Are we doomed to slower advancement until advancements stop?

Quote: chickenman

IIRC it was ostensibly to save gas after the embargo(s) but it did seem like forever to get rid of it.

It was to save gas in 1974. After they saw deaths go down they decided correlation=causation and a combo of insurance companies and states wanted to keep it. Insurance cos liked lower claims, states liked writing tickets. To this day I still think how cool it was to see my first "SPEED LIMIT 75" sign when I drove cross country.

Quote:

Good post BTW

TYVM

Quote: TheCesspit

(head desk)

?

Quote: Pacomartin

But doing testing on air breathing animals underwater is also difficult.

You do know most land animals simply cannot control their breathing? the exceptions are almost all aquatic animals like otters, hippos and such. The one non-aquatic mammal that can also control breathing are humans, which lends some credence to the aquatic ape hypothesis of human evolution.

Quote: AZDuffman

Something happened in USA Society between about 1970-1986. .

More like the mid 60's. Seat belts started in 1965.
Welfare and food stamps also kicked into high
gear in 1965. Books were written, like The Silent
Spring, to scare people about pesticides. In 1967
tamper proof packaging for drugs was introduced. In
1966 warnings on cigarette packs showed up and
TV ads for tobacco were banned.

Everything started getting in our faces every day
around 1970. Women's Lib, the war in Vietnam,
the Oil Crisis, smaller cars, 55 mph speed limit.
It hasn't let up since. There's a lot of money to be
made in constantly scaring people and making
them nervous wrecks.

Quote: Pacomartin

Pigs tend to panic if you put them in SCUBA gear, and they often are so agitated that you can't get reliable conclusions.

The mental image this invokes...

Quote: Evenbob

More like the mid 60's. Seat belts started in 1965.
Welfare and food stamps also kicked into high
gear in 1965. Books were written, like The Silent
Spring, to scare people about pesticides. In 1967
tamper proof bottles for drugs was introduced. In
1966 warnings on cigarette packs showed up and
TV ads for tobacco were banned.

Good points, starting point is soft because it is hard to pinpoint exactly when. With all that starting in 1965 a delay effect would keep people from reacting for a few years. 1965 is also kind of when US Cities started going to crap. Before then it was not terrible to live in them, but as time went on there was less a "neighborhood feel" in a city. After the riot era no sensible person opened a shop in a city, they went to the suburbs. But at the same time, the American ideal of success started to drift from that shopkeeper to some office job working until 5 or 6 with holidays off.

IIRC there were ads for smokes on TV until NYE 1970, the last one being on "The Tonight Show."

Don't get me started on how many people that "Silent Spring" women killed. We have a bridge here named after her for crying out loud.

Quote:

Everything started getting in our faces every day
around 1970. Womens Lib, the war in Vietnam,
the Oil Crisis, smaller cars, 55 mph speed limit.
It hasn't let up since. There's a lot of money to be
made in constantly scaring people and making
them nervous wrecks.

As a child of the 1970s it is kind of sad to think those years were a nadir in the USA on so many levels. At least that was the best decade for Saturday Morning kids shows. Creators on dope made for wild ideas.

Quote: AZDuffman

As a child of the 1970s it is kind of sad to think those years were a nadir in the USA on so many levels.

The race riots in 1967 were a huge deal, we really
started paying attention to blacks in this country.
Then in the early 70's we had All in the Family,
The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son. We went from
almost no blacks on TV at all, to shows about them
everywhere. In your face stuff as well, very unnerving.
We went from laughing at blacks in the 60's, to all
all of a sudden taking them very seriously in the
70's, while still laughing at them on TV. I still have
no idea what's going on in that area, except Detroit
is gone and the prisons in MI are mostly black.

Quote: AZDuffman

Don't get me started on how many people that "Silent Spring" women killed.

I'm not getting the cause/effect here: she railed against DDT as I recall, what else? Never read the book so honestly don't know.

Quote: Evenbob

The race riots in 1967 were a huge deal, we really
started paying attention to blacks in this country.
Then in the early 70's we had All in the Family,
The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son. We went from
almost no blacks on TV at all, to shows about them
everywhere. In your face stuff as well, very unnerving.
We went from laughing at blacks in the 60's, to all
all of a sudden taking them very seriously in the
70's, while still laughing at them on TV. I still have
no idea what's going on in that area, except Detroit
is gone and the prisons in MI are mostly black.

For all the "nonviolence movement" you hear about, that is rubbish. There were lots of riots and some areas became outright dangerous for whites. My maternal grandfather somehow convinced my dad to "take a ride to the riots" after King was shot.

As to TV/Movies the early 1970s was the "Blacksploitation" era with movies like "Blackula." I say that was when equal rights were achieved because it proved a black movie could be as bad as a white one. But one place I worked an older black female said she used to watch them anytime they were on.

1970 or 71 was the last year for de-facto segregated pools in my county. The old black-pool is now a bearly famous haunted house.

Quote: chickenman

I'm not getting the cause/effect here: she railed against DDT as I recall, what else? Never read the book so honestly don't know.

Her rally against DDT caused a ban. This cause an increase in malaria in the Third World. What people don't get is these old pesticides worked really well. Chlorodane was great for termites, they never came back. Then it was banned and you had to use three times as much of something else, and you had to come back way more often. DDT was never as bad as she said, though people sprayed it everywhere. I wish I saved the old pic I had from the 1950s or 60s of a woman spraying it right over a baby crib.

Quote: AZDuffman

For all the "nonviolence movement" you hear about, that is rubbish. There were lots of riots and some areas became outright dangerous for whites. .

It's still that way here. After the riots in 67,
when they tore up the store fronts in 'their'
part of town, many of them never reopened
and are still boarded up almost 50 years later.
Now there are parts of town you just don't
go into at night if you're white. A lot of things
changed in this country about 50 years ago.