You are missing my point, or at least not really addressing it, so perhaps I wasn't clear.

Your dismissals are "just about magnitude of difference", but your supporting examples are also about magnitude of difference, you are just choosing not to frame them that way.

> That statement also makes an important point: diabetics had solutions back in the old days 40 years before 2009, and there sure were a lot less people with self-inflicted diabetes then.

> Smart phones are a convenience, and a democratization of old technology; not a categorically new thing which insanely changes people's way of life. Even in 1969 (now that it's been 50 years), one could put a nickel in a pal phone and summon a cab.

I can make this argument about anything you listed as being "progress" from 1909-1959. People who now fly could have driven, or taken the train, or rode on horseback. Flying is just faster, right? The jet engine is just an evolutionary change over the turboprop. The atom bomb is just a really big bomb, right? Couldn't you just drop 10,000 equivalent bombs? And that's me trying to take you seriously -- one of your examples is "fuel-injected internal combustion engines", which you claim is a bigger "invention" than anything that's happened in computing since 1959.

In 1959, computers did almost nothing for almost nobody. You are taking an entire half century of advances in computing and saying they are irrelevant because you can draw some "fundamental" line in 1959 that everything was done before. But if we still had 1959-level computers our society would be, to use your words, insanely different. So what makes 1959-2009 "not progress"?

You started with a thesis and selected your evidence to match. What you write is "almost self-evidently true" because your examples are extremely selective. It "pisses people off" because you're trying to deceive them and they can see it.

Look, the ridiculous part of this argument is that I actually agree with you: I think the pace of technological development has slowed and that it's a problem. But you're making extreme claims that are just wrong, and your argument is based in some kind of weird definition of the world looking different than before that I can't relate to.

You write in your piece: "as such, I don’t think the world of 50 years hence will look very technologically different from the world now."

If you already don't think 2019 looks very different from 1969, then, sure, 2069 might not look very different from 2019 either. But I venture that if we transported you back to 1969 you're be complaining about the lack of progress since 1919 too, because you can make that same argument by cherry-picking facts. Each half-century of technological progress has looked different from the last. If you're looking for the type of progress that happened in the previous 50 years you'll miss the forest for the trees, just as you've done here.

Some of the grumpy people who were expecting the continuation of development of the railroads and giant industrial machines from 1859-1909 probably looked at the bio breakthroughs and jet engines and electrification of 1909-1959 as not being the same kind of progress. ("Planes were invented in 1903!")

We won't really know what mattered from 1959-2009 until 2059, and I suspect we will see a ton of groundbreaking "invention" work making real changes in people's lives when we look back from 2059. (Just look at the ads from 1959 and tell me how much of that garbage really still matters.)

And also:

> Takimag audiences appreciate non politically correct jokes; a man writes for his audience. If you don't like it, well, I'm sorry you're so sensitive I guess. I'm not sorry for making jokes.

That's nice. I'm glad there's an audience out there for you that also finds humor in mocking human illness. Diversity provides strength.