The FCC's actions are public documents and published on their website. Its not a coincidence that the ONLY actions the FCC takes for pirate stations have to do with FM or TV. Try finding -any- instance where someone was fined for an AM pirate station in the last 20 years. People with part15 AM transmitters or signal generators have to go out of their way to get the attention of the feds.
> all TV signals had to be sent digital. And of course if you set up an antenna, you can receive crystal-clear HD broadcasts of local TV stations over the air.
One of the problems with the switch to digital is the usable signal doesn't go as far as analog, so if you're in a rural area even with an antenna you lost access to some of the stations you were used to being able to receive. A lot of people in rural areas switched to cable or dish tv as a result.
And one of the perks of analog is that you can use a crappy signal, as a kid we didn't have cable and you could usually get the higher stations like UPN or Fox by messing around with the antenna.... usually the audio would be okay but the picture would be fuzzy or have interference/noise. Was it a perfect picture? Hell no. But you'd be able to sit and watch a show successfully. With digital if the signal is not good you just got pixelation as the tuner tries to buffer & compile the signal unsuccessfully.
I have to wonder if the switchover was encouraged by TV manufacturers because, while they made converter boxes, the public mostly reacted by turning all their existing tvs into e-waste and buying new ones instead. And in states where throwing out tvs is illegal and it costs money to dispose of them (if you can find a place that will take it if you pay them), so the public reacted by dumping them in the woods, creeks/rivers, swamps etc when no one was looking.
> I suspect most of the silent movies of the time would seem quite trivial compared with much amateur YouTube content today
I can't say what constituted "most film" in 1926 (are we going by what sold the most tickets? big blockbusters versus daily newsreels & cartoons?) but if you look at the era of 1925-1927 it includes Phantom of the Opera, Battleship Potemkin, The Vanishing American, The Bat, Metropolis, and Wings. Many of this list is iconic to this day to where they continue to be referenced & emulated in pop culture that many people recognize even if they haven't seen the originals before.
Granted this discussion will be hamstrung by how much film has been "lost" with so much of that content no longer in living memory at all (to say if it was masterpieces or crappy filler).
> The idea that people in the past had personalities that valued the pursuit of perfection more-highly than now is often assumed, but seldom is good evidence given to support it.
I think its not hard to show that people have come to prioritize the low cost of goods/services at the cost of quality as a way of artificially propping up lifestyle habits as available disposable income goes down.
An appliance like a refrigerator or clothes washer had to be good in 1960 not just because of its cost (which in today's money accounting for inflation is huge) but because consumers had the ability to financially demand it.
But if household disposable incomes go down (for a myriad of reasons), to where even two adult fulltime earners can barely tread water, a "good" appliance is unthinkably cost prohibitive in the short term. A cheap one that will barely outlast the warranty is their solution. And when it fails (and it will) you go buy another and it goes to a landfill.
Its like the typical exmaple of the poor person who buys shitty work boots that only last a few months because they can't drop a couple hundred up front for ones that will last decade(s).
In the US (can't speak for elsewhere), your 1950s stereotypical middleclass sitcom style family lifestyle died around 1970. Its been kept going ever since by the combos of decreasing quality wherever possible while using debt to wallpaper over the lack of micro-economic sustainability (hence the huge % of the population who has no real savings, little or no retirement investments, and will loose their home if they get a bad medical diagnosis).
> The social system we live in cannot tolerate mass unemployment
It already does if you go by the labor participation rate.
The traditional prescription for unemployment caused by technological innovation is to artificially decrease the employee pool by taking away both ends of the workforce (after shorting them by age). The elderly get retirement, and the young go to compulsory school. This was fine for dealing with the introduction of combustion engines, steam engines and early electricity adaptation but eventually even this was insufficient.
Which is why so many young adults 18-25 are put into higher education to artificially drag out the time until they enter their chosen careers. They're not necessarily there to obtain a specific set of skills or education, as if that were the case employers would be more willing to hire talented & skilled but diploma or certification lacking applicants (that are automatically tossed out of the running by mostly automated job applicant filters).
The problem is that this requires piles of money to sustain, and our leadership is already trying to crawl back retirement by upping the retirement age even as US life expectancy has been trending down for years (incl pre-COVID).
Most likely: We'll see people deemed redundant by the marketplace left to "let nature run its course" and die off from poverty (via addiction, avoidable medical problems, malnutrition etc). This has been what was already dragging down life expectancy in the post 2008-crash America.
> First is figuring out if we’ll need a safety net for the first wave of automated workers, or if more jobs will be quickly created.
Part of the problem is that people whose entire professions have ceased to exist, aren't always in a position to pivot to something else. If a skilled profession disappears entirely, those early in their careers can go back to school/training and switch to something else. But even if successful, they're usually on the hook for the cost of that education.
Enter into the equation those within, say 10-15 years from retirement, and do we honestly expect them to pickup student loans at age 55 that still won't be paid off when they're in their 80s?
Instead, they'll end up in a lower or un-skilled profession, their quality of life will permanently decrease, and our cultural response is to say "well, sucks to be you."
And then we wonder why so many people have resentful, crab in a bucket mentalities.
I am not sure that the American public cares much about what has become the norm in other countries so that line doesn't really carry any weight here.
I'd argue that instead, its more that the public is so apathetic about bad-turns of law that they'll just shrug with a sigh and begrudgingly tolerate the new paradigm.
2008 I had a totally offline map of all of North America in my car's aftermarket radio (7" touch screen, AM/FM, DVD player, GPS, analog TV, SD slot, all running a version of WindowsCE that was already outdatted). System cost me about $400. Bought it so I could do backroads road trips/exploring by car, as it didn't need (or even have) a way to connect to the 'net to do it. I can still get updated maps for it, but I don't bother.
Handheld gps's with offline maps go back even further. I was using them from '03 to '08. Garmin made a bunch of ones that were no bigger than a early-gen blackberry. Back then it was relatively easy to get pirated updated maps for them.
> They need to be good, well run with compassion and care of course.
And there lies the core of the paradox: We can't pull that off with run of the mill geriatrics. Bottom barrel nursing homes, like the kind medicaid pays for, are hell holes. And the plight of an old patient who has no family left to advocate for them, is not an acceptable one in the least bit.
If we're not going to properly handle this responsibility -now- for a sympathetic polite and docile old granny, do you really think the funding & care for 20s-50s aged mentally ill patients would be appropriate?
> A typical case from this time... the case of Edna Long, ...they put what assets remained under the management of an attorney, who made a bit of money from reducing the value of her estate by 86% (according to Ennis, a common practice at the time in New York). ...Most of the money that she and her husband had accumulated had been consumed by attorneys supposedly protecting her assets.”
This practice is widespread today minus the slave-labor component in the form of the guardianship system, underwhich people who work as "guardians" give kickbacks to healthcare providers to identify wealthy geriatrics. The guardian, once one of these victims is identified, has them declared incompetent (even if the victims are still living independently with no apparent problems), and then takes over all their financial resources and complete control over their healthcare. The end result is the elderly person or couple is forced into a nursing home against their will; their family will be barred from visiting or corresponding with them; and the guardian walks away with a percentage of their net worth (with the reminder going to the cost of the nursing home). In states that are popular destinations for retirees like Nevada, the court system sees families who oppose this fraud/practice as evidence in favor of it happening, with judges & guardians often arguing that it shows the next of kin(s) are only concerned with money and that's why they don't want their (up until now healthy and independent) retired parent going into a bottom barrel nursing home.
> What this person wants to bring back is the ability to lock people up and keep people locked up there with little recourse.
What they want, is a way for socially undesirables (an intentionally vague and flexible category) removed from society in a way that avoids the guilty emotions invoked by executing them.
The asylum system in the US was not dismantled because people like Edna Long had their inter-generational wealth stolen from their children/grandchildren. It was dismantled because in the 1960s it was shown that these places were engaging in torture. The journalist who broke the Pennhurst story (that culminated in the ending of the asylum system in the US) wanted to have the grounds turned into a museum modeled after the Holocaust Museum because he had uncovered how things like, full mouth tooth removal was being used as a routine punishment method, among other things.
The cruelty towards these people was the goal itself. People were warehoused in feces without clothing instead of employing enough staff to change people & do the laundry often enough.
I have been to the house of Pennhurst's head psychologist from the "bad years." When he went into a nursing home a contractor bought his Federalist era farm to use it as his own-home and found that the doctor had gone insane from the guilt that his career had given him; he lived his last decades off the grid with no heating, electricity or running water; had a hole in the decaying roof that he had dragged a 19th century clawfoot tub under to collect water, and filtered the rainwater through old bedsheets and used that for cooking/drinking. The farm, with brush & grass 3ft thick grew over everything; the barn filled with a massive dragon's hoard pile of intellectual books (many of which I got to keep as souvenirs), while the hidden loft had been turned into some kind of computer & photography studio with restraints, camera arrays and so on.
I forget whose case it was, but sometime after Kaczynski was sent to ADX Florence, there was a criminal who was sentenced to join him there. The judge remarked at sentencing that they were to be sent "where people's souls go to die" or something to that effect. That. Was the real purpose of our state Asylums.
And the station wagons got killed off by CAFE standards because they were treated as cars instead of as their own category. Taking a sedan and turning it into a station wagon is going to inherently make it heavier and less fuel efficient.
So if the auto makers are already struggling to make their sedans hit MPG goals, suddenly those station wagons have to be phased out.
Though to be fair, minivans start in the mid 80s and were very popular in the 90s instead of SUVs. Comparable MPGs to the wagons but felt a lot more roomy inside.
The big problem came in the 2000s when the auto makers started subtly turning their minivans into SUVs. Even the last wagon hold outs like Volvo took this road eventually.
> Then they're left out of some things, but they get to deflect that social stigma. I'm willing to accept being the lame parent.
I know this is anecdotal, but my experience doesn't show that pans out. I am on the older edge of the millennial cohort age-wise and had a very strict parent growing up who would not allow me access to TV, most movies, and contemporary music. Which meant I never listened to what my classmates did, wasn't familiar with their pop culture references, couldn't go with them to movies, sometimes had to sit out movies shown in class (!) and none of my classmates, all of whom picked up on it and most of whom bullied me for it, cared that it was my parents forcing the situation upon me.
Strangely, I was given unmonitered and unrestricted access to the pre-social media internet and used it to associate online mostly with adults and found it very rewarding re: my education & hobbies. Until smartphones became popular it made me a firm believer in this idea that "the internet is infinite knowledge" and "once everyone gets it we'll be infinitely smarter!" The idea of "crap, X broke let's research online how to fix it" has saved me a lifetime of hiring people for car or home repairs.
Anyway I am starting to go off topic but I am very skeptical of this idea that "my lame parent won't let me" means much when bullies latch on to "hey, little Jane/Johnny over there doesn't know what X is!"
> you're raised speaking German first, so that you can "learn your heritage" (read: always feel the divide between yourself and the rest of the country).
This isn't a fair take IMO. The Amish are not the only groups of Pennsylvania Dutch that are native German speakers, and many of these groups are not counter culture isolationists like the Amish are. The Moravians for example were banned from the colony of New York because they went there to represent the Mohicans when the New York colony tried to illegally rob them of the lands they'd been promised in treaties. Like many of the non-anabaptist (that's Amish & Mennonite sects) groups of Pennsylvania Dutch they were fully on board with participating in broader US culture as long as they could do so while speaking German and engaged in all the same businesses, government/legal/military roles that the rest of society did.
People just think of the Amish by default in these conversations because in part they're more visible, and in part because the non-isolationist groups scaled back the German speaking in the wake of the two world wars.
> Patriarchy in all decisions
In the non-anabaptist communities this is not like that anymore than it is for broader culture. Traditional medicine practitioners in the Pennsylvania Dutch- for example the pow-wowers, were socially expected to only train an apprentice/protégé who is of the opposite sex, and further socially expected to provide their services for free. To stray from either of those was (and still is) a major taboo.
Human consumption includes some agriculture. You'd be surprised to learn what counts as agriculture for purposes of water in places like California. One example: Golf courses. Others; horse race tracks, horse farms, cemeteries. All kinds of places that produce ZERO crops for human consumption.
Maybe that was true in the pre-firearm era. You'd have a hard time arguing that in today's world "if you send women to war your population dies." Israel, since its conception has proven that this antiquated viewpoint is no longer valid.
Can women fight in modern combat competently? Yes. This was true even 80 years ago during WW2 (see the Soviets, Chinese, French resistance, etc.).
The problem is that people seem to view women casualties as too high of a cost, so if you send women into front line positions and they get seriously hurt or killed it lowers morale and becomes a homefront PR disaster. So countries with the luxury to not pay that price like the United States choose not to send women to frontline positions to avoid the PR problem, while countries like Israel are willing to take the PR hit knowing that they're a small country surrounded by adversaries.
Would anyone know who Jessica Lynch is if she had been a man?
Lowered birth rates is actually a good thing, if we're going to be honest about our way of life and its sustainability problem. As a species, we are going to have to make some hard decisions about what quality of life we want to have, as the answer to that question will determine how many people should exist at one time.
And to head one common criticism off: That's not an argument for eugenics. People freely choosing to use contraceptives & consensual sterilization is a totally different animal from people being targeted for extermination. Lack of that technology presents another evil, where people are forced to have kids they don't want or can't care for.
The FCC's actions are public documents and published on their website. Its not a coincidence that the ONLY actions the FCC takes for pirate stations have to do with FM or TV. Try finding -any- instance where someone was fined for an AM pirate station in the last 20 years. People with part15 AM transmitters or signal generators have to go out of their way to get the attention of the feds.