I’ve been making the comparison to the first synthesizer in 1897. It was so huge, that it took up the basement of an entire city block in NYC. It was enormous, and relatively useless but it worked…technically. But 60 years of development later, and it can be put in a suitcase and carried around.

I see data centers and AI the same way. Sure, we can technically do it, but it’s big, unwieldy, and wasteful. It clearly isn’t ready for prime time.

Go back to the drawing board, address the real problems, including regulations, and get back to us in a decade or two, when they’ve figured out how to do this properly. Because right now it’s a monstrosity that’s more of a curiosity than an useful product.

I was living in a place I grew up, and didn’t really like. My wife had moved there, and she didn’t like it either. But I kept getting better and better jobs, so we couldn’t leave.

Then I became self-employed, and could work anywhere. We also got a small inheritance that gave us a temporary cushion. We took a small vacation to Florida, and decided that we could live on vacation for the rest of our lives, so we moved.

Since then, Florida has become MAGA HQ, and the state government is psychopathic, so now we’re thinking about leaving, but it was okay for about 20 years.

If we could focus our schools on one single thing, it would be Critical Thinking Skills. It’s how humans are supposed to think, but it has to be taught, and it has to be practiced. Everything else can be looked up on Google, but Critical Thinking Skills require active intervention to learn. Critical Thinking Skills allow us to immediately recognize and reject nonsense like propaganda and scams, and make proper decision based on facts, not vibes.

Those who don’t have Critical Thinking Skills adopt other chaotic methods of thinking, like Faith-Based Thinking, where you choose to believe anything an accepted authority tells you, no matter how outlandish. Or they embrace conspiracy theories, or fall prey to cults, like Scientology, Mormons, or MAGA.

Conservatives are actively fighting the teaching of Critical Thinking Skills, claiming it encourages children to challenge/ defy authority figures, which is a healthy thing in a healthy society. The real reason is that it teaches people how to recognize their insidious propaganda, which is so vitally important to MAGA success. If people start seeing that propaganda for what it really is, Conservatism is doomed.

I’m always happy to see a psychopathic company like Meta get spanked, but how does a fine like that help any of the countless victims?

If the money went to the victims, or was distributed among anyone who downloaded the Facebook app, etc. (even if it’s only 17 cents), I could see it, but it all just goes to the government, where it will be squandered on Sociopathic Oligarchs.

Fines for things like this should be put in an “America First” Fund, which is the money we use to fund the initial operations of new programs like Medicare 4 All, free college/ trade school, UBI, etc.

And those who made these deliberate, reprehensible decisions, that resulted in billion/ trillion dollar fines, should go to prison.

They intended to use AI to rape their employees and the American public, only to find out that the real money is in the AI companies raping THEM!

Real arguably, there is a LOT of competition.

Reverence is the perfect word for how performing the ritual makes you feel about the music.

Andres Segovia playing Bach’s Partita #3 for Solo Violin. I heard it first when I was a teen, and now I’m trying to learn it on electric guitar, as an oldster.

My Discwasher came with a little stylus cleaning brush that fit over the top of the little bottle of cleaning solution.

You probably didn’t have to clean it every time, but it wasn’t a bad idea to give it a quick swipe and remove any grit that accumulated from the last playing.

Our family’s policy is that we don’t start a Netflix show until it has run its course and is over. We’ve had too many disappointments watching a show we like, only to have it get abruptly cancelled. There are too many other things to watch that won’t pull the rug out from under us.

I’m sure Netflix hates this, but it’s their own fault. We are only responding to their irresponsible programming nonsense.

Where do I subscribe?

This is pretty much right on, especially the part about spending so much on audio gear to get vinyl’s best sound out of it.

I’m frugal audiophile…okay, I’m a cheapskate. Right now, I’m rocking a cheap SONY CD player, a $45 tripath amp, and a set of Boston Acoustic speakers that I bought nearly brand new from Goodwill for $10. The entire set-up was well under $100, and it sounds way better than the system I put together in my youth, which was more like $1000.

To put together a vinyl system that sounds as good as this cheap crappy system I cobbled together, would cost me thousands.

I knew guys who were so weird about their LPs, that they wouldn’t play something because they didn’t want to wear it out, which is stupid.

I also had customers (I worked at n record stores back in the day) that would play certain records EVERY day, and would buy a new copy once a year. Dark Side of the Moon, Rumors, Led Zeppelin 4, and Lynyrd Skynyrd were common ones.

When I was a kid, and my friends worked in fast food joints or bussed tables at restaurants, I worked in record stores. The pay sucked, but we got lots of free records, and it was the greatest job in the world.

We loved talking to enthusiastic music lovers, and we had lots of regulars that we looked forward to seeing. We knew their preferences, and when new stuff came in, I’d often set stuff aside for them.

They’d come in, greetings exchanged, and they’d say “What’s new?” and you’d pull something out from under the counter, and say “This came in so I put aside for you.” Even if they didn’t take it, they appreciated that you thought of them.

Lots of cute girls, too. Working alongside of you, their cute friends dropping by, cute customers, and I was the perfect age for it.

What a great job. I’d still be doing it today, if y’know, every record store didn’t go out of business, and if they ever paid more than minimum wage. Free records is nice, but you can’t eat them, and I never found a landlord who would exchange records for rent.

The first time I handled a Jewel Box I was in awe. Then they told me it was called a Jewel Box, and I fell in love. I could never surrender my Jewel Boxes.

You shouldn’t buy music by the pound.

CDs have caught on again, and it’s getting harder to find them. I used to go out on a Saturday, and hit 2 or 3 Goodwills, and come home with 20-30 great CDs, at only $.50-$1 each.

These days all they have are bad religious albums, vanity projects, old software, etc. Garbage.

I was in the record business from the 70s through the early 2000s, and oversaw the transition from LPs to CDs. I had a huge LP collection (50% classical), which I transitioned to a huge CD collection, and got rid of most of the LPs. I still have the entire collection.

CDs were the better format by a long ways, but I totally understand why people love vinyl. For one thing, the large format cover. I remember working for a classical record label, and we were looking at the final cover proof of the last LP we were releasing before going all CD, a particularly beautiful photo of the Alps, and my boss saying “Aren’t you going to miss the big cover art?” And all of us nodded solemnly. It really felt like a funeral, like I was saying goodbye.

I also remember wondering how people were going to clean their weed, and roll proper joints without an LP with a gatefold cover.

Properly keeping a vinyl collection is a chore. First of all, if you are doing it right, ALL of your LPs are in a poly sleeve for protection, so the process for playing an LP is this:

• Remove the album from the shelf, where it is properly stored upright and tight.

• Remove the LP from the poly sleeve

• Remove the inner sleeve/ dust cover from the cover.

• Remove the LP from the inner sleeve/ dust cover, carefully using fingertips on the edges and label only.

• Hold the LP, and look at it from the edge, to see if there are any obvious warps or kinks. Of course there aren’t, you store it properly, but you look anyway.

• You blow off any obvious hairs or dust.

• Set it carefully on the turntable, trying to put the spindle through hole on the first try, without rubbing it around, making nearly invisible, but bothersome, marks around the hole, that will irk you every time you see them.

• Carefully clean the surface with a Discwasher or some other cleaning device.

• Use a stylus brush on the needle to remove any schmutz.

• Carefully place the needle on the surface, and relax for the next 20 minutes as you listen to your music. Or dance. Or my personal favorite: Air Guitar (I play for real, I’m allowed).

• Flip the record, repeat the entire cleaning process, and drop the needle.

• Reverse the process, put the LP back into the inner sleeve, put that in the cover, put the album back in the poly sleeve, and slip it back into its proper place on the shelf.

That’s a lot more complicated than simply dropping a CD into a drawer and pushing a button.

The psychological result of all those steps, EVERY time you want to play music, is that it starts to feel like a ritual, and takes on a feeling of importance. The music you listen to, the LPs that that you fuss over, that you preserve, and collect, take on a personal and cultural significance, that you feel a need to protect.

As new formats came along, CDs, then Digital Downloads, the ritual was removed, and music stopped feeling important. In the 60s and 70s, music was a significant factor in ending the Vietnam War, but it is hard to imagine today’s music industry mobilizing against the government. Most people don’t take their music as seriously as they did back then.

Yet some have rediscovered the satisfaction in having such a strong, PHYSICAL relationship with their music collection, and are collecting LPs again.

I get it. Music has ALWAYS been important to me, so I don’t need the ritual to remind me anymore anymore, or maybe doing the ritual 100,000 when I was young wove it into my DNA. Either way, CDs have the durability, combined with the punchier sound quality, ease of use, and longer duration, and I was hooked the first time I saw one. I’ll take the advantages of the CD over The Ritual any day.

I’ve thought about that. Scare them all into hiding in their bunkers, and then never tell them that there never was a threat.

They can live in their precious bunkers, while we all go on with real life. 25 years from now, one of them will poke their heads out, and say “HEY! How long as everything been okay?” And we can say, “Since the day you people went into your bunkers, now get back in there!”

I saw that Twilight Zone episode! It was a good one!