In your opinion have things become worse the past 10 years?

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I mean on one hand things seem pretty tense worldwide, seems to be an awful lot of conflict. And some of the stuff these politicians say is just outright bigotry, poverty is becoming more widespread and I could go on but yeah basically seems everything going to hell more than it was a few years ago. But also maybe it always been this bad and there's just more coverage out about all the negative stuff.

So what do you WP people think?

progressively worse for most, better for some

"world population grows by 74 million people per year"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projectio ... ion_growth

world resources have to be shared with these new humans, so most have to get by with less

Arguably so. Here's a few ways things have gotten worse over the last ten years, off the top of my head:

Drones

The internet has gotten more corporatised.

Most people seem to be on prescription drugs.

Cloud Computing.

People have been conditioned that it's okay to pry into the private lives of, and inform on their neighbors via apps and social media.

The resurgence of mass public shaming.

Political correctness and diversity dogma steadily replacing any kind of adherence to liberal values.

The continuous Islamization of Europe.

The continuous metamorphosis of the nation state into various forms of globalist governance,

The swift erosion of many traditional career paths due to automation and "free" online services.

"Free" online has killed investigative journalism.

Due to the combined effect of illegal downloading, and a desire to water down content to appeal to foreign markets, most movies suck now.

Smartphone Zombies.

That's all I can think of right now.

Gallivanting, finger wagging, fuss bucketising, puritanical knob rot of the worst stripe gallivants. Whilst I don't actually think that rock n roll, dope and f*****g in the streets should be made compulsory, the ideas behind those things are a good place to start.

Ahh, Americanised asterix auto censorship, which proves my f*****g point!. Scunthorpe usually gets through though.

At least in the world of economics and employment yes. We're in a particularly tense position where holding on to job numbers seems like it would be fighting innovation, companies across the board run leaner with fewer people and accordingly get by with far less in HR-related costs. I heard yesterday that in the present economy it's not uncommon for people applying for loans at the bank now to have up to nine jobs in two years - not for lack of effort but because we're increasingly heading toward an environment where practically everyone is a temporary or contractor, accordingly the employers won't be providing benefits (that'll pick up even more steam in 2016 with Affordable Care Act), and the costs - at least for now - seem to keep going up. When you get even a sizeable minority of people holding jobs, living modestly, and still needing government assistance to cover their responsibilities we're in a position where the system starts getting untenable and the feedback loop of government paying all of this on debt seems like it will keep exacerbating the issue.

There are a lot of other bits and pieces floating around that I get concerned about but the above is at least the most pronounced and obvious.

More than ten years.

Pre NAFTA we had our ups and downs, neither lasted. NAFTA started an economic leak, jobs sent abroad, and employment has not been the same since. We are getting down to touching bottom.

I am old, and doubly insulted by first the useless Viet Nam war, drafting people to gain social control. Second would be it was to contain China, who is now best friends of industry.

The employed are making less than in 1970. The rich are making most of the total income.

Congress! Buy one, share it with your friends!

We got rid of the draft, got a willing well trained army, prepared to defend the country, then sent them to Afghanistan, Iraq, over and over. Reserves were called up, those who had served and were in the ready reserve, and year after year they were sent into a battle with no lines, and in the middle of civilians.

We have a lot that served over five years in the sandbox, which is longer than any American before served in combat. Compared, Viet Nam was one year and out. We are testing the limits, and self inflicted death is more common than ever. There was nothing to win, no end to the war.

Some joined the police, having grown up armed, and this time they expect to win. Police has become military occupation, by a hostile power.

Civil Rights has not worked for Black people. The borders were opened and illegals came and took the jobs they had. Privatized prisons saw Blacks as a growth industry, twenty years for weed, forty for crack. Getting tough on crime has increased it.

We used to measure it as we had more people in jail than South Africa in the old days, or USSR during the gulag. Now we have more in jail than the rest of the planet, and more crime than ever.

Trump says we have 100,000,000 without jobs. I would say unemployment is worse than the 25% of the Depression. 45 million on food stamps, working white people, military, that income does not cover need.

We have been getting poorer, most had a house for a main asset. Half of people of retirement age have no net worth. Social Security did not get a cost of living raise, the government said no inflation. I wonder where they shop?


Youth has no jobs, even after going into debt for an education, which a Pell Grant covered books and tuition twenty five years ago. At least people used to finish school, get a job, get married, before making a mess of their life.

The National Debt is $20 Trillion, half run up in the last seven years. A good deal of it is the Social Security Trust Fund, which has an IOU. It has to be paid.

Send the jobs abroad, less taxes paid here, more social service need. That and endless useless war, the Democrats had fun while it lasted.

Time has run out, we vote for Trump next year, or we will vote for Hitler in five years.

On the upside: number of terrorist attacks worldwide has gone down over the last forty years or so - just, nowadays, all terror seems in the name of allah, and the media report onit, whereas 2 decafes ago, an ETA bombing wasn't so widely covered.

And we are richer than we ever have been, when it comes to toys like computers and phones and cars. Our diet is rich in everything and cheap. No one in the western world is starving because of droughts, no one dying of vitamin deficiency because he really has absolutely no way to get vitamins if he knew he's having deficiency.
On the downside, we aren't able to appreciate computers, phones and cars as luxury, they have become a necessity, and we're doing the whole nutrition thing a bit wrong, becoming obese and ill.
And still, people are living longer than ever before, are travelling more and are better educated.

But, you know, gay people can get married, you have unprecedented individual freedom to do whatever you want and so on.

I do think that there's a ton of stuff that got worse and agree that another hitler, born out of economic unrest has become dangerously possible and all that. I just wanted to highlight some positive developments, for the sake of an argument.

Yes, definitely. And they're going to get even worse before they get a lot worse.

All of our thoughts create our reality. As a a man believeth...

I think I get the intention of the question, but at nearly any point in the history of the world, you could ask that question and get the same sort of answers. It's better in some ways, worse in others, and exactly how you define those parameters depends on your POV, your own experiences--past and present--and those of the people around you.

Respectfully, I say, it's a trick question (unless you accept that there's no one "correct" answer).

A lot of things have gotten worse, yes. Things like wages and prices for all but the top tiny percent (who don't live on wages anyway). Increased binary-ism and the pitting of one side against the other. Crumbling infrastructures being defunded by wars elsewhere. Corporatism, corporatism, corporatism.

But, there has also been a massive shift in the way people communicate, link together and have access to information. People are now able to join together in ways never before possible. It used to be that people with autism could only get information from their one doctor, the library (with books that might be 20 years old) and the newspaper. We were so incredibly siloed.

I think it's quite possible that we're going through something not unlike the changes that happened at the end of the 1800's. It was a period of massive technological upheaval, followed by a period of strife as some groups sought to hang on to prior powers while new ones worked to gain equality.

We may also be getting close to the end of the viability of capitalism as it is currently enacted, and there is no known way to predict the shape of things to come. Organized religion is also going through a period of upheaval. Both have been used to control masses of people in the present and past. I've no doubt both will survive, but they'll have to either go full-out authoritarianism or far more egalitarian to survive, and that threatens some people's wealth and power. And I'm sure some of them would say something similar, but as a mirror image, from their point of view. Which tells me there really is some sort of upheaval in action, and often that has meant a long, boring period of peace and prosperity in the not distant future.

And let's not forget how I have aged 10 years in the past decade alone!
I'm in my earlt thirties, where statistically, people are the least happy. So, subjectively speaking, things are terrible.

Edenthiel is right when she mentions the changes in how people interact and communicate. There is a major shift in the (male-dominated) status quo, which is causing those in authority to be regularly held to account by the public and the courts. Since we entered the second millennium, a new, feminine energy - what might be called free will or emotion - has been making its presence felt, which accounts for the desperate, last ditch attempt by the male hierarchy to suppress women, minorities, members of the LGBT community, the neurodiverse etc, who are all now asserting their rights. You only have to listen to people like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and those railing against refugees and immigrants to see how terrified the Establishment is of losing its grip on power.

It's really a mixed bag. Some things have gotten better, some things have gotten worse. It doesn't seem like there's enough impedance to work towards solutions to age old problems. The human race seems to be stuck in a rut. We're not solving the problem of poverty, mass inequality, abuse of power, etc... We're not in a position to start exploring space. The human race as a whole is crippled by fear and clinging to old ideas, sometimes violently. The utopian post-capitalist "Star Trek" version of humanity where threats to our existence are mostly external is nowhere near being realized. I now have doubts that it ever will be realized. Humans are a stupid and selfish race. It seems technological progress has continued but social progress has stagnated. Sigh....