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Yeah I remember the smog layer in the 80's, actually kind of nostalgic when the wildfires keep us inside for weeks in the summer (not)

Not needing car repairs every 2000 miles.

All right, but apart from TVs, long distance phone calls, bicycle shifting and clipless pedals, tires, outdoor clothing, dishwashers, digital cameras, computers, home construction, dentistry, and electric vehicles, what have the Romans ever done for us?

The air in Denver is vastly better than 40 years ago, well maybe not today due to wildfire smoke, but overall it’s better. We still get high ozone days (worse due to altitude), but now the infamous brown cloud is nothing like the 70s and 80s when you couldn’t see downtown from the foothills.

Unfortunately air quality improvement and food improvement (water too) were driven by policy choices (clean water act/air act) that were made when both parties were actually interested in governing. It gets a lot more difficult to sustain that with the GOP being a nihilistic band of grifters.

The Y2K bug, the hole in the ozone layer, etc.

Almost everything is better now than it was 40 years ago. If anything, you always want to live in the present because of medical advances alone.

Good morning from western Oregon.

How very cool! The return of the bald eagle is an amazing success story for conservation. We had a nesting pair up in a tree at the local PDQ chicken place when I lived in FL. People would stop and take photos of the chicks in the nest and it seemed so very magical.

/Superfund cleanup sites. Today, 50 years later, you can't eat fruits or vegetables grown in that soil. Now the "Aroma" is just the pulp mills on Commencement Bay, which smell vaguely unpleasant but only in that immediate area and have never caused nosebleeds (common with the smelter fumes).

Women's rights. Minority rights. Car safety. Drug safety. Availability of treatments generally. Health insurance. I can go on but the lie that things were "better back then" is still a lie.

I was going to say, I never once had to worry about air quality growing up in Pennwylvania, now it's a constant concern.

Villeneuve Smog Scale

LA resident 1969-1987. Moved away partly because of the smog. Return visits to see relatives over the next few years revealed we may have jumped the gun on the smog thing. We hike the San Gabes when we visit now breathing just fine and getting great views.

Yeah, I remember how I believed taking a deep breath was a bad thing because it hurt. I’m glad children in LA no longer have to experience that.

Yes... everything is better, because the human eyes are not microscopes, to see all the plastic.

Better batteries are an improvement. Yes

I remember the brown air from the 1980’s

Yeah, I use human based. And the creation of CGMs. So many painful years.....

In a rare case of 'product improving without public pressure', the company that manufactures our custom jigsaw puzzles (where we provide the art), called Ravensbuger, overnight and without warning increased the piece size drastically, and began including a large poster of the image. I was stoked.

Water quality. I grew up in Massachusetts and Maine. Rivers were poisoned. Beaches were COVERED in trash.

Tofu. So much firmer. So sexy.

Finally! Something legitimately better and not banal.

The return of the ozone layer is a big win

We finally got rid of the smoking in cinemas but not 20 years later we got mobile phones in them. I've given up on theater movies.

Bike infrastructure, car seatbelts, electric cars.

In the SF Bay Area during summer growing up we used to not be able to see the east side of the bay mountains from the west side of the bay. I don’t think that’s happened in decades now other than forest fires smoke.

My lung capacity is 7% reduced from SoCal smog in the 70s and 80s. I also remember boil water alerts. My Mom would boil water on the stove and we would skim off the top for what we needed. Tap water now is as good or better than bottled water (SoCal).

I grew up in Pasadena. In ‘73 I was doing a music project with a woman who’d just moved from Texas. One day a Santa Ana wind blew through and took out all the smog, and my friend stepped outside & freaked because she could see the big ass San Gabriel Mountains, two miles away, for the first time.

Same. I remember having pain in my lungs when taking a deep breath in the evening after playing outside.

air is a good take, it's not really became better, it became less bad, but you have a great point, insteas food.. i'm not on that xD here in europe it's only gotten worse, mainly 'cos of the big megacorps, tbh (oversee to the w probably is, better, instead)

Acid rain vastly better in Midwest and central Canada. Growing up, NASA sent astronauts to Sudbury, ON because it looked like a moonscape. Sulphur oxide emissions dropped by 81% and nitrogen oxide emissions fell by 46%.

I grew up right where the L.A. smog and the San Diego smog met.

Food has not gotten better in the last 40 Years: much more expensive and contaminated with pesticides, smoke, and miscellaneous particulate matter. Not to mention the loss of flavor. #foodsupply #corporatefood

I was in Pasadena from 1980 to 1984, and I remember the first week I was there on campus, I didn’t know that there were mountains 4 miles to the north because you couldn’t see them through the smog. The day the air temporarily cleared was quite a surprise.

No, its all plastic and fake and over priced

And I’m staying inside today because of unhealthy air quality due to wildfires in the PNW…we’re going backwards.

Healthcare, except in the US

rip the Clean Air Act which is literally responsible for it

The collapse of poverty worldwide. From 40% in 1990 to 10% today. Still a crisis! Still unforgivable in a world with so much wealth, but humans are living longer and healthier than at any time in history.

They let you stay inside?!? We went out and just coughed up brown gunk later.

The Hudson River, thanks in part to Pete Seeger.

Our rivers and lakes are so much cleaner than they were 40 years ago you can't believe it. Thank you Clean Water Act.

In the first Lethal Weapon movie, it starts with a helicopter pan of the city. Everything is orange brown and hazy. And you realize, they did their best to pick the best day they could to get that shot b/c of the cost of hiring the helicopter, crew, etc. That was a good day in LA for that time.

Minor, but something I was reflecting on the other day: all forms of lighting, from flashlights to overhead lights. Lighting is brighter, consumes less energy, and bulbs/chips last years longer. In the 80s, replacing light bulbs used to be one of my chores, literally every week.

We got a DVD set of "Barney Miller" a couple of years ago, and while watching it, we were amazed at all the "NYC pollution" jokes. We both grew up in Queens, and were of course familiar with how bad things were in the 70's. But it had been long enough that jokes about it caught us by surprise.

Porn and my phone

Grew up on the CT shoreline, downwind of NYC. It wasn't until years later that I understood that the painful feeling in my lungs I always got as a little kid (late 60s/early 70s) after playing at the beach on a sunny day was asthma, probably induced by ozone from photochemical smog.

And dihydrogen monoxide (also known as DHMO).

Same as to the L.A.-in-the-70s experience. But today Portland OR has the worst air quality of any major city in the WORLD due to wildfire smoke--just an eerie flashback of my life in L.A. 50 years ago.

My perception is, the seat is about the same, the food quality varies, and the in-flight entertainment is 300x better. It strikes me as very much a *similar* kind of experience as it was in 1990 or 2000, with modest changes around the edges. Factor in inflation and it's probably better?

I grew up in the Inland Empire in the 60s. Stage 3 regularly. Were there 4s?

In the 60s we drove from Cleveland to DC almost every summer. It was a big deal when we saw any kind of raptor during that long drive. Now when I go to Northern VA I get to check on bald eagles who nest there, and red-shouldered hawks live in the woods behind my house.

Medical care

dogs are cuter, thanks to the oodles of doodles...

Cars, in general, last longer and are safer.…they don’t have as much personality.

No more crazy fees for long distance calls. Also pharmacology

Job safety. Material from which clothes are made. Sunscreen. Automobile safety. Awareness of impaired driving. Animal care. Air conditioning/heat pumps. Solar. Digital calculators. Streaming. Email. Cataract surgery. Cosmetic surgery. Care for special needs/differently abled/elderly people.

Medicine. (And prior) 1920s-30s-40s-50s-60s cancer, heart disease and strokes were automatic death sentences.

Shaving has become incredibly better: sharper blades, lubricating shaving cream, no blood. The jarred pasta sauce in grocery stores is light years better than it was. That's all I have

Related to air quality: fuel economy of ICE cars. Even leaving hybrids aside, regular reasonable cars are much more efficient nowadays.

Medicine. AIDS is no longer a death sentence. Deaths after a heart attack are 40% less likely due to advancements in treatment. Even laser tattoo removal is new to the last 40 years.

Child mortality has improved a lot. But it does seem to be sliding back recently.

Recently visited São Paulo and it was a beautiful, wonderful experience that I highly recommend. I also, in just a few days, gained a great deal more intense firsthand appreciation for the Clean Air Act. I’d never been somewhere with such bad air pollution and it shocked me how noticeable it is.

We got to skip P.E.!

I was an undergrad at UCLA in 1985-1986. I remember those smog warnings. Horrible.

Computers - they're cheaper and more portable. You have control over your music and movies in ways that you had no chance at in the 80s. They're not an unmixed blessing, but little is.

Yup, I went to college in SoCal in the 80s and the air was sliceable some days. I loved the smog sunsets with silhouetted palm trees but would have traded them to be able to breathe

Mmm all that coal smoke from heating in the flats getting trapped over the city! We've had some bad days in Berlin this last winter but nothing that dire!

How you could move from LA to Ohio is mind boggling having grown up in Columbus and knew by age 12 I was getting the hell outta Ohio hahahaha

The best thing about increased immigration is the food choices. From tacos to pho to Ethiopian to curry, food in this country is a million times better.

I grew up i L.A. in the fifties and sixties, and we were out playing in what would later become a stage 2. or worse. Weeks would go by with the San Gabriel mountains completely invisible.

When I got to L.A. in 1995 there were days you would get headaches just from breathing the air outside for too long. You could see the brown haze sitting over the city from the hills

Totally remember driving to LA as a kid in the late 80s early 90s and seeing smog

They will be making a comeback

The efforts that made many things get BETTER over the past 40 years have made DRASTIC REVERSALS since Trump became president. A large portion due specifically to those Trump put in his Cabinet positions.

Infrastructure in general seems more stable. I remember hearing about "boil orders" where a town would be told over the radio to boil any drinking water for a short time. And power outtages, it seems like they happened during most big storms in the midwest. Now they're more infrequent.

Yep, I grew up there (west LA) during the same time period a good day was when we could see the mountains through the smog, which wasn’t often in the summer.

Ozone

I remember driving from San Diego to LA, you could see the brown smog blob 40 miles away.

Well, TVs are cheaper. Not sure how great that is. And yeah, environment is better…for now. I was born the same year Congress passed the Clean Air Act

MAGA John, not reporting terrible air quality is not the same as not having it.

Sadly that is very true. Even worse, most medicines are not tested on female lab animals because of fears that female hormonal variations will impact the results, but then the resulting drugs are given to women as if those hormonal cycles magically don't matter.

Oh yes. When my only daughter was born in 1986 at 24 weeks survival rates were 10%. No specialized ventilators, no surfactants for the lungs. I am very glad for the mothers today, and their babies.

The "dust" from the air was nasty when I grew up in Burbank. It would deposit on the exterior of our house. I remember touching it in the window sills and finding it slightly irritating to the skin.

Medical diagnoses; sustainable energy technology; no-wrinkle fabrics. What is "monotonically"?

Porn. Anyone with a phone can see more and better porn in one minute than the average person used to see in their entire lives.

SO MUCH is better now! Phones, cars, equality (sure we are in a rough patch but still net better than Reagan times), video games, solar and wind energy, and much more. And basically everything that got worse got worse because of companies making them worse on purpose.

SMOG DAYS…I grew up in O.C. and remember those days well and feeling my lungs actually hurt after we played outside anyway!

Explain the cyclosporia and ecoli and salmonella then.

But airplane travel is so, so much worse.

Acid rain was a thing. Less so now due to emission controls (though it may soon be a problem again).

I'd even say air travel, to the dismay of the person in the screenshot. Planes now are safer, more efficient and flights are cheaper. Sure, the food is often bland and airlines want to charge for more and more, but you don't have to be rich to fly to visit family anymore.

No more ozone warnings. We had them in the 90s in Germany. In the future we probably have heat warnings instead.

river around manhattan, nobody would want to fall in the water in the 70's, a polluted mess, today you can't see dolphins and such near the southern end, unthinkable back then

Yep, I was a kid in OC in the 80s and remember the same thing. The worst (non-wildfire) day now is ~equal to a pretty good day back then. As a kid, your lungs would just hurt after a deep breath when playing outside for a while

👍 Smog wasn't solved yet in the 1980s, but I recall people then griping about how bad some days were in 1000 Oaks. Those people would have been horrified to experience how much worse it had been for Greater Los Angeles area during the 1960s and early '70s.

And the automobile manufacturers fought like hell against the catalytic converter mandates that cleaned up the air. The rich have always hated Americans.

All I can say is everything was better till trump came along. He's gutting 40 yrs. of progress and what's better now won't stay better for much longer.

Lake Erie, thanks to the EPA

Wow I didn't realize it was that many!

And MUMPS!!!!

I was born in Pasadena in the 80s and Mom pushed hard for us to leave because of the smog. Dad had already had a job being worked out elsewhere so it wasn't sudden, but it meant he did a couple of years teaching at universities along the coast until the paperwork got sorted.