{"id":62233,"date":"2023-07-26T01:00:36","date_gmt":"2023-07-26T05:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=62233"},"modified":"2023-07-25T09:07:20","modified_gmt":"2023-07-25T13:07:20","slug":"qotd-things-were-better-in-the-old-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2023\/07\/26\/qotd-things-were-better-in-the-old-days\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Things were better in &#8220;the old days&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:right; padding: 0px 0px 10px 25px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"400\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-48672\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png 400w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-50x50.png 50w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a>&#8230; everyone of a certain age, but especially those who love history, tend to assume everything was better in the past, because the present sucks so much.<\/p>\n<p>For example, beer. As <strong>ganderson<\/strong> points out in the comments below, beer these days is better than it has ever been. I quote:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>the &#8220;old&#8221; microbrew brands, like Sam Adams, Summit, Sierra Nevada, Brooklyn, etc, are shunned by many millennials as not hip enough.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The very fact that excellent suds like Sam Adams can be found in gas stations across the land \u2014 making it tragically un-hip \u2014 is all the proof you need of <strong>ganderson<\/strong>&#8216;s thesis. I didn&#8217;t mean to leave the impression, below, that I consider Lone Star, Natty Lite, etc. to be good beer. They are, in fact, very bad beers. But since I went to college back in the days, and was on scholarship to boot, my choices were almost always between &#8220;bad beer&#8221; and &#8220;no beer&#8221;. And since beer, any beer, made me much more interesting and attractive to the opposite sex, and they to me, it was never really a choice at all. I have great sentimental attachment to Lone Star beer, but the very thought of drinking it gives me a hangover. [&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>The modern world sucks, but lots of things are far better now. Cars, too. I know, I know, they&#8217;re mostly Karen-mobiles, but the muscle cars have a hell of a lot more muscle, and they&#8217;re orders of magnitude more reliable. I grew up in a world where you could reliably expect cars to start falling apart at 30,000 miles on the odometer \u2013 you expected to lose an alternator at 30, a starter at 50, and by 100K miles you&#8217;d have a beater, no matter how scrupulously maintained. These days, with just routine idiot maintenance 100K passes without a hitch. That&#8217;s a win, and if &#8220;shade-tree mechanic&#8221; no longer exists (since you need three computers and a special wrench just to get to the spark plugs), well &#8230; still a win.<\/p>\n<p>Materially, these days, most things are better, and the things that aren&#8217;t better are cheaper, way cheaper. It&#8217;s an open question as to whether the latter fact is good or bad, but the fact is, materially life really is, in some ways, what the Leftards say it is. We pay the <em>spiritual<\/em> price for most of it, but when it comes to alcohol, at least, give me the Current Year.<\/p>\n<p>Severian, <!--<a href=\"http:\/\/www.rottenchestnuts.com\/a-historians-fallacy\/\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">-->&#8220;A Historian&#8217;s Fallacy&#8221;, <em>Rotten Chestnuts<\/em>, 2020-12-07.<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230; everyone of a certain age, but especially those who love history, tend to assume everything was better in the past, because the present sucks so much. For example, beer. As ganderson points out in the comments below, beer these days is better than it has ever been. I quote: the &#8220;old&#8221; microbrew brands, like [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,15,13],"tags":[210,111,45,1462],"class_list":["post-62233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quotations","category-technology","category-usa","tag-beer","tag-cars","tag-nostalgia","tag-severian"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-gbL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62233"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62233\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83834,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62233\/revisions\/83834"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}