To think the 90's/early 2000's was when we peaked and everything has gone downhill since due to technology

Well both things can be true here.

Probably Polish and Irish are more accepted now -assuming they’re white- because the common narrative of the extreme right is to spotlight brown and Black people as the enemy. They see white immigrants as the right type of immigrants and would favour a “foreign white” above say a British Muslim of Asian heritage .

I’m a POC and I rarely had racial abuse in the 90s. I have childhood friends still in my hometown who have mixed race kids that have been subjected to a lot of racial abuse growing up in the 2010-2025 period which I think is very telling. A party like reform that ran on a platform of “us and them” would hardly have got any votes when I was growing up in my area anyway, whereas it’s now a major party people are voting for.

Mmmm not sure, my poor Polish mum was treat horribly for being "a foreigner" at a factory she worked at in the 70s and 80s....and my friends mum was actually spat at in the 60s for being Irish....I think we've moved on for the better since then

Since Brexit because it has made us as a country a whole lot poorer.

To me it was 2020 since COVID lockdown, all gone downhill...

I still use my film camera, however film is quite expensive now.

@IDontHateRainbows - the data suggests not in terms of percentage - which did slightly surprise me. It does show the massive increase in fees though which completely aligns with your points. The data is taken from a couple of years ago so the latest position, post addition of VAT on fees, may well show a different picture.

https://www.civitas.org.uk/2023/02/24/private-schooling-in-britain-a-snapshot/

@IDontHateRainbows agree

I am from a solidly 'middle middle' background and I remember a lot of my peers being privately educated, you would need to have serious money to educate not just one but 2 or 3 kids privately these days but back then it seemed something within reach of 'normal' people. And before anyone says am I self selecting by only remembering kids from school no this was the local neighbourhood kids too and I wasn't living on millionaire's row!

Yep. I was recently looking at my childhood homes on Rightmove. Parents bought them all for under £300k, they’ve all sold in the last 5 years for 600k+

The quality of life you could give a family back then was incredible compared to now

I remember ‘fuck MySpace, come to MyPlace’ 😂 tragic

No, not really. OP specifically referenced the late 90s, early 00s. Many people had the internet but smart phones weren’t a thing.

In about 2008, I remember someone wearing a T-shirt saying "Myspace is for losers". (Myspace being a similar idea to Facebook.)

Thanks. To go back to the earlier message, we weren't actually scared, but we absolutely were aware of it. I don't think of it as being difficult or hard - it just was.

That’s hard.

The planet is being destroyed - no 'if' about it. This is not just down to numbers, but much more about economic activity. Google suggests that global per capita CO2 emissions have increased something like five times since 1900.
Second, it's true that Africa's population is currently increasing, but the birthrate is falling quite quickly, so this will also stabilise within one or two generations.
Finally, I totally agree that technology is (at least in theory) neutral, and can be - and is used for human improvement. Before that can happen, someone really needs to have a word with Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and all their mates though!

You’re getting mixed up. There was definitely no Facebook in the 1990s. You must be thinking of another website / forum. Facebook reached the UK in the mid-late 2000s. That’s a fact.

I think that everything has dismproved considerably since smartphones were introduced .
They have changed society considerably.

Where I grew up in the 70s and 80s, we all knew we were living at ground zero under a first wave target.

You're ten years out. Friends Reunited site came before Facebook but even that was from early 2000s onwards.

https://www.meta.com/en-gb/about/company-info/?srsltid=AfmBOoqg09troMjPlwJonrbCk1lb71iKNBsPRLwQ2i7M7TuAdS1Yq0BB

well Meta have a different take on their own history

“In January 2004, Zuckerberg began writing a code for a new website, known as "TheFacebook”

@Galdos

is wiki wrong?

Facebook was in the UK in 1995, but a slow burn, and started taking off big time in 1999.

I feel like I was lucky. Late 80s you could just ask for a council house. I'm from a big city. They put young people like me on the really rough estates, but you had a home at an affordable rent.

First kid 1991, the maternity ward was half empty and plenty of staff. Sure, the place was old and really needed a lick of paint, but there were actual beds and nurses to support. I had a normal birth and was still in 5 days - lots of stitches.

I could live on my wages. Was a secretary. Paid £11,500 pa full time, rent was something like £1,750 pa. After second kid, shopping was £50 pw. Husband was at uni, no loans, no tuition fees, he actually got a grant. Childcare was £6 for a half day (from 8am - 1pm or 1pm to 6pm) with food all in. Once they were 3, they went morning or afternoons to school with free food and wrap around.

Housing bubble had burst end of the 1980s / beginning of 1990s, which was very hard for some people. I ended up buying under 'do it yourself shared ownership' (you choose the house, purchase a % of it and a housing association purchases the rest of it and you rent that). Like, we paid for our 25% outright because you could save that much - as a secretary married to a student working part-time.

I hated Thatcher, but it feels as if New Labour did a right number on people - PFI really screwed things up. I don't think we recovered from that and the financial crash of 2008 was the cherry on the cake.

It's interesting following the sharp investor platforms. They don't know how to keep their money safe and growing these days. Mark Carney (was Governor of the Bank of England, now PM of Canada) made some pertinent remarks recently: he reckons it's all going to come crashing down on a global scale in the not too distant future. Dollar is basically being devalued at the moment. Stock market is volatile. Interest rates are garbage. All 'speculate to accumulate' avenues are pretty sewn up. The housing market, especially in the UK, is probably going to collapse - once people realise the biggest redistribution of wealth is going to be from their nest egg property into private healthcare as they age.

It's a mess.

I miss the days before digital cameras. There was excitement in waiting for your holiday photos to be developed, it felt like your holiday was never really over until you’d seen the photos, then there was the pleasure of putting them in an album.