My answer:
All this technology: Radios, Television, Pocket computers that you can just pull knowledge from that also perfroms the functions of various other gadgets which are also made possible by modern technology. And of course, THE INTERNET!
Standardization:
USB-C is awesome! :D
The world just uses AC power.
Metric system
Countries all around the world agreeing to a certain set of rules: Such as in Aviation, the world agreed to use Aviation English and standard phraseology, emergency frequency is 121.5, 3-Letter codes that is unique to every commercial airport in the world.
Treaties:
My favorite thing is the Kyoto Protocol [Edit: Montreal Protocol, mixed that one up]. We stopped the ozone from getting fucked. Now we need to do the same with climate change… 👀
Co-operation:
I was at a traffic light and it’s just amazing how (almost) everyone just follows the lights, and not just try to run red lights. Yay! (okay i know its just called “obeying the law” but still, I find this interesting)
International Space Station… (at least until a certain country withdrew… 👀)
I love that we can now easily communicate with each other from all around the world.
Well, not some places… ahem DPRK, PRC ahem
North Sentinel Island!
I’m in the NICU right now. Mother and child would probably be dead without modern medicine. Instead everyone knew what to do and everyone made it out safe and sound.
Food.
I can make a plate of food that has 10 different elements from all over the world in about 15 minutes, costing about $10.
100 years ago people barely had reliable access to salt and pepper.
This may get you banned from Italy, but international fuckery with Lasagna is awesome: mix in some taco spices and serve with nacho chips.
Once made a dessert lasagna. Cream cheese/ricotta cheesecake with vanilla and honey for the cheese layer. Forest berry preserve for the sauce, and I crumbled walnut, pecans, and raisins for the meaty bits. Fantastic concept, but I used Lasagna noodles just like in a normal lasagna and frankly they were the weak link. Just flavorless noodles running through an otherwise excellent treat.
If I ever go back to try it again, I’ll press my own noodles with spices and a touch of honey. That will be the ticket.
Wouldn’t pumpkin be more suited than pasta? Frankly the idea of sweet pasta scares me a bit.
Probably, but that wouldn’t quite have the same effect. Though a layering of pumpkin pie and cheesecake could be an alternative to jam…
Yeah. I watch some historic food shows and they make it a point to highlight that food was generally not as fresh or plentiful as today.
100 years ago people barely had reliable access to salt and pepper.
Pepper, okay, though I think it might be further than 100 years back for the wealthy world. However, I don’t know about salt. Okay, maybe in some areas well away from the coast, Mongolia or something, but if you have salt water and sunshine, you have salt. And, yeah, transport was more of a pain, but culinary salt isn’t that bulky.
kagis
Apparently Mongolia has a number of salt lakes, so even there, you’re not talking that far to get to salt.
And we can mine salt.
Spices that require growing conditions specific to part of the world are, I think, a lot more constrained than salt.
EDIT: Most trade historically happened by boat, and the importance of waterway transport meant that kingdoms and empires usually roughly aligned with watersheds, because if you controlled downstream of someone, you controlled their access to the sea. As long as you’re doing trade by boat, you just need to go all the way down the river to the sea to get to salt. Some rivers aren’t fully navigable, but for waterfalls or whatever, you can still transfer goods from boat to boat.
I don’t dispute the broader “we have access to a whole lot of condiments that people didn’t historically have”, though. Add in engine-powered transportation, refrigeration (including refrigerated transport), some important preservation technologies (irradiation, canning) and you also get a lot of out-of-season foods and foods that don’t grow near where the consumer is.
100 years ago people barely had reliable access to salt and pepper.
That’s a bit of a stretch.
IDK where you live but here in Europe there are at least 500 yo recipes with spices from all over the world. And no, not exclusively for the rich. Trade routes were always important. What they had was also certainly more healthy 100 years ago than the ultra processed garbage of today.
INDOOR PLUMBING
Oh yea lol, this reminds me of my mom and dad’s villages (two different villages) in PRC, where they have to go to like a shared village bathroom. And it sucks if you have to go in the middle of the night. I vaguely remember visiting and I always dislike rural areas because it feel so “boring”, unlike the city (Guangzhou) where it’s so “magnificient” (well I didn’t have the concept of “Urban” vs “Rural” when I was a kid)
Vaccines and antibiotics.
Fuck yeah. Even if we lost everything else back to the cotton gin, life expectancies, survival rates, and quality of life would still be dramatically better if we retained vaccines, antibiotics, and dental care (including the pain management part).
Modern medicine, as incomplete as it is, is a godsend we don’t appreciate often enough. And that includes opioids, despite the current hysteria.
Bitches will appreciate it a lot more when their kids start dying of measles n shit.
Or not. 2024 convinced me that a lot of people are irredeemably stupid.
Safe public water systems, fluoridated
Pasteurized milk
A large public agency looking after the safety of our food supply
A large public agency with global connections to detect new diseases before they spread
Don’t worry. In the US the current administration/regime is trying to remove all that. the CDC is already communications dark and the US has withdrawn from WHO.
The information superhighway as we called this thing way back when. Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, Gutenberg, free MOOCs, shadow libraries and what not are a godsend.
GPS and navigation in general. I cannot live without it.
Messaging apps. Those who’ve been in a long distance… You know, not having to use sh!t like SMS or pay stupid amounts of money for roaming is a godsend.
High refresh rate screens. Doesn’t matter what it is, every screen should be at least 90Hz. Preferably 120Hz. Especially on smartphones. 60Hz is completely unacceptable if you’re paying any more than 100~150$ for a phone.
Moto G Play 2024 is like $110 in the USA and has a 90hz HD 6.5 inch display. Apple really be scamming people lol
I got a nothing phone 2a for like 250$ new and that’s got a 120Hz amoled display… 60Hz on a 600$ phone is a joke
Free public education and healthcare are awesome, too. It really shows how much we as a society have grown and left behind the dark ages where those were for the rich only.
i don’t understand any of the words you just said.
(I’m American btw)
Modern medicine. I could live without my daily medication, but it would be life on hard mode.
Everything ancient civilization didn’t have.
I’m currently holding a rectangle of carefully organized sand and I can effortlessly argue with strangers just about anywhere in the world.
A rectangle made of carefully arranged sand, petrochemicals, crystalized aluminum, and trace elements.
Using lightning to trick Rocks into doing really complicated math
No you can’t!
That’s the spirit! Make em work for it!
Vaccine, antibiotic, and the entirety of our modern healthcare.
I really appreciate that people don’t just die out of nowhere anymore.
Not dying of fever or diarrhea
You can die from diarrhea?!
Oh yes, you can basically lose so much water and salts you die of dehydration, that’s why people used to die from cholera. And drinking a lot of water won’t be sufficient, as you also need to replace the salts and sugars you eject. Today in the developed world our hospitals can just give saline solutions and let the patient “wait it out”, but it has not always been an option and probably still isn’t a lot of places in the world.
It is one of the leading causes of infant death. About a half a million children under the age of 5 die of it every year.
Such was the world my grandparents grew up in. Before ORS became commonplace. They are in their 80s.
Diarrhea is one of the major symptoms of dysentery.
The world just uses AC power.
I mean…that’s not that standardized. Different frequencies, voltages, and plugs. Aside from Europe trying to find a least-common-denominator plug – which isn’t quite standardization – I’m not sure what major moves have happened recent by way of standardizing AC power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_electricity_by_country
USB-C is a lot more globally-standardized than AC power is.
