A film starring three women that does not pass the Bechdel Test.

What the fuck. How does this even. I just don’t know.

This post about how absurdly pricy rent is getting in the developed world (especially the US, UK, and Canada) reminded me of talking to a girlfriend’s father years ago about his cost of rent during the 1960s.

He lived in Virginia, if I remember correctly, and said something like, “Back when I was starting out, I could afford my own apartment working part-time at a grocery store. I just played music when I felt like it and worked 20 or 30 hours a week. Kids today can’t do that.”

A rare acknowledgement from someone of the Baby Boomer generation that things are categorically different now for those getting started, and that younger generations are not just lazy or entitled.

But no need to just listen to anecdotes – you can look at the data yourself to see that he is telling the truth. Here is a table of median gross rent divided out by state and decade.

For Virginia in 1960, median rent was $350 per month. (Note that the person I was talking to was probably paying well below median rent as he was single and didn’t/doesn’t care much about ritzy stuff.) But let’s use median rent despite the previous caveat.

The table is in 2000 dollars, so let’s translate that to 2014 dollars. In 2014 dollars, median rent in 1960 Virginia was $480 a month.

The minimum wage in 1960 was $1.00 an hour, which is $8.00 an hour in 2014 dollars.*

So assuming that the person I was talking to averaged 25 hours a week, his gross pay in 1960 (in 2014 dollars) would have been $800 a month. Let’s assume a tax rate of 15% on that income. That leaves $680 a month of net take-home pay.

So yes, a person in 1960 really could have worked part-time at a grocery store for minimum wage and afforded a quite good apartment on their own.

No one, anywhere in the UK, US or Canada, could do that now, or anything close to it.

*Very roughly – constant dollars aren’t really that constant, but that is way too abstruse of a discussion to go into here.

I was saying this was inevitable early as 1996 by the way, but the internet as we’ve know it is now dead.

The Federal Communications Commission said on Wednesday that it would propose new rules that allow companies like Disney, Google or Netflix to pay Internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon for special, faster lanes to send video and other content to their customers.

As usual, the corporations win and everyone else loses.

In reality of course the corporations won’t be paying for faster lanes. They will be paying to not have their connections artificially throttled by various means, which means of course that those who don’t pay up will by default be restricted.

US internet innovation is at an end with this move, but of course that is the way large corporations prefer it. Innovation, after all, is the main threat to them.

This is amazing.

This shows basically that there is no factory job in existence now that a robot could not do – it’s all just a matter of cost. As robots get cheaper and more capable (even than they are now), factories will all be automated like this.

And so will many other jobs.

Now that I think about it, one of the main reasons that I have distaste for NPR and its programs and hosts is that they remind me of people who looked down on me sneeringly when I was a feral North Florida white trash* kid.

They were judging on appearances of course, and never even realized that I was intelligent.

It’s not something conscious, really, just an association of past events perpetrated by similar types of people.

*Though I realize the term is now frowned upon, I’m taking it back so to speak, since I was often and repeatedly called “white trash” disparagingly in school.

I am sure all of these terrible things are true of Amazon, but I also have very little sympathy for publishers.

Publishing has been historically and still is one of the most hidebound, exploitative, decrepit businesses in the world, right behind the clowns at (and members of) the RIAA and MPAA.

A hardback book at $40, with the paperback to be released a year later – or maybe never – at an also-exorbitant price?

Great idea. How is that of any value to me when I can read a 400 page book in a few hours?

Amazon being able to seize so much power is a direct consequence of the publishers being so shitty. Doesn’t make Amazon some sort of savior, but is still true.

Why the fuck do people still buy vinyl records? Absolutely shitty sound quality (poor dynamic range, degradation over time, etc.) as well as being so huge and fragile.

I am old enough to remember and have used vinyl records (I believe the first 45 single I bought with my own money was this one, for instance.) and even at the time I thought they were horrible and limiting.

I know it’s no longer cool to hate hipsters and their bullshit, but I still do anyway.

One Man’s Quest to Make Business Travel a Lot Less Awful.

This is great. So many times that I’ve traveled for business I’ve wanted a place to meet with people that wasn’t a hotel room. And no, most hotels don’t allow you to use their conference rooms without extremely, extremely exorbitant fees. Brilliant idea. Wish I’d thought of it myself.

I think it’s mostly safe to tell people to follow whatever career that want to, as it doesn’t matter anyway.

Jobs are being eliminated and offshored across every field, in every domain, and none of them are very safe – save perhaps plumbers and a few others that absolutely require on-site presence (for the moment, anyway).

Some careers are for the moment “safer” than others, but that could change very quickly. Increasing automation is coming faster than most people now realize, and with global climate change now a fait accompli of being alive in the 21st century, the economy is pretty likely to worsen over time.

In my field, the jobs that I used as a stepladder to gain the experience I have today increasingly do not exist anymore. It would be really difficult if not impossible to get where I am today how I did so, and I started only 15 years ago.

What’s interesting about that – and horrible – is that those lower-level positions are of course how people gain experience to occupy higher-level ones. If those jobs go away, obviously one cannot ever move up as there is no path of preparation to, say, move from a helpdesk to an infrastructure architect.

This fact I believe companies will use to argue that there are “no qualified candidates” and thus all should be offshored where experienced (and cheaper) people can be hired. Or, failing that, H-1B visa employees can be brought in.

So pursue whatever career strikes your fancy. Likely as not, your job will not exist in 10 years anyway – at least not in your home country – so it doesn’t really matter.

My partner just said, “Twitter is like listening to half of a cell phone conversation on a bus.”

So true. Perhaps we are both too old but neither of us really get Twitter. Guess we never will.

Like many things on the internet, it reminds me of bad implementations of technologies that existed on BBSes in the 80s.

For the most part, I think the spazzing out over “cultural appropriation” is overblown.

Yes, when the harm is immediate and ongoing it can be offensive, such as dumbass hipsters wearing Native American headdresses and such. That is tacky and tasteless, and shows lack of historical knowledge as well.

However, the naïfs who go around screaming “appropriation” probably don’t realize just how much human cultures appropriate from each other all the time, every day, every month, every year since forever.

Most of the words we use, the music we listen to, the clothes we wear, etc., were at one time or another appropriated from another culture. It’s how culture works. Always has. Always will.

The only real difference is that most people lack the historical knowledge to recognize appropriations that occurred more than a few dozen years in the past.

But Americans are a very, very ahistorical people so that is not surprising. In my experience, even the most well-educated American people have almost no knowledge of history at all, and basically zero knowledge in this realm outside of England and perhaps France.

I saw this on someone’s Tumblr, but anyone who says that words are violence has probably never been punched in the face before. Or the stomach. Or the kidneys.

I have been, and I can tell you that a good hard punch hurts a hell of a lot more than any words.

I know what they are getting at, but it’s just…wrong.

Just noticed that I’ve been below my goal weight for over four years now.

I was just a little over 200 pounds five years ago. Now I am below 150 still, and will stay that way. That’s over 25% of my body weight lost and kept off for four — going on five — years.

Just because I can do it doesn’t mean you can; I am an outlier in many areas.

I was sure that I could do it, so I did. No lessons for anyone else should be drawn from this.

I meant to write a rant similar to this months ago about about this bullshit.

I am also just old enough to remember this world, which apparently s.e. smith is not.

Return to the phrase “cheap paperbacks.” This too is critical. The MMPB was meant to be inexpensive and disposable. It was meant to attract impulse buyers. It wasn’t meant to be printed on acid-free archival paper and passed down as an heirloom for generations to come. It was banged out cheaply to be sold cheaply… or pulped if it didn’t sell quickly enough.

These books were not status symbols of the “upper middle class.” They were dirt-cheap popular entertainment for all social classes, and all social classes were tempted by racks of the things nearly every time they entered a retail establishment. Remember that… these days the book aisle at Wal-Mart is a place you seek out on your own initiative. Forty years ago, cheap books were something the store would have tried to sell to you at multiple points, in the places you find now DVDs and candy bars and cut-rate video games. Cheap books WERE the DVDs and cut-rate video games of forty years ago.

Now, grandpa isn’t here to lament that time has moved on, kids. Grandpa likes DVDs and video games quite a bit. Grandpa just wants you to remember that books were targeted for sale to everybody, everywhere, and were not doled out of vaults at country clubs.

Yes. When I was a kid, books were available everywhere, commonly, and very cheaply. Drugstores, convenience stores and many other retail establishments had large and varied book racks. Hard world to imagine, I know, but it did exist.

I remember; I was there.

Now, my family was poor. When I was young, very, very poor. And yet we had hundreds of books. How? Used book stores, trade shops, library discards and similar. My mom somehow even had quite a few books with the front covers ripped off, which I believe were supposed to be returned to the publisher by the retailer.

How she got those, I don’t know.

But the point is that at least post-WWII owning a bunch of books was not some elitist, snobby activity. It was an aspirational and entertainment activity of the lower middle class and the poor as well.

If the Incredible Hulk and Tinkerbell had a child….

She can clean and jerk 175 pounds (though she’s not in this older video). Amazing.  Even at my most fit in the Army, I could do about 165 pounds consistently in that particular exercise…but then I had at the time about fifty pounds of weight and at least six inches of height on her.

She’s lifting absolutely and especially comparatively a lot, lot more weight than I ever did, or could.

Now I’d be lucky to clean and jerk 50 pounds.