Slashdot Mirror

I crunched the numbers (before the Carrie Fisher news hit) using http://fiftiesweb.com/dead/dea... as my guide. 2016 has killed the most celebrities (140 when you add in Ricky Harris, Carrie Fisher, and Richard Adams) than any year since 2000 (the earliest year that site had listings for). It was 40% more than the next closest year, 2005.

The baby boomers are now in their 60s and 70s. The thing that gets me is the overwhelming emotion seems to be surprise, as if never in history before have actors ever died of old age and natural causes.

There's going to be a big uptick in deaths the next decade or so, then quiets down until maybe the 2050s or 2060s. Then that generation will be upset that all of the great people of the millennial generation (which is another boom, bigger than that baby boomers actually) died in the same year of 2056 or whatever. It's actuary work. Probability and statistics.

Certainly, it is sad to lose people, especially those that have inspired others. But unless the death rate percentage of population has changed significantly, there's nothing to worry about. Everyone needs to relax. 2016 isn't cursed or anything. It's just statistics.

Why have public relationships? Public internet relationships are a fad of fake, self-destructive behavior, like the way women dressed in the 1950's.

All of the LinkedIn requests I've ever received have been attempts to pretend that a relationship exists that is more meaningful than in reality.

Sometimes a large percentage of people do crazy things. Don't follow them. I have friends, customers, and business contacts who sometimes read and reply to only the first paragraph of an email, and don't read the rest. It's part of the nonsense of the times.

I told a dentist with a Facebook page that Facebook was showing an ad for another dental clinic on his Facebook page. The dentist just accepted the abuse.

The free open source diaspora* social network software allows privacy.

This book is about the development of Diaspora: More Awesome Than Money: Four Boys and Their Heroic Quest to Save Your Privacy from Facebook. The book is poorly written by someone with no programming experience and no interest in learning, but it does tend to show the difficulties of developing software.

Are you too happy? Is it uncomfortable being happier than everyone else? Facebook is the answer. Read Facebook use predicts declines in happiness, new study finds. Or download the scientific paper.

The first result in a Google search for 50's clothing and hairstyles says, "Ever ready to suffer for the cause of soft feminine looking Fifties styles, after the perm, we still had to roll, curl our hair." A Wikipedia article says, "One ingredient in 1950s hair spray was vinyl chloride monomer; used as an alternative to chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), it was subsequently found to be both toxic and flammable."

Avoid the craziness you see around you.

They don't expect 6 figures and to run the company in 2 years, they expect to be able to find a living wage job. Unfortunately because of cheapskates like you, for a lot of them making 6 figures is what it's going to take to pay off college and buy a house in a reasonable period of time.

In 1950, the average home cost $14,500, the average income was $3,216. So the average home cost 4.5 years worth of income.

In 2012 the average income was $51,000, the average home was $211,000. Or 4.1 years worth of income.

If you think you need to make 6 figures to buy a house, clearly your expectations are too high.

The high student loan debt is a direct result of decades of student loan assistance inflating the price of college tuitions. Unfortunately, schools are not a perfectly elastic market - which school you go to matters to a lot of people, so you cannot simply substitute a degree from a newly-founded college with one from Princeton or MIT. Consequently the supply is constrained. If you then dump a bunch of cheap money onto the people wanting to go to these schools, the schools will simply raise their prices to suck up that extra money. (And before those on the left go nuts over this, the correct solution is to instead dump that money into low-tuition public universities which compete with private colleges. That'll generate downward pressure on tuitions at private universities.)

Ah yes, those too. And I Spy, Mission Impossible, Space 1999, The Saint, I Dream of Jeannie, Hawaii Five o..
On and on and on. There was so much cool stuff on TV back then. It's just impossible to list it all.
Oh and I'll be mixing in some great old movies from Turner Classic Movies and Fox Movie Channel.
Here's a link I found that lists a *few* of the many shows from back then.
http://www.fiftiesweb.com/tv-shows.htm

Ahh, those were the days.

Costs are very relative.

For example:
http://www.aau.edu/aau/MasseyCharts.pdf

an experienced PHD earned under $20,000 in 1950.
an experienced PHD earned about $33,000 in 1960.
an experienced PHD earned about $40,000 in 1970.

In all three cases, they were earning VERY good money.

From
http://www.fiftiesweb.com/pop/prices-1950.htm
House: $14,500
Average income: $3,216
Ford car: $1339-$2262
Philco model 1403 TV: $199
Admiral "home entertainment" TV system: $549.50
12" records: $4.85
10" records: $2.85
Milk: $.82
Gas: $.20
Bread $.14
Postage stamp: $.03
Pumpkins : $.02 cents a lb
Campbell's Pork & Beans - (2) 1 lb. cans: $.25
Sirloin steak: $.77 lb
Kraft Mayonnaise - quart jar: $.62.

----
So in 1950, they could afford a typical house on a single years earnings, and a typical car on 1/9th of their income.

----
If energy went up 25% and everything (including salaries) went up 25%, it would be a net wash.

---
So it only matters if something doesn't go up.

Cars are about the same price as they were in 1950.
The average person earns $40,000 today.
A cheap car is $12,000->$14000 with tt&l or about 1/3 of salary.
A cheap car then was $1,339 ir about a third of their annual salary.

---
Basically income is up from $3,300 to $40,000 (or about 12x).
Anything that hasn't increased in price by 12x has gotten cheaper.
So gas should be $2.40. Hmm. looks on target.
A Top of the line TV should be about $6,000. Looks about right. Maybe TV's are even cheaper.
Campbells pork & beans should be $3.00. I think they are about $1.80. So a bargain (tho in 1950 you were getting much healthier, REAL, unhormoned, antibiotic'd meat... so maybe we should compare it to organic foods)
---

And our houses are bigger (My 1955 house is tiny compared to my friends 2002 house).

---
Inflation will get you bad if you retire and don't leave about a third of your money in equities.

When someone mentions the name "Hopper", the first image that pops into my mind is Paul Drake, from the original Perry Mason TV series. http://www.fiftiesweb.com/tv/perry-mason.htm
William Hopper, of course, was famous for much more than just that role. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Hopper
My favorite movie of his is "The Deadly Mantis". http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050294/
Mantis, grasshopper, nyuk nyuk nyuk!

The word is poncy, and is a British slang word roughly meaning pretentious.

The word is "Fonzie" and is an American slang word roughly meaning "Arthur Fonzarelli."

http://www.fiftiesweb.com/fashion/fonzie.jpg

My reaction to this was "Huh?" so I went and looked it up. Apparently, Burma Shave was the company that developed the idea of stretching a message across several signs along the road. The idea was that people would tune in to the advertisement because they wanted to know what the punch line of the slogan would be. Apparently the scheme worked quite well, and we now see the concept in popular media such as Road Runner cartoons and the movie Rat Race. (You, Should, Have, Bought, A, Squirrel!) ;-)

Parent may have been refering to a moment from Star Trek IV:

"William Shatner (Kirk): Oh, him? He's harmless. Part of the free speech movement at Berkeley in the sixties. I think he did a little too much LDS."

See here.

The mere fact I know this may mean I'm not getting a date with anyone not in a Troi costume for a year or two.

It's not the parachute that caused the plane crash. Rather, the parachute failed to prevent the plane from crashing. Learn the damn difference. Nine times out of ten, the actual cause of the crash is pilot error, like grandparent post already explained. It's actually much higher than nine out of ten, if you read the NTSB aircraft accident reports. It's usually a VFR pilot with "go fever", who risks flying in snow or at night over water to get back home in time so the ball & chain won't give them an earful. Or they thought they had enough gas in the tank, or they did but had to divert around bad weather or they were off course because they forgot to periodically reset their gyro compass. All mistakes that could have been easily avoided, had the pilot done the proper preflight, trip planning, and cockpit awareness routines. And none that have anything at all to do with optional safety devices.

If you pull a bonehead maneuver that risks your life, be fucking grateful someone gave you a second chance. Don't sue them, or next time they won't help you. It's asshats like this that are the reason we need Good Samaritan laws in the first place.

TV is no "dumber" now than it was twenty years ago. This is just a stupid knee jerk reaction to an industry it is now more fashionable than ever to hate.

Look at the top rated shows and you will find only a sliver of those "reality" shows everyone loves (when they're alone in front of the tv) to hate (the next day around the water cooler). What is there in spades, however, is the cookie cutter crime shows - allegedly "intelligent" content apparently all written by the same crack team of hackneyed high school chemistry dropouts.

Now go back thirty years to 1974 and note the top rated shows. Sanford and Son might be classics now, but no matter how much I loved Redd Foxx I sure wouldn't call it "intelligent." Six Million Dollar man? Fun when I was 12, but in the end only slightly less demeaning in its scientific take than CSI-name-your-favorite-city. It's Charlie's Angels for the geriatric.

Then there was MASH and Bob Newhart and Maude; now there's West Wing and Will and Grace and Family Guy.

Now let's move into the eighties. I'm not even going to bother looking for a link - I can name them off the top of my head: intelligent fare like Three's Company and Dukes of fucking Hazzard and Wonder Woman intermingled with the monthly installments of Battle of the Network T's and A's.

Great shows like those produced by Rod Serling - the MASHs and the West Wings have always been rare on TV. By and large it has always sucked, all that's changing is your own awareness of just how badly. What you're forgetting is it's been that bad all along... you just had no other choice.

$345 shure was a lot of money when a house cost $22,000 and the average income was $3,960 (thanks to fiftiesweb).

A quick adjustment based on the 2001 median household income of $42228 (US Census Bureau) is $3,450... rather a lot of money.

Notice that the article says the past five years, not the past year as the poster misquotes. Not to poke holes in their numbers, but here are some historical US business failure statistics randomly grabbed from Google. I have read that 80% of new businesses fail in the first 2 years, 90% if they are restaurants. So if the statistics include startups that are destined to fail naturally, it's not as significant as it sounds.

Captain Kangaroo started in B&W in 1955, but went color in 1969. Check it out here

And lyrics in general.

The Harry Fox Agency has managed to close down a source of information so universally acknowledged as useful that it was one of the first archives/search sites on the web.

The story is told in part here and here and here.

The parable of the dog in the manger, who can't eat the hay himself, but prevents others from eating it, has never been more appropriate.