There are no rights in nature. The concept of inalienable rights is an Enlightenment fiction, along with the egalitarian travesty that "all men are created equal".
Rights are by definition legal benefits defined and protected by a government.
Before Hammurabi decided to codify the law, rights and benefits were subject to the whim of the ruling body.
Before large scale human settlements, the only rights that existed were ones gained through battle. You had the right to rule the tribe only if you were the strongest and could beat everyone else. You had the right to eat that caribou only if you killed it first. With the advent of farming, the right to till the soil was established by successfully defending the land against others.
I think this post indicates only one thing we can learn from this debacle: All Haitians must be deported from the United States to their island hell hole of orign. Nowhere in the history of mankind has a more wretched place existed. Somehow, nature in its randomness has bestowed upon those people a level of barbarity previously unknown. They are cruel joke, a testament to Werner Heisenberg, who first made us understand that pretty much anything can happen out there.
The only rational course of action we as civilized members of society can do is insure that this vicious cancer upon our society does not spread. After all Haitians are returned to their island home, that island should be permanently quarantined, with escape being punishable by death. People of the Dominican Republic should be encouraged to flee, with generous rewards given to those who wish to settle in Antarctica.
Once the Haitian threat is isolated, the Prime Directive will take over. Let the Haitian people develop in peace, naturally, without the undo influence of our corrupt society. There, they can work their fine art of mind control and zombification so that in several centuries, we can perhaps steal that technology from them and use it to make the perfect business manager.
I have news for you, sugar is a substance necessary for your survival. It is about as addictive as air. Without it, you couldn't live, not even for a second.
You don't see people snorting down lines of sugar impulsively do you? Or compuslively eating bananas or potatoes, or any of the countless natural foods that contain sugar?
People confuse "sugar" with "candy and baked goods". Those candy and baked goods are always made with wheat or dairy products, which are addictive due to opioid peptides they contain. Some companies like Nestle add addictive beta-carbolides to their food as "flavor enhancers". Tobacco companies add them to cigarettes as well.
It is not the sugar that is addictive, it is substances added to food which influences neuroreceptors in your brain. Much junk food today can accurately be thought of as calorie rich drug delivery devices.
That said, beta carbolides function a lot like benzodiazepine drugs and opioid peptides found in wheat and dairy products function like those from the poppy. They are typically sedating, a lot of people need to consume caffeine to overcome the fatigue caused by these foods.
Oh yeah, if anyone disagrees with you it must be a troll. After all, slashdot is just for mutual ego stroking and confirmation of simplistic ideals. What was I thinking?
I am egalitarian, because I am not a big enough asshole to think that I am inherently better, or worse, than anybody else.
Such a belief will be to your detriment. I have news for you, the vast majority of the world's population does not hold such views. You have been raised to feel that way in schools and through television to make you easy prey. Nothing more. By not asserting your right to exist at the expense of other life (irrespective of the value judgement "better"), you are choosing a philosophy that will ultimately end up in your destruction.
In fact, the only people I feel qualitatively better than are those that feel they are entitled to something more than what they already have.
That is a decidedly christian ethic, and one you have the luxury of enjoying in the relatively safe confines of western society. If we lived 2000 years ago, you would simply go extinct and your views would be forgotten.
Maybe your ethic makes sense when you have people who are obscenely decadent, but what about the average family who wants to have enough children to replace themselves and further their people? Do you know how hard it is to afford to have three children in these modern times? Don't you realize how illogical it is for you to think you are better than the man who has three children? In 100 years, you will be dead, but the man you hate will have contributed to the future.
How are you going to contribute to the future?
The fact of the matter is that Christian ethic is one intended for slaves, to make them happy with their pitiful life and give them some sick conception of how they are better than their masters. It is not a recipe for the advancement of the human race or the furthering of civilization. In the grand scheme of life, it is irrelevent.
Just because I'm a realist doesn't mean I can't be an optimist, too. Does it?
You have but to look at nature itself, and the natural struggle for life which constantly makes all living things stronger through the elimination of the weak. It is that struggle which has allowed human beings to rise thus far, what makes you think that process has suddenly stopped? Because your god says all men are equal? That the least of you will inherit the earth?
It is technology and modernity itself which has rendered this process impotent in modern man. It is this unnatural state we find ourselves in today which is the cause of all the environmental problems you decry.
The fact of the matter is you don't really love nature, and you don't understand it. You call yourself a realist, but you live in a fantasy world where there is no death and only life. You don't understand the balance between the two, and how they are intimately related.
There is TOO MUCH life in this modern world. The longer we wait, the worse it is going to be when natural balance is restored. If 7 billion isn't overpopulated, what is? 10 billion? 30? 50 billion? Do you want to be there when 50 billion people are battling over scarce resources? Unless you are so naive to think some people will choose to die, rather than fight to survive?
Who, ironically, are against intolerance and fascism in all its forms.
Fascism?
Where did that come from?
I have news for you, fascist governments were the first to have any realistic environmental policies to moderate industrial pollution.
Also, if you have any plans on saving the earth, you are going to have to start being intolerant of somebody. The problem is there are too many people on this planet. There is too much life.
Typically, when there is too much life in a given local, organisms fight it out to see who survives. We humans can do that too, but the results may not be pretty.
Either way, somebody is going to have decide who lives and who dies in the future, or more precisely, who reproduces and who does not. That is nature, not your feel good egalitarianism. All humans are not equal, it makes sense only the best and brighest reproduce.
It always is shocking to me when enivronmentalists espouse such egalitarian tripe. They can look at the vastness of the earth's wonderous species, the tremendous variance... The sheer beauty of the struggle for life, yet they cling to this marxist idea that humans are all interchangable, that they have no differences save for superficial appearences. Why are they unable to see how humans fit into our natural world?
I think you will find that it is egalitarianism that causes environmental disasters. Everyone can't have everything they want, and some authority is going to have to say "ENOUGH". Can you trust democracy to take such a step? I think not.
The solution to your greatest concern IS fascism, and this will become more apparent to you as time goes on.
Games don't need that kind of speed now. Video, audio, or photo editing benefit only marginally more so, and for at least 90% of that small demographic, the need simply isn't there.
I dunno, the Desert Combat mod for BF1942 is pretty taxing on my Athlon XP 1800+. My Radeon 9700 Pro has been enough for every game for the last year, but DC is really pushing it.
That said, you can see how the future of PC games are going to be as complex and vast as Desert Combat. If a game like that can benefit from a fast CPU and a gig of ram, I think its easy to imagine a game that utilizes more.
Re:This may sound like flamebait or a troll...
on
G5 vs Opteron, Finally
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Maybe he is a crackhead.
$30 is enough to get at least a day's worth of drugs, maybe two. Desperate times call for desperate action.
I don't know if you have checked ATI's website lately, but MMC 8.8 just came out and it is very good. All the bugs that I experienced in the past are gone.
It also has a cool feature where it can dynamically compress and broadcast TV to other computers on your network. So, if you have an AIW card in one computer, any other computers that have an ATI card can also watch TV. Check out anandtech for more info on this very cool feature.
One caveat, I am using a AIW 9700 Pro, things may work differently for you with an older card...
I also do know that the latest DVD decrypting software is not released for the 7500, you have to have an original MMC 8.x disc to install it. You may want to consider purchasing that cd from ATI, or purchasing an AIW 8500 or higher card, which comes with the MMC 8.x disc. The DVD software really works great these days.
I have an Athlon XP 1800+ I got about 1.5 years ago. I didn't feel the need to replace it until I started playing Desert Combat. Can't run it reliably at 1600x1200 like every other game.
There is always the issue of encoding video though, it would be nice to convert a DVD to divx in like 30 minutes instead of 4 hours.
The same ones who have to work for a living and see their jobs being sent offshore.
The importation of foreign vehicles was simply the beginning of internationalist economic policies. Manufacturing of virtually everything has been destroyed in the US. You self respecting hackers had it easy when the the internationalists were not going after YOUR job. Now they are.
Might want to make a rule of focusing your economic activity on your own country, while you still have one.
I agree with your general sentiment. But, NYC firefighters don't ALWAYS end up in the highest income brack, although they may after enough experience, and if they work overtime. NYC is a bad example though. You can be in the top income bracket yet still be living in a shitty apartment just getting by. When the median price of a house is nearly $500,000, it is almost impossible to have a family in New York and NOT be in the top income bracket.
Don't forget about Social Security, btw. They always put the ceiling just slightly above the amount necessary for a comfortable middle class lifestyle. When you combine FICA and regular income tax, the middle class pay a lot more than the wealthy, as a proportion of their income. Social Security should have no ceiling, if we are going to have it at all. That would immediately save Social Security for all time to come. But then it wouldn't serve its intended purpose, to destroy the middle class... They might actually save that money themselves and increase their wealth, rather than borrow money from the moneylending class.
Not only that, their combined population is only 14 million, smaller than many US states. They are really irrelevant in the grand scheme of international business. They could ban the sale of computers or cars, and I don't think anyone could care.
HS/Link really was an awesome program. There was some other bidirectional protocols out there (i think someone mentioned bimodem), but HS/Link really was fast, slightly faster than zmodem as I recall. It also had a spiffy interface and later versions allowed you to chat!
I do recall the major difference between HS/Link and Bimodem: HS/Link produced much better DSZ logs, so elite BBS software like OBV/2 or Vision-X could record how much and what was actually transferred. I could never get bimodem to work with obv/2 for that reason...
I don't think Kermit could handl 1K CRC packet sizes, which is really what made Zmodem fail.
The real benefit of Zmodem wasn't just its larger packet sizes, but the resume feature. Wow, that made the life of a BBS warez kid so much better. Leave that download going at 2400bps all night, and if the sysop kicks you off because you were too poor to get that 9600... no matter. Just download later where you left off.
512 has been the standard for some time, in fact longer than any other standard since 4 megs of ram it seems. Every since then, every six months or so it has doubled until now. Even microsoft can't seem to figure out how to use more than 512 megs of ram. I have a gig of ram in my main machine, but only to edit those 2400dpi scans, which take up like 400 megs of ram. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't need it.
"When human hearts break and human souls despair, then from the twilight of the past great conquerors of distress and care, of disgrace and misery, of spiritual bondage and physical constraint, look down upon them and hold out their eternal hands to despairing mortals. Woe to the people that is ashmed to grasp them."
Your time of retribution is coming. Every year more and more people lose their jobs, their future, and ultimately their life(but perhaps not their existence).
People only choose to be a part of a society when it benefits them. As soon as the people gain nothing from following your ridiculous economic laws they will start their own society in its place. A man who has lost everything has nothing to lose by fighting for change.
In the end you are a traitor, and when the revolution comes, you will have no place in the new order. Your ideology is destructive because it depends upon the bourgeois as its justification, but it ultimately leads to its destruction. You are not guided by any ideal of human advancement, only materialistic gain(and your belief that is the prime motivator of human existence). The nihilism of the western world you see all around you is just the beginning. For now, sex, drugs, and rock and roll is enough to keep the people amused. We have reached the apex of that ploy however. No one cares about rock and roll anymore. Alcohol consumption is declining. Party drugs have lost their thrill, but heroin is coming back, a sign people need a powerful pain killer for their troubled souls. The vast numbers of whores on every communications medium has trivialized sexuality. People rightly view now as no different than eating. Its just a different kind of hunger.
The only animal instinct left to tittilate is bloodlust. It is the desire for war which affects all great change. Every other desire simply placates.
The only question left to ask is what side will you be on?
You are probably right, but Sun should have chosen a different name. Java just had bad connotations, mostly due to events which happened now seven years ago, but still.
What are you talking about. It is new buildings which HAVE inferior soundproofing. Thats because plywood and sheetrock doesn't reduce the impact of your neighbors belching, let alone traffic.
Have you ever lived in an apartment building? its pretty common knowledge you want to avoid new buildings, unless they are luxury apartments with concrete in the walls, BECAUSE they are so noisy.
Old buildingss were constructed of brick and plaster, which is essentially soundproof. I know, I used to live in a 100 year old apartment building in Manhattan. It was nothing fancy, but it was quiet.
This is also true of houses. Middle class townhouses from the 1880-1900's are all over New York and Brooklyn, tens of thousands of them. They require minimal exterior maintenance (tuckpointing every once and a while), and are constructed entirely of brick and stone. Do you really think the average crap house being built today will be standing in 120 years? Not a chance. Plywood, 2x4s and sheetrock simply will not last that long.
People do not know HOW to construct proper housing anymore. Further, constructing a house which would last 120-150 years would cost a lot of money. The only way houses can be affordable for the masses is if they are constructed to last 50 years maximum. There are major economic consequences of this. One of the primary ways you could enrich your family over time was by giving your house to your children. Today, if you live your entire adult life in a house, it will be essentially worthless to your children (the land might have value though). Some would argue this is one reason the middle class is getting poorer over time, a reverse of economic trends from 1700-1950.
Slashdot Mirror
Provide a link to the company that makes that shit. I am curious what they produce.
There are no rights in nature. The concept of inalienable rights is an Enlightenment fiction, along with the egalitarian travesty that "all men are created equal".
Rights are by definition legal benefits defined and protected by a government.
Before Hammurabi decided to codify the law, rights and benefits were subject to the whim of the ruling body.
Before large scale human settlements, the only rights that existed were ones gained through battle. You had the right to rule the tribe only if you were the strongest and could beat everyone else. You had the right to eat that caribou only if you killed it first. With the advent of farming, the right to till the soil was established by successfully defending the land against others.
You have to fight for your rights.
Wow, at least somebody got the joke.
Thanks man, I have had my faith in humanity restored.
I think this post indicates only one thing we can learn from this debacle: All Haitians must be deported from the United States to their island hell hole of orign. Nowhere in the history of mankind has a more wretched place existed. Somehow, nature in its randomness has bestowed upon those people a level of barbarity previously unknown. They are cruel joke, a testament to Werner Heisenberg, who first made us understand that pretty much anything can happen out there.
The only rational course of action we as civilized members of society can do is insure that this vicious cancer upon our society does not spread. After all Haitians are returned to their island home, that island should be permanently quarantined, with escape being punishable by death. People of the Dominican Republic should be encouraged to flee, with generous rewards given to those who wish to settle in Antarctica.
Once the Haitian threat is isolated, the Prime Directive will take over. Let the Haitian people develop in peace, naturally, without the undo influence of our corrupt society. There, they can work their fine art of mind control and zombification so that in several centuries, we can perhaps steal that technology from them and use it to make the perfect business manager.
I have news for you, sugar is a substance necessary for your survival. It is about as addictive as air. Without it, you couldn't live, not even for a second.
You don't see people snorting down lines of sugar impulsively do you? Or compuslively eating bananas or potatoes, or any of the countless natural foods that contain sugar?
People confuse "sugar" with "candy and baked goods". Those candy and baked goods are always made with wheat or dairy products, which are addictive due to opioid peptides they contain. Some companies like Nestle add addictive beta-carbolides to their food as "flavor enhancers". Tobacco companies add them to cigarettes as well.
It is not the sugar that is addictive, it is substances added to food which influences neuroreceptors in your brain. Much junk food today can accurately be thought of as calorie rich drug delivery devices.
That said, beta carbolides function a lot like benzodiazepine drugs and opioid peptides found in wheat and dairy products function like those from the poppy. They are typically sedating, a lot of people need to consume caffeine to overcome the fatigue caused by these foods.
we know who is sitting on juries in this country.
Ummm, who?
Wow, there's a really good troll.
Oh yeah, if anyone disagrees with you it must be a troll. After all, slashdot is just for mutual ego stroking and confirmation of simplistic ideals. What was I thinking?
I am egalitarian, because I am not a big enough asshole to think that I am inherently better, or worse, than anybody else.
Such a belief will be to your detriment. I have news for you, the vast majority of the world's population does not hold such views. You have been raised to feel that way in schools and through television to make you easy prey. Nothing more. By not asserting your right to exist at the expense of other life (irrespective of the value judgement "better"), you are choosing a philosophy that will ultimately end up in your destruction.
In fact, the only people I feel qualitatively better than are those that feel they are entitled to something more than what they already have.
That is a decidedly christian ethic, and one you have the luxury of enjoying in the relatively safe confines of western society. If we lived 2000 years ago, you would simply go extinct and your views would be forgotten.
Maybe your ethic makes sense when you have people who are obscenely decadent, but what about the average family who wants to have enough children to replace themselves and further their people? Do you know how hard it is to afford to have three children in these modern times? Don't you realize how illogical it is for you to think you are better than the man who has three children? In 100 years, you will be dead, but the man you hate will have contributed to the future.
How are you going to contribute to the future?
The fact of the matter is that Christian ethic is one intended for slaves, to make them happy with their pitiful life and give them some sick conception of how they are better than their masters. It is not a recipe for the advancement of the human race or the furthering of civilization. In the grand scheme of life, it is irrelevent.
Just because I'm a realist doesn't mean I can't be an optimist, too. Does it?
You have but to look at nature itself, and the natural struggle for life which constantly makes all living things stronger through the elimination of the weak. It is that struggle which has allowed human beings to rise thus far, what makes you think that process has suddenly stopped? Because your god says all men are equal? That the least of you will inherit the earth?
It is technology and modernity itself which has rendered this process impotent in modern man. It is this unnatural state we find ourselves in today which is the cause of all the environmental problems you decry.
The fact of the matter is you don't really love nature, and you don't understand it. You call yourself a realist, but you live in a fantasy world where there is no death and only life. You don't understand the balance between the two, and how they are intimately related.
There is TOO MUCH life in this modern world. The longer we wait, the worse it is going to be when natural balance is restored. If 7 billion isn't overpopulated, what is? 10 billion? 30? 50 billion? Do you want to be there when 50 billion people are battling over scarce resources? Unless you are so naive to think some people will choose to die, rather than fight to survive?
Who, ironically, are against intolerance and fascism in all its forms.
Fascism?
Where did that come from?
I have news for you, fascist governments were the first to have any realistic environmental policies to moderate industrial pollution.
Also, if you have any plans on saving the earth, you are going to have to start being intolerant of somebody. The problem is there are too many people on this planet. There is too much life.
Typically, when there is too much life in a given local, organisms fight it out to see who survives. We humans can do that too, but the results may not be pretty.
Either way, somebody is going to have decide who lives and who dies in the future, or more precisely, who reproduces and who does not. That is nature, not your feel good egalitarianism. All humans are not equal, it makes sense only the best and brighest reproduce.
It always is shocking to me when enivronmentalists espouse such egalitarian tripe. They can look at the vastness of the earth's wonderous species, the tremendous variance... The sheer beauty of the struggle for life, yet they cling to this marxist idea that humans are all interchangable, that they have no differences save for superficial appearences. Why are they unable to see how humans fit into our natural world?
I think you will find that it is egalitarianism that causes environmental disasters. Everyone can't have everything they want, and some authority is going to have to say "ENOUGH". Can you trust democracy to take such a step? I think not.
The solution to your greatest concern IS fascism, and this will become more apparent to you as time goes on.
I hope I never interview with someone that goes by the handle "Ass Clown"
That article is way outdated.
The GeforceFX 5800 sucked. It only had a 128-bit memory bus. etc. We all know this.
None of that is true anymore. The 5800 isn't for sale anymore. The 5950 has as much memory bandwidth as ATI's fastest card.
Games don't need that kind of speed now. Video, audio, or photo editing benefit only marginally more so, and for at least 90% of that small demographic, the need simply isn't there.
I dunno, the Desert Combat mod for BF1942 is pretty taxing on my Athlon XP 1800+. My Radeon 9700 Pro has been enough for every game for the last year, but DC is really pushing it.
That said, you can see how the future of PC games are going to be as complex and vast as Desert Combat. If a game like that can benefit from a fast CPU and a gig of ram, I think its easy to imagine a game that utilizes more.
Maybe he is a crackhead.
$30 is enough to get at least a day's worth of drugs, maybe two. Desperate times call for desperate action.
I don't know if you have checked ATI's website lately, but MMC 8.8 just came out and it is very good. All the bugs that I experienced in the past are gone.
It also has a cool feature where it can dynamically compress and broadcast TV to other computers on your network. So, if you have an AIW card in one computer, any other computers that have an ATI card can also watch TV. Check out anandtech for more info on this very cool feature.
One caveat, I am using a AIW 9700 Pro, things may work differently for you with an older card...
I also do know that the latest DVD decrypting software is not released for the 7500, you have to have an original MMC 8.x disc to install it. You may want to consider purchasing that cd from ATI, or purchasing an AIW 8500 or higher card, which comes with the MMC 8.x disc. The DVD software really works great these days.
They make an Athlon64 motherboard that takes 168 dimms?
You can barely find a Socket A mobo that takes them.
I have an Athlon XP 1800+ I got about 1.5 years ago. I didn't feel the need to replace it until I started playing Desert Combat. Can't run it reliably at 1600x1200 like every other game.
There is always the issue of encoding video though, it would be nice to convert a DVD to divx in like 30 minutes instead of 4 hours.
The same ones who have to work for a living and see their jobs being sent offshore.
The importation of foreign vehicles was simply the beginning of internationalist economic policies. Manufacturing of virtually everything has been destroyed in the US. You self respecting hackers had it easy when the the internationalists were not going after YOUR job. Now they are.
Might want to make a rule of focusing your economic activity on your own country, while you still have one.
I agree with your general sentiment. But, NYC firefighters don't ALWAYS end up in the highest income brack, although they may after enough experience, and if they work overtime.
NYC is a bad example though. You can be in the top income bracket yet still be living in a shitty apartment just getting by. When the median price of a house is nearly $500,000, it is almost impossible to have a family in New York and NOT be in the top income bracket.
Don't forget about Social Security, btw. They always put the ceiling just slightly above the amount necessary for a comfortable middle class lifestyle. When you combine FICA and regular income tax, the middle class pay a lot more than the wealthy, as a proportion of their income. Social Security should have no ceiling, if we are going to have it at all. That would immediately save Social Security for all time to come. But then it wouldn't serve its intended purpose, to destroy the middle class... They might actually save that money themselves and increase their wealth, rather than borrow money from the moneylending class.
Not only that, their combined population is only 14 million, smaller than many US states. They are really irrelevant in the grand scheme of international business. They could ban the sale of computers or cars, and I don't think anyone could care.
HS/Link really was an awesome program. There was some other bidirectional protocols out there (i think someone mentioned bimodem), but HS/Link really was fast, slightly faster than zmodem as I recall. It also had a spiffy interface and later versions allowed you to chat!
I do recall the major difference between HS/Link and Bimodem: HS/Link produced much better DSZ logs, so elite BBS software like OBV/2 or Vision-X could record how much and what was actually transferred. I could never get bimodem to work with obv/2 for that reason...
I don't think Kermit could handl 1K CRC packet sizes, which is really what made Zmodem fail.
The real benefit of Zmodem wasn't just its larger packet sizes, but the resume feature. Wow, that made the life of a BBS warez kid so much better. Leave that download going at 2400bps all night, and if the sysop kicks you off because you were too poor to get that 9600... no matter. Just download later where you left off.
512 has been the standard for some time, in fact longer than any other standard since 4 megs of ram it seems. Every since then, every six months or so it has doubled until now. Even microsoft can't seem to figure out how to use more than 512 megs of ram. I have a gig of ram in my main machine, but only to edit those 2400dpi scans, which take up like 400 megs of ram. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't need it.
"When human hearts break and human souls despair, then from the twilight of the past great conquerors of distress and care, of disgrace and misery, of spiritual bondage and physical constraint, look down upon them and hold out their eternal hands to despairing mortals. Woe to the people that is ashmed to grasp them."
It doesn't matter how you justify yourself.
Your time of retribution is coming. Every year more and more people lose their jobs, their future, and ultimately their life(but perhaps not their existence).
People only choose to be a part of a society when it benefits them. As soon as the people gain nothing from following your ridiculous economic laws they will start their own society in its place. A man who has lost everything has nothing to lose by fighting for change.
In the end you are a traitor, and when the revolution comes, you will have no place in the new order. Your ideology is destructive because it depends upon the bourgeois as its justification, but it ultimately leads to its destruction. You are not guided by any ideal of human advancement, only materialistic gain(and your belief that is the prime motivator of human existence). The nihilism of the western world you see all around you is just the beginning. For now, sex, drugs, and rock and roll is enough to keep the people amused. We have reached the apex of that ploy however. No one cares about rock and roll anymore. Alcohol consumption is declining. Party drugs have lost their thrill, but heroin is coming back, a sign people need a powerful pain killer for their troubled souls. The vast numbers of whores on every communications medium has trivialized sexuality. People rightly view now as no different than eating. Its just a different kind of hunger.
The only animal instinct left to tittilate is bloodlust. It is the desire for war which affects all great change. Every other desire simply placates.
The only question left to ask is what side will you be on?
You are probably right, but Sun should have chosen a different name. Java just had bad connotations, mostly due to events which happened now seven years ago, but still.
What are you talking about. It is new buildings which HAVE inferior soundproofing. Thats because plywood and sheetrock doesn't reduce the impact of your neighbors belching, let alone traffic.
Have you ever lived in an apartment building? its pretty common knowledge you want to avoid new buildings, unless they are luxury apartments with concrete in the walls, BECAUSE they are so noisy.
Old buildingss were constructed of brick and plaster, which is essentially soundproof. I know, I used to live in a 100 year old apartment building in Manhattan. It was nothing fancy, but it was quiet.
This is also true of houses. Middle class townhouses from the 1880-1900's are all over New York and Brooklyn, tens of thousands of them. They require minimal exterior maintenance (tuckpointing every once and a while), and are constructed entirely of brick and stone. Do you really think the average crap house being built today will be standing in 120 years? Not a chance. Plywood, 2x4s and sheetrock simply will not last that long.
People do not know HOW to construct proper housing anymore. Further, constructing a house which would last 120-150 years would cost a lot of money. The only way houses can be affordable for the masses is if they are constructed to last 50 years maximum. There are major economic consequences of this. One of the primary ways you could enrich your family over time was by giving your house to your children. Today, if you live your entire adult life in a house, it will be essentially worthless to your children (the land might have value though). Some would argue this is one reason the middle class is getting poorer over time, a reverse of economic trends from 1700-1950.