Category Archives: Media & Culture

Does Frugality Matter If You’re Rich?

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“A 2015 study showed that one-third of American households with an income of $75,000 or more live paycheck-to-paycheck … and 44 percent of those households claimed that lifestyle purchases were to blame for their lack of financial progress.”

“According to a 2015 poll, which surveyed 1,044 investors, one in five respondents with investible assets of $100,000 to $1 million dollars agreed they carried too much debt and said they live paycheck to paycheck. Worse, 1 in 10 respondents with assets of $1 million to $10 million were in the same boat.”

“In the same poll, 45 percent of respondents with investible assets of more than $100,000 worried they wouldn’t have enough money to last through retirement.”

Personal Capital Blog

People still listening to radio. Even for news.

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“91% of Americans ages 12 and older had listened to traditional AM/FM radio in the week before they were surveyed in 2015, according to Nielsen Media Research. […] In research asking about how people are learning about the U.S. presidential election, 44% of adults said they learned about it from radio in the past week. Radio outpaced both national (23%) and local (29%) print newspapers, although it trailed local TV news (57%) and cable TV news (54%).”

Pew Research State of the News Media 2016

Packing

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Screen Shot 2016-05-16 at 11.22.26 AMAn acquaintance is a firearms instructor and holds classes for those who want to get a permit to carry a concealed weapon. Attending one of these is a requirement in Missouri although it sounds like that might change. The state legislature passed a bill making such training unnecessary. Or so I’ve been told.

I don’t own a sidearm and have no interest in carrying one, concealed or otherwise, but I attended the morning session of one of these yesterday. We saw two hour-long videos by a self-defense attorney in Kansas City. The first hour explained the Missouri statute on concealed carry, and the second hour was about self defense laws in general and Missouri’s “castle defense” in particular. The attorney did an excellent job of making some complex shit mostly understandable.

Frankly, I was amazed that anyone would still want to carry a gun after watching the videos. I came away convinced that most people are far more likely to spend time in jail for misusing a firearm than successfully defending their home or person. But that’s just an opinion.

The afternoon session (I didn’t stay) was spent on the firing range. If I understood correctly, to get a permit you had to be able to put X number of shots into a target from a certain range. Most folks succeed I think.

Couple of takeaways. One, in Cole County, Missouri (where I live) the local sheriff processes 17 applications a day for concealed carry permits. Some of those are renewals but if only half are new permits that’s what… 2,000 a year? My other takeaway came when during the morning break when about 15 of the 20 people in attendance stepped outside to suck down a couple of cigarettes. Since most of these folks were getting permits to carry a gun so they could protect themselves, I found it strange they were not fearful of lung cancer.

All and all, it was an interesting morning and I came away with a slightly better understanding of the concealed carry mindset.

This is why I love Apple Music

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You know I love my Apple Music playlists. And have wondered aloud who puts these together. Steven Levy wondered the same thing:

“Who are those editors putting the playlists together? It turns out they are music nerds who might have otherwise been displaced by technology. People from radio; people who used to work at publications; people who used to work at record companies — hard core passionate music people. They check in to work at offices in Cupertino or LA (though a few work remotely) and perform curation tasks that include making those playlists, which they draft and discuss in meetings that must be more fun than the ones at your job. The important thing is that they are human beings. Apple believes that only flesh-and-blood music lovers can properly select and format these lists, artfully making the segues from one tune to the next.”

“They are very much like those cosmic deejays in the early days or FM, or today’s superstar spinners at Las Vegas casinos and high end clubs everywhere. But without a direct channel to communicate with the audience — no microphone to explain yourself between blocks of song — it’s a weird kind of communication they have with their audience. […] After listening to a lot of these playlists, I feel I almost know whoever it is at Apple who specializes in Americana, Blues, and 60s rock.”

Apple Music has a Connect feature where fans can ‘connect’ with their favorite artists. I have zero interest in doing that but would love to connect with the people who create the playlists.

Distributed: A New OS for the Digital Economy

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“The increased surface area for corporate capitalism is human attention. So we spend more and more of our time feeding the market place. Central currency and chartered monopoly — corporate capitalism — is not a condition of nature. It is an operating system that was invented by certain people at a certain moment in history and they’ve long since left the building.”

“It was such a good little thing”

“How much is our data worth if we don’t have any money?”

“If we’re all doing everything for advertising, what’s left to advertise?”

Douglas Rushkoff is the author of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus – Douglas Rushkoff Link above to some of my favorite parts of the book (PDF).

Illiteracy in America

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“According to a study conducted in late April by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy, 32 million adults in the U.S. can’t read. That’s 14 percent of the population. 21 percent of adults in the U.S. read below a 5th grade level, and 19 percent of high school graduates can’t read.[…] The current literacy rate isn’t any better than it was 10 years ago. According to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (completed most recently in 2003, and before that, in 1992), 14 percent of adult Americans demonstrated a “below basic” literacy level in 2003, and 29 percent exhibited a “basic” reading level.”