To get to your conclusion you ignore 99% of what my comment si about and concentrate on a single thing, cars. I don't like these kinds of arguments where people carefully select one minor thing and pretend it's the main point. I wrote about quite ab bit more, and cars were not even close to the center of my post!

> I call friends and family, enhancing connections and communicating more.

I also question the validity of statements such as these. It does not seem to me to be supported by evidence that our connections between people - and lets concentrate on connections between already connected people to remove the question if new tech lets us make new ones more often - are qualitatively better than in the past. I would think such a statement very much deserves a [Citation needed] response. I think a lot of your statements are equally... creative and subjective, or worse ("I don't die as often, living is productive.").

Just my perspective:

I don't feel like I know my friends or family very well these days, despite being friends for almost thirty years with some.

Twenty years ago we would talk on MSN or email and arrange to do something or hang out. These days you just see photos of their lunch.

I also feel like a lot of folks are scared to hang out, even pre-COVID, because they have nothing to talk about that isn't already on Facebook. What they do discuss is pretty much solely consumption of "I ate x", "I bought y".

I largely feel like folks have lost the art of conversation. Instead they're now content creators.

My perspective is quite the opposite, people travel to see each other way more, video chat way more, and we talk about more diverse and interesting stuff.

They have more hobbies and more interesting hobbies (the internet has really exploded the ability to learn about and try things, and new tech like kite surfing is popular with my friends). My wife learned how to sew during the pandemic using just YouTube.

Very interesting! I've found that most people I know never really access the internet outside of Facebook. The idea of using a search engine is something academics apparently do. Seeing far fewer businesses with their own websites too, just telling people to follow them on Instagram or Facebook.

Sorry, I use a phone to look up transit info and it's 100x more convenient.

There's a massive and tangential discussion to be had about tech and it's influence on culture and connectivity, but that's not for this thread.

> Sorry, I use a phone to look up transit info and it's 100x more convenient.

I'm a bit baffled, what does your reply have to do with either of my previous comments? I mean what I actually wrote, I'm aware I prominently mentioned such a convenience feature. It's just that there was no question that it was convenient.

It's a direct response to this:

> It was when I looked at the tram station not far form my house, which for a year or so has been upgraded to have a display with the expected arrival times of the next three trams.

> It sure is very convenient! However, compared to a similar transport system of fifty years ago, which achieved the same thing, we now have a lot of additional effort to maintain such infrastructure. It got waayyyy more complex, all the electronics, and software has to be written and maintained, screens installed and maintained, computer infrastructure - all just for some slight improvement in convenience. Is it worth it? I have no conclusion, I just have to think about that when I hear yet another "we need more 'Fachkräfte'" (skilled workers). How many people do we need for mostly just minor convenience upgrades?

You made up some arbitrary thing that you admit improves quality of life, and I pointed out that your example doesn't really even capture the difference. 40 years ago you had to ask around, or call to ask about the times of tram. Now you can find the exact times, delays, of any tram anywhere directly from your tiny pocket supercomputer. The difference is so stark, and yet you focused on signs at the station when the revolution was in your hand.

---

Realizing you brought up like 5 different things, and now every time I refute one you're motte and bailey-ing to the next thing. I don't owe you to refute every point you put out, the thread here was a specific example of tech improving productivity, and I think it's definitive.

The study is ridiculous and proves nothing, and the rest is pathos and too broad to reply to.

> It's a direct response to this:

I still don't see how the reply fits to the comments I made. You missed the point of my example by miles, is my impression still. I think I already expressed it well enough even in the original comment, so I have no idea how to re-express it for you.

> 40 years ago you had to ask around, or call to ask about the times of tram

No you didn't. The train or bus schedule was and still is posted at each station, and pocket watches have been a thing for a very long time. I find your style of a bit tiring to be honest.

> You made up some arbitrary thing

Even more misrepresentation! I did not make up anything! That happened!

> Realizing you brought up like 5 different things, and now every time I refute one you're motte and bailey-ing to the next thing. Realizing you brought up like 5 different things, and now every time I refute one you're motte and bailey-ing to the next thing.

You keep ignoring my point and keep talking about deliberate misrepresentations of some minor examples that merely serve as illustration!

> The difference is so stark, and yet you focused on signs at the station when the revolution was in your hand.

Given what the parent comment is about, the really huge difference e.g. between tech such as gas lights and electricity, or horse carriages and modern transport, your claim of a "stark" difference seems unjustified to say the least. You still get from A to B in about the same time and with at best a minor improvement in efficiency and convenience. It is certainly not a game changer to have computerized timetables compared to paper schedules plus watches and clocks, unless a transport system is so grossly broken that it barely ever runs anywhere close to the posted schedule.

I see no basis for you claims of "stark difference" and "revolution", given the context of this entire discussion. The Internet and computerization are, but not replacing paper tram schedules with electronic boards. Again, unless your experience is from some place where the paper schedules were completely useless and trains and buses ran randomly and you had huge random wait times. In which case they would still be far better off fixing their broken transport system so that the schedule actually has meaning.

> I don't owe you to refute every point you put out

You keep "refuting" what there never was to begin with. For example, as if I had said "there is no benefit" (of changes), a point I never made.

Never once did you even acknowledge (or ever even see?) my point, which is the position in a larger context. You keep attacking positions I never took. I will not repeat them here, since I already mentioned them in my original post.

> The main point though is that you don't accomplish more

You said this is your main point, and I directly replied to that.

Another point you made was that electronic signs at trams aren’t an improvement. I agree! Wholeheartedly. I mean showerheads haven’t improved either! We could list all sorts of things that either haven’t changed or that aren’t improved by tech. But that would be silly.

You in fact have avoided the very valid point I made in reply to that. Electronic tram signs are a red herring. The revolution is in your pocket. I can check flights, trams, buses, anything in about 15 seconds anywhere in the world. That is a huge productive improvement.

Anyway it’s clear this convo isn’t going well, but glad we had it. I very much got your other points, I just didn’t feel them relevant to the article or this thread, it’s a whole other conversation on simplicity or satisfaction, not really productivity. You can see one of my sibling replies for what I think about it.

> > The main point though is that you don't accomplish more

> You said this is your main point, and I directly replied to that.

You don't refute my statement. You still only get from A to B in about the same time. It's just slightly more convenient. But if the schedule is actually kept by the trams it's not even that, you can just look at the posted paper schedule at the station. The difference in convenience then only is that you have to walk a few steps to see the much smaller print.

I never disputed the utility of GPS. Although there is indeed the disadvantage of using it too much, having lived long enough in the pre-GPS time using maps and/or trying to use just my brain to find my way felt good in different ways, and I still use that method when going somewhere where the journey is the goal itself. It's like when one of my flight instructors covered up all the instruments and got me to fly by sight - including things like angle of attack, at least in level flight (yes that only works for small planes, large ones must be flown by the numbers and instruments, same with IFR conditions).

You still overlook all the larger picture things, the systemic stuff. A discussion so limited to only the thing itself instead of the system is useless in my view, and quite boring, more like trying to gain the upper hand in a discussion by selecting a limited scope and reading into the comment only as much so you can find some angle of attack, instead of using good will and really actually trying to see one's point. You began like that right from the very start, when you started your first reply: "What a horribly myopic take". Zero good will and insulting. AFAICS you keep looking for ways to "win". This is quite tiring.

Again in terms of productivity: safety (huge), money savings (huge), literal speed (yes, it's faster A to B), productive activities possible during driving / due to the comfort of driving / due to tech like GPS (...huge) as... summarizing all that as "convenient" is disingenuous. I hope if you actually reply again, that you explain even just the massive safety improvements as not direct, concrete productivity improvements.

Also turning a smartphone with internet, realtime transit info, route planning, which can do it anytime in the future, anywhere on earth, and let you plan travel across any number of travel modalities (it shows me transfers between bus, train walking, weather along the way, etc) into... "GPS" is just a great example of myopia. And that's just scratching the very surface! For just the narrow, narrow use of travel, the phone solves whole entire large brick-and-mortar industries that used to exist like travel agents - remember, you used to go to a dedicated store to book travel? And trusted one person who actually didn't know much about anything? And they had like a few packages, and you browsed them in a low-res pamphlet? I mean really, travel is the topic you want to say hasn't improved, and your example is electric sign-posts? The, well, myopia in that is stunning.

But I worry even bringing in one extra point, because you've shown yourself to be the type who latches onto examples and reduces, rather than expanding. Remember - smartphones replacing travel agents in a 100x better fashion is but one of thousands of improvements it's made to transportation (Google search, Wikipedia, Tripadvisor, Uber, Getaround, Yelp, HotelTonight, Airbnb, online booking), which is but one of thousands of use cases it's done similar for.

Virtually everything you mentioned has nothing to do with the point that was so eloquently stated by the above poster.

> The main point though is that you don't accomplish more

And I pointed out ~10 ways I do accomplish more because of it, refuting exactly the point.

The rest of the comment cites a ridiculous one-off, narrow social science study with a few vague pathic appeals to the quaint simplicity of the before-fore-times.

I think you both want to zoom way-way out to 10-guy "like, what does accomplish even really mean? Isn't simplicity, like, the real accomplishment?" and I'm all for a simple life well lived, but that's pretty much re-defining the entire discussion to be about something else. And no one is getting rid of cars or phones at this point, I'd love to see that argument.

You write to me on an internet-connected device, on a forum on the web, from likely a laptop or phone built within the last 5 years. That same phone you likely use all day, every day for hours a day. And you'll argue it's somehow a sinister regression? So... why are you here? A laptop, the internet (and modern healthcare that saves lives, modern cars that save lives, etc) doesn't exist without "complexity". It's such a ridiculous attempt to de-rail an interesting and specific debate.

It's also such a uniquely HN-specific type of person that pines for olden days while distinctly relying on modern technology all day every day, so weird. The same types will laud the Framework Laptop - yet talk about reducing complexity and supply chain reliance.

Laptops were much easier to maintain twenty years ago. The idea of a Framework would not be much of a novelty. Most decent laptops had swappable batteries, and both the RAM and CPU were socketed instead of soldered.