Author Archives: eehines

A Gen-Zer is Upset

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The young woman is tired of her generation being called lazy because they—she in particular—are working 40-hour weeks, “barely getting by,” and don’t want to do that for the rest of their lives. They have other things they want to do. She then insisted that today’s economy is not the one in which prior generations started out, and Gen-Zers starting out have it hard today compared to earlier generations when we were starting out.

She has a beef in some respects.

However.

Here is what was available to this Boomer when I was just starting out.

The house I grew up in was all of 1232 square feet, compared with today’s median size of 2500 square feet. That house didn’t have central air conditioning. We were some years into it before we got a window air conditioner for our living room. Such basics as a thermostat for the furnace was a manually set mercury-based affair, not today’s programmable with its variety of part-of-day or -night or vacation settings.

We didn’t spend $250 and more per month on cable TV—it didn’t exist.

We didn’t spend $50-$100 per month on an Internet connection—there was no Internet.

We didn’t spend $80-$120 per month on cell phone service—it didn’t exist.

We didn’t drop $800 on a new cell phone—they not only didn’t exist, the phone company gave us our landline instrument as part of their POTS service. (Don’t know what that is? Welcome to my starting out world. Go look it up, if it doesn’t interfere too badly with modern priorities.)

We didn’t hire Uber or Lyft or Door-Dash or anything of that ilk—that ilk didn’t exist. We drove ourselves, or went shanks mare. And doggy to go bags were our takeout.

We didn’t have much in the way of shipping costs, other than moving our household, or the occasional order from a Sears or Montgomery Ward catalog—there was no such thing as eTail.

We couldn’t even order our books online. We used the local library, or we drove (or did that shanks mare thing) down to the local bookstores. Of course, the library or the bookstore could special order a book we wanted. By sending a letter or making a POTS call. And we could go pick up the book at the library or bookstore when it arrived.

We spent nothing on programs for our personal computers or laptops or aps for our cell phones—that kind of software programming didn’t exist, and neither did the personal computers or laptops, or cell phones to run them on. Spreadsheets? Those were paper-printed grids on which we used pencil or pen. Word processors? Manual typewriters, or pencil/pen and paper. We did have actual (hand-cranked) adding machines, though, so it wasn’t all pencil and paper.

If we wanted to talk to our neighbors, we visited them or they us. If the ones we wanted to talk with lived far away, we wrote postcards and letters. International mail was something else, with its folding envelopes on which we wrote our letters, and then folded them to become the international mail envelope to save the weight of an additional sheet of paper. Or we called long distance (haven’t heard of that? Welcome to another aspect of the modern world, which isn’t what I started out with) on our landline POTS service. International calls were both especially expensive and faint of voice on both ends. There was no concept of electronic social media.

The list goes on and on.

If Gen-Zers want to start out with costs similar to those earlier starting-out generations, they need to learn to live without all of today’s technology.

Further, regarding today:

When I finally walked out the door in retirement from my skilled professional job, I still was working 50-60 hour weeks. That schedule wasn’t universal, but it was quite common throughout those earlier start-outers’ careers. We had families to support and kids’ college to plan for. Family mattered, not personal wants. Indeed, family was central to our personal wants, and gladly so. We weren’t centered exclusively, or even primarily, on our selves.

The mom-and-pop HVAC folks who deal with my current house’s heating and air conditioning (central, mind you, today) not only work those 60-hour weeks, they work holidays, too, including Christmas. It’s the same for the plumbers, electricians, carpenters, road builders, all the trades.

One last fillip. This particular Boomer did have a somewhat easier time handling my starting out costs. I’d enlisted in the USAF, getting commissioned through my college’s ROTC. With that military career as my first, I was given structure, a place to live, and a grocery store that was a bit cheaper than the local economy grocery stores. The young woman, and others of her cohort, might think about enlisting in one or another branch of our military, whether as enlisted or as an officer. They’d be helping out their nation’s security, and they’d learn what work truly is and how rewarding it can be.

Telling the Truth is Insulting

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Welcome to California or at least Los Angeles—or at least welcome California or LA into your rear view mirror—where saying explicitly why a citizen is leaving the State, or even just the city, is somehow wrong. That’s the position of Los Angeles Times‘ letters editor Paul Thornton, in his op-ed headlined Commentary: If you want to leave, fine. But don’t insult California on the way out.

Often, the departees, cash in hand from the sale of their $1-million bungalows, feel the need to express disdain for their home state, and even some anger too[.]

Don’t complain, though, about the cost of housing there—$1-million bungalow, indeed. There’s a hint in there.

…our liberal politics, with the state Republican Party shrunk to irrelevance after its vicious attempt in 1994 to marginalize immigrants with Proposition 187.

But it’s OK for Thornton to insult Californians who remain, but disagree with his august pressman self. Prop 187, which sought to bar the State from extending social services to illegal aliens, passed overwhelmingly, with 60% of California’s voting citizens approving the proposition. Those vicious Californians. Who knew 60% of them were Republicans?

Perhaps I’m sensitive because California—and especially Los Angeles—used to be the place people would come….

Used to be. Looks like another hint to me.

…critical problems we have to fix for progressive ideals to match the reality on the ground[.]

Progressive ideals. To hell with Conservative ideals. There’s only one side to the story. And that is one more reason to leave California—and to tell the unvarnished truth about why you’re leaving.

Valid Arguments

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Several States’ Attorneys General have filed an amicus brief in a Supreme Court case centered on whether Texas and Florida statutes that limit Big Tech’s ability to censor speech done on their platforms are legitimate. The analogy they draw is one valid argument.

[Summarized by Fox News]: [G]iving Big Tech the ability to moderate or censor users’ content would be like giving cable or telephone companies permission to cut phone lines on speech at their discretion. The AGs note that under federal “must-carry requirements,” those companies are banned from subjugating any speech on their lines.

And:

The Eleventh Circuit concluded social media companies could censor content because they have “historically exercised” power to refuse transmission of disfavored ideas.
But telegraph companies have a much longer history of censorship. Social media is less than two decades old. Congress did not impose must-carry requirements on telegraphs until 1888, 50 years after their invention[.]
Yet it is well recognized today that those must-carry regulations were constitutional—even though this Court declared that telegraph companies are “not common carriers.” History thus provides no basis for dismissing the striking similarities between social media companies and telegraph and telephones by dubbing social-media censorship “editorial judgment[.]”
While the earlier laws applied to telegraphs and telephones, it is no different when the companies carrying other people’s speech are digital rather than analog[.]
The States thus have a paramount interest in urging this Court to affirm that longstanding, historic authority of States to protect freedom of speech and enable representative government by prohibiting dominant communication networks from censoring[.]

There is one more argument that is, IMNSHO opinion, dispositively on point. This is the status of those Big Tech platforms—X (nee Twitter), Meta’s Facebook, and Alphabet’s YouTube, for instance—as public forums. Indeed, some of these platforms have explicitly stated that they intend to be public squares for public discourse, even as they also provide mechanisms for exchanging private correspondence.

The public square is precisely where speech may not be censored except within a very few very narrowly defined boundaries—incitement to riot, explicit threats of violence against particular persons. Whether any Big Tech platform has explicitly styled itself a public square, each of these platforms have grown so large—become so dominant—that each one of them is, de facto, a public square. Their censorship practices must be barred.

Why Donald Trump Shouldn’t Get a Second Term

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Or so advise the august Editors of The Wall Street Journal. They only consider one side of the question. My august self considers some additional sides.

Start with the fact that Mr Trump would be an immediate lame duck. He can’t serve more than one more term, and if he does win it will be narrowly with little political capital.

This is a wash. If Biden is reelected, he’ll also be a lame duck with little to no political capital.

If the first term is a guide, Democrats will oppose anything Mr Trump proposes that isn’t one of their priorities.

And if Biden is reelected, he’ll most likely face a similarly split Congress and get nothing passed that isn’t a Conservative/Republican priority. Another wash.

The internal opposition will still be implacable, the leaks unending, the press relentlessly hostile.

It may well be that one of things Trump has learned is how to get rid of the internal opposition that puts their whims ahead of their duties as administration employees—including leakers, who are intrinsically dishonest regardless of which party they claim to favor.

Aside from that, while there are reasons to oppose a Trump Presidency, moving to stop him simply because internal opposition will still be implacable, the leaks unending, the press relentlessly hostile would simply be to vindicate those groups’ dishonesty and encourage further obstructionism.

It also isn’t clear Mr Trump could attract first-rate advisers.

He eventually figured that out in the latter stages of his term. Biden has already demonstrated that he has no first-rate advisors; there’s no reason to believe that he could find any for his second term.

A Death Penalty Revival

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Former President Donald Trump (R) revived the use of the death penalty after a hiatus of some duration, and President Joe Biden (D) has moved to deprecate the death penalty anew, even if inconsistently so.

I confess to being conflicted regarding the death penalty. There are some crimes so heinous that they cry out for execution of the criminal. Rape, especially of children, and premeditated murder come to mind for me, along with mass and serial murder.

However, the error rate in getting convictions for these crimes is high enough to give me pause. Some errors are the result of police error in the investigation, police or prosecutorial misconduct in the runup to trial, prosecutorial or judicial error during trial, or prosecutorial misconduct during trial. These instances are very rare, but they happen. Another reason for my reluctance is improving technology. Increasing ability to analyze DNA data—even the basic ability to handle DNA as evidence at all—reveals what becomes erroneous trial and conviction today even when those convictions of yesterday were correctly obtained given the evidence then available.

Thus: it’s easy enough to execute a criminal tomorrow. But if he’s executed today, and tomorrow we learn that he was wrongly convicted, we can’t undo his execution.

It’s maddening, on the other hand, for the survivors of the criminal’s crime to suffer the delays defense attorneys and “liberal” Others throw up to obstruct and delay an execution, and those delays deny justice for those survivors.

One at least partial solution would be to streamline the death penalty appeals process. Require attorneys bringing a case for delay or sentence reduction to something less than execution to present all of their objections in a single case, to include consolidation of all of the several separate lawyer cases into a single, class-action if you will, case. Perhaps, allow a single additional appeal based on truly newly developed evidence.

That won’t address the errors later discerned with improving technology. However, we can’t allow heinous criminals to escape the death penalty on the basis of inherently speculative potential future technology advances.