me too

Look at it like this: motors are a recent invention. It used to be if some group was big enough to have a city, they had slaves or slave-like laborers that were looked down on and generally abused. Everywhere. Including European serfs. Even Vikings made slaves out of Englishmen. Everything from reaping wheat to making nails was the result of physical labor so an underclass was necessary once you were bigger than a village/town.

For a bunch of reasons, Europeans developed better ships sooner and so had the opportunity to exploit the labor of other peoples as well as their own countrymen. That set up a cascade of development. The French revolution happened early enough that it served as a warning to other governments to spend some resources pacifying the masses at home. The masses were never in a position to know what was going on beyond their own borders, so the people in control – the people gaining all the rewards – had a psychological reason to mentally frame the people of their conquered colonies as inferiors. To be fair, almost every country has considered themself to be a better people than all others. Everyone thinks they do things the best way.

I feel pretty sure that if the Chinese of Japanese had come to Europe in, say, 1200 A.D. with ships and guns, Europe would have been colonized. The same goes for any other power. Sigh I sometimes wish Carthage had defeated Rome.

Per https://piefed.social/post/1262797 which links to Axios source:

• The latest: Utah Gov. Spencer Cox ( R ) confirmed Sunday on ABC News’ “This Week” that Robinson lived with a romantic partner who was undergoing a gender transition.

Regular store bread has lots of preservatives. I do not think you want that. Many small bakeries make good basic breads without preservatives, but they are usually expensive. If you can afford that price, buy it! Making bread takes a lot of time, but it is cheap, If you can afford that time, make it! Personally, I like whole-grain flavors for almost everything from sandwich bread to fried rice … but not for the rice in sushi.

Just about anything can be made with or without questionable additives. What sorts of things do you want to eat?

You can buy bread with preservatives that stays ‘fresh’ for weeks, but bread made with just water, flour, yeast and salt generally starts getting hard the next day and moldy in around a week (depending on climate +/-). Whole grain bread is dense, more flavorful, and will not rise as much as white bread because the bran and the nutrient rich wheat germ break up the long-chain gluten structure.

So do you pick a bread that lasts or one that molds? Do you pick white bread because it is fluffy or whole wheat because it has more vitamins?

Maybe you don’t eat bread. Well, the same applies to rice. Most white rices are fortified to make up for the vitamins lost in milling, but whole-grain (brown) rice is tougher, has a stronger flavor, and is less fluffy. Which would you prefer?

Before security cameras were everywhere, things felt ‘normal’. There have been security cameras in store for a looong time before everyone had them – so common even the culture touchstone movie Terminator (1984) showed their use and they were common well before that.

Unlike most folks, it took me over a decade to come to grips with the loss of anonymity. Once the internet existed, I never entered my actual name into anything online, wouldn’t join facebook, and wouldn’t let anyone take my picture lest they attach my name to it. Eventually, I realized that even if I didn’t put my name online, everyone with my phone number put me in THEIR address books and anonymity was simply a lost cause.

At the same time, I’ve noticed that news/tv no longer show faces in their generic street-scene footage about anything that might be damaging (like ‘How fat is our town?’) and instead just show people waist-down, blurred, or very distant. That also happens a lot for less embarrassing content, and there’s generally less footage of generic local people.

That said, I’m really glad everyone has a cell phone with camera to catch bad police behavior. Lots of people used to dismiss such reports as people with a grudge making stuff up, but now there’s too much evidence to hide it.

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:

• ebay
• sorctheshop
• vinylbazar
• rootsvinylguide

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.

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.

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?

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!

I’m doing better without him, so don’t worry too much about it. Old women tend to live alone simply because men die younger, so it’s no biggie if some of us start that trend a bit early.

I remember an old guy who really wanted to remarry when his wife died, courted and married someone new, and then expected her to do all the household chores because that’s what women do. She was aghast. He hadn’t given any indication that what he wanted was a free maid while wooing her, and she backed out of the whole thing immediately – much happier to be on her own than take on his expectations.

The reddit hivemind gets triggered by the very idea of cheating. As far as I know, there was no cheating in my marriage and eventual divorce, but it didn’t matter to me if he cheated or not. It mattered to him that I didn’t cheat, so I didn’t. From my point of view, I’d have a problem if he was spending all his free time with someone else instead of helping with the house, chores, relationship, and so on, but random sex was fine by me – as long as it didn’t result in pregnancy or become a full-blown relationship.

Years ago I read some paper about how humans have two primary and competing reproductive strategies: monogamy versus promiscuouness. It theorized that cultures tend to codify monogamy as the standard to follow because its proponents get very hostile to the promiscuous whereas the promiscuous do not much care what the monogamous do.

Agreed!

I might think it is in my self interest to lie, cheat and steal, but if I do that, my community and my reputation are worsened, and I may have a harder time getting a better position in a crappier world.

If instead I think it in my self interest to volunteer at the local food bank, I might see my community and reputation improved, and by demonstrating a commitment to community, perhaps I will get a better job offer.

More basically: civilization has figured out that fair trade benefits both the farmer who needs tools and the blacksmith who needs food. It is in everyones’ self-interest to support things like: rule of law, commerce, and education.

He’d tell you because I was crazy.

I’d say it was because he wanted us to both move in with his (wonderful and supportive) family.

I was crazy, but not THAT crazy.

We had been living far away from his family, but he’d landed a fantastic job in their home town. Before the move, his mother started calling me and telling me that if I wanted to live in her house, I’d have to be respectful, and not go out drinking all night and coming home drunk – something I’d never done or conceived of doing – or what chores I would have, or how loud I could be, and when we would eat, and so on. I told him that I could not live 24/7 with his mom. I said I was moving to MY mother’s and when he got us a place of our own, I would join him. He didn’t. We divorced.

The divorce was fairly amicable. That was all about 30 years ago and I never remarried. I did shack up with a wonderful man for about 20 years, but I eventually kicked him out because he’d shrink into the shadows when I most needed support and I was tired of feeling emotionally devastated when I reaching out for succor and instead finding a void. I explained that I’d rather know that no one is there to help if I’m flailing about than to have someone I trusted stand by and do nothing. Yeah, I’m bitter about that one. I still love the guy, but sheesh.

Nah, gotta got vinyl because cassettes deteriorate just sitting in their cases while vinyl stays pristine … until you actually play it, anyway – but if you want to store an audio recording for longevity, press a gold version of a vinyl album.