shinjitsu

I remember in a very early 1990s (maybe '91 or '90) the Utne Reader had an article talking about how journalism outlets were merging at a rapid rate, resulting in layoffs and consolidation. The author feared that by 2000 there would only be 4-5 news conglomerates left. The internet was pretty much for engineering Universities and Tech companies (and all command line at that) so certainly before the 'open internet' as most people think of it.

>And yes, I get the "Europe short distances" argument, but how many Americans are really driving 300+ miles every day?

Everyday? probably not many, but 300+ in a single day several times a year, well I bet it is quite a few. Visiting relatives at Thanksgiving and other holidays, summer vacations, sure some people take airplanes, but most aren't that well off. And if you have children visiting aunts/uncles/cousins/grandparents, the only place I'd want to do a 40 minute charge for the next leg is maybe Buc-ees, which is in a pretty small part of the country.

Will this take me and my family where we need to go is a more important consideration than the daily commute for me, but perhaps that is not as common a sentiment.

>Wow you must drive a lot.

300 miles a week in a full sized van and 10K is a three year supply of gas at current prices.

I think also the ridiculous nature of the automobile market is a significant secondary problem in the US. When the median new vehicle is $49000 and the median annual salary (pretax) is ~$65,000 that isn't sustainable.

I actually require the book the Jon Bodner was talking about in a class I teach every couple of years. The students who do well (the ones you would want to hire) will read it, the others will skim or try to summarize it

Patrick Santore - he worked there sometime in the mid-late 1980s

How much of the school closures are because of declining enrollment? https://www.bostonindicators.org/article-pages/2024/june/emp... https://www.bu.edu/articles/2025/public-school-enrollment-do...

How big was the Franklin back then? My uncle worked there in the 1980s, but I was a kid and have no concept of if it was a scappy startup or a midsized company.

As a fan of Heinlein's book, the movie flattened the exploration of the political themes from the book and turned it into said black comedy. It would be like turning Animal House or Lord of the Flies into a black comedy.

>Despising older folks has been a thing a long time, made famous by Zuck starting out.

and before that is was hippies with "Don't trust anyone over 30" which became deeply ingrained in at least American culture.

Sometimes people who are able to talk a lot do quite well in interviews - and University students need to be exposed to a wide variety of topics, but rarely support large projects for a long time, so that wouldn't be something that would come up in an interview.

So Thundarr the Barbarian?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_4HBH6Z-Iw

Right you are - if cheap was all that matter the Yugo would have been everywhere https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a21082360/a-quick-hist...

My parents were public school teachers for decades. When our oldest son was getting to be school aged they recommended that we homeschool because as they said "It is nothing like when you went to school".

When I met an old high school classmate who is a public school teacher in the district we both live in (300 miles away from where we grew up), she also said something similar.

large cities seeing erosion of their tax base are also hiring PR firms I think

Well The local governor of Hawaii used twitter to cancel a missile alert - so it isn't that wild an idea

https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/23/16923080/hawaii-governor-...

Now if only they could do something like this for states. Some of the high pop high tax states are far worse to file for than the feds.

Wayland has struck me for years as being the new IPv6, the tech that the deep technical people tell me needs to come and replace the old thing that "doesn't work any more" and yet never quite takes over.

maybe the year of critical mass switchover will be soon?

Was the one who got tenure the one who brought in bigger grants? Unfortunately in the R1 Universities these days that is probably the most important thing, even more than your academic family tree https://academictree.org/

>then I'd argue Maine should be in -4.5 instead of -5. Maine knows it should be in Atlantic, it just doesn't want to be more isolated from the rest of the country than it already is https://www.pressherald.com/2017/04/27/maine-may-switch-to-a...

An interesting take on this. Will it lead to a general increase for the Global South?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKvT7OS-lbU

I was a subscriber 10-15 years ago, but I used steam/proton now, I wonder how large the market for something like codeweavers is in 2023?

Command line heroes was amazing, I was bummed they ended - but I guess they did cover a lot. (https://www.redhat.com/en/command-line-heroes)

I'm also a big fan of Coder Radio (https://coder.show/) Tagline: "taking a pragmatic look at the art and business of Software Development" They called the layoffs and salary adjustments happening now back in April 2021

If you want to look at software from a non-coastal US perspective (and don't mind occasional [or in early episodes not-so-occsional] profanity) I like Friday afternoon deploy (https://friday.hirelofty.com/)

I also was to second the Go Time recommendation from another post (https://changelog.com/gotime) - while it is Go focused more often than not, in recent months they've done show on intellectual property, tech horror stories and code maintenance

emm386 Error #06

And a subscription to the Microsoft knowledge base which came on CD (in addition to the books others have talked about)

And I vaguely remember that the debugger inserted itself between DOS and windows, when meant that it could bring crash windows if something went wrong.

Fun, but slower than today.

I've loved ubuntu for a while as well, but snaps are making me want something new - any suggestions for a "I'm middle aged with children so I need an it just works distro"?

Most of these (Kosher Butcher for example) are going to be very small companies and these kinds of requirements don't usually kick in till you have a certain minimum level of employees since there is an assumption in most states that very small businesses will mostly hire (extended) family.

This works fine for research universities, but in teaching universities (couldn't find the statistics, but there are a lot of them out there) someone has to subsidize the new STEM programs until the alumni start giving grants. In my experience, a lot more STEM alumni give large donations than humanities and social sciences. But that does mean a bigger initial outlay by someone.

In my high school a few years before me there was a legendary cheating ring that would tap out the answers to each other in Morse code which was presented as tapping a pencil eraser on the desk like they were thinking. Unfortunately for them it was long enough ago that one of the teachers knew Morse code and so it didn't last.

Unfortunately a lot of this is because many faculty of 'liberal arts' colleges/universities believe "we are here to give an education and open student's minds and broaden their horizons" but even more often I have heard "liberal arts are not intended to be job training institutions"

so it is a much easier sell a creative writing major in a faculty senate or something similar than Aircraft Maintenance. And when you do get Aircraft Maintenance it usually gets tucked into the engineering or business schools in order to survive.

also: https://thedispatch.com/p/we-are-less-educated-than-we-think

The issue here is that for most people (as opposed to highly paid tech workers) these items are all luxury items that are rarely replaced, as opposed to food and energy which are necessities of life. I know a number of university students who are using 4-6 year old laptops to do their work. The fact that they can get a better laptop for the same money is irrelevant because they are spending that money on things like gas to get to classes and work.