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).
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
Was this not also true in earlier generations?
Also, most people from highly developed countries with sound social safety net (G7 and close friends) do not have such a doom-and-gloom outlook. I assume your view comes from the US.
where even two adult fulltime earners can barely tread water
This is certainly not true in the vast majority of G7 and close friends -- only US.
> 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?
The existence of these challenges does not mean we shouldn't try.
I think that's the problem, we spend so much energy arguing about the shoulda coulda woulda's that we never actually get started doing anything meaingful.
Start with the existing system then. If you think we can do better, prove it. Bring that same level of optimism into improving existing standards of medical care -- then come back and we'll talk about expanding those systems.
> we never actually get started doing anything meaingful.
I think this regularly gets pulled out as a justification for expanding systems that have significant problems, and critics are supposed to take it at face value that we're all going to earnestly try to do better this time. But without something more concrete behind it, it's just talk, and talk is cheap. What often ends up happening is the same negative outcomes are expanded, and then the process repeats with the exact same line -- again and again and again.
So let's all get together and fix at least a few of the things that are already broken, and then maybe I'll believe you that we can all band together and build something new. But this kind of optimism divorced from practical action doesn't actually address concerns and doesn't actually improve existing or future standards.
I'm not saying everything needs to be perfect before we do anything new, of course that's never going to be the case. But I am saying that if all of our existing systems are garbage, the words "we must try" need to be backed up with something much more tangible than anyone is providing in this comments section.
That is exactly what this original article is about.
The article, and me in these comments, have been proposing to do exactly this. Bring back much of the old system that has been sustematically dismantled over the last 70 years, with improvements of course.
I think you are missing a lot of the context here.
> Bring back much of the old system that has been sustematically dismantled over the last 70 years
That is not at all what I meant by "existing system" :)
"Start with the existing system" means "prove the US is capable of imprisoning people without regularly subjecting them to horrible conditions." That we used to run an even more expansive prison system doesn't mean that bringing that prison system back under the guise of medical care wouldn't be an expansion of the current system. The old system was torn down for a reason, and reintroducing it now would be an expansion of the current prison system.
We very deliberately systematically dismantled the old system of asylums because they were incredibly abusive. And unfortunately, the remnants of that system are still abusive today. My point is that "we have a long way to go but we have to try" doesn't mean very much when it's just words. Advocates for asylums should start by addressing some of the abuses that are still rampant today in the systems that are operating right now -- let's see some evidence that re-expanding the prison system won't be a horrible disaster for human rights, let's see some actual improvements to prisons that already exist today to back up that optimism.
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The risk behind untested optimism is that every expansion of the prison system can be excused this way. Any abuse that results in cutting back on incarceration becomes temporary and it's assumed that "getting back to normal" and reintroducing those systems is the normal desired state, rather than a dangerous step backwards towards a system that was consciously rejected for good reason. And advocates that argue (deliberately or not) for expanding and reintroducing systems of abuse can just keep saying "we'll do better this time, this time we'll have reforms."
Nah. Let's see some of those reforms in existing prisons as they exist now for regular prisoners. Let's see standards rise for the prisoners with and without mental issues that we already have in jail today. Then we'll talk about whether expanding from what we have today is wise.
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.