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ORIGINAL: DesFIP

My daughter's on her second kindle. When she left it at a friend's she just shifted to reading on her phone or laptop. She bought a friend a book for the friend's birthday. We trade books and kindle's all the time so as not to have to both pay for them.

Don't look now but your false assumptions are showing.

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ORIGINAL: MercTech

Age gives perspective...

When young, you think nothing has ever changed. When you get old you realize that everything is always changing and you start lamenting the lack of stability and they way some things have changed for the worse in your own lifetime.

Remember the promises:
Federal income tax is only a temporary measure to pay off the debt from the Spanish-American War (1914 Yeah, my grandfather's lifetime but he mentioned it so often I use it)
Closing the Public Health Service clinics and implementing medicaid cards will save everyone money and make health care universal (1968)
Vietnam will be the last time our troops fight in a foreign country with out a congressional declaration of war (1976)

1973 was the year I first had a job where I paid Social Security. Minimum wage was $1.91 an hour. In 2000, I took that minimum wage and applied the inflation rate published by the federal government. I found that, according to government figures, I should be making about $46.00 per hour to have the same purchasing power I had when I was a teenager.

And old farts see patterns over the years. Municipalities spend millions on new civic buildings while laying off the workers that maintain the infrastructure. Then want to increase the tax rate to pay for the water system falling apart, resurfacing roads with bicycle swallowing potholes, and bridges that are no longer safe for traffic.

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ORIGINAL: HipPoindexter

The part of my that loves monsters, and therefore Richard Nixon, will never let me forget that, whatever his failings at the Fed, Burns was a good soldier in the end.

quote:

ORIGINAL: LookieNoNookie

quote:

ORIGINAL: HipPoindexter

I was a young fogey. At age 12, my hero was Alex P Keaton. I wore sweater vests. I had my own subscription (well my grandfather paid for it) to the National Review and I diligently read the editorials William F. Buckley Jr. wrote--in hindsight so polysyllabic and so vacuous. I read the classics. I muttered about the decline of the west and how the world was going right to hell because of loose morals and the decline in family values. My father, to his credit, snickered at me.

One day he showed me some essays by long dead Englishmen (the Oxbridge dudes, the ones who always went by three initials and some blueblood surname) about the decline in values and the unwillingness of the young to seize the bull by the horns and get their hands dirty and all that rot. He told me about his grandfather's complaints about his father's generation (the omg Greatest Generation). After that, I became intensely aware of old editorials/essays/television shows/etc about how the world was going right to hell. It became clear that the world had been Going Straight to Hell since the first Greek complained that his contemporaries were men made of bronze instead of the men made of gold of the Golden Age.

So I guess I'm wondering: Do you really think the world is getting worse and the kids today are Out of Control? Do you remember when the old timers were shaking their heads and talking the same shit about you?

All that aside, you gotta admit, Arthur Burns was a rock star.