The best we had in the 90s was Encarta, ya know, that CD-ROM Microsoft sent with some computers?
My library was on Dewey Decimal / Card Catalog for a good chunk of my childhood. If I was looking up information, it was like that. The computers were some weird old DOS-like prompt screen that almost no one knew how to use. No fucking internet. My Dad happened to be able to get Microsoft Encarta and that was the first time I ever was able to look up information in any manner similar to today, but as a CD-ROM it was only about historical / cultural old stuff, not about recent events.
No, I’m a millennial I used the Internet.
And secondly, bullshit. Wikipedia wasn’t invented yet… and if it had been invented, it wasn’t respected until the 2010s+ (unable to be used to write our school reports off of). So what website were you even using back then if you happened to magically have access to the Internet?
We were playing Neopets, maybe using GameFAQs or spreading memes on SomethingAwful. But looking up information? What is this, 2010s+ ?? No one trusted the internet yet for information.
You literal 7 year old is not 5. Of those events you listed, the Troubles is the only one I was over 4 years to experience the end portion.
Okay so you were 7 during the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and you were 12 during the bombing of the USS Cole and you were 7 during the Oklahoma City Bombing. You were 9 during the US Embassy Bombings (linked to Osama Bin Laden: en.wikipedia.org/…/1998_United_States_embassy_bom…).
We all know children today, even literal 7 year olds, are more informed than we were back then. Like seriously, we couldn’t look up information back then. Its nothing against us as a generation, its everything to do with our technological level.
In a letter sent to the service’s members Oct. 28, AOL Chairman Steve Case touted a new pricing plan that offers unlimited access to the service’s proprietary content as well as to the Internet for $19.95 a month.
[Snip]
Until the new unlimited plan was unveiled, all users paid $9.95 a month for 5 hours of usage and $2.95 for each additional hour.
This is what I remembered. My dad always told me to watch the Internet usage, because it cost money for each hour. These were 5-hours / month plans back then. That being said, 1996 is a year before Diablo, meaning the “unlimited” plans came in soon afterwards. But “unlimited” didn’t really work out in our favor because my mom and grandma who lived with us always wanted to use the phone.
And we were the only kids of the neighborhood who had internet. People came over to our house to surf the net.
Mate we were literal children during these events.
My literal 7 year old niece knows about both the Israel-Hamas War and the Ukrainian War.
I duno how old you were, but lets say 3 years after the Rodney King riots of 92? So lemme pick a random 1995 event. Were you aware that Israel Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated when you were 7? Something I do remember was the USS Cole bombing. Do you remember that? That happened a bit later, Wikipedia says 12 October 2000.
The issue isn’t “we were children”. The issue is that research and information was far more difficult back then. Newspapers cost money and required manual reading. (Though I was able to pickup a few Newspapers when I was waiting for a haircut or other such events). We didn’t have online forums (well, ignoring BBS and USENET)… or at least online forums weren’t popular. And internet was very expensive and slow back then. So we didn’t get information anywhere as quickly as children today get information.
Secondly, it wasn’t “cool” to be politically informed before 9/11. That was just nerd shit back then. 9/11 changed our collective mindsets and everyone became more aware of world events.
Looks like 22% had internet at home, but over 54% had a computer.
How do you think the majority of computer users played Castle of the Winds, Jazz Jackrabbit, Doom, or other shareware games? Hint: it wasn’t the internet because most computer users didn’t have internet.
1993, the previous census figures are even worse as that’s before AOL
Btw, downloads weren’t a thing even for those who had internet. Back then, you paid per minute hour of internet usage.
My family connected to the internet to download (POP3) out email and then disconnected. Because my Mom would then want to use the phone to call her friends. Unless you had two phone lines like a rich person, extended multi-hour download sessions at 33kbps (or slower) was just not a thing.
That’s 14MB per hour, if you don’t remember how slow 90s internet was.
The college students with T1 connections were the source of shareware / disks by the later 90s (like 97, 98 etc. Etc). But home users weren’t doing online downloads yet, too expensive and too slow.
I’m also a millennial and all my friends are millennials.
Outside of my history-buff friends, most of my friends (despite being Engineers, Doctors, PH.Ds and other well-educated positions) are very ignorant of the 90s era of politics. All of us have had our awakening starting with 9/11 or so. In fact, the only reason why I know these things is because I explicitly went back and studied the politics of my childhood. Its not a thing I knew back then.
Most of my elders who were young adults and adults in the 90s don’t know what that song is about either.
Typical Gen Z will know “This is America” references the Charleston church shooting. As well as adults.
You know why? Because today, we have the internet, and everyone is far more knowledgable and can pick up on references. Back in the 90s, “Zombie is about The Troubles” was obscure, and hell… just knowing what “The Troubles” were was kind of obscure with a lot of people completely ignorant to the events.
Today, we have things called cellphones, Wikipedia and Google. The level of obscurity and references in our modern media landscape is far more subtle because everyone and everything is smarter. Have you ever use the Dewey Decimal System, card catalog, and microfiche to look up information? Shit was hard to do research back then.
Go look at this “90s was full of hope” crap that the rest of this thread is full of.
There were the Troubles in Ireland/Britain, there was Osama Bin Laden (1993 Bombing, 1998 Embassy Bombings). The was far-right nationalism. There was Columbine. There was Rodney King race riots. There was Desert Storm 1.0. There was Ruby Ridge and Waco. Etc. etc.
I dare say that today is possibly more peaceful than back then. We just are more informed about various disasters today than we used to be. All this “Era of Peace” crap the rest of this thread is talking about is pissing me off. It wasn’t like that in the 90s at all.
I’m bringing up the Troubles because 90s-era Troubles got pretty bad, up to the Good Friday Agreement in the very late 90s. The world was always on fire, and any 90s kid talking about “The Peaceful 90s” has extremely selective memory.
Millennials are ignorant of Rodney King Riots, Desert Storm, Waco / Oklahoma City Bomber (far right domestic terrorism), Newt Gingrich’s rise of the ‘Party of No’, and other such political events of their era. Pop quiz, what is the Cranberries’s Zombie song about?
Gen Z however is keenly aware of the problems occurring around them.
I remember the politics of the 90s. It wasn’t as happy as others point out here. We really didn’t start the fire.
Columbine happened under our childhood yo. And the 1980s going Postal craze was a different brand of public mass shootings. 9/11 was the SECOND attack on the Twin towers after all.
Ummm… no. I loaded it through a floppy found in the mail through a system called shareware. (Where people would leave floppy disks in people’s mailboxes, and we didn’t know what viruses were so we just plugged them into our computers).
Did you actually exist in the 90s? That was floppy era of shareware, you’d spread games like Doom by mail and/or by copying the floppy and giving it to a friend. That’s why it was called SHAREware, you shared it with friends. In some cases, computer stores would combine a bunch of shareware games into CD-ROMs (650MBs!!! So much space!!) and you’d get a lot of shareware all at once.
Yup. Its nothing about “better” or “worse”. Its about the technological differences of today’s children vs myself as a child.
Here’s a memory for yall who are too young to remember how dumb we were in the 90s. On 9/11, bullies were blaming China (and me, being a slanty-eye Asian) for bringing down the Twin Towers. I think people don’t grasp how unfathomably ignorant pre-Internet and pre-9/11 people were. Such a mistake wouldn’t happen today.
Nothing against those bullies. Everyone was that dumb back then.
9/11 was a big wakeup moment. Society collectively decided that paying attention to world events was important, and we got smarter. Technology improved as well, so it became easier to look up news events after that. But deep down within our collective psyche was a turning point in foreign-policy mindset. I’m seeing that Gen Z today is far more anxious and worried about world events (both good, and bad, associated with that). The 90s “peaceful” era of my youth was an illusion, it was created by my (and my peer’s) collective ignorance about the world.
I look at my ignorant Youth vs what GenZ grows up with today, I see pros/cons with both. I think knowing more about the world is a better thing overall though.
Good. Now look at the rest of this thread downstream. Plenty of people talking about how “peaceful” the 90s were as if they didn’t live in that era.
I stand by what I said. Millennials largely were ignorant of world events before 9/11 and the overall explosion of information the internet afforded us. Meanwhile, GenZ always lived in post 9/11 world AND always had information at their fingertips.
Nerds weren’t celebrated back in the 90s. If you knew too much back then (or showed that you knew too much), people would look at you funny and bully you. Today, knowledge is more generally appreciated.
Wikipedia started in '01. I was absolutely using it before '02/'03 for schoolwork. Just because you didn’t know about it or how to cite things doesn’t mean that applies to everyone.
100% bullshit. You’re forgetting that I’ve actually lived in this era. No teacher was accepting of Wikipedia citations until the later 00s. There was no trust on Wikipedia’s articles until much later. You didn’t cite Wikipedia because your Teachers would penalize you for doing so. (and this culture was true well throughout all the 00s). Citations on the other hand, were just a Microsoft Word / .doc plugin so it wasn’t that big a deal.
Furthermore: there were competing online wikis and webpages. I don’t even think Wikipedia was the breakout wiki at that age, but instead the C2 Wiki.
And with 25-million subscribers, that’s only some ~25% of American-households with AOL back then, at its absolute peak. Internet in general was never a common thing for Americans to get until the Broadband era.
If you want to talk about the internet in the 90s, be my guest. But any Millennial who lived through that era remembers that the internet was relatively rare. Most people’s exposure was through libraries and maybe schools/university systems.
For example, I used to follow a lot of subreddits for individual YouTube content creators, however, Lemmy doesn’t really have the size or culture to support this currently.
Oh I’ve been to New York and the Wash DC Smithsonian, likely the two best public transit systems in the USA. BART in San Fran also is fine but could be better.
But I’ve also gone to Madrid, Tokyo and some other cities around the world. There’s no comparison. Best in the USA is closer to average of Europe, while average of USA is pretty bad public transit wise.
Ex: I’ve also gone to big cities like Nashville, Manilla Philippines, Los Angeles where things are closer to bus-only and the local traffic suffers greatly as a result. The general expectation in the USA is that ‘public transit is for the underclass’. In contrast, you do see rich people take Wash DC metro, NYC, and especially Tokyo’s subway. And it makes a difference when both rich and poor take the same system.
But all USA cities are car-first designed. As opposed to European model where cars are actively being de-prioritized on a city level.
Except like, New York City. One place in USA where walking works extremely well across the whole of Manhattan. But further out is less good transit, but the central island is well made.
I see you’ve missed my point. Let me dumb it down a bit: there’s a highly popular politician out there who is reinventing the past with fake history, and invoking fake-nostalgia upon this fake-history to gain political power.
how shit has gotten progressively worse under Capitalism
Glorifying early-industrialization factory conditions, a time of the robber barons, laissez faire politics, and literal corporate overlords spying + sabotaging labor movements sounds like a bad way to create that discussion. There’s a fucking reason why Leninism / Communism was invented in the late 1800s to early 1900s.
I think that’s an acceptable answer. 1910s wasn’t perfect but it was better than 1880s for sure. Hmm, its just that “factory job” has so many implications depending on exactly which decade you’re talking about.
The only “really good” factory job times IMO were 1950s, post-war. Even by the 1970s, USA factory jobs began to lose out vs rise of Japanese products and giants. So its a really short period in the great scheme of things. Arguably, the rise of 1950s-era economic miracles was only made possible because Europe + Japan was so wrecked by WW2 and the USA was one of the only undamaged industrial nations, so our products did extremely well around the world. I don’t think its going to be possible to replicate that era.
Bruh, no shit, you clearly missed my point, this comic is depicting how the housing crisis has gotten progressively worse.
Home Ownership rates in 1950-1960 was like 61%.
Homeownership rates today is 65%.
Go back to 1900s and you’re down to like 45% home ownership rates.
That’s why we take the census, so that people know how this country progresses. Part of the problem with today’s politics is that people go with vibes and feelings and MAGA and fake nostalgia instead of looking at the fucking data.
The 1910’s were the first time in American history where a single factory worker could sustain a household on one salary, including purchasing a car. It wasn’t a perfect system and included a lot of corporate paternalism, but it was far better than what came before.
Um, no. 1910s was still “Henry Ford builds town because none of the workers can afford a house” time of history. Workers weren’t just dependent on corporate leaders for their job, you also were dependent upon them for your house, well being, schools, and more. Henry Ford advertised his towns of workers under a utopian dream, but in practice there were all kinds of warts.
Workers wouldn’t “own” their own house until well into the 1930s when laws were finally being passed to encourage home-ownership as part of the New Deal. But in practice, people were too poor during the Great Depression to actually afford homes in practice, but at least the dream existed. It wasn’t until the 1950s where postwar economic miracle combined with the legal changes to banking (from decades prior) finally combined into an environment that allowed for large scale homeownership.
In the 1890-1940 period, the homeownership rate fluctuated in the 43- to 48-percent range. From 1890 to 1920, the homeownership rate fell as immigration and urbanization offset the rise in income. Income growth increased the homeownership rate during the 1920s, but the Depression more than wiped out this gain so that the rate had fallen to a low of 43.6 percent by 1940.
During the 1940-1960 period, the homeownership rate rose by over 18 percentage points, from 43.6 to 61.9 percent. This remarkable transformation was facilitated by higher incomes, a large percentage of households being in prime homebuying age groups, the FHA-led revolution in mortgage financing, the GI bill of rights, improved interurban transportation, and development of large-scale housing subdivisions with affordable houses. While all of these factors played an important role in making the United States a Nation of homeowners, it is important to note that a Department of Labor study (cited in the Housing and Home Finance Agency’s Housing Statistics Handbook of 1948) reported a 53.2-percent homeownership rate for 1945. If this survey was correct, then approximately half of this change took place prior to many of these factors becoming fully effective and during a time when wartime needs virtually halted residential construction. Higher wartime incomes, the absence of many competing consumer goods, and shortages of rental housing may explain this wave of homebuying.
So you really haven’t studied early-industrialized pre-labor union factory politics?
12 to 16 hour shifts, 70+ hour weeks were regular.
No safety standards – regular loss of limb and life.
No age standards. Ignorant children were commonly employed.
Pre-air conditioning. Hot, loud, poor conditions.
Shanty towns characterized by overcrowding, poor sanitation, and diseases (cholera anyone?)
A single-family home? Laughable. These people lived in disease-ridden tenements and had to pay laughable sums of money for that privilege. No one was building generational wealth… certainly not during the era of “Robber Barron” industralization. Factory owners would employ spies, they would play labor forces against each other using racism (albeit “White” racism: Germans vs Irish vs Protestants, but that’s the 1800s for ya. Racism looked different back then).
There weren’t any ecological standards either. All the pollution for the factory seeped into the living quarters. Lead, toxins, smog, you name it and it was in the drinking water. Smog was so thick, that Vitamin D deficiency was widespread, leading to rickets.
You didn’t even have a damn private toilet, let alone a damn house to yourself. 1800s was the era of shared and communal outhouses, and those outhouses went right back into the drinking water, leading to Cholera outbreaks. Its utterly laughable to suggest that factory-worker time of early industrialization was a good time to live and/or raise a family.
And I got some pro-Trump comics to share if you don’t care much about historical accuracy. The reason why comics / words / discussion works is because people should be spreading the truth and/or revealing truths about the world.
Letty just wants to find a house where he can live and be safe in. But that Demon Lord of Real Estate keeps finding him trap-filled dungeons, or ghost-filled hallways and overemphasizing the security features…
EDIT:
Tohru, despite having a cute and adorable human-form, is actually a badass. So Letty probably is the dragon you were looking for this meme.
What are some generational differences between millennials and Gen Z ? (lemmy.zip)
What is a niche interest or hobby you'd personally like to see represented more on Lemmy
For example, I used to follow a lot of subreddits for individual YouTube content creators, however, Lemmy doesn’t really have the size or culture to support this currently.
i’m living in a school with gamblers (lemmy.world)
The American mind cannot comprehend this (i.imgur.com)
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From fearsome creatures to *this* abomination. (lemmy.zip)
souce: kobayashi’s dragon maid
Jimmy Wales: One of the biggest obstacles to ... cryptocurrency ... is the sheer number and size of scandals associated with it. (wts2.wt.social)