What would you want to be able to buy from Atari…

[Keatah]

3 hours ago, zzip said:

I'm sure if there was a market for high-quality authentic catherdral radios,  they'd produce them.   But the transistor and other innovations turn radios into a cheap, throwaway thing.    

 

It's another relic from a different time-  When radio was considered hi-tech and people would pay a premium for it, when vacuum tubes and AM radio were the norm, and when there were repair shops all over the place to get it fixed when it broke.

Back when these things were new, there was a certain amount of manufacturing crudeness. Materials like heavy wood and Bakelite and metal were used because that's all we knew how to work with then. So things were big, bulky, and could take some abuse. The mass of the materials just sucked it all up. And we equate that to quality.

 

Today we'll do plastic knobs with a spray-on chrome finish. Back then it was a fully cast/molded piece of metal that got polished. Today wires will be thin traces on a PCB. Back then it was cloth-insulated discrete point-to-point wiring.

[+x=usr(1536)]

13 minutes ago, Keatah said:

Back when these things were new, there was a certain amount of manufacturing crudeness. Materials like heavy wood and Bakelite and metal were used because that's all we knew how to work with then. So things were big, bulky, and could take some abuse. The mass of the materials just sucked it all up. And we equate that to quality.

Fundamentally, I agree with the points you're making.  But even at the time when these items were contemporary, there were still degrees of manufacturing quality that differed between manufacturers and models.  Variations could still occur both quantitatively and qualitatively in ways that we still see and/or relate to today.

16 minutes ago, Keatah said:

Today we'll do plastic knobs with a spray-on chrome finish. Back then it was a fully cast/molded piece of metal that got polished. Today wires will be thin traces on a PCB. Back then it was cloth-insulated discrete point-to-point wiring.

Much of this can be put down to technological progress and the changes it brings.  However - and this is an opinion drawn purely from after-the-fact observation as I wasn't alive to see the difference - this is something that I feel can also be attributed to post-WWII manufacturing changes, customer expectations, and increased discretionary income.

 

By the late '50s / early '60s, plastics were more versatile to work with, consumers wanted more of the latest and greatest items that reflected the modernity of the times, and had the money (in the US, at least) to spend on those items.  Pre-war manufacturing techniques simply wouldn't be able to keep up with demand, and consumers weren't interested in things that didn't keep up both externally and internally with the Jet and Space ages.  This fed the rush to the transistor, ABS case, and plastic controls.

 

An Art Deco floor radio from the 1930s has massive appeal for me, not just aesthetically but also technologically and in terms of interaction.  Sure, I know that most of what's inside of it is unused space, getting replacement tubes will not be easy, and the sound quality from its 83-plus-year-old speaker may not be any better than what's in a pair of dollar store earbuds.  But using a satisfyingly-solid tuning knob to rotate a dial lit from below, smelling the change in the air around it as the tubes heat up and dust burns off of them, and listening to stations on something that still does what it was designed to do nearly a century later while appealing to my sensibilities is, to my mind, delightful.  It's not an anachronism simply because it's multisensory art.

 

It's also an object that I realise most people aren't going to care about.  It's old, occupies too much space, and they already have a phone that plays music as well as doing a bunch of other things.  That's fine, and I don't begrudge them their preferences.  But they're the ones driving the market.  I don't need (or want) the phone that folds open like a paperback, nor do I particularly care about most items endorsed by <insert celebrity here> that seem to be highly-prized.  It is the world we live in, though, and thankfully one that can be participated in to chosen degrees.

[Keatah]

Cathedral radios and lighted dials.. baghhh! Tubes and dust smell.. pfffggh!

 

Crystal radio is where it's at! Romance of the Diode and all. Yeh'know!

[Lord Mushroom]

16 hours ago, GoldLeader said:

It's the things they did with the name.  It's the things they did to others (including some of us here and some of us who are no longer with us...)   (Bows out)

That was when it was run, and largely owned, by Frederic Chesnais, and he is no longer in the company. If today´s Atari is not like Bushnell, Warner or Tramiel´s Atari, it is not like Chesnais´ Atari either.

 

Things have improved under Wade Rosen, although there is still some way to go.

[+GoldLeader]

2 hours ago, Lord Mushroom said:

That was when it was run, and largely owned, by Frederic Chesnais, and he is no longer in the company. If today´s Atari is not like Bushnell, Warner or Tramiel´s Atari, it is not like Chesnais´ Atari either.

 

Things have improved under Wade Rosen, although there is still some way to go.

So many people used to say that, even when Chesnais was still at the company (moved over to the crypto-grift),  so forgive me if I'm skeptical...

Edited May 2, 2023 by GoldLeader
PS I do know Chesnais is out of the company now, But I don't know the details (of why)...I still doubt we (Atari & I) see eye to eye...

[zzip]

15 hours ago, Keatah said:

Back when these things were new, there was a certain amount of manufacturing crudeness. Materials like heavy wood and Bakelite and metal were used because that's all we knew how to work with then. So things were big, bulky, and could take some abuse. The mass of the materials just sucked it all up. And we equate that to quality.

 

Today we'll do plastic knobs with a spray-on chrome finish. Back then it was a fully cast/molded piece of metal that got polished. Today wires will be thin traces on a PCB. Back then it was cloth-insulated discrete point-to-point wiring.

There's that,  but also when the tech device itself is expensive, there's no reason to skimp on build quality.

 

Take the IBM 5150 or even the Atari 800.   New tech, pricey.  The Atari 800 had a crazy amount of RF shielding,  at that point might as well use solid case materials and high-quality keyboards.   The people who can afford your product to begin with are the kind of people willing to pay a little extra for quality.

 

Later PC clones would have thin aluminum cases and crappy keyboards to help bring costs down,   The Atari XL line was nowhere near the build quality of the Atari 800, and the XE line was cheaper quality still.

 

But yeah, you're right that the radios of that era had far less options.   That was before transistors were invented, and there weren't a lot of options for plastic-like materials.  Maybe they could use thinner or cheaper woods, skimp on the chrome, but not much more.    Things were build to last back then because they had to be 

[Lord Mushroom]

3 hours ago, GoldLeader said:

PS I do know Chesnais is out of the company now, But I don't know the details (of why)

Chesnais gradually reduced his stake in Atari over the years. Rosen bought his remaining shares, and became CEO a year after.

 

Chesnais was left as a manager of the crypto-stuff, but left to start his own crypto company. 

Edited May 2, 2023 by Lord Mushroom

[christo930]

On 5/1/2023 at 2:07 PM, zzip said:

Because getting things repaired is much less convenient, how many people are going to risk a large amount of money on a radio that could break? 

 

The reason we don't repair consumer grade anything in the US is because we cannot import cheap foreign repair wages and other costs.  Asian manufacturers don't have to have armies of lawyers, don't have endless regulations and all the other bloated costs in the US to do business, not to mention they have less valuable currencies and lower wages generally.  In effect, we are importing their low costs. 

 

Paying an American with a bunch of American costs and wages makes repairing just about anything sold to consumers just not worth it.  The cost of fixing most things in America  exceed the cost of just importing a brand new one.  There are many things where a major repair would exceed the cost of replacement in parts alone because housing parts in the US is an expensive venture.

 

Also, I really wouldn't want to buy an exact copy of a 1930s cathedral radio.  I would want something with modern technology in the form of the old cathedral radio that is built fairly well.  I have a cathedral radio and it's beautiful and all and it's on display, but only occasionally used because it's AM only.

 

All this could change very, very quickly and relatively soon.  If a hot war were to break out between China and the US, something IMHO no longer unthinkable, there will be shortages of most consumer items. It will make the days of Covid seem like the good old days.  What can be repaired will be repaired and resold as used for more money than it was new.

[christo930]

On 5/1/2023 at 6:35 PM, Keatah said:

Back when these things were new, there was a certain amount of manufacturing crudeness. Materials like heavy wood and Bakelite and metal were used because that's all we knew how to work with then. So things were big, bulky, and could take some abuse. The mass of the materials just sucked it all up. And we equate that to quality.

 

Today we'll do plastic knobs with a spray-on chrome finish. Back then it was a fully cast/molded piece of metal that got polished

They made them using the best materials available, not because these were the only materials we could work with.  The styling was also meant to fit in with the home decor.  We equate that to quality because it is quality.  Also, all the parts were available (even custom ones) and schematics were available. That's also part of the quality.

 

OTOH, you paid for that quality. Everything was far more expensive back then. Not just electronics.  A big part of why everything was so expensive was you were paying for American wages and costs.  But you could buy something and have it last 20 years.

On 5/1/2023 at 7:24 PM, x=usr(1536) said:

Much of this can be put down to technological progress and the changes it brings

Very little of this is because of improving technology.  Electronics for example were built very well up until our companies were smashed by foreign manufacturers given unfettered access to US markets and the growth of the US state.  The legislation of the 60s and 70s destroyed American competitiveness.  American workers were the highest paid workers in the world with the highest standard of living in the world. Mostly because we were so productive.  All the new regulations of the 60s and 70s made us extremely unproductive.

 

On 5/1/2023 at 7:24 PM, x=usr(1536) said:

increased discretionary income.

More income doesn't make you buy cheaper items.

 

On 5/1/2023 at 7:24 PM, x=usr(1536) said:

By the late '50s / early '60s, plastics were more versatile to work with, consumers wanted more of the latest and greatest items that reflected the modernity of the times, and had the money (in the US, at least) to spend on those items. 

That's not true. Plastics had still not taken over at that time.  What happened is Americans became impoverished by the great society, the moon program, Vietnam. the cold war and the decades of high inflation that followed.  We are just accustomed now to the high inflation rates, so it all seems so normal.  The US has not had a SINGLE YEAR where the official government debt went down since like 1962. That includes the alleged "Clinton Surplus"  You can just look at the debt at the close of each year of the Clinton presidency.

 

We were only able to survive by sending our mothers into the full time workforce and importing ever more consumer goods.

On 5/1/2023 at 7:50 PM, Keatah said:

Crystal radio is where it's at! Romance of the Diode and all. Yeh'know!

By the time the diode was invented in 1947, crystal radios were a memory.  It's called a "Crystal Radio" because it used a crystal as the detector diode.  I think they often referred to them as a cat's whisker.

 

[zzip]

17 minutes ago, christo930 said:

The reason we don't repair consumer grade anything in the US is because we cannot import cheap foreign repair wages and other costs.  Asian manufacturers don't have to have armies of lawyers, don't have endless regulations and all the other bloated costs in the US to do business, not to mention they have less valuable currencies and lower wages generally.  In effect, we are importing their low costs. 

 

Paying an American with a bunch of American costs and wages makes repairing just about anything sold to consumers just not worth it.  The cost of fixing most things in America  exceed the cost of just importing a brand new one.  There are many things where a major repair would exceed the cost of replacement in parts alone because housing parts in the US is an expensive venture.

Yeah I agree, it's because we made everything cheap and disposable, if something breaks, it makes more financial sense to throw it out and buy a new one.

 

It wasn't always like this, even when I was younger, repair operations were far more common.   For instance people would have these large, heavy console TVs that they kept for many years and repairmen would show up to fix them when they started acting up.   Today's flatscreens are a lot more reliable, but now they suffer from planned obsolescence,   Once the switch to HD happend, they kept shoving higher and higher resolution standards every few years:  1080p, 4K  soon 8K,   never mind that it's questionable if there's any real benefit to 4K or 8K in your living room setup,  you need this!!   

 

And to top it odd, the same companies now pushing us to throw everything away and replace it every few years love to tell us how much they care about the environment and sustainability..  yeah, sure you do!  

 

39 minutes ago, christo930 said:

All this could change very, very quickly and relatively soon.  If a hot war were to break out between China and the US, something IMHO no longer unthinkable, there will be shortages of most consumer items. It will make the days of Covid seem like the good old days.  What can be repaired will be repaired and resold as used for more money than it was new.

I think it's already in the process of changing, war or not.    COVID showed how vulnerable the supply chains are.   We've already reaped the benefits of globalization decades ago, now we're suffering the hangover-- security concerns,  the human social costs,  working class uprisings, etc.

[zzip]

16 minutes ago, christo930 said:

OTOH, you paid for that quality. Everything was far more expensive back then. Not just electronics.  A big part of why everything was so expensive was you were paying for American wages and costs.  But you could buy something and have it last 20 years.

And you didn't have as many of them.

Families used to bond sitting around the TV watching the same show, because there was only one TV.   Now everyone is isolated watching their own personal devices.   

Same with computers or video game consoles, they were expensive, so you owned one if that.

 

Nowadays it seems we all have piles of these things and not enough time to give each the the attention to make them worth owning

 

23 minutes ago, christo930 said:

Very little of this is because of improving technology.  Electronics for example were built very well up until our companies were smashed by foreign manufacturers given unfettered access to US markets and the growth of the US state.  The legislation of the 60s and 70s destroyed American competitiveness.  American workers were the highest paid workers in the world with the highest standard of living in the world. Mostly because we were so productive.  All the new regulations of the 60s and 70s made us extremely unproductive.

There was also the fact that WWII wrecked much of the developed world apart from the US, so US manufacturing boomed for several decades until other countries rebuilt and started selling their goods.

[christo930]

9 minutes ago, zzip said:

Today's flatscreens are a lot more reliable, but now they suffer from planned obsolescence,

 

I disagree that they are more reliable.  Most CRT TVs of the later 80s onward would run 10 years usually without any problems. But if they did have problems, you could usually get them repaired.  I've been through like 5 flats creens since NTSC was shut off.

Flatscreens are not reliable at all and only last a few years and there are no parts and no schematics available. 

12 minutes ago, zzip said:

Once the switch to HD happend, they kept shoving higher and higher resolution standards every few years:  1080p, 4K  soon 8K,   never mind that it's questionable if there's any real benefit to 4K or 8K in your living room setup,  you need this!! 

 

IMHO, 1080p is where you start running into diminishing returns unless you buy an extremely large screen which will be viewed from very far away.  All the programming in my area tops out at 1080 anyway.

15 minutes ago, zzip said:

I think it's already in the process of changing, war or not.    COVID showed how vulnerable the supply chains are.   We've already reaped the benefits of globalization decades ago, now we're suffering the hangover-- security concerns,  the human social costs,  working class uprisings, etc.

I think we would like to do that, but we're unable to.  We can only really be competitive where cost is not an issue.  This is why we are or recently were a large exporter of machinery.  American businesses just have too many costs to be competitive on the world stage with cost sensitive goods.  There is absolutely zero taste for tariffs or other protectionism from our rulers who absolutely despise the masses.

 

The human social cost is hard to even put on a piece of paper. We're losing 100k a year of the former middle-working classes to opiate addiction alone.

[Lord Mushroom]

31 minutes ago, christo930 said:

The US has not had a SINGLE YEAR where the official government debt went down since like 1962. That includes the alleged "Clinton Surplus"  You can just look at the debt at the close of each year of the Clinton presidency.

That is true in terms of dollars, but not relative to GDP, which is a more useful metric:

 

[christo930]

8 minutes ago, zzip said:

There was also the fact that WWII wrecked much of the developed world apart from the US, so US manufacturing boomed for several decades until other countries rebuilt and started selling their goods.

 

There is some truth to this, though it is usually overstated. Americans were the highest paid workers in the world before the war too.  Really, it was the productivity of the Americans which allowed the Allies to win the war.  Americans built 64000 planes, plus all the ones that got shot down, 90 aircraft carriers plus all the men to operate, maintain and repair those machines.  90 aircraft carriers in 3 years plus all the planes to put on them, not to mention many hundreds of other types of war boats.  Then there was all the tanks and jeeps and other vehicles and the fuel to operate them. 7/8ths of all fuel used by all of the allied powers was fuel made in America.

 

Also, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand weren't destroyed in the war.  It's not like we were doing a bunch of business with the Soviet block and the Chinese after the war.  Those were the countries outside of Germany that got the most damage.  Japan is probably the best example outside of Germany where they were utter destroyed and did rely on Western manufacturing for a long time.

[christo930]

2 minutes ago, Lord Mushroom said:

That is true in terms of dollars, but not relative to GDP, which is a more useful metric:

 

This is a horrible metric and it doesn't even measure anything useful. US debt held by the public excludes US debt held by foreign nations, foreign central banks and other foreign entities.

 

Anything using GDP is absolutely worthless.  GDP numbers are completely useless.  GDP numbers is how we lie to ourselves about our economic condition.

[zzip]

7 minutes ago, christo930 said:

I disagree that they are more reliable.  Most CRT TVs of the later 80s onward would run 10 years usually without any problems. But if they did have problems, you could usually get them repaired.  I've been through like 5 flats creens since NTSC was shut off.

Flatscreens are not reliable at all and only last a few years and there are no parts and no schematics available. 

In my experience CRTs degrade over time, but my flatscreens have kept going and going with no loss of quality-  of course that depends on the flatscreen tech as OLED and plasma are more susceptible to burn-in than LCD.  Still have the first LCD HD (720p) TV I bought about 20 years ago.  It's the bedroom TV now and the one in the living room was upgraded.

 

14 minutes ago, christo930 said:

IMHO, 1080p is where you start running into diminishing returns unless you buy an extremely large screen which will be viewed from very far away.  All the programming in my area tops out at 1080 anyway.

Yeah there's charts of screen size vs resolution vs distance from TV that will show you if a person of average eyesight will benefit from a higher resolution or not.

 

 

[Lord Mushroom]

31 minutes ago, christo930 said:

This is a horrible metric and it doesn't even measure anything useful.

It is a much better metric than dollars. It says how big the debt is relative to the ability to pay it back. A $100 billion debt is no problem if the GDP is $900 billion, but if the GDP is $30 billion, it is going to be a lot harder to pay it back.

 

42 minutes ago, christo930 said:

US debt held by the public excludes US debt held by foreign nations, foreign central banks and other foreign entities.

 No, it doesn´t.

 

43 minutes ago, christo930 said:

Anything using GDP is absolutely worthless.  GDP numbers are completely useless.  GDP numbers is how we lie to ourselves about our economic condition.

No, GDP per capita it is a very useful figure to show how rich/poor a country is. Show me a country with a high GDP per capita that is poor.

[+x=usr(1536)]

1 hour ago, christo930 said:

A great many things, which I am omitting for brevity.

If you're going to reply to things that have been written, please have the courtesy to not tailor your replies to a half-dozen words taken out of context.

 

There are points that I would be more than happy to discuss with you, but not if this is how you intend to do it.  Thank you.

[christo930]

Just now, Lord Mushroom said:

No, GDP per capita it is a very useful figure to show how rich/poor a country is. Show me a country with a high GDP per capita that is poor.

America's GDP numbers are absolutely worthless for several reasons.  First, much of the GDP is just inflation.  The "deflator" they use always understates inflation.  Is there anyone who actually believes the US experienced 8% inflation in the last couple of years?  They have been doing this every single years for the last 6 or 7 decades.  The government has many reasons to do this. COLA adjustments are one of them.  The amount of money SS has to lay out is based on inflation. By saying there is less inflation than there really is, it inflates away the SS checks. Keeping interest rates down is another reason.  Inflation pisses voters off too.  Google the term "Hedonics" and "substitution"  Something can go up in the store, but go down over at the BLS via "hedonic" adjustments.  Substitution is the idea that when steak becomes too expensive, you can always buy hotdogs.  Never mind your standard of living just took a huge drop.

 

GDP is loaded with nonsense like homeowner's rent (the value you receive by living in your own home).  These BS items are trillions of Dollars in the GDP.  Things like "free checking accounts" are counted here too.

 

Government spending is counted in GDP and makes up a HUGE portion of the GDP.  This is money the government has taken off of you or plans to take off you later.  As of pre-2020, the last time I looked at it (pre-covid), total government spending including all levels was over 8 trillion Dollars.  At the time, it was like a 3rd of GDP.  This doesn't even include off-budget spending.

 

Also, it counts all spending equally. If I sue you for a million dollars and win, that's a million Dollars added to the GDP.  GDP even includes untrackable items such as illegal drug sales!!!  It's just calculated assuming prices at all levels.  If they are getting numbers from the police, they massively inflate the value of drugs they seize.  GDP also includes money the government literally steals off you on the side of the road.  Not tickets (they're counted too though), but confiscation.  Investment and spending are indistinguishable in the GDP numbers.  New plant and equipment counts equally to hookers and blow.

 

The examples are endless.  The GDP is pure fantasy.  it's how we lie to ourselves to make things seem rosier than they really are.

[christo930]

9 minutes ago, x=usr(1536) said:

If you're going to reply to things that have been written, please have the courtesy to not tailor your replies to a half-dozen words taken out of context.

 

There are points that I would be more than happy to discuss with you, but not if this is how you intend to do it.  Thank you.

I wasn't trying to misquote you.  I highlighted what I though was your main point.  My apologies. I didn't want to over-quote.

[christo930]

25 minutes ago, Lord Mushroom said:

No, it doesn´t.

I'm gonna need some documentation for a chart that literally says "US debt held by the public" doesn't mean that and actually includes all the foreigners.

 

26 minutes ago, Lord Mushroom said:

It is a much better metric than dollars. It says how big the debt is relative to the ability to pay it back. A $100 billion debt is no problem if the GDP is $900 billion, but if the GDP is $30 billion, it is going to be a lot harder to pay it back.

No, because it is being counted in the GDP.  Debt is not subtracted out of GDP.  If the government borrows 2 trillion Dollars and spends it, that 2 trillion is in the GDP.  This will ALWAYS lead to the GDP being at least as big as the debt.

 

Also, debt to GDP SKYROCKETED in the 30s, not because there was a ton of new debt, but because GDP fell.  Debts are fixed, assets are not. Ask the banks.  This is exactly the reason all these banks are failing. They have assets that aren't worth what they paid for them. The asset price (the treasuries) dropped and now they can't pay their depositors even if they sell the asset.

[Lord Mushroom]

I am sure there are all kinds of inaccuarcies in the creation of the GDP numbers, but GDP per capita still gives a very good idea of how rich a country is. The U.S. is one of the richest countries in the world. As are other countries with a high GDP per capita. If you travel to a country with a low GDP per capita, you will see how much poorer they are.

 

13 minutes ago, christo930 said:

Government spending is counted in GDP and makes up a HUGE portion of the GDP.

[...]

Investment and spending are indistinguishable in the GDP numbers.  New plant and equipment counts equally to hookers and blow.

As they should, as GDP is a measure of the total production of the country.

 

Inhabitants benefit from government spending as well. Some countries have a low government spending and high private spending, where inhabitants have to pay for most things themselves. And some countries have a high government spending and lower private spending, where more services are cheap/free (mainly education and health) because of the high government spending.

 

Investments don´t benefit anybody in the short term, but increases economic growth. At least if they are profitable investments. To what degree countries want to prioritize economic growth (high investment) or a higher short term material standard (low investment), is up to them.

[christo930]

8 minutes ago, Lord Mushroom said:

Investments don´t benefit anybody in the short term, but increases economic growth. At least if they are profitable investments. To what degree countries want to prioritize economic growth (high investment) or a higher short term material standard (low investment), is up to them.

Sure they do. It benefits everyone who supplied those investments.  If I buy plant and equipment, other people benefited from those orders. Plus, I'm now far more productive and can ship more widgets which would be counted by GDP.

 

10 minutes ago, Lord Mushroom said:

I am sure there are all kinds of inaccuarcies in the creation of the GDP numbers, but GDP per capita still gives a very good idea of how rich a country is. The U.S. is one of the richest countries in the world. As are other countries with a high GDP per capita. If you travel to a country with a low GDP per capita, you will see how much poorer they are.

But that isn't really the purpose of GDP.  To give you an idea of just how dumb GDP is for our own internal purposes, the great recession started in the 4th quarter of 2007. But nobody even knew we were in it until the summer/fall of 2008.  We lived through the worst recession since the great depression for 6-9 months without even knowing it.

 

In any event, you don't need GDP to tell you this.  We already know Uganda is poorer than the US.  That's only relative anyway. It's not precise for us.  When you are calculating debt to GDP, you should know what our actual productive output is.

 

15 minutes ago, Lord Mushroom said:

As they should, as GDP is a measure of the total production of the country.

Government spending is not a measure of the total productivity of a country, especially not the US.

 

If we applied GDP to a person or family using this thinking and methodology, it would produce catastrophic results.  A guy running up his credit card looks like he's getting rich. Look at all this money he's spending. His GDP is going up by the day.

 

The GDP could tell us useful things. But everyone has a lot of incentives to BS everyone and no incentives to be honest.

[Keatah]

2 hours ago, zzip said:

Yeah I agree, it's because we made everything cheap and disposable, if something breaks, it makes more financial sense to throw it out and buy a new one.

 

It wasn't always like this, even when I was younger, repair operations were far more common.   For instance people would have these large, heavy console TVs that they kept for many years and repairmen would show up to fix them when they started acting up.

We had like 3 TV repair shops within 5 miles of the old house back in the 70's. I remember making the rounds asking for old tubes and parts to play with. It was like a "free RadioShack store". I'd always get a little something.

 

I even remember going to one to have the guy teach me what an RF modulator was. Because the night I bought my Apple II home I didn't have one and couldn't get it working till I bought one the next day.

 

1 hour ago, christo930 said:

I disagree that they are more reliable.  Most CRT TVs of the later 80s onward would run 10 years usually without any problems. But if they did have problems, you could usually get them repaired.  I've been through like 5 flats creens since NTSC was shut off.

 

Flatscreens are not reliable at all and only last a few years and there are no parts and no schematics available. 

 

IMHO, 1080p is where you start running into diminishing returns unless you buy an extremely large screen which will be viewed from very far away.  All the programming in my area tops out at 1080 anyway.

2 hours ago, zzip said:

Today's flatscreens are a lot more reliable, but now they suffer from planned obsolescence,   Once the switch to HD happend, they kept shoving higher and higher resolution standards every few years:  1080p, 4K  soon 8K,   never mind that it's questionable if there's any real benefit to 4K or 8K in your living room setup,  you need this!!   

Jurys' out on the reliability, I had a few go bad, mostly they'd develop a single dead line or a dead line and crap below it. Something in the demux driver chips I'd hazard a guess.. Then there's recapping, I have a few older Samsung displays due for recap soon. They work and all, but now take time to "warm-up" like the old tube sets.

 

But I'm with you on the resolution. I'm all 1080p currently and may eventually upgrade to a new resolution in time. But it isn't a priority. There's only so much time I'm going to spend looking at the details in a scene anyway. At least I was right on saying (in 2015) that resolution would be the one property they continue to advance in the years ahead - along with refresh rate and color vividness.

 

Besides.. new PCs don't decode 4K UHD Blu-Ray anymore, they removed the SGX instruction set (from the CPU) that processes the security. Hollywood demanded that as 4K and 8K are getting close to source material resolution. I'm not looking to spend time on a work-around.. Hence little interest..

 

2 hours ago, zzip said:

And to top it odd, the same companies now pushing us to throw everything away and replace it every few years love to tell us how much they care about the environment and sustainability..  yeah, sure you do!

Ohh companies are full of shit when they preach pro-environmental to the consumer. I just throw my e-waste shit out whenever and wherever. Costs me too much time to do it right. And what's in it for me? Companies try not to do things not in their interest/profit. So I do the same.

 

2 hours ago, zzip said:

And you didn't have as many of them.

Families used to bond sitting around the TV watching the same show, because there was only one TV.   Now everyone is isolated watching their own personal devices.   

Same with computers or video game consoles, they were expensive, so you owned one if that.

 

Nowadays it seems we all have piles of these things and not enough time to give each the the attention to make them worth owning

This is true "playing Atari" when I was a kid was a special event. Still special despite playing 4-5 times a week.

 

Our neighbor spoiled brat kid is the laziest selfish sloth around. Commands the whole living room with blaring hip-hop ******-*****, with like a laptop, ipad pro, iphone constant alerting on what hollywood "starz" are doing, teeny-bopper screaming nonsense at concerts, and no one can do anything in that crazymaking household where debonding is the theme of the day. Hear the shit 24/7 no matter what time you pass by!

 

Totally opposite of scheduled and controlled "Bob Ross pace" plastic model making sessions we did as kids!

[Lord Mushroom]

1 hour ago, christo930 said:

I'm gonna need some documentation for a chart that literally says "US debt held by the public" doesn't mean that and actually includes all the foreigners.

The public debt is the fund borrowed by a nation’s government. Governments borrow from people, banks, organizations, and other countries. It is an aggregation of all internal and external debt liabilities pertaining to a nation.

https://www.wallstreetmojo.com/public-debt/

 

1 hour ago, christo930 said:

No, because it is being counted in the GDP.  Debt is not subtracted out of GDP.  If the government borrows 2 trillion Dollars and spends it, that 2 trillion is in the GDP.  This will ALWAYS lead to the GDP being at least as big as the debt.

When the government borrows in its own currency, and spends it domestically, the government spending just replaces private spending and investment. Nothing is added to the GDP.

 

When the government borrows foreign currency, and spends it abroad, it doesn´t count in the GDP as the trade deficit is subtracted when calculating GDP.

 

1 hour ago, christo930 said:

Also, debt to GDP SKYROCKETED in the 30s, not because there was a ton of new debt, but because GDP fell.  Debts are fixed, assets are not. Ask the banks.  This is exactly the reason all these banks are failing. They have assets that aren't worth what they paid for them. The asset price (the treasuries) dropped and now they can't pay their depositors even if they sell the asset.

And the lower your debt is relative to your current ability to pay, the less likely you are to have difficulties repaying the loan due to unfortunate events.