But it's so easy to make a good estimate, takes less than 10 seconds:
Take your instinctive estimate. Double it. Increase units by one (if you think "hours", make it days. If you think "weeks" make it months, etc.)
So if you think it'll take 2-3 days, tell your manager it'll be ready in 4-6 weeks. Don't forget that in management school, they teach these fuckers to under-promise and over-deliver. He understands.
From a human psychology standpoint he would rather know that it will be done in 3 days, barring delays, than not know when it will be done and have it in two hours. I personally think that is a dumb way of doing things, but I am the outlier, not the director.
The psychological issue is that you don't know, but you have a hunch, you have some insight. You know it's probably going to be a few hours.
But for non-techies, all this stuff is a total blackbox. When you say "I don't know" they panic, because for them that means anything from a day to a month or maybe infinity. Uncertainty is a horrible psychological state and people try to avoid it. It's an instinct. When you don't know if that shadow is a monkey or a lion, it's better to panic just in case.
By saying "three days", you give him certainty. Now he knows the shadow isn't a lion.
Some people will applaud this action, saying that no one should have their private pictures posted without their consent. Some people will call this an issue of right to privacy. Those people are misguided.
Explain how, exactly.
There are things that you just don't do (like, say hitting a woman).
Unfortunately, if the population is large and anonymous enough, you always have someone who does something that you shouldn't do. That's when we need a law. You understand these laws don't fall from the sky, yes? They're the written down rules of society. And society needs rules, otherwise it's not a society, it's just a mob.
And posting sex pictures of other people without their consent is just the kind of stuff that you don't do. And if people don't get it, you have to tell them.
Blame the users mostly for not giving a fuck about encryption.
That is stupid. It's like saying blame the drivers for not giving a fuck about fuel injection. Users should not have to care about encryption. They should care about having secure and private communication, and how to make that happen is our job, it's why we are being paid more than burger flippers.
We have the technology. If we want, we can make strong crypto work. Problem is that most of the big players with the money to make it happen don't want, and the small guys either don't understand the technology and complexity (users) or are incapable of making it actually usable (techies).
If we suddenly are no longer able to google one particular kind of content, someone will offer their own search engine, supported by specialized advertising, for it.
Welcome to the Internet, great to have you here. When you hang around for a bit, you will notice that there are search engines beside Google, especially for adult content.
the half-mystical "deep Web"
Has nothing to do with porn sites. There's very little about porn that's deep, or hidden, except maybe a few very, very extreme fetishes, but unless it's illegal in 120 countries, you are very likely to be no more than five minutes away from it as soon as you open a browser.
People keep using that word but do not really seem to know what it means.
True, but the "it's just free market" screams also obscure and important point: It's not censorship when one store, newspaper or company does it. But what if everyone does it? If thanks to pressure from certain interest groups, your particular topic vanishes not from one store and newspaper, but from all of them?
When a story cannot be published even though both supply and demand exist, is that not censorship?
That is why it's right to question such changes when big companies do it. I'm not worried for porn, it'll always exist. But asking Google the simple question "why" is not wrong.
because not everyone on the internet can discern between what they click on... (like kids
Little kids are not at all interested in porn. There've been very few studies on this, due to the obvious difficulties of getting the ethics board to approve, but from what I've read about it, their primary reaction is boredom. Like "what is this shit and how do I get back to what I wanted?".
Teens are interested in porn. And short of locking them all up in isolation cells, they will get it, because they're ready to dedicate even more time and effort to the task than the puritans do to "protect" them.
"Tame" for very specific definitions of that word. As many comedians here in Europe have said in one way or the other: American movies is where children are protected from seing the nipple they suckled on some years ago, but hacking people into pieces is perfectly fine.
Remember when Apple was forced to remove all porn apps from the App Store? I'm sure it wasn't because they wanted to, but there's a group of dedicated social conservatives who do nothing but complain about anything even remotely explicit.
This. The democracy we live in is highly vulnerable to dedicated groups or particulate interests. I've seen it up close when the Pirate Party here in Germany imploded (and went back from 4-7% of votes to 1-2% in one legislation period) because it had been infiltrated by too many people pushing their agendas in topics such as drugs, womens rights, public transport and such.
Small groups of people fanatically dedicated to one narrow interest can deliver a tremendeous amount of force, because they are focussed, unwavering and never stop to even consider compromises. They will always push over any moderate opponents.
Think back to the superbowl "wardrobe malfunction" - it probably wouldn't have gotten anywhere
All of Europe and probably most of the rest of the world was shaking its head over that one and wondering if someone had forgotten to tell you guys that it's the 20th century, not the 12th.
You don't have to wait for another major Firefox release
I agree in principle, but this is ludicrous. Firefox releases seem to be twice a week now, and we'll probably all live to see the version number overflow.
Yeah, there should be several competing plugins. But maybe FF can ask you which one you want after install, assuming that anyone with three working brain cells wants an adblocker.
Americans. Everyone who disagrees with them or who thinks that letting people starve on the streets might be unbecoming of a civilized nation must be a communist.
You're not very different from ISIS. For them everyone who disagrees with them is a to-be-slaughtered satan worshipper. Different words and details, same approach. Bush Jr. summed the american mindset up very good: If you're not with us, you are against us. In the small box that is your world, there is only space for two opinions, and nothing inbetween or to the sides.
I would pity you, but ignorance is a choice and not an accident, and I never pity people for self-inflicted misery.
The main problem we have is the default assumption.
From my perspective, anything that everyone involved is happy with is fine. Hetero- or homosexual, two, three or however many partners - it may not be for me, but who am I to judge the happiness of other people?
Society as a whole, however, has a concept in its mind, and even with a stronger tolerance for variety, it still very strongly sets this concept as the default assumption, and everything that deviates from the norm needs to justify itself.
All of this is true outside of sex and relationships, btw. -- there are also default concepts of a man and a woman, of a couple and a household. How you should be, what you should do. There are acceptable and "strange" hobbies, interests, professions, lifestyles, homes.
The Greeks can build their socialist utopia if they like
Are you retarded or what? The plans of the new greece government are as far away from "socialist utopia" as a Ford Model T from a flying car.
All sustainable advancements towards more participation and social insurance in Europe have been made from a position of economic strength
Not really, no. But don't let facts spoil your ranting. Especially social changes often came about in times of crisis, because it is then that the ugly truth of the current system shows itself in full splendor.
If you can't even see how competitive economies are far preferable to economies which create all the "right" disincentives,
If you don't understand that all extremist positions are evil, you've not paid attention in history class. Competition is good, but hypercompetitive environments are disasters to physical and mental health, society, culture and every aspect of humanity other than profit, profit, profit. On the opposite end, social security is good, but nanny-states (the real ones, not the "omg, the government actually moved a finger" hyperbole of american right-wingers) cut into innovation, progress and motivation to do anything at all.
It's clear advertisement companies have declared war on us, and think any and all means are permissable. No other mindset can explain these actions. If these people would not consider us enemies, they could not possibly look at themselves in a mirror.
So when will Firefox ship with ABE (or some other fork, don't use the original AdBlock, it has been sold to an advertisement company) and default to having it enabled?
I mean, aside from the hacking and privacy issues, every time I see the Internet on a browser without ad blocker, I can't believe people endure this crap.
That is the point. 13% of WHAT - of the GDP. Which had just imploded, thanks to austerity measures.
I posted elsewhere a car analogy. This is like me borrowing you money, then when you get into trouble forcing you to sell your car to pay your debt. Ok, so far it's more or less fine (though stupid of me if you need your car to earn money to pay me back). But here's the trick: After you sold your car, I tell you that since your net worth has dropped (you no longer own a car), you now have a different credit rating, and because of that, you owe me more money, higher interest, whatever. Please sell your bike, too. Yes, that will reduce your net worth further.
The last time Germany had a balanced budget was 1969.
Austerity was caused by 60 years of borrowing money that was never ever intended of being repaid. The cause of the implosion to the GDP is the 60 years of borrowing. There would be no need for austerity if there was not prior, out of control, borrowing.
So who are the idiots who gave money to someone who so obviously not only couldn't, but never intended to actually pay it back? And why are we bailing them out with taxpayer money?
The battle cry of socialists and communists world-wide: We'll do it and the world will follow. Never seems to work, does it?
Step out of the binary world for a second. There is communist dicatorship soviet style, and oppressive hypercapitalism USA style, but there are also worlds inbetween. For 50 years, Europe had a successful social-economical system called social market economy. It worked really great, and gave us the prosperity of (almost) the USA with the social security systems of (almost) socialism. The gap between rich and poor was much lower than across the atlantic, while productivity and freedom were much higher than in the east.
The new greece government makes demands that 30 years ago wouldn't have raised an eyebrow in Europe. You want people to be able to actually survive on the wages of a full-time job? Yeah, so what? Everyone wants that. You want to spend money to help the unemployed and create jobs? Why are you even saying that, this is what we all expect from a government.
Also, how many times do you have to watch handout economies fall back versus competitive economies to LEARN THE FUCKING LESSON!
"fall back" in what metric? The USA looks great on paper, but your richest 0.1% are taking in 50% or 90% or whatever incredible share of all the wealth and profits.
Do you want to live in a country with an average wage of 5000 or 10000? Sounds like a simple question. But if the average is just statistics, and most people actually collect 10% of it in the "richer" country, living in the poorer one is the better choice for most people.
Nobody is going after those who took all this money? Its not magic, it went somewhere.
To foreign banks, mostly. And if we've learnt anything at all during the past seven years, it is that Iceland is the only european country with enough balls and not enough corruption to actually go after those responsible for the whole clusterfuck.
The new government officials are cozying up with the kremlin which is a kleptocracy.
True, but since the US basically doesn't give a fuck about your country if you don't have oil, and europe is in the firm grasp of a woman who gets pleasure from re-introducing levels of poverty we've not seen since the world wars, there really aren't many places to go to for support.
You know the ones currently driving tanks west across the Ukraine.
That's a completely different topic, so I'll only say that the europeans actions in Ukraine will probably be in the history books of the 22nd century as examples of unbelievable stupidity and ignorance.
Like that happened by itself, or like the fact that banks had bought the government bonds somehow makes the situation more troublesome than if individuals had bought the bonds.
It does, because banks are big players and can trick or coerce governments into deals that are bad for them. There's a reason many governments are buying back properties they privatized in the 80s and 90s when corrupt consultants convinced them that selling state property was a cute idea.
There are long articles by actual economists on this topic, but the basic idea is that for any debt crisis, you need not only an irresponsible borrower, but also an irresponsible lender.
Oh, now it's Greece's achievement that the reforms which were demanded of them actually worked?
Are you fucking kidding me? They balanced their budget, by crashing their economy. Your definition of "worked" is far out there.
For the getting-the-money-back part, the balanced budget is happening soon.
One way for us to balance our budget could be to sell all those people who are so willing to give away our money to prop up other nations who hate us for it.
You mean our banks? I'm against selling them into slavery, they belong into jails.
Frankly speaking, very few people these days are really monogamous. There's a lot of cheating and there's serial monogamy, where you have one partner at a time, but switch them fairly often (i.e. many short-term relationships).
From what I've gathered from my history studies, the ancient world had a lot more open social events than we do today. I don't mean festivals and such where you're anonymous in a crowd. In ancient Athens, men would meet to discuss and make politics, for example. Today, we delegate all this shit because we're too busy with our lives.
it seems like our society's model for creating and building relationships is utterly broken.
Or our assumptions about relationships. For example that they have to last for life. Don't get me wrong, I know from my own experience how right Nietzsche was when he wrote "Alle Liebe will Ewigkeit" (all love wants eternity) and I certainly want to grow old with my girlfriend. Subjectively, that is what love tricks us into wanting and believing in.
But reality teaches us that relationships usually last some time. Sometimes a hundred years, sometimes ten. The problem is that we see one as a success and the other as a failure. But why should we? In the words of queen: "Just one year of love. Is better than a lifetime alone".
We consider relationships investments (you want to get back more than you put in), that's another problem.
So yes, there's a lot broken in the land of love, but don't fall for the mistake of thinking our ancestors were so much better. Sure they didn't divorce as much, but in many cases that was not because they didn't want to. If you're in Europe, visit a castle and take a tour. They'll explain you that there were so many bedrooms not only because of the constant guests, but also because man and woman sleeping together in the same bedroom (let alone the same bed!) was highly unusual and risque, and the lower classes did it simply because they had to, as soon as people had some money they got seperate bedrooms.
Because you will rarely enter a comparable environment again. What makes college special is that you live in a place where you spend a lot of time, are basically forced to meet new people regularily, in a shared environment with shared interests and a higher interest in cooperation than competition.
It's rare to find that after college. Work usually has more competition and less overal interaction, clubs and hobbies offer less time exposed and (after the initial phase where you are the new guy) a lower turnover. Other social settings (family meetings, neighbourhoods, etc.) often lack the shared interests.
Slashdot Mirror
But it's so easy to make a good estimate, takes less than 10 seconds:
Take your instinctive estimate.
Double it.
Increase units by one (if you think "hours", make it days. If you think "weeks" make it months, etc.)
So if you think it'll take 2-3 days, tell your manager it'll be ready in 4-6 weeks. Don't forget that in management school, they teach these fuckers to under-promise and over-deliver. He understands.
From a human psychology standpoint he would rather know that it will be done in 3 days, barring delays, than not know when it will be done and have it in two hours. I personally think that is a dumb way of doing things, but I am the outlier, not the director.
The psychological issue is that you don't know, but you have a hunch, you have some insight. You know it's probably going to be a few hours.
But for non-techies, all this stuff is a total blackbox. When you say "I don't know" they panic, because for them that means anything from a day to a month or maybe infinity. Uncertainty is a horrible psychological state and people try to avoid it. It's an instinct. When you don't know if that shadow is a monkey or a lion, it's better to panic just in case.
By saying "three days", you give him certainty. Now he knows the shadow isn't a lion.
Some people will applaud this action, saying that no one should have their private pictures posted without their consent. Some people will call this an issue of right to privacy. Those people are misguided.
Explain how, exactly.
There are things that you just don't do (like, say hitting a woman).
Unfortunately, if the population is large and anonymous enough, you always have someone who does something that you shouldn't do. That's when we need a law. You understand these laws don't fall from the sky, yes? They're the written down rules of society. And society needs rules, otherwise it's not a society, it's just a mob.
And posting sex pictures of other people without their consent is just the kind of stuff that you don't do. And if people don't get it, you have to tell them.
Blame the users mostly for not giving a fuck about encryption.
That is stupid. It's like saying blame the drivers for not giving a fuck about fuel injection. Users should not have to care about encryption. They should care about having secure and private communication, and how to make that happen is our job, it's why we are being paid more than burger flippers.
- Crypto doesn't play well with webmail
But you've heard of Hushmail, yes?
We have the technology. If we want, we can make strong crypto work. Problem is that most of the big players with the money to make it happen don't want, and the small guys either don't understand the technology and complexity (users) or are incapable of making it actually usable (techies).
If we suddenly are no longer able to google one particular kind of content, someone will offer their own search engine, supported by specialized advertising, for it.
Welcome to the Internet, great to have you here. When you hang around for a bit, you will notice that there are search engines beside Google, especially for adult content.
the half-mystical "deep Web"
Has nothing to do with porn sites. There's very little about porn that's deep, or hidden, except maybe a few very, very extreme fetishes, but unless it's illegal in 120 countries, you are very likely to be no more than five minutes away from it as soon as you open a browser.
People keep using that word but do not really seem to know what it means.
True, but the "it's just free market" screams also obscure and important point: It's not censorship when one store, newspaper or company does it. But what if everyone does it? If thanks to pressure from certain interest groups, your particular topic vanishes not from one store and newspaper, but from all of them?
When a story cannot be published even though both supply and demand exist, is that not censorship?
That is why it's right to question such changes when big companies do it. I'm not worried for porn, it'll always exist. But asking Google the simple question "why" is not wrong.
because not everyone on the internet can discern between what they click on... (like kids
Little kids are not at all interested in porn. There've been very few studies on this, due to the obvious difficulties of getting the ethics board to approve, but from what I've read about it, their primary reaction is boredom. Like "what is this shit and how do I get back to what I wanted?".
Teens are interested in porn. And short of locking them all up in isolation cells, they will get it, because they're ready to dedicate even more time and effort to the task than the puritans do to "protect" them.
to make the internet as tame as American TV
"Tame" for very specific definitions of that word. As many comedians here in Europe have said in one way or the other: American movies is where children are protected from seing the nipple they suckled on some years ago, but hacking people into pieces is perfectly fine.
Remember when Apple was forced to remove all porn apps from the App Store? I'm sure it wasn't because they wanted to, but there's a group of dedicated social conservatives who do nothing but complain about anything even remotely explicit.
This. The democracy we live in is highly vulnerable to dedicated groups or particulate interests. I've seen it up close when the Pirate Party here in Germany imploded (and went back from 4-7% of votes to 1-2% in one legislation period) because it had been infiltrated by too many people pushing their agendas in topics such as drugs, womens rights, public transport and such.
Small groups of people fanatically dedicated to one narrow interest can deliver a tremendeous amount of force, because they are focussed, unwavering and never stop to even consider compromises. They will always push over any moderate opponents.
Think back to the superbowl "wardrobe malfunction" - it probably wouldn't have gotten anywhere
All of Europe and probably most of the rest of the world was shaking its head over that one and wondering if someone had forgotten to tell you guys that it's the 20th century, not the 12th.
You don't have to wait for another major Firefox release
I agree in principle, but this is ludicrous. Firefox releases seem to be twice a week now, and we'll probably all live to see the version number overflow.
Yeah, there should be several competing plugins. But maybe FF can ask you which one you want after install, assuming that anyone with three working brain cells wants an adblocker.
discussions with communists
Americans. Everyone who disagrees with them or who thinks that letting people starve on the streets might be unbecoming of a civilized nation must be a communist.
You're not very different from ISIS. For them everyone who disagrees with them is a to-be-slaughtered satan worshipper. Different words and details, same approach. Bush Jr. summed the american mindset up very good: If you're not with us, you are against us. In the small box that is your world, there is only space for two opinions, and nothing inbetween or to the sides.
I would pity you, but ignorance is a choice and not an accident, and I never pity people for self-inflicted misery.
The main problem we have is the default assumption.
From my perspective, anything that everyone involved is happy with is fine. Hetero- or homosexual, two, three or however many partners - it may not be for me, but who am I to judge the happiness of other people?
Society as a whole, however, has a concept in its mind, and even with a stronger tolerance for variety, it still very strongly sets this concept as the default assumption, and everything that deviates from the norm needs to justify itself.
All of this is true outside of sex and relationships, btw. -- there are also default concepts of a man and a woman, of a couple and a household. How you should be, what you should do. There are acceptable and "strange" hobbies, interests, professions, lifestyles, homes.
Well, we also delegate our politics because we have societies with more than a few hundred or thousand people now.
Even on the local level, we don't have even nearly the amount of involvement that the ancient world had.
But yes, of course, the pure size is a big factor.
The Greeks can build their socialist utopia if they like
Are you retarded or what? The plans of the new greece government are as far away from "socialist utopia" as a Ford Model T from a flying car.
All sustainable advancements towards more participation and social insurance in Europe have been made from a position of economic strength
Not really, no. But don't let facts spoil your ranting. Especially social changes often came about in times of crisis, because it is then that the ugly truth of the current system shows itself in full splendor.
If you can't even see how competitive economies are far preferable to economies which create all the "right" disincentives,
If you don't understand that all extremist positions are evil, you've not paid attention in history class. Competition is good, but hypercompetitive environments are disasters to physical and mental health, society, culture and every aspect of humanity other than profit, profit, profit. On the opposite end, social security is good, but nanny-states (the real ones, not the "omg, the government actually moved a finger" hyperbole of american right-wingers) cut into innovation, progress and motivation to do anything at all.
It's clear advertisement companies have declared war on us, and think any and all means are permissable. No other mindset can explain these actions. If these people would not consider us enemies, they could not possibly look at themselves in a mirror.
So when will Firefox ship with ABE (or some other fork, don't use the original AdBlock, it has been sold to an advertisement company) and default to having it enabled?
I mean, aside from the hacking and privacy issues, every time I see the Internet on a browser without ad blocker, I can't believe people endure this crap.
Overall it's budget deficit was around 13%
That is the point. 13% of WHAT - of the GDP. Which had just imploded, thanks to austerity measures.
I posted elsewhere a car analogy. This is like me borrowing you money, then when you get into trouble forcing you to sell your car to pay your debt. Ok, so far it's more or less fine (though stupid of me if you need your car to earn money to pay me back). But here's the trick: After you sold your car, I tell you that since your net worth has dropped (you no longer own a car), you now have a different credit rating, and because of that, you owe me more money, higher interest, whatever. Please sell your bike, too. Yes, that will reduce your net worth further.
One year in over 60?
The last time Germany had a balanced budget was 1969.
Austerity was caused by 60 years of borrowing money that was never ever intended of being repaid. The cause of the implosion to the GDP is the 60 years of borrowing. There would be no need for austerity if there was not prior, out of control, borrowing.
So who are the idiots who gave money to someone who so obviously not only couldn't, but never intended to actually pay it back? And why are we bailing them out with taxpayer money?
The battle cry of socialists and communists world-wide: We'll do it and the world will follow. Never seems to work, does it?
Step out of the binary world for a second. There is communist dicatorship soviet style, and oppressive hypercapitalism USA style, but there are also worlds inbetween. For 50 years, Europe had a successful social-economical system called social market economy. It worked really great, and gave us the prosperity of (almost) the USA with the social security systems of (almost) socialism. The gap between rich and poor was much lower than across the atlantic, while productivity and freedom were much higher than in the east.
The new greece government makes demands that 30 years ago wouldn't have raised an eyebrow in Europe. You want people to be able to actually survive on the wages of a full-time job? Yeah, so what? Everyone wants that. You want to spend money to help the unemployed and create jobs? Why are you even saying that, this is what we all expect from a government.
Also, how many times do you have to watch handout economies fall back versus competitive economies to LEARN THE FUCKING LESSON!
"fall back" in what metric? The USA looks great on paper, but your richest 0.1% are taking in 50% or 90% or whatever incredible share of all the wealth and profits.
Do you want to live in a country with an average wage of 5000 or 10000? Sounds like a simple question. But if the average is just statistics, and most people actually collect 10% of it in the "richer" country, living in the poorer one is the better choice for most people.
Nobody is going after those who took all this money? Its not magic, it went somewhere.
To foreign banks, mostly. And if we've learnt anything at all during the past seven years, it is that Iceland is the only european country with enough balls and not enough corruption to actually go after those responsible for the whole clusterfuck.
The new government officials are cozying up with the kremlin which is a kleptocracy.
True, but since the US basically doesn't give a fuck about your country if you don't have oil, and europe is in the firm grasp of a woman who gets pleasure from re-introducing levels of poverty we've not seen since the world wars, there really aren't many places to go to for support.
You know the ones currently driving tanks west across the Ukraine.
That's a completely different topic, so I'll only say that the europeans actions in Ukraine will probably be in the history books of the 22nd century as examples of unbelievable stupidity and ignorance.
Like that happened by itself, or like the fact that banks had bought the government bonds somehow makes the situation more troublesome than if individuals had bought the bonds.
It does, because banks are big players and can trick or coerce governments into deals that are bad for them. There's a reason many governments are buying back properties they privatized in the 80s and 90s when corrupt consultants convinced them that selling state property was a cute idea.
There are long articles by actual economists on this topic, but the basic idea is that for any debt crisis, you need not only an irresponsible borrower, but also an irresponsible lender.
Oh, now it's Greece's achievement that the reforms which were demanded of them actually worked?
Are you fucking kidding me? They balanced their budget, by crashing their economy. Your definition of "worked" is far out there.
For the getting-the-money-back part, the balanced budget is happening soon.
One way for us to balance our budget could be to sell all those people who are so willing to give away our money to prop up other nations who hate us for it.
You mean our banks? I'm against selling them into slavery, they belong into jails.
Frankly speaking, very few people these days are really monogamous. There's a lot of cheating and there's serial monogamy, where you have one partner at a time, but switch them fairly often (i.e. many short-term relationships).
From what I've gathered from my history studies, the ancient world had a lot more open social events than we do today. I don't mean festivals and such where you're anonymous in a crowd. In ancient Athens, men would meet to discuss and make politics, for example. Today, we delegate all this shit because we're too busy with our lives.
it seems like our society's model for creating and building relationships is utterly broken.
Or our assumptions about relationships. For example that they have to last for life. Don't get me wrong, I know from my own experience how right Nietzsche was when he wrote "Alle Liebe will Ewigkeit" (all love wants eternity) and I certainly want to grow old with my girlfriend. Subjectively, that is what love tricks us into wanting and believing in.
But reality teaches us that relationships usually last some time. Sometimes a hundred years, sometimes ten. The problem is that we see one as a success and the other as a failure. But why should we? In the words of queen: "Just one year of love. Is better than a lifetime alone".
We consider relationships investments (you want to get back more than you put in), that's another problem.
So yes, there's a lot broken in the land of love, but don't fall for the mistake of thinking our ancestors were so much better. Sure they didn't divorce as much, but in many cases that was not because they didn't want to. If you're in Europe, visit a castle and take a tour. They'll explain you that there were so many bedrooms not only because of the constant guests, but also because man and woman sleeping together in the same bedroom (let alone the same bed!) was highly unusual and risque, and the lower classes did it simply because they had to, as soon as people had some money they got seperate bedrooms.
After you leave college, it's all downhill.
Because you will rarely enter a comparable environment again. What makes college special is that you live in a place where you spend a lot of time, are basically forced to meet new people regularily, in a shared environment with shared interests and a higher interest in cooperation than competition.
It's rare to find that after college. Work usually has more competition and less overal interaction, clubs and hobbies offer less time exposed and (after the initial phase where you are the new guy) a lower turnover. Other social settings (family meetings, neighbourhoods, etc.) often lack the shared interests.