It's not an education if you only assign stuff "relevant to their lives" (which is a crapshoot decision in any case; what books are really going be relevant to modern teenagers?). Part of what you're supposed to be getting in school is knowledge of the foundations of your civilization, which is why colleges have a Great Books program in the first place. High Schools typically don't burden students with all that many difficult old books anyway. I had to suffer through Wuthering Heights but I also got to discover Lord of the Flies.

Might it be that the Beeb relies on groups like the Spectator for guests as an opposite to it's own party line, and thus drive the outrage demo to boost ratings? A' La the old CNN crossfire route? What else would they do? Bring on, say, the Guardian every night and basically just agree on everything?

The daily format, yes. The Internet has killed that.

But I think there's still some room for print journalism under certain conditions, and profitably so as well, if done right.

Many moons ago, I used to get the Washington Post's Weekly Edition. I don't know if they do it anymore, but it was a newspaper, mailed to your home once a week, that had longer, more in-depth investigative stories and analysis on the issues of the day than you'd find in the daily papers, as well as an opinion and editorial section. I think something along these lines, combined with certain elements of the old Sunday paper format... cartoons, ads, local events and notices, arts coverage.... could sell as part of a larger digital subscription that gives you daily access.

More to the point, dating apps already suck for young men. It's hard enough for them to get a match of any kind, and the apps are notorious for women ghosting men or going out with men just to get a free meal or monetary favor of some kind. Now imagine finding out that the only reason a woman goes out with you was to use you for your work connections. How is this not a kind of catfishing or fraud?

I tell my sons to avoid these apps like the plague. This kind of stuff only reinforces that.

algorithmic feeds

We need to find, capture, try, execute, and then piss on the grave of whoever decided that the word "algorithm" was the best word for what they didn't like about Facebook. Their hasty decision, combined the word's apparent mainstream sexiness (who knew?!) is going to result in the word's loss.

The summary makes the article sound a lot dumber than it really is. But it is dumb, and the core dumbness from which the rest of the article derives is here:

I thought about setting up a self-hosted media server to stream everything to my phone. But ultimately, I got lazy

He knew real the solution to all his problems, but like he says, "I got lazy," and so he went to his comical Plan B. Despite weird statements like this..

Many folks are sick of streaming in general. They’re sick of giant corporations, algorithmic playlists, and an internet infested with AI slop.

..he actually doesn't appear to have any problem with streaming at all. It's just that he had been using a proprietary streaming service called Spotify, which does things very differently than a user-oriented approach (e.g. self-hosted subsonic API server) would do. Navidrome isn't a giant corporation, the algorithm of its playlist is "play what the user told me to play" and whatever AI Slop you play depends completely on what AI Slop you decided to add to your collection.

But by conflating streaming tech with proprietary streaming services, he gets to make up a lot of non-existent problems with streaming and sneak by the core premise of his entire article: "I got lazy."

So he decided against the obvious, and instead, went with a less convenient alternative. I particularly liked the part where he called cassettes "compact and super-portable" by comparing them to vinyl, instead of the actual media competition: flash memory, remote spinning-rust, etc.

Does Android even have a music store anymore?

Hopefully not and never. OS-specific music (?!) stores are a very silly idea.

As a [reluctant, but what else is there?] Android user, my music comes from the same sources it would come from if I owned no phone at all.

Rust.Net - Now with holes big enough to drive a semi thru!

As a nomad traveling around with a phone and ancient Surface

Ugh, I think no matters what happens, you lose. If your car has a CD player and is the main place where you usually listen to music, then it seems you would need to keep your CD collection in the car too, and that puts an upper limit on its size. Between the back seats and trunk, I could maybe fit a dozen or two beer-cases-repurposed-as-CD-boxes, but it would completely take over those spaces. And keeping even that small of a subset of the collection organized enough to be binary-searchable sure sounds annoying.

That was always the problem with CDs as a playback medium instead of just a long-term storage medium: inserting the CD back into the collection after playback. It's not terrible when you have shelving [and enough of it, since it keeps growing] but as soon as you have to pack things in boxes, it gets pretty hard to work with. I remember for a time there, before I had all my music ripped, where we were just listening to same 30 or 40 CDs sitting out in a loose unboxed pile that I jokingly called the "L1 music cache," over and over again. ;-)

Elsewhere you mention that you live in the car and simply don't have anywhere else to store things, so I guess this general kind of problem is going to be recurring. (Where do you keep your air fryer and microwave and coffee maker and stove and your wife's decorative bathroom hand towels that you're supposed to never use, the cat litter box, and the air mattress you put out when you have company staying over at your car for the weekend?) j/k but my point is that the cars have never been really CD friendly but if the car is your house and storage shed too, then .. oy, do whatever you can but it's never going to be convenient.

Music can't be the only thing where the market isn't catering to you. I might even go as far as suggesting the housing market as the number one mis-cater!

do you see how .. the decision to take [CD players] away seems much more to do with power and selling subscriptions than practical engineering capability?

Oh, sure! I didn't know that you couldn't get car CDs players anymore (I'm admittedly very out of touch with the new car market), but it doesn't surprise me that they're no longer something you can just take for granted by default. No doubt pushing subscription services played a later role in de-emphasizing CD players in cars, but you should keep in mind that real consumer demand had been doing that too, ever since around the turn of the century when HD-based MP3 players started to get popular. Subscriptions to proprietary streaming services are a bit of a late-comer to the CD funeral.

Even if there were no such thing as music streaming subscriptions, a lot of people today would be using their phones even in CD-ready cars. They would just party like it's 2001, playing files ripped from CDs. I don't know if that would be enough to remove CD players from cars, but I bet at least some manufacturers would have.

I don't disagree, but all that ignores the fact the the problem with schools is the student body itself: there are too many walking the halls that belong in reform school instead of real school.

We've had "easy access to guns" for 250 years. High Schools used to have firing ranges and shooting teams (including girls shooting teams). It was not uncommon to see rifle racks in the back windows of trucks in my high school parking lot. Somehow we managed to not shoot anyone. What's changed is the introduction of ghetto thug culture into schools. If you had a problem with a guy when I was in school, you arranged to meet out back after 3 PM and settle it with fists. Now kids "pop a cap" into students and teachers for "dissing" them. Then there's the constant, roving gang fights in schools, typically with a bunch of kids cornering one kid and beating him bloody, all while recording it on their phones and bragging.

It's ironic, because in the 1970's, French philosopher Michel Foucault kicked up a storm when he wrote that, architecturally, schools looked like prisons because they served a similar function. Modern school systems are buying mass surveillance systems precisely because modern students act like prison gangs, and have to be managed the same way.

It'll be a dying market in 20 years. AI doesn't need Christmas gifts.

Maybe geek nostalgia gifts will replace it. Shirts with a pic of a Bash script with "This used to be my job".

If you don't have a CD drive, then you don't get to rip CDs. You'll have to acquire your files some other way. And/or buy a CD drive.

How can I rip CDs to a phone?

You don't. You rip them to your fileserver at home, and run a subsonic-API server on that. The phone connects to it over a VPN, and a subsonic API player plays it to the car with bluetooth.

seats packed to remind your knees that they are trying to maximize the headcount per square foot(see also, seats in blatantly undesirable positions relative to the screen); dickheads making noise or fucking around on their phones, some asshole who decided to bring a screaming-age child, the works.

I went to a couple movies a few months ago, and I didn't see any of that. My fat American ass had plenty of room in the reclining sear, and the next row of seats was a few feet beneath me and seemingly ten feet away. The theaters have become fucking luxurious.

But it's expensive. And I wonder if that's what's keeping the obnoxious screaming kids away.

And you're totally right about the half hour of ads. That's definitely the worst part, these days.

But the seats and space .. omg those problems are over, at least here in the super-wealthy gigantic metropolis of .. Albuquerque.