And, the "farmer" no longer sits on the tractor, it is an immigrant laborer. The farmer sits in his office and deals with numbers while, according to this, his bones weaken. THe immigrant workers are on their feet all day, in and out of the tractor etc, etc.

Not at all like the old days. I remember (excuse the ramblings of an old man) working on a woman's house when one of my men stopped us and said he could hear someone calling for help. We honed in on the call and saw a tractor that looked parked in a field a quater mile away. Running over there we found an old man (in his 70s) who had been pulling a stump with his tractor when the stump pulled and the tractor big wheel ran up his leg and knocked him down. It was still in gear and he was holding it from running over him completely just by sitting up. We got it off and him out, he got up, shook himself off and got back on the tractor to get back to work with a "thanks for the hand!"

Not too many farmers like that left today.

You are using an e-reader that won't read PDF? Probably using some kind of DRM trash I guess. As I said above, it is the Americanization of commerce (the cheapest is always the best) that is destroying this particular market. e-readers can be cheap, for the romance/vampire novel set, but if you are going to need to do higher level work then there should be higher quality tools that meet your needs.

I have used e-ink displays for years, actually more than 15 now (Sony PRS, the first one was my first) and a high quality e-reader whips butt. The iRex, from Europe, was used by pilots (for example) to hold their logs as well as their flight manuals instead of rolling the kilos of paper required for that task. Obviously scrolling/paging back and forth was important for them as well.
The problem is the common American mistake of assuming that the cheapest is the best. The iRex not only had two screens, but also cost $900.00 and came with an integral cover and other goodies (I forget the whole list). It was quite impressive.

Can you get one now? DIIK, but if you can't, I will blame the Americanization of commerce for that, too;)

How about you airgap your email and your email? As in separate business and personal? As in do your WORK at work and your personal away from work? it really isn't that hard boys and girls. Oh yeah, right, you link all your shit together so that you can do your facebook (sorry, i don't use it) and your G+ (I have 2, one work, one personal) etc. You think its hard, but because of my job a public request to see my email must be honored, so any of my colleagues who don't airgap their stuff get what they deserve.

The voice of reason speaks.
[watch your back, mate]

So, you haven't helped your parents to get more reasonable service yet? Why not?
If yoiu could get them the services they need with an ADSL connection and then let them drop the landline and the cable and set them up with a single internet connection that would give them all the services that I have the way I have it for a savings, why don't you?

  And then when you find that they are still being robbed by the corporations that provide the service. maybe you can write in and apologize.

The thing is that I am not getting that 100meg service for the money I pay. My service is being gamed by the corporations that are trying to force me to pay more than ten times what is reasonable for a relatively small service that my tax dollars subsidized in the first place. You may not use as much in your house as we do in our house, but we pay for much more than we receive, and have ever since we came back to the US.
  Believe me, the Chinese and the Thai do not get subsidized service in the cities, the corporations that provide the services make a fortuine there: in fact the deposed prime minister of Thailand and his family -- which also includes another recent PM of Thailand-- made their multibillion dollar fortune on providing internet service in Thailand, as well as mobile phone and satellite TV. All for a tenth (or less) of what we pay here.
Don't try to tell me that greedy corporations in Asia are less greedy than they are here, especially when they can afford to buy Premier league soccer teams in England with their ill-gotten gains.

. "The fact that you pay so [[much]] for very high speed Internet shows that other people are [not] subsidizing you, because most people don't need or use 100 Mbps connections."
FTFY
(aside: the number of people using/watching Netflix and Hulu are increasing exponentially. more and more of the students and teachers and staff at the 50,000 person university where I work have dropped their landline+cable connection because they can't afford the extra cost. And remember we are the 1% in the world who can't afford that. when I lived in Asia, poor shopkeepers sleeping an entire family ion a single sheet of plywood on the concrete floor of their storefront had internet for pennies a week. That was 15 years ago, they are miles ahead of us now for a tenth the cost we pay. Stop kidding yourself, go abroad to live and discover the truth)

Well, I use Veriscum in Tampa for @$85 a month, internet only: but that is still too expensive considering that my interenet enabled TV has trouble pulling in HULU plus but no problem with Netflix. That is the problem with Internet openness, the cost, the speed the FAIRNESS (especially to the consumer)

you really should not make ignorant assertions like this. I lived in China for 6 years, total. In that time I saw the uptake of internet spread across the entire country-- admittedly first to urban center and the rural SW last of all, but then I lived in the rural SW back around 2000-2002 and had the same internet (in my crummy little apartment that was all I could afford on my $375 a month salary as a teacher) as the governor in his mansion. So, don't talk about what you don't know about. Rick is right.

And, I bank with an unusual American bank. One of the things I noticed is that I get my paycheck credited to my account a day before everyone else in my office. Maybe this is why? I also know that this bank (which I have used for decades has:
1) photo check deposit (and has had it for the last ten+ years)
2) smartphone app that allows all transaction activity through the app
3) transaction assessment: they email me about every transaction over my (self-imposed) limit, and stop/refuse any transaction from a location where I am not (you might not like it, but when I travel I call them first and tell them where I will be. This protects me and the retailer/hotel/etc)
4) has only one physical location
5) monthly repayment of ATM fees from other bank/store ATMs
6) complete/robust on-line banking with all the bells and whistles (like buying clubs for cars and houses, loan applications, investment tracking, I can't think of everything they let me do on the website)
No, I don't want to give their name, they used to be just for armed forces families, but now have a little broader outreach. my son said he even saw an ad for them the other day, that would be a surprise.

This: Here in Florida, and in many other states, they want to charge people who have rooftop solar for lost business. Perhaps I overstate the situation, they are fighting our ability to feed electric back into the grid and be reimbursed for that electricity at commercial rates. They want to consider loss of opportunity as well as loss of the need for generation and pay a pittance of the value of the power we feed back into the system. Naturally, we want to be reimbursed at a rate closer to what we pay for power they generate.

Because it is crap on the sites that I use to deliver content to my students. The two students that have surfaces are constantly failing to keep up because their browser can't connect to the LMS site (Canvas). Firefox (my hater buddies) is what works best for Canvas. Chrome is a close second and Safari neck and neck with chrome. IE is just a waste of time to even start up.

Sorry, but that is my daily truth, and the fact that my students have been brainwashed to use IE because they aren't sophisticated enough to know that there are other browsers is a sad commentary on the continuing effect of the MS micromonopoly. (Oh, this is in the US, but it is worse in China.)

You are living in the past. Here in Tampa, public transit, that is buses, is growing faster than uber and lyft. (Disclaimer, my wife drove for Lyft until a couple of weeks ago, when she just got sick of the low return on time and our investment in a nice car). I was talking to a driver on the #6 route last week (my morning ride of 45-50 minutes door to desk) and he said they just hired 27 new drivers for route expansion and retirement replacement. Mostly expansion according to him. He has 30 years in as a driver and plans to stay on, the custoimers are getting nicer he says.

If I was driving, on the highway, it would take about 35 minutes from door to desk, so it costs me an extra 10-15 minutes to take the bus. Even at twice the loss consider this:
Bus cost: $.50 (50 cents) one way= $1.00 a day
Gas cost: 20 miles one way, 40 round trip, say $5.00 a day
Parking cost: $250.00 a year, say $1.00 a day minimum if I take no vacations
Cost of maintenance or carpayments for that second car (as it is we only keep one car because I don't need it to drive to work) as well as taxes and insurance.

OK, now think about this: instead of two crappy cars on my crappy salary we have a 2014 Chevy Volt, spend less than $100.00 a month on gas, $0 on maintenance, and have an nice, awesome ride. We are looking at trading up to a Tesla S when they come off of lease and we can get them about half price.
How could I do that if I was wasting my money on a second car?

More and more people can and should run this kind of simple cost/benefit analysis and realize that their lifestyle could be better just by making better choices. When I talk about this at work everyone has excuses, but the reality is that people are starting to move to my neighborhood because it has awesome bus service. the value of my house has gone up 45% in the last three years because it is close to downtown and has 5 different bus lines running on 15-20 minute schedules within 3 blocks of my front door.

So, your description of the bus is wrong, I know cause I ride it every day, dressed for my office and my classrooms and I fit in just fine.

I have to agree. I switched my work computer to linux to suit what I had been doing for years as a lone wolf, but the office is MS. I do appreciate that, for what we do, Windows works OK. I still can work faster than most of my colleagues, but that is just me, not the systems.
BUT, I am still completely acclimated to gnome3 and linux and it would be a real waste of time and effort to switch to Windows. It is one of my few worries at work, that Win10 will be so tightly controled that in a WinOffice there will be no way to not use windows, or at least dual boot.