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(Mind you, more wild fires now, impacting air quality. Even so.)

Villeneuve Smog Scale

LA resident 1969-1987. Moved away partly because of the smog. Return visits to see relatives over the next few years revealed we may have jumped the gun on the smog thing. We hike the San Gabes when we visit now breathing just fine and getting great views.

Yeah, I remember how I believed taking a deep breath was a bad thing because it hurt. I’m glad children in LA no longer have to experience that.

Yes... everything is better, because the human eyes are not microscopes, to see all the plastic.

Sex toys?

Finally one I can agree with!

I remember the brown air from the 1980’s

Insulin systems. The Insulin pump has been a life changer for Type 1 (juvenile onset) diabetes. Without it, I'd have been dead 20+ years ago (I grew resistant to long acting insulin)

Healthcare has gone to hell, but advancements in medical treatments since the 80s are mind-blowing. My lupus med was the 1st new one in 50 yrs! Until relatively recently, the kind of leukemia my husband has would have been a death sentence. Yay, science!

Regulation worked so well that those that cannot remember think it wasn’t necessary.

In a rare case of 'product improving without public pressure', the company that manufactures our custom jigsaw puzzles (where we provide the art), called Ravensbuger, overnight and without warning increased the piece size drastically, and began including a large poster of the image. I was stoked.

Water quality. I grew up in Massachusetts and Maine. Rivers were poisoned. Beaches were COVERED in trash.

Less dog poop on the sidewalks ..No more smoking areas in offices, on airplanes and in restaurants.

Which is exactly why we gotta make coal great again. These air quality numbers are rookie numbers.

Tofu. So much firmer. So sexy.

Finally! Something legitimately better and not banal.

The return of the ozone layer is a big win

We finally got rid of the smoking in cinemas but not 20 years later we got mobile phones in them. I've given up on theater movies.

Bike infrastructure, car seatbelts, electric cars.

Same, tho southern Pasadena early 70s. Awful.

Beer. The beer is much better now.

Breathable soft fabric. As a kid in the 60s and 70s who could not even function in scratchy fabric it’s a tremendous relief.

River cleanliness. Rivers famously caught on fire, of course. But less dramatically in my area of the Chesapeake Bay, we used to swim in the river and come out coated in brown oily muck. I had a white bathing suit that turned brown. Now you can swim in the water without acquiring residue.

My lung capacity is 7% reduced from SoCal smog in the 70s and 80s. I also remember boil water alerts. My Mom would boil water on the stove and we would skim off the top for what we needed. Tap water now is as good or better than bottled water (SoCal).

I grew up in Pasadena. In ‘73 I was doing a music project with a woman who’d just moved from Texas. One day a Santa Ana wind blew through and took out all the smog, and my friend stepped outside & freaked because she could see the big ass San Gabriel Mountains, two miles away, for the first time.

Same. I remember having pain in my lungs when taking a deep breath in the evening after playing outside.

And I mean, honestly, “Has anything gotten better?“ is a pretty stupid question, and I would assume it stems from a relatively high degree of privilege.

Try getting an appendectomy now vs. in the 1970s. Very different experience! And don’t get me started on cancer — if I’d gotten sick even two years earlier I still would have gotten cured, but with way more physical damage. And there’s been like a breakthrough a month since then, it seems.

I grew up right where the L.A. smog and the San Diego smog met.

Food has not gotten better in the last 40 Years: much more expensive and contaminated with pesticides, smoke, and miscellaneous particulate matter. Not to mention the loss of flavor. #foodsupply #corporatefood

I was in Pasadena from 1980 to 1984, and I remember the first week I was there on campus, I didn’t know that there were mountains 4 miles to the north because you couldn’t see them through the smog. The day the air temporarily cleared was quite a surprise.

I remember cycling to college in Ireland late 80s and the smog (pea soupers) was bad too. We banned smoke emitting coal in 1987. It cleaned up the air in one city then was rolled out countrywide. And it worked. Fewer deaths, illnesses.

And I’m staying inside today because of unhealthy air quality due to wildfires in the PNW…we’re going backwards.

Food from Aldi is the best I've ever bought at a chain market!

Nothing is better, has been on an actual decline in 40 years, rapidly worse the last 20.

Healthcare, except in the US

rip the Clean Air Act which is literally responsible for it

I remember living in Pasadena in the early 1990s, and not being able to see the San Gabriel Mountains through the smog.

The collapse of poverty worldwide. From 40% in 1990 to 10% today. Still a crisis! Still unforgivable in a world with so much wealth, but humans are living longer and healthier than at any time in history.

The Hudson River, thanks in part to Pete Seeger.

Water Quality too (in many areas). Boston Harbor was a national joke in the 1970's and 80's; basically an open sewer. Today it is the most sought after real estate in Boston, with lots of on-water activities and even fishing.

It’s crazy how many big things like this back then were fixed with one simple change. Smog: catalytic converters, ozone hole: ban cfcs, acid rain: ban/filter high sulfur coal. Can’t do anything about climate change though, we just had to wait for the market forces to make renewables cheaper than FFs

Flying into LA was always a decent into brown

i watched SPEED (filmed in the summer of 93) the other day and its very striking how the sky is like dark brownish gray in the background of half the movie.

Minor, but something I was reflecting on the other day: all forms of lighting, from flashlights to overhead lights. Lighting is brighter, consumes less energy, and bulbs/chips last years longer. In the 80s, replacing light bulbs used to be one of my chores, literally every week.

We got a DVD set of "Barney Miller" a couple of years ago, and while watching it, we were amazed at all the "NYC pollution" jokes. We both grew up in Queens, and were of course familiar with how bad things were in the 70's. But it had been long enough that jokes about it caught us by surprise.

Adding “Decent Coffee” and access to it. Also Decent Beer. Maybe this is covered under food…..

Medicine! Wonderful researchers have developed cervical cancer prevention injection & there are so many diseases that are treatable now which weren’t 40 years ago.

Porn and my phone

Grew up on the CT shoreline, downwind of NYC. It wasn't until years later that I understood that the painful feeling in my lungs I always got as a little kid (late 60s/early 70s) after playing at the beach on a sunny day was asthma, probably induced by ozone from photochemical smog.

We have 10,000 chemicals in our food today. The rest of the world allows only 700. Our food is definitely not better In the 50s we were 700 but now we are 10,000. More chemicals is not better

I grew up in the Inland Empire in the 60s. Stage 3 regularly. Were there 4s?

I grew up in Denver in the same time and ,yeah, it's so much better now. Thankfully

Nope

Cuyahoga (sp?) river is no longer catching fire on the regular. We aren’t breathing leaded gas fumes. Yep some things are definitely better.

Medical care

dogs are cuter, thanks to the oodles of doodles...

Cars, in general, last longer and are safer.…they don’t have as much personality.

Cars. I’m still surprised when a car rolls over 100k. My childhood was when cars rarely made it past 100k intact. My civic just passed 212k and still gets 40+ mpg. They’re also exponentially cleaner machines.

Job safety. Material from which clothes are made. Sunscreen. Automobile safety. Awareness of impaired driving. Animal care. Air conditioning/heat pumps. Solar. Digital calculators. Streaming. Email. Cataract surgery. Cosmetic surgery. Care for special needs/differently abled/elderly people.

Medicine. (And prior) 1920s-30s-40s-50s-60s cancer, heart disease and strokes were automatic death sentences.

Shaving has become incredibly better: sharper blades, lubricating shaving cream, no blood. The jarred pasta sauce in grocery stores is light years better than it was. That's all I have

Related to air quality: fuel economy of ICE cars. Even leaving hybrids aside, regular reasonable cars are much more efficient nowadays.

Not true. Pollution from controllable sources. Not wildfires. 1/4 of the northern lower 48 has been experiencing air quality alerts in dangerous levels every single spring, and summer for the last decade. And that is projected to get much worse in the years ahead.

Medicine. AIDS is no longer a death sentence. Deaths after a heart attack are 40% less likely due to advancements in treatment. Even laser tattoo removal is new to the last 40 years.

Child mortality has improved a lot. But it does seem to be sliding back recently.

Recently visited São Paulo and it was a beautiful, wonderful experience that I highly recommend. I also, in just a few days, gained a great deal more intense firsthand appreciation for the Clean Air Act. I’d never been somewhere with such bad air pollution and it shocked me how noticeable it is.

We got to skip P.E.!

Movies have gotten a lot better since the 70s. Not necessarily the writing, but the special effects, photography, sound, and realism are all much better. I just watched some old James Bond movies and they were hilariously bad.

I was an undergrad at UCLA in 1985-1986. I remember those smog warnings. Horrible.

Computers - they're cheaper and more portable. You have control over your music and movies in ways that you had no chance at in the 80s. They're not an unmixed blessing, but little is.

Yup, I went to college in SoCal in the 80s and the air was sliceable some days. I loved the smog sunsets with silhouetted palm trees but would have traded them to be able to breathe

My dad was Caltech class of ‘71 and the smog back then was so bad that it was normal for students from out of the area to be genuinely startled the first time they saw the mountains from campus (usually when the Santa Anas started blowing)

West-Berlin in the 80s. Smog. In winter we sometimes had to stay at home because the air quality was so bad that the schools closed. And cars weren't allowed to drive. That might have been smog alert 3.

Everytime people complain about the gas prices in CA cause of the additives to prevent this my mom (who had an outdoor job) is like you cannot imagine how bad the air was esp in the valleys

How you could move from LA to Ohio is mind boggling having grown up in Columbus and knew by age 12 I was getting the hell outta Ohio hahahaha

Actually trans fats made food better. Also Americans got super fat in the 2000s.

The best thing about increased immigration is the food choices. From tacos to pho to Ethiopian to curry, food in this country is a million times better.

I grew up i L.A. in the fifties and sixties, and we were out playing in what would later become a stage 2. or worse. Weeks would go by with the San Gabriel mountains completely invisible.

"I don't really miss all the smog, mind you," Carl said, staring off. "But they made for some beautiful sunsets."

When I got to L.A. in 1995 there were days you would get headaches just from breathing the air outside for too long. You could see the brown haze sitting over the city from the hills

70's and 80's. Pfft. You should have seen the 50's and 60's. You couldn't see across the playground, and the airborne lead was glorious. Kids.....

Totally remember driving to LA as a kid in the late 80s early 90s and seeing smog

They will be making a comeback

The efforts that made many things get BETTER over the past 40 years have made DRASTIC REVERSALS since Trump became president. A large portion due specifically to those Trump put in his Cabinet positions.

I agree with air quality, water quality and food.

Infrastructure in general seems more stable. I remember hearing about "boil orders" where a town would be told over the radio to boil any drinking water for a short time. And power outtages, it seems like they happened during most big storms in the midwest. Now they're more infrequent.

Yep, I grew up there (west LA) during the same time period a good day was when we could see the mountains through the smog, which wasn’t often in the summer.

Ozone

Our water quality is better.

I remember driving from San Diego to LA, you could see the brown smog blob 40 miles away.

Well, TVs are cheaper. Not sure how great that is. And yeah, environment is better…for now. I was born the same year Congress passed the Clean Air Act

MAGA John, not reporting terrible air quality is not the same as not having it.

Concur, John. The Southland air in the 60s was often unbearable in the summer.

Food safety and variety, for sure. Air quality in urban areas. But I would point to things like prenatal care (viability dropped from 25 weeks to 22 weeks with a 40% survival rate at 24 weeks now) and cancer care (from a 49% 5-year survival rate to 70% today) all over the last 40 years.

The "dust" from the air was nasty when I grew up in Burbank. It would deposit on the exterior of our house. I remember touching it in the window sills and finding it slightly irritating to the skin.

bsky.app/profile/dian...

Medical diagnoses; sustainable energy technology; no-wrinkle fabrics. What is "monotonically"?

Porn. Anyone with a phone can see more and better porn in one minute than the average person used to see in their entire lives.

SO MUCH is better now! Phones, cars, equality (sure we are in a rough patch but still net better than Reagan times), video games, solar and wind energy, and much more. And basically everything that got worse got worse because of companies making them worse on purpose.

SMOG DAYS…I grew up in O.C. and remember those days well and feeling my lungs actually hurt after we played outside anyway!

Explain the cyclosporia and ecoli and salmonella then.

I'd even say air travel, to the dismay of the person in the screenshot. Planes now are safer, more efficient and flights are cheaper. Sure, the food is often bland and airlines want to charge for more and more, but you don't have to be rich to fly to visit family anymore.

No more ozone warnings. We had them in the 90s in Germany. In the future we probably have heat warnings instead.

Yep, I was a kid in OC in the 80s and remember the same thing. The worst (non-wildfire) day now is ~equal to a pretty good day back then. As a kid, your lungs would just hurt after a deep breath when playing outside for a while

Also has air travel gotten worse? Depends on the metric I imagine. How about air travel safety, as in the thing the FAA is most responsible for.

And the automobile manufacturers fought like hell against the catalytic converter mandates that cleaned up the air. The rich have always hated Americans.

All I can say is everything was better till trump came along. He's gutting 40 yrs. of progress and what's better now won't stay better for much longer.

Lake Erie, thanks to the EPA

Here in southeastern New England the recovery of wildlife populations since I was a kid in the 60s is amazing. So many extirpated critters are now plentiful again e. g. beaver, turkey, black bear.

As for my own amazed progress note? THERE'S A CHICKEN POX VACCINE!

I was born in Pasadena in the 80s and Mom pushed hard for us to leave because of the smog. Dad had already had a job being worked out elsewhere so it wasn't sudden, but it meant he did a couple of years teaching at universities along the coast until the paperwork got sorted.

There are a lot of environmental issues that have improved! Rivers that have healed, species that have been saved from the brink. Climate change has obviously eclipsed a lot of these successes, but we should take heart that they exist.

Video game graphics, synthetic textiles, vaccines, and Brussels sprouts Scientists: 4 Capitalists: 0

Food? Food has gotten WORSE! Why are so many Americans fat? Because of the food industry.

My biggest complaint are these usual phony af useless 🤡 republicans. Wasted the entire first quarter of this, our new century.

Similarly, smoking bans in indoor spaces. I've told younger people about going to a restaurant and being asked "smoking or non-smoking" and they just stared at me.

No more lead in paint or petrol (The US did ban leaded petrol?)

And hey: we saved the whales.

I also grew up in LA in 50’s through’70’s. Most days you couldn’t see the mountains.

Cancer therapies. Automobile efficiency. Personal transport generally.

Covid lockdown was a huge kick in the head when it comes to air quality in LA. It's gotten amazingly better with smog, but being able to see the ocean from Griffith Observatory was a crazy tangible experience.

In the US interior air quality has been vastly improved by restrictions on where you can smoke.

Air quality has gotten worse where I live, in southern New Mexico, to the point where I'm probably actually going to move. Not that everywhere else is perfect either, but there's better and then there's worse. And climate change is part of the reason it's gotten worse here, if not all of it.

Thank the Clean Air Act and the EPA (til you know who).

Yes-I also remember those days. We couldn’t run around at recess or PE. My chest felt tight when breathing sometimes. Things are so much better now.

I grew up south of SF and literally every time we went to LA there was a smog alert. Every time.

Mental health medications. There’s a lot more and they work much, much better.

Television shows - because limited series on streaming platforms are a) well funded and b) not restricted in content by advertisers.

Yes!

I completely agree! (As I sit here chocking on the smoke from a nearby forest fire!) Vehicle safety has improved dramatically as well. My grandparents use to let me and my sister play in the back of the station wagon, completely unrestrained. If grandpa was driving, we sat in the bed of the truck.

Watch vintage tv from that era and check out the smog in the background.

Denver literally had a brown cloud over the city every day for a long time. Like its relative size would be in the morning newscast.

Orange air and SIGAlerts, ahh nostalgia.

I remember smog being a major concern leading up to the LA 1984 Olympics, too. LA smog was well known nationwide at that point.

Weather forecasting has greatly improved, including such life-saving things as hurricane prediction.

Ditto on water quality. I grew up on the Saco River, and we could tell what the leather shops upriver were working on by the color of the foam drifting by (blaze orange, neon green and bright pink were common).

Healthcare technology. I know that the U.S. has a shit healthcare system but there is no point in time where I'd say "Hey, wish I could go back in time 5 years for my appendectomy."

When visiting London for the first time in the late 90s, I remember the sight of the black dirt in the tissue after blowing my nose. It's nowhere near as bad these days

Driving on the skyway in Chicago in the 80s your eyes would burn from the industry.

It will get worse this weekend. Trump is coming to town!

My driving experience is way better than it was 40 years ago. My car handles the driving in stop and go traffic while I sit back and listen to KPop streaming with zero commercials in a comfy air conditioned seat. Oh yes, way better.

I remember smog days in the San Diego area in the 70s. Really bad, lung burning. On the flipside, I also remember when you could count on wildlife smoke here in Idaho being short-lived and mostly contained to local fires. We haven’t opened with windows in weeks this summer.

Not a thing a few more years of maga couldn't restore.

I'm old enough to remember when we laughed at the people who told us bank cards (MAC) would replace money. Now I can visit my daughter in Lyon without needing a dreaded Travelers Cheque.

Air quality improvements, especially due to the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990, have saved so many lives, tens of thousands, and have improved health and life for millions. Yay environmental regulations!

Denver was infamous for its brown cloud, even worse than LA because of temperature inversion. We had six coal-burning power plants belching out smoke. Nowadays we have zero.

Think the last, at least on the Westside of LA, were the horrible Pacific Palisades fires.

I don't know, John. At least in the 70s you could see what you were breathing.

Milk. When I was young, bottles of milk from the grocery store would sometimes be spoiled when we first opened them. I still have a habit of sniffing and taste-testing freshly opened milk to make sure. But now, that never seems to happen anymore, and I've been wondering why.

and the obesity rate is what!!!

Birds. I never saw bald eagles, hawks, falcons, heron, egrets etc in the Twin Cities. But now...these birds are everywhere. Can't think of the last time I saw a grackle.

Air travel is much safer. So is car travel.

"Food is so much better?" 🤣 Give me a break, clown!

Now it’s wildfire smoke, though. Air quality in the west is in the toilet at the moment.

I remember the smog alerts. Orange County was unhealthy for people exercising to try and be healthy. Very.

I remember smog alerts. We moved out of California because of it.

Lead levels in children are way down compared to the 70s and 80s. Highway fatalities are probably the biggest public health advance over the last 60 years.

It’s a lot easier to get important documents with the internet. Passport? Renew on line. Birth certificate? Request on line. Death certificate? Same. New social security card? Same. Not 40 years ago.

Blue jeans are a lot worse. Made from cheap, thin fabric now. Almost none are made in USA.

Medicine, especially certain cancer treatments and the mRNA vaccines are infinitely better. 40 years ago people still whispered "the C word"

Opening shots of Die Hard look crazy now.

We did a family road trip down to Disneyland in ‘84, just before the Olympics. The smog in LA was horrible, but all the locals were saying how the air had “never been better” due to the pre-Olympic efforts. Yesterday morning, here in Vancouver, the sun was red and cast no heat, due to wildfires.

I remember learning so much about acid rain in school and like? Is that even a thing anymore?

In the early 70s I remember getting smog days off school like kids in the North get snow days. You couldn't see across the street.

"I grew up in the Los Angeles basin in the 70s and 80s" Ditto. I remember days when it hurt to breathe, a diffuse ache in my lungs when I tried to take a deep breath.

Nothing is better.

Weather forecasting. Short term and long range forecasts are so much more accurate than when I was a kid, and now we have apps on our phone that tell us when it's going to start raining at our specific location.

I remember getting those out in Redlands in the early 80’s. That gunk would hit the SB Mountains and just sit there.

LA basin air was mucho toxic when I escaped to Santa Barbara in 1971. There everyone had a can of kerosene on their porch for the tar you got walking on the beach. Both are better but they still threaten. Cruise ships in SB harbor, Disnification of lower State Street, bye bye SoCal.

Food is most assuredly NOT BETTER. Just ask all of the people getting explosive diarrhea, eating screw worms, and drinking polluted water. Why? Deregulation and deportation. #RepublicansWantToKillUsAll

Also feel obliged to point out that HIV/AIDS treatments are noticeably better than they were in the late 80's 😞

Same. My chest still hurts thinking about it

If you look around and see things that have gotten worse, they must have been better , like two years ago…..

Here, water quality. We have packed beaches right across Toronto all summer long. 50 years ago there weren’t lifeguards on beaches, there were warnings not to swim. I grew up with bald eagles as birds I’d have to travel hours to see. A pair have nested here on Toronto Islands, 2 years in a row.

I remember those days. Those crazy hot, ochre days with killer sunsets. But you didn't know how awful that atmosphere was until you got out of the city.

I also grew up in Los Angeles and remember those things I lived in the San Fernando Valley teenager of the 80s Valley, Girl. I guess you could say.

Seconded. My childhood was spent breathing sulfur dioxide in Chattanooga, TN.

An old boss who grew up in L.A. in the 60’s told me there were many days they couldn’t even go outside.

Same here although it was the 60s and 70s. I remember the burning in the chest if you played outside. Now I’m in the PNW and woke up today to air quality of 130 so yeah.

I was in LA in the summer of '72 or '73 and I do not exaggerate when I say the outside air was unbreathable. You had to take careful, measured breaths as any deep breath would start a coughing fit that might actually kill you.

California can actually take credit for Denver not having the menacing brown cloud temperature inversions as well. The inversions still happen becuase they are a natural phenomena but they rapid pollution build up does not because emissions are now controlled.

Although I don’t enjoy the knowledge that my excellent food is tainted with plastics, metals, and pesticides.

Yep. We drove through LA sometime in 67/69, and the sky was brown

Not to be confused with healthcare, which is a completely separate issue, but medicine in general has gotten better. Better diagnostic tools, better surgery techniques/robots, amazing creations like mRNA vaccines and CRISPR gene editing.

People might hate the expression, but “living in CA is like living in the future” Don’t hate us just because we’re out in front of history

Yup, visiting London for the first time in many years, the air was so much cleaner than when I worked there in the 1970s. Low-emission zones, congestion charging, electric buses and taxis, have all gone to make the place so much better. No smoking in pubs and restaurants, too.

Automobile safety. Crashes are waaay more survivable than they were when I was a kid, even as speed limits have increased. Air bags, crumple zones , seatbelt laws, collapsible steering columns, blind-spot detection, backup cameras- all big improvements. Now REPAIRING cars, on the other hand....

As far as "stuff" goes, I can't think of anything that has gotten worse. Almost everything I can think of is, in read dollars, cheaper and either better built or more advanced. A notable exception is housing. Houses are, for the most part, better built. But way more expensive.

You'll appreciate this

Yeah visiting Mexico City earlier this year you could really see and feel the difference. The smog there is pretty terrible. Hopefully the work they're doing to reduce pollution will help.

Having grown up in a Soviet satellite state, let me count the fucking ways how a whole lot of things became better...

After reading through a lot of replies, an alternate title for the thread might be: Why regulations are actually important.

Car safety! Esp for children. I drive a 40 year old classic car from time to time and theres -NO AIRBAGS- because they were optional in 1982 :) Then the gov'men' came in a required them. The tests got better, the cars take more impact, and now theres lane assists and parking lines

Air quality everywhere has gotten better. I can go into a restaurant and not come out smelling like an ashtray now. That's a huge Plus.

My uncle used to joke he didn’t trust air you couldn’t see.