I’ve been through at least 5 different kinds of phone chargers over the years. Starting with the olde-fashioned coaxial power connector, then going to various versions of USB, and at least 2 kinds of Apple proprietary connectors. Standardizing on USB-C is great. I just hope that they’re able to update it in 10-20 years when USB-C is fully out of date.

Yeah, even an established creator is going to have a hard time moving their audience.

If YouTube weren’t a near monopoly it would be different. Then other companies would be competing for creators.

Making it worse is section 1201 of the DMCA. It makes it a crime to circumvent access controls. In the past, Facebook was able to grow by providing tools to interface with MySpace. People didn’t have to abandon their MySpace friends, they could communicate with them through Facebook, and Facebook could ensure that messages sent on its platform arrived to people still on MySpace. But, if you tried that today Facebook has access controls in place that make that a crime. The same applies to YouTube. Nobody can build a seamless “migrate away from YouTube” experience because YouTube will use the DMCA to block them.

The governments of the world need to bring back antitrust with teeth and force interoperability.

I mostly agree with you, it’s just that historically governments have been really bad at producing some necessities of life.

I really wouldn’t want anybody other than a government providing clean drinking water. I think they’ve proven they’re great at that, and private industries just mess it up in various ways. OTOH, governments historically haven’t been very good at producing crops. It seems like every time a government wants to fully take over farming, the result is a famine. Having said that, farming subsidies, and programs where governments are guaranteed buyers of farmed stuff is pretty great.

It really pisses me off that some of the most right-wing, most anti-government people in the US are farmers, and farmers are absolutely supported by the government. There are certainly some flaws in the system. The corn subsidy being so high is ridiculous, and results in things like high fructose corn syrup being available nearly free, and so it’s in everything. OTOH, it’s thanks to government intervention that the US is absolutely secure when it comes to price shocks for food items. Almost everything is made domestically. And, while there can be quirks like egg prices being high (which again is due to unregulated / badly regulated monopolies) the overall system is very stable.

Housing is another thing that is iffy if it’s 100% government made. The awful apartment blocks of former soviet republics are an example of that. But, unregulated housing construction is even worse. This is one where you need to find some balance between fully capitalist and fully government run.

Mostly though, right now, the governments of the world just need to start cracking down on capitalist businesses that are harming the public. The EU is at least trying, but the results have been mixed. The US was starting to do something under Biden and then Trump took over and… wowza. I think the recent NYC election shows that the population is well to the left of the democratic party establishment, and that cracking down on big business could be a huge win in future elections.

Capitalism only works if it’s regulated. Unregulated capitalism just becomes feudalism again. In your example, the owner of the bakery chain no longer has to innovate or compete. They simply own something and wait for money to be delivered to them.

Of course, for the government to be able to regulate things, it needs to be bigger and more powerful than the businesses it’s regulating. You can’t have Amazon being worth 2.3 trillion because it can easily make itself immune from competition and immune from regulators.

A mixed capitalist / socialist economy is the best solution we’ve come up with so far that actually seems to work in the real world. Only the most insane would want things like fire services to be fully privatized, or for every road to be a privately owned toll road. But, a fully state owned economy didn’t really work either. Trying that caused the USSR to collapse, and it caused China to switch to a different version of a capitalist / communist / socialist setup. The real issue is where to draw the boundaries. Most countries have decided that healthcare is something that the government should either fully control, or at least have a very strong control over. Meanwhile, the US pays more and receives less with its for-profit system. In England, they privatized water, and it seems to have been a disaster, meanwhile the socialist utopia of USA mostly has cities providing water services.

Where do you draw the line? Personally, I think Northern Europe seems to have the best results. Strong labour protections, a lot of essential things owned by / provided by the government, but with space for for-profit private enterprise too.

However, this is ultimately a matter of subjectivity, and I don’t think I’ve referred to LotR as the greatest fantasy story.

No, I don’t think you have. I just think that some people do. I think the hype around LotR makes kids go into reading it expecting it will be the best thing they ever read, and some come out of that disappointed.

I agree that Harry Potter is also massively overrated. If you ignore Rowling and her current issues, Harry Potter is a decent fantasy book for kids. But, it became this international phenomenon. I don’t know why.

As for A Song of Ice and Fire, I get that one more. He did things that most other fantasy authors didn’t. For example, he was willing to kill off characters in a way that almost nobody else does. That really raised the stakes because you could no longer assume the main character was untouchable. He also did something really interesting in the early books in that they were fantasy books, and there was all this talk about magic and gods and dragons… but for a long time there was nothing in the books that proved that magic really did exist. The dragons were all dead. The stark children had “dire wolves” but they weren’t magical wolves, they were just really big. People believed in magic and all these interesting gods, but there was no proof that anything supernatural was happening. I was actually disappointed when the later books revealed that magic was real, and that the gods seemed to exist (or at least there was supernatural stuff associated with worshipping / believing in gods). It would have been really interesting to have a full book series that was “fantasy” without the supernatural element.

Classical music is a bit different because it’s effectively frozen in time. They’re not introducing new instruments. They’re not using amplification for the most part. It’s like doing the same Shakespeare plays over and over again.

If there were a Beethoven today, he probably wouldn’t be composing classical music. He’d be doing popular music of some kind. In fact, the historical record suggests he would have been a keyboardist in a rock band.

For music, a better example might be Jimi Hendrix. He was an amazing musician and his approach completely shaped modern rock music. But, while his music was influential, are his songs the best rock songs of all time? I don’t think so, because other people have built on what he did and have taken it further.

Tom Bombadil is such a minor portion of the Shire, is that even something relevant to the narrative as a whole?

No, and that’s why a better author (or their editor) would have removed it.

Fantasy, specifically, has evolved over time through the introduction of power systems sure — does that make them inherently better than LotR?

Yes. Not just because of their “power systems”, but because the authors have used some of the ideas that Tolkien introduced, and told better stories with them, or introduced better characters. Or, because they lack some of Tolkien’s key weaknesses, like they’re able to write interesting 3-dimensional female characters. IMO the heavy lifting that Tolkien did is to introduce a world filled with all these various kinds of creatures that we all take for granted now: elves, dwarves, ents, orcs, etc.

He was probably the greatest fantasy writer of his time. But, he’s “of his time”. He unconsciously brings all kinds of biases and baggage into his writing that a reader in the 1950s wouldn’t even notice, but that become more apparent 75ish years later.

You simply cannot deny the level of effort that went into creating LotR on Tolkien’s part

Nor can you deny the amount of effort that went into The Room but that doesn’t mean it’s a great movie. LotR is a great book, but it’s not because Tolkien put a certain amount of effort into it.

But, is it overrated? There are 2 ways something can be overrated. Something can be bad and rated as being ok, and so it’s overrated. Or something can be good but rated as being the best in the world and so it’s overrated. I think LotR is in the second category as a fantasy story. As a foundation for fantasy literature, I don’t think it’s overrated because it introduced so many things that we just take for granted today. But merely as a book, looking at it through modern eyes, it is probably overrated. I think it’s great, but it’s no longer the best fantasy book ever written.

Yeah, there are some amazing episodes. TOS also has some amazing episodes. Offhand, I can’t think of anything since DS9 / Voyager that was that good. There were definitely some fun episodes, but nothing that I kept thinking about for a long time after they aired, like say Picard’s living an entire life in The Inner Light.

((Also funny about The Inner Light, is that I can’t think of that episode without thinking of the really awkward way that they had Patrick Stewart pretend to play the flute by having someone lie on the floor out of camera and pretend that his arms were Patrick Stewart’s arms.))

Robot Wars.

I don’t see what’s disturbing about that. As long as the bodies come from a legal, reputable source, what’s the big deal?

Star Trek is a difficult one. The oldest stuff is very dated, even TNG has some things that are very weird for a modern audience. But, some of the modern stuff is basically unwatchable.

Modern fantasy owners might be standing on the shoulders of giants, but to extend the metaphor, it means their heads are higher than those giants.

LOTR could be overrated as a piece of fantasy writing for a modern audience, even if it is absolutely key to establishing the modern fantasy genre. For me, LOTR was good, but it was unsatisfying in some ways. Like, Gandalf and Saruman were obviously powerful “wizards”, but what is it that they could do? How did their powers work? And there were characters like Tom Bombadil who were confusing and had me flipping pages.

I greatly respect Tolkien’s work. But, unlike some more modern authors, I don’t devour everything he wrote. For example, I absolutely couldn’t read the Silmarillion.

So, yeah, I can see how someone would say that LOTR is overrated, even if it was key to establishing an entire genre.

Man, Connections was such a good show. I gotta rewatch that sometime.

It was probably a more stressful job than just being an advisor. An advisor could probably try a joke here or there if they wanted, but they weren’t expected to always be making wisecracks. A jester was probably having to push the limit a lot more often and going over the line could be a problem.

Certainly a better job than 99% of the population, but one joke bombs and it could be the end.

But where are the costumers supposed to change costume if not in a stall?

Hancock had superpowers, so no.

Yeah, I’ve run one for decades. I keep thinking it will get easier but it never does. I get better at the old stuff, then new stuff comes up which makes it difficult again. I always had the intention to offer it to friends and family, but I’ve never felt confident that I could guarantee that it would work. These days I know what I’m doing, but I can never guarantee that emails sent from my domain will arrive. Google or Yahoo or Microsoft will sometimes just automatically mark things from my domain as SPAM even if I’m following all the SPF, DMARC, DKIM, whatever rules.

And that’s all aside from the constant, unending stream of SPAM I’m dealing with, in addition to the constant, unending attempts to hack my server.

It’s actually kind of liberating when you manage to do that.

It’s not true, but if you pretend it is, it allows you to do all kinds of math. Follow the rules as if the spin were real and there were real momentum and it allows you to predict things that you can test. It’s almost like looking at a really good magic trick, where you know that what you seem to be seeing isn’t possible, but the magician is manipulating things so that your brain can anticipate what’s coming next.

Yeah, it’s also one of the few remaining interoperable ways of communicating.

If your friend who used to use gmail is now using hotmail, you don’t have to use a new app to communicate with that friend, you just update their email address and nothing else changes. If you used to be on gmail and you now want to run your own mail server you should check into a mental health clinic, but once you get out, you just tell your friends your new email address and for them nothing else changes. In fact, you can set gmail to forward emails, so any friends who forget will still communicate with you without difficulty.

Yes, that’s what makes it so good. :)

I use a different email alias for every service I subscribe to, and my “for humans” email is very different from my subscribe aliases.

Unfortunately, many humans in my life say “oh, merc would like this, I’ll just enter his email address on this web form”. So, I still get a lot of spam to my “only for humans” email address.