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by psi75 1432 days ago
How the quality of Disneyland has evolved is... tricky to evaluate. The rides are almost certainly safer and probably a bit more impressive on a technical front, but the experience itself? I'm not sure and, given that I'm a middle-aged man, I have no desire to go to Disneyland ever. Still, I imagine it was a better experience in the 1960s because it was less crowded. That's not Disneyland's fault, of course. It has gone from a place where a few devoted fans went a few times in their lives to a place where a much larger number of people go only once in their life (because it's just not worth it, in terms of headache, to go more than once, especially if you don't have kids under 12).

The general problem is overpopulation--but the good news is that there's a countervailing force built in: the more people there are, the more stuff of value there can be. New York's too congested to live in? Go to Chicago. Chicago becomes full? Live in Minneapolis, or Madison, or some up-and-coming artsy small town most of us have never heard of. So, the problem we actually experience is not overpopulation itself but, rather, the weighted overpopulation that is created by extreme inequality (i.e., by some people having 1,000,000 times more votes and more choices than the rest of us). When some rich douchebag can play the high school bully and buy hotel rooms for $1000 per night (or even buy out the whole hotel) it means everyone who can't pay $1000 per night for lodging suffers. We don't actually need to depopulate the world (although, and I hate to say this, I think traumatic and unplanned depopulation is a high likelihood in the next 50 years) so much as we need to do something about the astronomical footprint of the rich; we could support the global population that exists now if only the world were run by better people and the resources better organized.

2 comments

Significant percentage of Disney rides are ... identical to when they opened. They've added some new ones, and removed some, but many things remain (and are probably "stuck" now - I see no way they could remove "It's a small world" even though they keep redoing the art.
I wouldn't be surprised if the number of devoted fans going repeatedly is higher now than it was back then.