It’s also possible for someone to be a shitty person and a shitty author. There are tons of discussions on just how badly written HP is and that would be true even if she suddenly stopped being a horrible person.

Sort of.

Some people could service cars, if they had the space, equipment and skills to do it.

For much of that period the people who could afford phones were not the ones who knew how to fix them. Part of it is that phones do more now. If you get an old flip phone it’s basically bulletproof and you don’t need to worry about repairing it (although you can typically swap out broken pieces). The problem is that you’ll be rockin an ancient flip phone. Once you start adding a bunch of stuff (capacitive touch screen, wifi, camera, bluetooth, etc) it’s gonna be harder to fix.

My desktop today is designed to be more serviceable than early computers were. I don’t need to solder anything, parts just fit together and there’s far better standards support. Did you ever have the joy of messing with autoexec.bat and config.sys just to get your mouse working? Do you remember what a PITA it was getting an old Soundblaster to work?

I’ve had a guy come out to repair by boiler, my dishwasher and (twice) my washing machine. Appliances are still serviceable but (just like in the old days) it usually involves calling someone.

There were many many things that were worse about the “good old days”.

Cars sucked, phones sucked, computers sucked, houses were smaller, appliances sucked (if you had them at all), clothes sucked (yes there were some cool outfits but they were expensive, uncomfortable and high maintenance).

It’s not like work conditions were universally awesome either. Consider how many women were regularly getting raped as part of their job and we didn’t prosecute the Cosbys and Weinsteins of the world until recently. Today, if your boss sends you a harassing text, you go public with it. Back then, if you complained about your boss calling you “sugartits” and copped a feel, your options were basically STFU or GTFO (because you almost certainly can’t prove it).

If we want to strive for a better future, we’re more likely to succeed if we avoid romanticizing the past.

That makes sense.

I get frustrated at frequent oversimplifications. Reagan and the neocons certainly made things worse but they were a few out of many factors.

Even if we imagined a world where we have a bunch of Bernie Sanders all over government there are limits to what they can do. Strong unions in the US wouldn’t have done anything to stop Asia from industrializing, Europe from rebuilding its economy or the rest of the developing world from trying to move out of agrarian economies. When the US car companies were the only game in town there was a lot of excess that could be spread around to workers. Once a bunch of other countries started offering cars it put more and more pressure on the US companies to spend more money on quality and charge less for finished products. Over here we got used to a war induced monopoly and convinced ourselves that’s “normal” or that it’s simply the result of democracy or American ingenuity.

If we actually want to improve the state of regular people we’ll have much better success if we’re honest with ourselves about both the present and history.

As much as I think “whataboutism” is an overused word, this is a perfect example of it. It’s not germane to anything in my post. I pointed out that the “good old days” claim in OP is a myth. A claim of, “so and so made things worse” has nothing to do with my statement.

While Reagan was president, one of my grandparents was in a union. They still had to use a toilet in the hall that they shared with the neighbor. They couldn’t afford a car. They didn’t have a TV. None of those things were available because all the factories in their country got bombed. At the same time my other set of grandparents paid taxes but never got to vote. They lived in a colony of the democracy-loving British but since they were natives they were second class citizens.

Pretending that the world was some paradise until Reagan and the neocons showed up is just willful ignorance.

We used to see these “good old days” posts from boomers. They mostly seem to have stopped since they mostly learned that this was a fantasy not shared by most people. It also ignores that most people today don’t actually want to live under the conditions above. In 1960 only about half of all households had washing machines. This idyllic fantasy ignores that some lucky ladies were making this possibly with hours of hard domestic labor per day. It also ignores that huge economic boost the US got after WWII for being the only country that still had intact industry.

edit: typo

tl;dr I was wrong.

I used to go to a restaurant that I was sure was a front.

Years ago I was walking home from the gym and I got peckish. I was in one of the less fancy areas of Manhattan so I didn’t think twice about just walking into the first place I saw.

The second I walked in I decided it was a big mistake. This place looked fancy. Nice place settings, real wood furniture, etc. I was dressed like a bum and probably smelled bad.

But the head waiter came out and treated me like royalty. Fresh baked bread, a sauteed flounder that he filleted right at the table and all around baller service at a very reasonable price. I was the only person there but it was early so I didn’t think much of it. I figured that if their food and service was this good when they thought I was a bum this is the place for me. I dropped a 100% tip and decided I’d go once a week and if I ever found a date I’d impress the hell out of her when we roll into a nice restaurant and the head waiter greets me by my first name and treats me like a big shot (aside: the first and only girl I brought there didn’t like their vegetarian options but ended up marrying me anyway).

Ever time we went the place was practically empty. This was one of the less fancy areas of Manhattan but they were still paying Manhattan rent. The food was always top notch and did I mention how awesome the service was? Mooci, the waiter once came back from vacation and insisted that I try some of the moonshine from his Sicilian Mother. Constant freebies too.

We decided there’s no way they could be turning a profit and assumed it was a mob front. Some older NYers may remember when the story broke that SPQR was a mob front, so it seemed pretty likely.

Well a few years ago we went back after moving out of state. The restaurant was under new management and everything sucked. Crappy place settings, shitty generic food and I didn’t recognize anyone there. It turns out they weren’t a mob front. They were just great cooks that sucked at running a business and ran out of money :(