So you "trust" for example that Slashdot has not been compromised and there is no possibility loading this page will send down some malicious javascript that might do a heap spray and exploit your browser?
Sorry buddy the entire Internet works on people connecting to hosts and parsing and in some cases execute content from hosts they have no reason to "trust." As a network admin I could ensure one hosts (the intercept proxy) got signature based IDS updates every 15min. I could not make sure every host on my network had new signatures every 15min. We can have a separate discussion on the value of that protection but its one layer and its one thing that is only practical to do at high frequency at a choke point ( and at less than high frequency its really is worthless).
Than there is outbound. I might trust my employees to not act maliciously (after all if I don't trust them in that sense I should probably can them) That does not mean I trust them not to forget an accidentally violate policy. DLP services and such work well for that; but only if you can look at the content.
Trust isn't black and white. Its a matter of degree; and its a lot easier to establish a high degree of trust in a host like a proxy than in all the hosts you don't control and even in a lot of cases those you do.
Its all political at this point. How many times did COMODO screw up and they are still Trusted. Lets not talk about LetsEncrypt which passes out DV validated certs and does not even check there is some kind of payment method tied to them. Stupid
I pay a lot of taxes state and county to support the roads I drive on. I pay a lot in federal gas taxes. A lot of people are net recipients of tax. By some estimates as many as 47%.
As a payer - yes I should get say in how that tax money is allocated. If you don't pay you should have no say. I would argue that one man one vote isn't justified either. Those who pay the most should get more votes. Maybe not liberally; perhaps log scale or something but more influence. Ideally we'd create a situation where tax payers could vote to lower their tax burden by spreading it onto others at the price of diminishing their influence.
A board should NOT be a meritocracy. It should be a collection of the N-largest shareholders or their appointed representatives. There is no other sound basis for selecting a board.
Hopefully the board has the sense to choose management based on merit.
Cool and in the meantime I am going to work hard to make sure that leaches like you don't get a chance make these changes. People who don't pay taxes and are not educated should not be voting. With a few more SCOTUS appointments maybe we can make that happen.
You probably do pay taxes are are qualified to vote but that does not matter without the rabble you won't win.
Don't forget if any busier airports are involved and you miss your window the ATC delay. Detla plays A LOT of games to make their ontime and cancellation numbers look a lot better than they are too. I have laterally had a 4pm flight be delayed for 8 hours while later flights to the same destination took off because it was better to screw the ~150 of us for the better part of a whole day to keep their later flights from figuring negatively into their ontime states.
Usually this does not happen because its the same plane being turned around and used for the later flights; but when its not watch out.
I agree the there have been some ergonomic improvements in terms of lumbar support; better padding etc. They have also gotten a lot narrower and reduced the leg room considerably. I think paying to make slightly better quality seats was a minimal concession for creating a situation where an averaged sized man 5'8" 120lbs can't do anything other than sit bolt up right without invading his neighbors space.
No even that is not 'hard' tedious often but not hard. People thought it was going to be hard, until they actually tried around y2k and it turned out to be not hard just a lot of work.
The hard part if there is a hard part is supporting the stack around it. What people, especially people on Slashdot who wrote some Microfocus COBOL in Windows for a college course some time, about COBOL is it does not run in vacuum. Its not the COBOL program that is hard. Its the fact that COPYBOOK is referenced in 65 different programs. Its the 500 JCL job steps before and after with their sync sorts and COND statements. Its the FTP and character conversion steps; and stuff that is scarping CICS and CICS web interfaces around the COBOL you need to worry over.
All this stuff amounts to Rube Goldburg devices that happened to be constructed from very very reliable and consistently operating components. So it all works and humms along for decades but try and replace any part of it with something new and feel the pain of running a square peg into a round hole.
First five paragraphs are how obsessed anyone with a PC got about Myst. Mentions how people put up with the crashing and restarts just to get to the puzzles than concludes with Myst being the start of "casual gaming"
Which is it?
I think Myst was a very interesting title in its day - but if you going to write an article about it pick a thesis, and support it.
The "adults in the room" are the problem. They all have an interest in protecting their investment portfolios at the expense of this nations future.
The truth of the matter is there can be only one super power. When there are two you get the cold war and proxy wars along with it. When there are none but many power you get WWI/WWII.
We are already seeing the proxy fights with China. Russia wants to pretend it still matters and is muddying the waters but that is a distraction. China with its imperialistic plans for "a new silk road" etc place it on a collision course with our economy.
The choice for us is do we leave or children and grandchildren a world where American hegemony remains the norm and we can continue (all be it slowly at times) push for justice and equality for all; or do we want some fat cats to line their pockets today and leave our kids in an America that must kowtow (see already using their words) to Chinese racism and oppression.
Nobody seriously thinks a trade war is good for the economy or good for the America worker short term. However looking out 30 or 50 years its about the only option if want to make sure America remains on the top of the geo-political heap. For you folks who question if that is a positive thing for the world, for all our problems I strongly suggest you actually have a conversation with a Chinese immigrant (one who isn't trying to protect family back home anyway). The window over which we can 'win' this fight is also rapidly closing.
The problem really comes down to the "DO MORE" though. I would argue you're typical office worker could be perfectly happy with Word 6.0 and Excel 4.0 on Windows For Workgroups. A solid WYSIWG word processing and spread sheet with easy document sharing on file shares etc. All without having to learn any cryptic commands etc. Oh and there was Chat and Microsoft Mail there too. Did it all fit on one floppy no - but was still probably under 40MBs with room left to work; if memory serves.
Want a little more polished experience with some collaboration enhancements fine jump to Windows 95 and Office 97. Now you have more features than many people will ever even want to use without taking up all that much more space.
Its really the 80/20 problem. For the most part PC and Smart Phone applications fall into the categories of office automation, communications, and entertainment. They are now mature products. The one you have today would meet the needs of 80% of the user base out there. There are 20% with some esoteric needs who have problems to solve yet. Once in a while a new idea reshapes things and a new *need* is created.
To use a car analogy imagine its 1999 (everyone uses their mobile phone fore this now) GPS was the new hotness. It made sense from a feature standpoint to include a GPS navigation system in your dashboard. Prior to that the feature set of the typical car had not changed much from say the mid 60's. There were a few "under the hood" improvements. EFI - much more reliable; but if you do have problem it becomes much more complex. Airbags improve safety but add weight and huge repair costs; ditto for ABS systems. They automotive state of the art was by then and remains at a point where the additional features you can put in are only really value adds to some - the majority don't need the feature and in a lot of cases might not even want it. These is where we are with PCs today.
Yes but for many of the examples cited even that really isn't going to change things. One contemporary x86 core can handle Slack for example and will be able to do so for even considerably more bloated releases of slack. Now maybe Slack uses larger and larger time slices of that core but even that won't make consumers reject it as long as the core count keeps going up.
I would take it step further. The Bible is really speaking to slaves not their masters. Its not an endorsement of slavery at all its more saying that your condition of slavery is worldly but you remain holy.
Your true master is the Lord, like your earthly master it he who will judge you both and your path to salvation is thru Christ all the same. Its more conciliatory than anything else; an assurance your place in the divine kingdom does not reflect your place in earthly ones.
Or you could look at it as really really cynical way to keep the plebs in line; however given the author is a prisoner facing execution; I for one will go with sincere.
What about people with speech impediments often refereed to as "lisps". Should they be force to be reminded of their disability every day they go into the office?
Guido van Rossum - is literally worse than a Nazi.
Parent and worker? Parents have children, children have been exploited and continue to be by many societies as workers. Often subject to harsh, dangerous, and life shortening conditions for little pay!
By choosing these terms for use in Python he is clearly endorsing these practices. I don't think there is any choice here but to call for the immediate divestiture in all things Python; Socially responsible organizations should be porting their applications in scripts to languages that better reflect today's social norms.
All the solutions in the comments will for the most part ignore the very fundamental issue that maybe these devices should not be considered disposable.
Our society seems to be shifting more and more to the disposable and away from the durable good. Why should I be buying new computers and cell phone every 2 years? Used to be you bought a PC, paid like 6K for inflation adjusted and you ran it for 6 or seven years! Sure that meant that you did not always have the latest and greatest. It was perfectly normal back in the day for Joe to have i386-DX20 on his desk still while Bob unboxed his brand new Pentium-60. These machines were worlds apart in performance but WFW3.11 booted up just fine on either. Both were fully supported.
Most of the App store isn't a choice for an 2012 iPhone 4s today.
Maybe the question to be asking is why can't I pull some screws off the back of iPhone; pry up the A10 CPU and install a A12 "over drive" or swap out the memory chips, replace the flash module user data lives on with a bigger one?
Sure this would mean probably thicker more expensive phone but we could make a mobile that has 10 year life span rather than 1.5 - 4(max).
I don't know if you are trolling, human garbage or just the typical deeply ignorant useful idiot. What you fail to understand is its the internationalists that harbor the deep hate, not those right-wing nuts. They might dislike one group or anther for whatever reason but they are NOT the authoritarians this time around.
The Internationalists are! Step back and look objectively at the treatment by the major international bodies EU, UN, WTO etc of anyone who does not subscribe to their current secularist viewpoint, and anyone who believes that they might want to take care of their family and neighbors before considering themselves a world citizen. Why they will come down on them with tools of oppression that would have made the Nazi state blush. No they are not piling up the bodies yet but that is coming; rest assured. Its a major reason they are all gun grabbers. They know eventually good people will be forced into a corner defending their families or their faith and have no choice left to them but violent resistance and they want to make sure those people will lose.
These international bodies are NOT different than the empires of old; they just bamboozle folks into thinking they are. The UN isnt about international cooperation its about one world government, a post national world. The EU is the same thing. When there are no-nations to stand up to the abuses of other nations you will have a single giant empire again like Rome and it will be oppressive! People who support this stuff are fighting to end their own freedom. (Well unless you are part of the ruling class; I suppose).
Right now there is a lot of talk about voting rights and influencing elections the question you need to be asking yourself is once all this power is turned over to these international bodies will the elections matter at all? Seriously unless you are part of the POL/Money changer classes supporting international anything is aggressively stupid and against your interests.
Theranos was a private company so the stock was restricted, and she had no way to liquidate.
Well one 'solution' would have been to take some big loans collateralizing them with her Theranos position; or give herself some loans from the company....
Double down - obviously. Where she messed up was believing her own lies. She should have moving wealth into secret accounts and portable property stored beyond the reach of US law enforcement.
You plan on serving your time when you get caught and than enjoying easy street when you get out.
Do you want to eat 25% more bread to get the nutrients you need
The answer to that is "yes" for the groups we are talking about. People in places where there is significant food scarcity and nutritional insecurity absolutely could stand to eat more calories and still be healthy. The vast vast majority of them wish the could!
In places that are not food insecure; that wont be necessary at all making small variations in diet will more than likely fill any nutrient deficits without increasing calorie count. Sure some westerners do manage to get scurvy even in the 21st century - but that is because they make stupid choices like eating nothing by Kraft MacnCheese all week. Its not because they don't or won't have other options. Even if you are way below the poverty line in the west you could still eat a fist full of dandelion greens and chew on some pine needles - to supplement you bread and cheese.
A big reason why the problem has yet to be solved is "because creating effective obscenity filters depends on the filter's ability to understand a word in context
Wrong - the issue isn't context. The sorts of people that get 'offended' by character strings; that they know are not something the application designer or sight operator intended to put there but rather something something some troll thought would get a rise out of people like using the n-word for their handle don't care about context. They know the context and they get mad anyway because they are the types who go around looking for things to be mad about.
The issue is people. You can't solve people problems with technology no matter how good your AI is.
What this argument overlooks, of course, is that literary culture as we know it was the product of a technological revolution, one that began with Johannes Gutenberg's invention of movable type. We take books and mass literacy for granted, but in reality, they are a recent iteration, going back not even a millennium.
1) Before that there was oral tradition and the written word pretty much eviscerated that in western society. There was no reason to sit around waiting for the bard or minstrel to tell stories when you could go read them. Plays, and narrative song survived for a long while because literacy rates were low; not because people wanted to sit thru Everyman #886. As literacy increase the play became an art form and the narrative song became the ballad also an art. Here were are witnessing the death of print; Video killed the mass market paper back star. TL:DR - Things change and I don't like it.
2) More print media is probably produced and consumed than ever (even if not the long form novella) its just you can't make money at it on ad revenue because it competes for the attention with all the other kinda of media out there. Oh and maybe there is too much of that? Maybe society is harmed by the fact that we dont all read the same books; in the last decade we have stopped watching the same movies and TV too; in case you had noticed with the fragmenting of cable, amazon, and netflix. I think this actually quite sad because it actually divides us into little tribes. I suspect the cause is there is too much money in media - we have to many laws protecting it and to many cartels pushing access to giant libraries or bundling huge amounts of content in all or nothing propositions. All of this is causing society to over produce this things.
There are a lot things we can do but we need to be careful system thinkers about all of it not knee-jerk react to one thing. Solar is the darling of green weenies (note I consider myself an environmentalist but I want to be smart about it that is the difference).
Although the environmental impact of manufacturing photo-voltaic cells has been less than feared its still a huge land impact. It takes currently about 3K acres to put in 1k acreage of actually solar panels. This is on the small end of an industrial scale solar plant. People are lobbying to build these in places like Corner of WV, VA, and PA. This region boasts some of the only large unbroken forest areas left on the east coast out side of Maine! Doing this would be a disaster! Yet people believe its "green."
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if there will be counter-sue for barrarty feature.
So you "trust" for example that Slashdot has not been compromised and there is no possibility loading this page will send down some malicious javascript that might do a heap spray and exploit your browser?
Sorry buddy the entire Internet works on people connecting to hosts and parsing and in some cases execute content from hosts they have no reason to "trust." As a network admin I could ensure one hosts (the intercept proxy) got signature based IDS updates every 15min. I could not make sure every host on my network had new signatures every 15min. We can have a separate discussion on the value of that protection but its one layer and its one thing that is only practical to do at high frequency at a choke point ( and at less than high frequency its really is worthless).
Than there is outbound. I might trust my employees to not act maliciously (after all if I don't trust them in that sense I should probably can them) That does not mean I trust them not to forget an accidentally violate policy. DLP services and such work well for that; but only if you can look at the content.
Trust isn't black and white. Its a matter of degree; and its a lot easier to establish a high degree of trust in a host like a proxy than in all the hosts you don't control and even in a lot of cases those you do.
Its all political at this point. How many times did COMODO screw up and they are still Trusted. Lets not talk about LetsEncrypt which passes out DV validated certs and does not even check there is some kind of payment method tied to them. Stupid
I pay a lot of taxes state and county to support the roads I drive on. I pay a lot in federal gas taxes. A lot of people are net recipients of tax. By some estimates as many as 47%.
As a payer - yes I should get say in how that tax money is allocated. If you don't pay you should have no say. I would argue that one man one vote isn't justified either. Those who pay the most should get more votes. Maybe not liberally; perhaps log scale or something but more influence. Ideally we'd create a situation where tax payers could vote to lower their tax burden by spreading it onto others at the price of diminishing their influence.
A board should NOT be a meritocracy. It should be a collection of the N-largest shareholders or their appointed representatives. There is no other sound basis for selecting a board.
Hopefully the board has the sense to choose management based on merit.
Cool and in the meantime I am going to work hard to make sure that leaches like you don't get a chance make these changes. People who don't pay taxes and are not educated should not be voting. With a few more SCOTUS appointments maybe we can make that happen.
You probably do pay taxes are are qualified to vote but that does not matter without the rabble you won't win.
Don't forget if any busier airports are involved and you miss your window the ATC delay. Detla plays A LOT of games to make their ontime and cancellation numbers look a lot better than they are too. I have laterally had a 4pm flight be delayed for 8 hours while later flights to the same destination took off because it was better to screw the ~150 of us for the better part of a whole day to keep their later flights from figuring negatively into their ontime states.
Usually this does not happen because its the same plane being turned around and used for the later flights; but when its not watch out.
I agree the there have been some ergonomic improvements in terms of lumbar support; better padding etc. They have also gotten a lot narrower and reduced the leg room considerably. I think paying to make slightly better quality seats was a minimal concession for creating a situation where an averaged sized man 5'8" 120lbs can't do anything other than sit bolt up right without invading his neighbors space.
No even that is not 'hard' tedious often but not hard. People thought it was going to be hard, until they actually tried around y2k and it turned out to be not hard just a lot of work.
The hard part if there is a hard part is supporting the stack around it. What people, especially people on Slashdot who wrote some Microfocus COBOL in Windows for a college course some time, about COBOL is it does not run in vacuum. Its not the COBOL program that is hard. Its the fact that COPYBOOK is referenced in 65 different programs. Its the 500 JCL job steps before and after with their sync sorts and COND statements. Its the FTP and character conversion steps; and stuff that is scarping CICS and CICS web interfaces around the COBOL you need to worry over.
All this stuff amounts to Rube Goldburg devices that happened to be constructed from very very reliable and consistently operating components. So it all works and humms along for decades but try and replace any part of it with something new and feel the pain of running a square peg into a round hole.
First five paragraphs are how obsessed anyone with a PC got about Myst. Mentions how people put up with the crashing and restarts just to get to the puzzles than concludes with Myst being the start of "casual gaming"
Which is it?
I think Myst was a very interesting title in its day - but if you going to write an article about it pick a thesis, and support it.
The "adults in the room" are the problem. They all have an interest in protecting their investment portfolios at the expense of this nations future.
The truth of the matter is there can be only one super power. When there are two you get the cold war and proxy wars along with it. When there are none but many power you get WWI/WWII.
We are already seeing the proxy fights with China. Russia wants to pretend it still matters and is muddying the waters but that is a distraction. China with its imperialistic plans for "a new silk road" etc place it on a collision course with our economy.
The choice for us is do we leave or children and grandchildren a world where American hegemony remains the norm and we can continue (all be it slowly at times) push for justice and equality for all; or do we want some fat cats to line their pockets today and leave our kids in an America that must kowtow (see already using their words) to Chinese racism and oppression.
Nobody seriously thinks a trade war is good for the economy or good for the America worker short term. However looking out 30 or 50 years its about the only option if want to make sure America remains on the top of the geo-political heap. For you folks who question if that is a positive thing for the world, for all our problems I strongly suggest you actually have a conversation with a Chinese immigrant (one who isn't trying to protect family back home anyway). The window over which we can 'win' this fight is also rapidly closing.
The problem really comes down to the "DO MORE" though. I would argue you're typical office worker could be perfectly happy with Word 6.0 and Excel 4.0 on Windows For Workgroups. A solid WYSIWG word processing and spread sheet with easy document sharing on file shares etc. All without having to learn any cryptic commands etc. Oh and there was Chat and Microsoft Mail there too. Did it all fit on one floppy no - but was still probably under 40MBs with room left to work; if memory serves.
Want a little more polished experience with some collaboration enhancements fine jump to Windows 95 and Office 97. Now you have more features than many people will ever even want to use without taking up all that much more space.
Its really the 80/20 problem. For the most part PC and Smart Phone applications fall into the categories of office automation, communications, and entertainment. They are now mature products. The one you have today would meet the needs of 80% of the user base out there. There are 20% with some esoteric needs who have problems to solve yet. Once in a while a new idea reshapes things and a new *need* is created.
To use a car analogy imagine its 1999 (everyone uses their mobile phone fore this now) GPS was the new hotness. It made sense from a feature standpoint to include a GPS navigation system in your dashboard. Prior to that the feature set of the typical car had not changed much from say the mid 60's. There were a few "under the hood" improvements. EFI - much more reliable; but if you do have problem it becomes much more complex. Airbags improve safety but add weight and huge repair costs; ditto for ABS systems. They automotive state of the art was by then and remains at a point where the additional features you can put in are only really value adds to some - the majority don't need the feature and in a lot of cases might not even want it. These is where we are with PCs today.
Yes but for many of the examples cited even that really isn't going to change things. One contemporary x86 core can handle Slack for example and will be able to do so for even considerably more bloated releases of slack. Now maybe Slack uses larger and larger time slices of that core but even that won't make consumers reject it as long as the core count keeps going up.
I would take it step further. The Bible is really speaking to slaves not their masters. Its not an endorsement of slavery at all its more saying that your condition of slavery is worldly but you remain holy.
Your true master is the Lord, like your earthly master it he who will judge you both and your path to salvation is thru Christ all the same. Its more conciliatory than anything else; an assurance your place in the divine kingdom does not reflect your place in earthly ones.
Or you could look at it as really really cynical way to keep the plebs in line; however given the author is a prisoner facing execution; I for one will go with sincere.
What about people with speech impediments often refereed to as "lisps". Should they be force to be reminded of their disability every day they go into the office?
Guido van Rossum - is literally worse than a Nazi.
Parent and worker? Parents have children, children have been exploited and continue to be by many societies as workers. Often subject to harsh, dangerous, and life shortening conditions for little pay!
By choosing these terms for use in Python he is clearly endorsing these practices. I don't think there is any choice here but to call for the immediate divestiture in all things Python; Socially responsible organizations should be porting their applications in scripts to languages that better reflect today's social norms.
All the solutions in the comments will for the most part ignore the very fundamental issue that maybe these devices should not be considered disposable.
Our society seems to be shifting more and more to the disposable and away from the durable good. Why should I be buying new computers and cell phone every 2 years? Used to be you bought a PC, paid like 6K for inflation adjusted and you ran it for 6 or seven years! Sure that meant that you did not always have the latest and greatest. It was perfectly normal back in the day for Joe to have i386-DX20 on his desk still while Bob unboxed his brand new Pentium-60. These machines were worlds apart in performance but WFW3.11 booted up just fine on either. Both were fully supported.
Most of the App store isn't a choice for an 2012 iPhone 4s today.
Maybe the question to be asking is why can't I pull some screws off the back of iPhone; pry up the A10 CPU and install a A12 "over drive" or swap out the memory chips, replace the flash module user data lives on with a bigger one?
Sure this would mean probably thicker more expensive phone but we could make a mobile that has 10 year life span rather than 1.5 - 4(max).
I don't know if you are trolling, human garbage or just the typical deeply ignorant useful idiot. What you fail to understand is its the internationalists that harbor the deep hate, not those right-wing nuts. They might dislike one group or anther for whatever reason but they are NOT the authoritarians this time around.
The Internationalists are! Step back and look objectively at the treatment by the major international bodies EU, UN, WTO etc of anyone who does not subscribe to their current secularist viewpoint, and anyone who believes that they might want to take care of their family and neighbors before considering themselves a world citizen. Why they will come down on them with tools of oppression that would have made the Nazi state blush. No they are not piling up the bodies yet but that is coming; rest assured. Its a major reason they are all gun grabbers. They know eventually good people will be forced into a corner defending their families or their faith and have no choice left to them but violent resistance and they want to make sure those people will lose.
These international bodies are NOT different than the empires of old; they just bamboozle folks into thinking they are. The UN isnt about international cooperation its about one world government, a post national world. The EU is the same thing. When there are no-nations to stand up to the abuses of other nations you will have a single giant empire again like Rome and it will be oppressive! People who support this stuff are fighting to end their own freedom. (Well unless you are part of the ruling class; I suppose).
Right now there is a lot of talk about voting rights and influencing elections the question you need to be asking yourself is once all this power is turned over to these international bodies will the elections matter at all? Seriously unless you are part of the POL/Money changer classes supporting international anything is aggressively stupid and against your interests.
Theranos was a private company so the stock was restricted, and she had no way to liquidate.
Well one 'solution' would have been to take some big loans collateralizing them with her Theranos position; or give herself some loans from the company....
Either way she failed to stash the cash.
Double down - obviously. Where she messed up was believing her own lies. She should have moving wealth into secret accounts and portable property stored beyond the reach of US law enforcement.
You plan on serving your time when you get caught and than enjoying easy street when you get out.
Do you want to eat 25% more bread to get the nutrients you need
The answer to that is "yes" for the groups we are talking about. People in places where there is significant food scarcity and nutritional insecurity absolutely could stand to eat more calories and still be healthy. The vast vast majority of them wish the could!
In places that are not food insecure; that wont be necessary at all making small variations in diet will more than likely fill any nutrient deficits without increasing calorie count. Sure some westerners do manage to get scurvy even in the 21st century - but that is because they make stupid choices like eating nothing by Kraft MacnCheese all week. Its not because they don't or won't have other options. Even if you are way below the poverty line in the west you could still eat a fist full of dandelion greens and chew on some pine needles - to supplement you bread and cheese.
A big reason why the problem has yet to be solved is "because creating effective obscenity filters depends on the filter's ability to understand a word in context
Wrong - the issue isn't context. The sorts of people that get 'offended' by character strings; that they know are not something the application designer or sight operator intended to put there but rather something something some troll thought would get a rise out of people like using the n-word for their handle don't care about context. They know the context and they get mad anyway because they are the types who go around looking for things to be mad about.
The issue is people. You can't solve people problems with technology no matter how good your AI is.
So complete dumpster fire then - got it
What this argument overlooks, of course, is that literary culture as we know it was the product of a technological revolution, one that began with Johannes Gutenberg's invention of movable type. We take books and mass literacy for granted, but in reality, they are a recent iteration, going back not even a millennium.
1) Before that there was oral tradition and the written word pretty much eviscerated that in western society. There was no reason to sit around waiting for the bard or minstrel to tell stories when you could go read them. Plays, and narrative song survived for a long while because literacy rates were low; not because people wanted to sit thru Everyman #886. As literacy increase the play became an art form and the narrative song became the ballad also an art. Here were are witnessing the death of print; Video killed the mass market paper back star. TL:DR - Things change and I don't like it.
2) More print media is probably produced and consumed than ever (even if not the long form novella) its just you can't make money at it on ad revenue because it competes for the attention with all the other kinda of media out there. Oh and maybe there is too much of that? Maybe society is harmed by the fact that we dont all read the same books; in the last decade we have stopped watching the same movies and TV too; in case you had noticed with the fragmenting of cable, amazon, and netflix. I think this actually quite sad because it actually divides us into little tribes. I suspect the cause is there is too much money in media - we have to many laws protecting it and to many cartels pushing access to giant libraries or bundling huge amounts of content in all or nothing propositions. All of this is causing society to over produce this things.
There are a lot things we can do but we need to be careful system thinkers about all of it not knee-jerk react to one thing. Solar is the darling of green weenies (note I consider myself an environmentalist but I want to be smart about it that is the difference).
Although the environmental impact of manufacturing photo-voltaic cells has been less than feared its still a huge land impact. It takes currently about 3K acres to put in 1k acreage of actually solar panels. This is on the small end of an industrial scale solar plant. People are lobbying to build these in places like Corner of WV, VA, and PA. This region boasts some of the only large unbroken forest areas left on the east coast out side of Maine! Doing this would be a disaster! Yet people believe its "green."