Production per hour labor has increased in the USA and elsewhere.
I have 3D printer in my living room.
Transportation
Home delivery is way cheaper than it used to be. Mail order has been a thing for a long time, but good mail-order products are new. It’s not impractical to buy everything you need without going to a store.
Manufacturing + Transportation
When you combine the developments of manufacturing plus transportation you get brand new phenomena, like being able to start a consumer hardware startup out of your living room. This doesn’t affect everyone’s living room, but my living room is full of shipping supplies and my basement has a small factory in it.
War
The B-2 stealth bomber reached initial operational capability in 1997. GPS and satellite mapping are ubiquitous. Guided missiles, real-time satellite surveillance and Predator drones are more capable today than in 1980s science fiction. Laser defenses, Gauss cannons and exoskeletons are on the way.
We also do nuclear tests with computer simulations instead of physical atom bombs. This particular example illustrates how physical technologies can turn into digital technologies. Physical technologies turning into digital technologies can create the illusion that physical technology is stagnating.
The fact that some advances exist is entirely consistent with the thesis that the overall rate of advance has slowed down, as the original article points out.
I am going to push back a little on this one, and ask for context and numbers?
As some of my older relatives commented when Wolt became popular here, before people started going to supermarkets, it was common for shops to have a delivery / errand boy (this would have been 1950s, and more prevalent before the WW2). It is one thing that strikes out reading biographies; teenage Harpo Marx dropped out from school and did odd jobs as an errand boy; they are ubiquitous part of the background in Anne Frank’s diaries; and so on.
Maybe it was proportionally more expensive (relative to cost of purchase), but on the other hand, from the descriptions it looks like the deliveries were done by teenage/young men who were paid peanuts.
When I think about home delivery, my reference point is the dao xiao mian 刀削面 knife I bought in 2020 from AliExpress for $3.57 including shipping and delivery to my door. In the 1990s, the simplest way to get an exotic product like that was to fly to China.
I’m not just thinking about the ease of sending something from one house to another within my city. I’m thinking about the ease of sending something from an arbitrary residence on Earth to an arbitrary residence on Earth.
Shipping small packages from China to the US via the USPS has been subsidized—the price of mailing a Beanie Baby from Beijing to New York has been lower than the price charged to mail that same Beanie Baby from Los Angeles to New York. One of the few things the Trump administration did right was renegotiate the international postal system treaties so that China doesn’t get “developing nation” subsidies any more.
Manufacturing
Production per hour labor has increased in the USA and elsewhere.
I have 3D printer in my living room.
Transportation
Home delivery is way cheaper than it used to be. Mail order has been a thing for a long time, but good mail-order products are new. It’s not impractical to buy everything you need without going to a store.
Manufacturing + Transportation
When you combine the developments of manufacturing plus transportation you get brand new phenomena, like being able to start a consumer hardware startup out of your living room. This doesn’t affect everyone’s living room, but my living room is full of shipping supplies and my basement has a small factory in it.
War
The B-2 stealth bomber reached initial operational capability in 1997. GPS and satellite mapping are ubiquitous. Guided missiles, real-time satellite surveillance and Predator drones are more capable today than in 1980s science fiction. Laser defenses, Gauss cannons and exoskeletons are on the way.
We also do nuclear tests with computer simulations instead of physical atom bombs. This particular example illustrates how physical technologies can turn into digital technologies. Physical technologies turning into digital technologies can create the illusion that physical technology is stagnating.
The fact that some advances exist is entirely consistent with the thesis that the overall rate of advance has slowed down, as the original article points out.
I am going to push back a little on this one, and ask for context and numbers?
As some of my older relatives commented when Wolt became popular here, before people started going to supermarkets, it was common for shops to have a delivery / errand boy (this would have been 1950s, and more prevalent before the WW2). It is one thing that strikes out reading biographies; teenage Harpo Marx dropped out from school and did odd jobs as an errand boy; they are ubiquitous part of the background in Anne Frank’s diaries; and so on.
Maybe it was proportionally more expensive (relative to cost of purchase), but on the other hand, from the descriptions it looks like the deliveries were done by teenage/young men who were paid peanuts.
When I think about home delivery, my reference point is the dao xiao mian 刀削面 knife I bought in 2020 from AliExpress for $3.57 including shipping and delivery to my door. In the 1990s, the simplest way to get an exotic product like that was to fly to China.
I’m not just thinking about the ease of sending something from one house to another within my city. I’m thinking about the ease of sending something from an arbitrary residence on Earth to an arbitrary residence on Earth.
Shipping small packages from China to the US via the USPS has been subsidized—the price of mailing a Beanie Baby from Beijing to New York has been lower than the price charged to mail that same Beanie Baby from Los Angeles to New York. One of the few things the Trump administration did right was renegotiate the international postal system treaties so that China doesn’t get “developing nation” subsidies any more.
https://reason.com/2019/11/11/american-taxpayers-are-subsidizing-ultra-cheap-shipping-from-china/