Jim: I have 2006 on one of my comps. But I'd prefer a picture of Anita with a nice orange on the side of a boxcar. Seeing that other peson would just cause me to barf all over my keyboard.
The good old days
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Jim: I have 2006 on one of my comps. But I'd prefer a picture of Anita with a nice orange on the side of a boxcar. Seeing that other peson would just cause me to barf all over my keyboard.
The picture you paint makes for a very attractive world, especially when compared to the worst of today. But lets look at the whole picture and see how well it stands up.
Anyone remember polio, smallpox, measles and other diseases that were still rampant. Not something I would want to reintroduce.
The small village lifestyle where you knew and were known by your neighbours is often held up as an ideal. Well if you conform to the majority view it probably was but dare to be different and it makes Big Brother look like amateur hour.
Of course big city anonymity can be lonely but it also allows new ideas to sprout and flourish. Are they all good, no but is repressing everything new any better?
I think that if you look closely at every aspect of society, a fair comparison will show similar trends. On the surface life was simpler and perhaps healthier but look a bit deeper and the ugly parts appear.
That kinda depends on how far back you go. I don't think we're talking about going back to the 1860s. More like the 1950s.
Smallpox still has no cure. Only a treatment. Measels also has no cure. Polio also has no cure. Just a preventative vaccine. So you wouldn't be "re-introducing" them. They still exist today. What WOULD be gone would be HIV/AIDS. I lived in a relatively small town as a kid. We knew all the people in our neighborhood. As a kid I was able to ride my bike about a mile away from home and play baseball in the park without being accompanied by a parent. NO parents were there. Just us kids. Think anyone will let their kids do that nowadays?
Back then if you were seen by a neighbor doing something you shouldn't be doing, there was a phone call to your parents and you got corporal punishment when you got home. Parents believed the neighbors over their kids. In school if you got caught goofing around you got whacked by your teacher, then the teacher called the parents and they had to come to school. When you got home you got whacked by them. Amazing what a good whacking will do to straighten you out. Neighbors had block parties and everyone got to know everyone. Now, every house is an island and people don't know who is living next door to them. Could be a saint or a child molester or drug dealer. Nobody knows until police show up and drag them away. That's when you hear the comments "he was a quiet guy that never bothered anyone".
Big city....crime, pollution, crowded, noisy, high taxes, corrupt leaders....no thanks. I call those the ugly parts.
"Big city....crime, pollution, crowded, noisy, high taxes, corrupt leaders"
Hell, Chicago was like that in the 50s, hasn't gotten any better but it hasn't gotten any worse either. Probably cuz you can't go down from the bottom. :wave:
At AJ, technically this whole thread is off topic since it's all about the decline of the community and really should be in Trainz Community rather than General Trainz. :hehe:
Hell, Chicago was like that in the 50s, hasn't gotten any better but it hasn't gotten any worse either. Probably cuz you can't go down from the bottom. :wave:
At AJ, technically this whole thread is off topic since it's all about the decline of the community and really should be in Trainz Community rather than General Trainz. :hehe:
I heard that, screwdriver, pliers, and a matchbook. The striker strip on the matchbook was used to clean sparkplugs and points, set the sparkplug gap with a match, set the points gap with the matchbook cover. Might not be specs but close enough to get the little beastie running.
True but hand cranking that visible engine was no fun either. And then, before the on board computer, the fine, interactive adjustments that result in much cleaner burning and higher efficiencies were just a dream in the engine designers minds.
Every age had its advantages and disadvantages. To compare the best of the past with the worst of today is disingenuous at best. As is the claim that everything is better today. As in most things, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle between the two extremes.
To bring this back OT, even though many profess a love of all things steam, I wonder how romantic the fireman thought his job was after shoveling tons of coal. Or all the other dirty, messy jobs that needed to be done to keep a steam engine functioning. I don't think many passengers or line side residents will miss the billowing clouds of soot either.
RoysTrainz
Rembrandt van Trainz
Martin I remember that smoke very well as a passenger
Just after WWII the mighty german steam loco's I love to see and ride as passenger countless times and hang out of the window and sniff the smoke and got spanked home coz close dirty and smelly but heck young and love'd it. We lived just across the border with Germany near Aachen and still fresh in my memory driving to next big station in Colone (Koln) where many puffing trainz come and go. Wonderful stuff and excellent memories as a kid.
regards
Roy
Just after WWII the mighty german steam loco's I love to see and ride as passenger countless times and hang out of the window and sniff the smoke and got spanked home coz close dirty and smelly but heck young and love'd it. We lived just across the border with Germany near Aachen and still fresh in my memory driving to next big station in Colone (Koln) where many puffing trainz come and go. Wonderful stuff and excellent memories as a kid.
regards
Roy
Crime is no different than it was before, nor were weirdos following kids around a park. The thing is the media makes a big thing out of everything today. Back then new traveled more slowly, and people looked out for each other. The news came twice a day as a newspaper and or a TV show, and not every 15seconds with repeats of the repeats of nothing. I hate to say it but CNN and others get to the point that they run out of news when there's a bit event, and I swear they would start interviewing the ants on the sidewalk to see what they'd say if they could!
When I was growing up, we had neighbors who would keep an eye on us as we were out playing. If anything happened, we could go to anyone of them, and they'd contact my mom. I don't see this today in my neighborhood. Kids get the sheltered rides back and forth between the ball field, and are not allowed to socialize with anyone in between.
We also now have parents who don't want to take the time to teach their kids to how not talk to strangers, and how to socialize with other peers, without their mobile devices. People in general don't even socialize with each other the way they used to. Today every family is their own entity and no one is there to look out for each other. There are exceptions of course, but this is what it looks like today.
The other thing too is kids are brought up in such a sheltered indoor environment. They rarely go outside anyway because they're busy playing video games. If they did go out by themselves, they'd probably get lost because they'd need a GPS hooked to their bikes in order to find the ball field and their way home.
Things weren't so rosy in the past. We had diseases as others have said here without cures, or the cures were worse than the disease its self. Beethoven, for example didn't die from pneumonia. He became deaf, but that wouldn't have killed him. He died from the result of his medicine, which contained arsenic and lead!
Growing up we had two wired plugs without ground pins (rare). My parents had toasters that were nothing more than hot wires inside a frame. My mom burned her hand on it when she was 10 years old. Today we have glass tubes, or quartz tubes, instead to heat the bread. This is a lot safer, although the heating isn't as great.
Major pesticides were used such as DDT on our food. Today I have Parkinson's Disease and had thyroid cancer. Both of these have been linked to pesticides such as Chlordane, DDT and others used in agricultural areas where I grew up.
We didn't have the easy technology, although I wonder how much this stuff has made some things so much easier. The thing is, we see the past as being better because we're not in it anymore, and we only see what we want to see. But if we look at what we have today and compare it to what was in the past, we're actually living in the best times, politics or not. In fact the politics really haven't changed much either. If you look through history, you'll see the exact same antics being carried out today as they were 30, 50, even 150 years ago! The thing is, we have micro-sized news bursts and constant news feeds from various sources constantly bombarding us with some tidbit. Some of this bombardment is even misquotes, pure lies, and even plagarized information. News reporters at many outlets today don't even bother to verify the news until after the fact. This is not the way things used to be, or least it wasn't.
Anyway, There are still a lot of good things. We have clean food and water, which were quite rare in the 1930s to 1970s. Back then we still had areas in the US that had no electricity or indoor plumbing. People were smoking, using asbestos, lead paint, and mercury like it was nothing. Radiated toys were handed out like it was nothing, and chemical companies were still dumping major pollutants into the water supplies of many cities and towns. Woburn, MA, Love Canal, and many other areas of the country are proof of that. Today we're cleaning up these areas and building shopping malls on them, and reclaiming the land for other uses as well.
Surgery is less invasive and the recovery time is a lot less. My thyroid surgery in 2003 consisted of a tiny cut the about 1/2" in length, and my recovery time was 6 weeks. About 20 years ago, the same surgery would have meant 2 weeks in the hospital and a scar from one earlobe to the other with months of in bed recovery. Knee surgery is the same. How many people have you seen with knee operations today? A few weeks with a cast and then a cane. Back in the 1980s, this would have been a cast up to their hip. In 1962 I had a clubbed foot operation. I was the youngest person in the world to have this surgery. After that I lived with splints, braces, and casts. Today the same surgery is performed at birth, instead of 1 year, and the cast is nothing more than a tiny plastic pillow-like thing around the leg. My casts were up to my hip and had to be cut-off with a razor saw.
There are many other good things as well like Trainz for example. How could we have something like this if we didn't have computers, and the internet like it is today. Without the proper funding of education, our colleges and universities never would have developed the networks we have for the DOD or for themselves. A lot of our technology came out of the Cold War and the research efforts done at the domestic schools. I could go on, but remember history does repeat its self whether we want it to or not.
John
John: I agree with SOME of what you say 
I do think crime has gotten worse. At least, the way the in which crimes are committed. Weirdos may have followed kids around the park, but the kids knew enough not to go near them or get in the car with them. And as you said, good people kept an eye out for weirdos. Many times the good people in the town found their own ways to get rid of weirdos and they got help from the police to do so. We don't HAVE "parents" any more. Now we have "parent" and that single parent leaves the kid to his own devices while he/she goes out partying. Can we say Casey Anthony? I still have a wire toaster. Works better and lots cheaper than the new ones
We stopped using DDT and now we have malaria back as a problem. Some tradeoff.
Trainz...in the past we had toy electric trains and we had even MORE fun running them. I still have an extensive collection of 0-gauge trains and I set them up every Christmas time. Oops...can't say Christmas any more. Have to say Winter Holiday Time.
And we all know Al Gore invented the internet (and Global Climate Change).
I don't know about anyone else, but I would gladly turn the clock back to 1940, even with all the drawbacks that that entails. I never did get to ride on one of those smoking, chuffing beasts that ruled the rails back then. That coal smoke would be perfume in my nose compared to the nasty smell of diesel :hehe:
I do think crime has gotten worse. At least, the way the in which crimes are committed. Weirdos may have followed kids around the park, but the kids knew enough not to go near them or get in the car with them. And as you said, good people kept an eye out for weirdos. Many times the good people in the town found their own ways to get rid of weirdos and they got help from the police to do so. We don't HAVE "parents" any more. Now we have "parent" and that single parent leaves the kid to his own devices while he/she goes out partying. Can we say Casey Anthony? I still have a wire toaster. Works better and lots cheaper than the new ones
We stopped using DDT and now we have malaria back as a problem. Some tradeoff.
Trainz...in the past we had toy electric trains and we had even MORE fun running them. I still have an extensive collection of 0-gauge trains and I set them up every Christmas time. Oops...can't say Christmas any more. Have to say Winter Holiday Time.
And we all know Al Gore invented the internet (and Global Climate Change).
I don't know about anyone else, but I would gladly turn the clock back to 1940, even with all the drawbacks that that entails. I never did get to ride on one of those smoking, chuffing beasts that ruled the rails back then. That coal smoke would be perfume in my nose compared to the nasty smell of diesel :hehe:
RoysTrainz
Rembrandt van Trainz
Hi All john hit the nail on the coffin
absolutely right John the media is the major culprit that makes things look much worse and makes things worse by guiding weirdo's to copycat or invent new things to make the news.
Politicians are second but not better they are the jackals no not jackasses all of them only 99%.
The church(chrisitan i mean) is making progress and catching up on the mafia and how to rule the believers world for centuries as a global business.
Finally its all in the heart and mind of normal people where things happen and can be shared, everything else is doomed for ending up in the hype world we live in.
Thailand and also were we live from the outside world is worse the US getto's but let's put it this way every big city in the world has the same problem and most rural countryside including ours is most peaceful and normal to live even with regular weirdo's but still harmless. and yes doors open at night and we live 3 km from the nearest village but more than 1.5 hours from the next city in any direction.
have a great day guys
Roy
absolutely right John the media is the major culprit that makes things look much worse and makes things worse by guiding weirdo's to copycat or invent new things to make the news.
Politicians are second but not better they are the jackals no not jackasses all of them only 99%.
The church(chrisitan i mean) is making progress and catching up on the mafia and how to rule the believers world for centuries as a global business.
Finally its all in the heart and mind of normal people where things happen and can be shared, everything else is doomed for ending up in the hype world we live in.
Thailand and also were we live from the outside world is worse the US getto's but let's put it this way every big city in the world has the same problem and most rural countryside including ours is most peaceful and normal to live even with regular weirdo's but still harmless. and yes doors open at night and we live 3 km from the nearest village but more than 1.5 hours from the next city in any direction.
have a great day guys
Roy
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