Or maybe I should say, digital piracy.

As I said, people tended to buy music once. Yes, there was pirating in the form of mix tapes, but I'm fairly certain it was not even a drop in the bucket of online piracy (to use the parlance of our time).

In the past, free (stolen) music was not common - relatively speaking - because the means of distribution were limited. The average consumer of music understood that the form factor - record, 8 track, tape, CD - required they buy it once. This set the bar for musicians (though let's be honest, record companies always made the lion share of the profit) to expect they could sell their music at a certain price.

Fast forward to our hyper-connected world, delivery seems effortless, or at least bundled with the monthly fee we pay our ISP. Stealing music no longer feels like actual stealing because it is all digital, and we're accustomed to sending and receiving bits without a thought to the huge amount of infrastructure and manpower required to create content and keep all those servers running. Additionally, the market forces dictate a new pricing structure because we're consuming music sans physical medium, so the expectation is that price will drop accordingly. But we have a decades old system predicated on the $10 - $15 price point (give or take inflation) for an album.

We have conflicting interests: Joe Musician still has to perfect his craft and write all those songs. He can engineer it at home, but let's be honest, that is often obvious in the end product. Either way, Joe still has the same level of effort to make an album, but the consumers now have the world at their fingertips and an expectation that with a widespread and immediate audience Joe will take a lot less for his record.

Note: This is not a new phenomenon, nor is it only in the digital space. Costco and Walmart have done the same thing for the cost of manufactured and farmed goods. Do those cheap chicken thighs really reflect the cost of raising chickens? They do if one is okay with cramming chickens into a factory farm. In this instance, the environment and well being of the animals suffer, so no one complains.

At least in the United States, I feel the push for STEM programs is the politicians wanting to be perceived as doing something; and, as typically is the case with politicians, they are doing it wrong. Technically wrong, and for the wrong reasons. As for the "empires (corporations)," that is tracing the curve to its logical extreme, as if faceless corporations will take over the world and we will be powerless to stop them. As much as I love a good corporate apocalypse movie, it is only happening because we allow it, and continue to allow it because we accept the carrot that is leisure time in exchange for the freedom to decide -- because choice comes with the possibility of failure.

I have begun to think that maybe we deserve to be slaves. The divine right of kings was tossed on its head after centuries by the U.S. Constitution. And ever since we divested ourselves from it we have slowly moved back towards it. Our politicians have celebrity status. How long before another Kennedy clan arises, and we cheer as they crown themselves king?

Good point. When I was in high school (1980s) we weren't required to learn how to use a slide rule (although I owned one because nerd). Maybe now we shouldn't teach calculator and instead integrate Matlab or Mathematica into the learning process? A CS course should teach fundamentals, not functional programming or other highly abstracted languages. But applying computers as a tool to solve problems is an entirely different animal these days.

Why would they outsource healthcare.org to a company that didn't know what they were doing and charged (at least) 10 times what it should have cost, when there were US-based companies with the expertise who could have rolled it out faster and with far less issues? Because it is about greasing palms and returning favors.

I didn't realize they had that. It is a start. What I would really like is a la carte channel packages instead of bundles. But I know that isn't likely to happen any time soon because so many channels would be free-marketed into oblivion when ad revenue plummets because only a tiny fraction of the consumers want them.

On the other hand, maybe the lack of cheap accessibility is good. If the bar of media consumption is lowered too much, we may see a generation of people completely give themselves over to leisure.

The further removed we are from having to work hard, the more we forget what was sacrificed for the free time we enjoy.

If only content creators truly were providing a la carte content. HBO Go requires a subscription to a traditional service provider. Hulu is artificially restricted, and has ads. Netflix is marginalized by content providers striking deals with Amazon, Apple, and others, making their best content Korean action films and their original series. In the sports world, ESPN streaming requires subscription to a traditional service provider, and Fox Sports, the only one that offers their service separate from a traditional service provider (at $20 per month), was priced out of the Premier League market by NBC -- whose sports service requires subscription to a traditional service provider.

If becoming an alcoholic taught me anything, it's that it is amazing how little sleep you can operate on. And how good greasy food can taste.

I think they thought it would be neat for people to be able to let others know they were pooping and whatnot. But then people with lots of followers started making money off of the resulting notoriety, and suddenly a cottage industry of allegedly helping people make money off it sprang up.

I've seen Twitter accounts that do nothing more than re-tweet. I don't get it.

And then you get Internet and fried chicken!

I vote for death rays.

Spend any amount of time on Twitter and it is clear that "abuse" in forms other than malicious is rampant. For example, the guy with 17k followers who follows 18k people. His whole Twitter ring is a meaningless bunch of follows/followers/retweets designed to make people look (or feel) popular. In the end, it is just noise.

Except this one cash sniffing dog I saw -- gold grills; Rolex; diamond studs in his ears as large as dog biscuits...

The even older, even more refined nerds prefer a good night's sleep. And alcohol.