[windowshopping]

I love this article, it really point out a lot of things we take for granted. It's easy to focus on the bad and forget how much things have really improved.

The one line about the EU made me laugh though:

> EU: the European Union & single Euro currency make the EU easier to understand & travel in it much less tricky and expensive

The fact that it just says this in passing from the perspective of a tourist and without any addendum like "And countless other improvements for Europeans brought about by EU regulation" makes me think of that famous New Yorker cover~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Ave...

[rdlw]

Well, the page starts with this in the introduction: "So here is a personal list of small ways in which my ordinary everyday daily life has been getting better since the late 1980s/early 1990s"

So on the contrary, it seems to me listing "countless improvements for Europeans" as an everyday life improvement would be an extreme overstatement of the American (?) author's empathy, or perhaps a performative indication that they think about the lives of others even when explicitly trying to focus on themself.

[gwern]

As an American, I do indeed have little idea what sorts of improvements people in the EU as a whole - much less any individual country - have had. I can guess at a few, since presumably a lot of my items transfer. (Pascalization for avocado preservation, for example, is presumably a world-wide thing because the laws of physics are the same everywhere.) But I can't write a decent list.

I see that fact as more of an invitation to write your own. Do Europeans feel annoyed at the omissions of XYZ? Go right ahead and make your own! There's no patent on the idea of 'writing down a list of things that have gotten better'. I'm not going to sue you if you write down a list of ordinary things that have gotten nicer in the UK. In fact, I'd be happy to link it in the external links section if anyone makes a decent list for some other country in the same spirit. (I would prefer it not be tech-heavy, though. Things like "did you know PCs and smartphones also got really cheap in the Third World or the EU, and SSDs are pretty sweet compared to HDDs?" are not particularly interesting to anyone and do not need to be pointed out.)