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3 yr. ago

  • My parent's generation all had pensions. You didn't have to worry about it unless the accountants cooked the books and didn't manage it honestly. I was too young to know all the details, but I gather that system got upended by two things: 1) several pension funds that went bust and 2) shift from people working at one place forever to job-swapping which made pensions basically impossible (before computers).

  • For album art (by H.R. Gieger), Emerson Lake and Palmer's Brain Salad Surgery. An almost monochrome skull folded out to reveal a monochrome woman, it included notes, band pics, and even the LP label had art.

    More complete details can be seen in these seller posts:

  • Old person here.

    before computers, how did you learn to do something?

    Books! and People! And while they wouldn't give you endless answers to every trivial thing you wanted to know, you could call the library to ask a question for them to look up for you.

    was a constraint lifted

    Maybe, but not really. I think people talked and shared more. If you were in the midwest, you'd never eaten Thai, Japanese, Ethiopian, or even Lebanese food, and it wasn't available. The ingredients weren't available, either, so you weren't going to learn to cook it from scratch. Even if you had a cook book. By the 1990s, I had an Americanized Thai cook book with substitutions for some things. Now I can get everything from fish sauce to harrissa paste at local stores. That was more important than access to recipes. Also, there were strange recipes in the 70s -- like Watergate Cake and Chex Mix (which you had to make at home and always had nuts), and all kinds of jello 'salads'.

    Was life more simple

    Yes. I gather this was true prior to the 70s/80s I remember, but simplicity came from vetted curators. If you bought name brand things, they would work and last a long time. "No one was ever fired for buying IBM." -- because their stuff worked. Same for GE, Kodak, Pyrex, Whirlpool, and so on. Not anymore. I'm pretty sure everyone is working to make the cheapest possible version of everything now, so figuring out what version of a thing to get is much harder, and you can't trust that online reviews aren't paid advertising.

    We believed experts, and called out liars. We knew people who'd had polio harm their families, so we got vaccines because they obviously worked better than 'healthy living'. For things like music, you knew which critics had your tastes, and could trust their suggestions for what to hear were spot-on. They got a decent salary for their dedication and you supported that by buying their publications. Enjoy rock? Maybe Robert Christgau was your guy, or maybe Lester Bangs, but both would give you an entertaining read with solid recommendations. It was WAY better than algorithms.

    Further: while there is much wrong with the studio system, the cost of getting a record pressed meant we were not flooded with the volume of bad, under produced junk that litters the music world today. There would be no "Sgt. Pepper's" without a LOT of studio work. Also, there was a glorious heyday of FM radio before it got the same commercialization as AM where you DJs (especially the late night ones) would make interesting set lists that we all heard together over the airwaves.

    All that said, moving to internet searches was easy, but the results feel fractured. We all read the same newspapers, and generally believed them, knowing each had some biases and we never had every detail. We might have different opinions, but we had the same facts. I remember reading a book on raising ducks and accidentally learned that their chromosomes are not X/Y, but Z/w (boys are ZZ and girls Zw). I did not expect to learn that. A search for 'raising ducks' generally doesn't mention that, and a search for duck sex traits doesn't bring up raising them. Knowledge ran deeper, if more slow.

    To sum up: Yeah, the internet is nice, but I miss feeling like we all share the same world.

  • I expected "transit" to refer to non-car public transit, but I'm not the OP. That is: the more people on trains, buses, and such, the more routes and times. The route with 5 riders per day gets cut as too costly.

  • No one has mentioned the financial manipulation? I've heard policy wonks rant about it for decades. From Bloomberg:

    Starting in the mid-1990s, China spent a decade regularly intervening in the foreign-exchange market to keep the yuan at a pegged rate to the dollar. Policymakers were essentially maintaining an undervalued exchange rate to help exporters and further the process of industrialization.

    From a library of congress snippet about China/U.S. trade:

    China’s currency, the renminbi (RMB), had been undervalued for many years with Chinese government's continual intervention in setting a target rate for currency exchange. Undervaluing their currency made Chinese exports more competitive, attracted foreign investment, and made imports less competitive.

  • Goes Viral

    No it hasn't. They want it to, but it ain't happening.

    🎼 🎶 Trump is in the Epstein files!

    doo-dah doo-dah 🪕

    Trump is in the Epstein files!

    all the doo-dah day! 🎶

  • Try weisswurst & sauerkraut paired with a Hefeweizen (mild white sausage and wheat beer).

  • Deleted

    Was it naivety?

    Jump
  • You could say it started with Eisenhower lying about a U2 spyplane being a normal weather flight, then Khrushchev producing the pilot and exposing the truth of the espionage campaign. Supposedly, the U.S. more or less trusted its government up to that point, but that big lie started deflating the post-WWII belief in an honest democracy.

    If you watch old movies from the 1940s and even into the 1950s, you will find a substantial number where "Rule of Law" and general ethics were central and critical parts of the story. The populace expected liars, cheats, and scoundrels would be outed, convicted where there was crime and ostracized where there was not. Of course there have always been greedy bosses, but the U.S. has vacillated between imposing extreme taxes and regulations to doing nothing at all about social imbalance.

    Most recently, everything got disrupted by Citizens United wherein the Supreme Court ruled that money is speech. Money is the opposite of speech. Money is power. The point of Constitutional 'free speech' was that speech be allowed despite a lack of power and influence -- not because of it.

    In the aftermath of Citizens United, the ultra-rich have swayed the elections of judges and politicians with special attention to given to writing policies and eliminating restrictions. This was made easier by earlier elimination of the fairness doctrine and the 1996 Telcom Act that loosened limits on how many news outlets an entity could own. (extra info)

    -- But no, it was NOT naive way back when. The U.S. used to be a country that would (generally) hold bad actors to account. Nixon resigned when impeached because he understood that he could not lead after being caught. Trump knew he could lead despite his crimes. Perhaps we'd have been better off in Nixon had remained president such that the country would have been forced to take action back then.

  • The absence of sex is part of the definition for platonic (unless you're referencing how Plato himself had sex which would have to be Platonic, but it's a different word when capitalized).

    platonic: Neither sexual nor romantic in nature; being or exhibiting platonic love.

    platonic love: Intimate but non-sexual affection.

    Attested 1636 in Platonic Lovers by William Davenant. Earlier coined in Latin in the 15th century as amor platonicus by Florentine scholar Marsilio Ficino (originally in 1476 letter to Alamanno Donati, later expounded in De amore (1484)), based on his interpretation of the Symposium by Plato, specifically the speech by Socrates, relating the thoughts of Diotima of Mantinea.

  • Hidden camera, 'abandoned' box of fundraising candy with a few bars left and an envelope of money ($80). The bottom of the box has a mailing sticker on it to Jamal Brown's address (that is actually to a low rent accomplice's home). The trick is finding a likely place the candidate would reasonably find this while alone. Does candidate leave it or take it? Does the box make it to the address intact?

  • You're probably focusing on the wrong thing. My guess is that while you think she was reacting to what you said, she was probably reacting to something else. For example, if you have boys who wore wet clothes without comment, or if you yourself have worn wet clothes without complaint, she might think it sexist to presume a female is required to be more modest than a male. She might have thought you were acting as if your immature child was vamping like she was in a wet t-shirt contest rather than a squirmy toddler (no idea what age your girl is, tho) and that your reaction was too embarrassed. It could have been a number of things, but you'd have to ask her to find out.

  • Has to be the current POTUS simply because there are more people with more access to more places to post ridicule. Add to that the whole marketing drive for 'engagement' (especially ragebait) and AI, and you end up with a volume of ridicule greater than ever before possible in human history. In the future, perhaps we can get the bots to shout at one another somewhere easy for humans to ignore.

  • You are the OP. You should know that the source is Erin, not the Advocate.

    More: You are welcome to check links yourself before adding to the steaming pile of misinformation.

  • False (for now). Please, please, please don't repeat crap until you've looked for yourself! Everything about the Trump admin is horrific -- there's no need to spread falsehoods here.

    Copying my comment from another thread:

    The source wrote the piece well and linked to archive.ph so people can see the history. They have a snapshot from July 10th with 'bisexual' erased, but as of July 11th, it is back. As I write, the text they cite for the MAIN page (not History) reads:

    Before the 1960s, almost everything about living authentically as a lesbian, a bisexual person or a gay man was illegal.

    The History page (current | Jun 4 archive } April 19 archive uses LGB) is obliquely worded and has been for months, saying:

    Through the 1960s almost everything about living openly as a member of the Stonewall comunity was a violation of law

    It still omits transgendered as it has since the February 'purge'.

  • This is not true (yet). I see all the news aggregators are repeating it, though.

    Copying a comment I made on a cross post:

    The source for this article is here: https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/after-trans-people-trump-now-erasing

    They wrote that piece well and linked to archive.ph so people can see the history. They have a snapshot from July 10th with 'bisexual' erased, but as of July 11th, it is back. As I write, the text they cite for the MAIN page (not History) reads:

    Before the 1960s, almost everything about living authentically as a lesbian, a bisexual person or a gay man was illegal.

    The History page (current | Jun 4 archive } April 19 archive uses LGB) is obliquely worded and has been for months, saying:

    Through the 1960s almost everything about living openly as a member of the Stonewall comunity was a violation of law

    It still omits transgendered as it has since the February 'purge'.

  • Again and again, when the Times attempts its false balance — trying to make Republicans sound less unhinged than they actually are — it results in bad journalism. It is the same problem social media platforms have encountered in moderation: removing misinformation and deplatforming bad actors means removing and deplatforming more Republicans. Eventually, using the excuse of “fairness,” social media companies gave up.

    The Verge also cites this Politico article on how the right actively worked to discredit Claudine Gay. From Politico:

    When you put those three elements together — narrative, financial and political pressure — and you squeeze hard enough, you see the results that we got today, which was the resignation of America’s most powerful academic leader.

    Lordy, how I wish truth and logic was sufficient to fight lies and crazy.

  • For a brief moment reading this, I couldn't remember the last time I ate beef -- but then I remembered the summer sausage in the fridge... which probably has beef in it, so... yesterday. Other than that purchase, I don't know if I've had any other beef this year.

    The study found that 12% of Americans consume nearly half of the country's beef

    So if we got that particular 1/8th to cut down, we'd be half way there! Just like if we could get the 1% to cut down on [so many things], we'd be in the clear!