the wealth gap essentially is is just a label of who has the most wealth. But you don’t need to be anywhere close to that to be stable/comfortable.
Fact: if everyone on Earth was poor, the wealth gap would be zero. A small/non-existent wealth gap does not equal things being in good shape.
Fact: The correlation between the size of the gap and the incidence of poverty in world history is negative–in other words, long ago, the gap was smaller, and many more people were desperately poor.
Fact: It is absolutely possible for there to be a wealth gap, even one as large or larger than the one we have presently, while no one is poor. Further, it’s extremely unlikely that the hypothetical total eradication of poverty would shrink the gap at all, or even slow its growth.
Fact: If you waved a magic wand so that everyone in every county of the US, for example, had their income raised to the median, essentially wiping out poverty nationwide, the size of the wealth gap would literally be unchanged–the gap from broke to comfortable is nothing compared to the gap between comfortable and ‘wealthiest on the planet’.
New wealth is created constantly, it is not zero sum and never has been. And there will always be someone who has the most.
P.S. The World Bank’s poverty line has never been lowered that I can see, only raised, most recently in 2022 from $1.90 to $2.15 per day. So no idea what you’re talking about with ‘lowering the poverty line to make capitalism look good’.
Interesting video, thanks. I think the main point is that most (historical) data has a lot of gaps and wrong interpretations / extrapolation. People like Pinker seem to (perhaps just ignorantly) somewhat cherry pick data and use it as an argument for their optimistic statement.
More plebs suffering under capital owners = global poverty rate went
Doesn’t look that way to me, given that the change has been pretty smooth and shows up on specific regions and adjusting for outliers and inflation (and matches the rise in median income).
More importantly, it’s not incompatible with global inequality on the rise. Different stats measure different things.
Renewable energy beating expectations is the opposite of greenwashing, it specifically compares actual generated renewable energy against previous projections. If you want to poke holes into it for the sake of… denying anything good has ever happened, I guess? you should instead point out at how disproportionately that growth is driven by China.
And again, that’s perfectly compatible with CO2 emissions going up. Different stats, different things.
And again, that’s perfectly compatible with CO2 emissions going up. Different stats, different things.
The only reason to care about renewables is if they prevent climate change. Why am I supposed to be happy solar panels exist, if CO2 emissions are increasing?
Because those are two separate parameters. Less solar panels don’t mean less CO emissions, they mean more. You are cutting down on one metric even if you’re not reversing the trend.
That is an absurd question, by the way. Why are you supposed to be unhappy we’re making more solar panels in this scenario? What is the downside?
Because more solar means that the increase in CO2 was much less than it would’ve otherwise been without solar. An ocean liner doesn’t turn on a dime. First emissions increase less than they would’ve, then they increase at rates lower than years past, then they stop increasing, and then finally they can begin decreasing
But energy use is way up and AI data centers have erased all gains from renewables.
Care to source that statement? What’s the global consumption for AI compared to production by renewables?
Cool, but that’s unrelated. We need the energy transition to happen anyway. Energy consumption is still climbing regardless, so we still need to move things over to renewables on top of whatever other actions we take. When it comes to climate stuff people tend to want a silver bullet or claim that anything short of that is useless, which I find kind of infuriatingly counterproductive.
Also, data centre power consumption has been up on aggregate on a very smooth curve since the 2000s. AI or no, those things have been burning through an increasing amount of energy over time. They need to generate that energy from clean sources in any case, which requires a faster energy transition.
Incidentally, I don’t know if AI datacenters have “erased all gains”. I don’t have a direct comparison handy, but the numbers I see around for those two things seem an order of magnitude apart. If you have good sources I’d love to take a look, though.
I suspect the claim that AI has consumed all gains is hyperbole, given that it used to be applied to crypto.
Regardless, those assholes are still using too much power, privatising the benefits, and socialising the fall out.
Sure? But, again, the question is whether there have been positive changes this century. Separate negative changes are not a counterpoint.
AI power consumption would have been AI power consumption. The unexpectedly fast adoption of solar is there regardless.
Obviously, that depends how you’re counting.
In the year 2,000, if you projected solar adoption, you might now be pleasantly surprised.
However in the year 2,000 if you projected progress on climate change, you’d probably now be horrified.
Solar adoption wouldn’t be a positive if not for climate change.
That’s the best part, though, solar adoption has beaten forecasts consistently over time. Most revisions upwards have still been too conservative.
Now, is that fueled by an energy crisis in turn caused by war, making self-generation and energy independence more appealing? Maaaaybe. But still, sun power!
That doesn’t address my point though.
Solar is only good because climate change is bad.
You can’t say “solar adoption is good” and ignore the climate deteriorating faster than expected.
I don’t know too much about the median income, but I’d wager that it was mostly because the really poor country got a bit better off. Also, at least according to Wikipedia, the latest definition of extreme poverty was made in 2015, before the recent inflation spikes.
And “beat expectations” is just a non-statement. What were the expectations? And how does it matter if we’re still on track for a climate catastrophe? We’ve crossed the 1.5°C target.
Hey, I’ll take poor countries getting a bit better off before any benefits to any American any day. That’s good news, so point made.
As for “beat expectations”, I was going off a specific study showing multiple official forecasts and how far behind actuals they all were, but unfortunately I don’t have it handy.
But the data is the data, so here’s another example from an Australian blog post: https://evcricketenergy.wordpress.com/2025/01/02/2030-renewables-in-australia-forecast-2024-update/
And some data on renewable generation overtaking fossil fuels in the EU: https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2024/09/Report_Wind-and-solar-overtake-EU-fossil-fuels-in-the-first-half-of-2024.pdf
I don’t know why people look at this as such a binary. Climate change isn’t an on-off switch. This has to happen regardless. Faster is better than slower. Climate catastrophe or not, we need to figure this out, it’s about how bad things get before we do and how much extra work and impact we have to deal with from going over certain thresholds. Going over 1.5 doesn’t mean we can give up now, we still have to get the renewable transition done, even if now we also have to deal with a bunch of humanitarian crises that wouldn’t have happened had we transitioned sooner.
but I’d wager that it was mostly because the really poor country got a bit better off.
That’s what happened. The bimodal world income distribution has become unimodal as the working class of East Asia has seen a lot of improvement. Inequality in the first world went up since a lot of working class jobs left their countries while the wealthy were able to get richer.
I met and married an amazing person this century, so I’ve got that going for me which is nice.
Congratulations! Same here!
Congratulations! Same here!
Congratulations! Same here!
Yes. The fediverse wouldn’t get much awareness if it wasn’t for Twitter and Reddit absolutely shutting themselves. I wouldn’t even be here if that never happened.
Assuming you meant “shitting themselves” - Lemmy is doing that too, it just wipes better, at least for now.
It’s a better description than mine.
That’s technology in a nutshell. We moved off of one platform to join another.
If we didn’t, we’d still be sending each other messages on AOL and join chatrooms to have discussions.
At least this time around there’s no central server that can be shut down killing everything that exists in that platform. Obviously AOL Instant Messenger and many other popular messaging apps from that era suffered from this exact fate.
Guys, I don’t think I will make it to the end. I could live to 122 years old but I don’t want to.
Have you read about the first quarter of the prior century?
Robber barons and spiraling inequality:
- 1920s ✓
- 2020s ✓
Ooh! The dust bowl of the 30’s and the, I’m sure, many many ecological and natural disasters heading our way will have nice synergy on your list as well.
The US will be playing the role of the Weimar Republic this time around, BTW.
ikr this time last century we had just finished the most deadly war in history and one of the deadliest pandemics in history.
World war already started we just haven’t accepted it yet.
At least we handled the pandemic much better… Boomers are still around hmmm
Not according to those who think that the new century only began in 2001 because the Christian calendar has no year 0 or smth.
So in the year 2000 it wasn’t a new century? Seems pretty stupid
Yep. That’s because there can’t be a “0th year after that one geezer was born”. It’s -1 BC (the last year before) and then immediately 1 AD (the first year after).
(I know they did the calculations wrong and it should actually be somewhere around -6 to -4. That doesn’t change the fact that there is no year 0.)
How 'bout we don’t give a fuck and use a sensible system instead?
What did I do to you…? I was just explaining what the reasoning for “there’s no year 0” is. I don’t agree or disagree with it. What would be a more sensible system exactly? One based on anything other than the birth of a mythological figure? Sure. Got any suggestions that are implementable without exorbitant effort?
Just adding a year 0 would be enough. Other than that, the human era.
You know that would shift every year after 0 one down, yes? We’d be in 2024 now. That doesn’t seem easily implemented.
That’s… not the only option. We could also shift down everything below 1. Sure, that would shift some historical dates, but would not really affect any part of modern life. And we already have situations where we need to account for different calendar systems (e.g. the October Revolution actually happened in November, according to our current calendar), so we know the world doesn’t end. And when Russia switched to the Gregorian calendar, which was more complicated than adding a 0 somewhere, the world didtend either.
So you’d want the year leading up to Jesus’ (supposed) birth to be 0. Okay. Why though? Never mind that it doesn’t make sense to start counting at 0 (calling the first instance of something the “0th” instance), I’m still puzzled over what the benefit would be. I’m not saying the world would end, I’m just not seeing why.
Russia switching to the Gregorian calendar was aligning itself with its neighbours, the world has changed significantly since then, having the “correct” date, i.e. the same as everybody else, has become A LOT more important.
Of course there can be an 0th year.
Kids don’t start at 1 because they can’t be 0, you start counting by days weeks and months and then years. This wasn’t even a problem though, because in the 0th year people weren’t walking around referencing dates according to whatever calendar we use.
If no years have elapsed then it’s the 0th year.
It sounds to me as though some idiot named the 0th year “1”, which just happens to be a numeral.
Kids start at 0 because they’re not yet 1 year old. They’re only 1 year old after their first birthday and during the second year of their life. Jesus wasn’t 1 year old during year 1, it was just year number 1 after his (supposed) birth.
Edit: I just remembered: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asian_age_reckoning
Conservatism has dragged America fifty years behind in tech progress and wasted all of our resources on destruction over building. I wish this country would get fucking NUKED. America is a dismal failure on every level
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We could be driving electric cars and having solar panels everywhere.
We could be having the fastest wifi network.
We could have high speed trains.
Medical advances as well. I don’t even want to go into the vaccine territory.
All of those things were considered problematic by the old guard, who conservatives supported. One side continues to protect the yacht owning class. Conservatives would still be fighting marijuana if the rest of the population didn’t tell them to fuck off.
And if you think this is all wishy-washy speculation, get the fuck out of America for a minute and look around the rest of the world. American cities are no where near other international cities in terms of living, quality, tech, support. You have to be dumb as fuck to not recognize how often Conservatives vote against tech initiatives to line their own pockets.
Ehh looking at semi conductor & solar panel production I see what this person’s saying. “Losing 50 years of tech progress” isn’t quite accurate definitely, however the US has decayed its tech lead compared to the space race era, for example.
The thing about losing progress is you can’t know where you would be if priorities were different.
If the same amount of passion and resources was poured into the space program for the last 50 years as it was during the moon landing we would certainly be much further ahead, but no one would be able to tell you where would we be.
How do expect someone to describe something that hasn’t been invented yet?
The thing about losing progress is you can’t know where you would be if priorities were different.
There are some cases where you can know where you’d be if priorities were different. Hence the most frustrating graph in the world:
Very revealing if it’s true. Fusion is the perpetual “20 years away” poster child.
Here’s a PDF of the study, seems legit
Oh I totally believe it, I meant assuming all those figures on the graph were true, which I do. Been following fusion for decades. Frankly it looks more and more like the fusion industry has taken the same approach to fusion that drug industry take with disease - don’t cure it, just keep treating it forever.
Turns out electric companies aren’t too interested in electricity that’s too cheap to meter.
Obviously not everywhere but marriage equality made great strides.
I ate a really nice curry in 2014.
And that places closed a week later because of health code violations right?
I learned how to make a really nice curry.
