Panasonic's been cooked for a while new. Their HT projectors were fantastic, their HT receivers were built around TI's PurePath digital amplifier, which has insanely good sound (I have two..)

And then one day mid last decade they stopped all of that. By 2018 they were gone from that market.

Very bad sign back then.

Their LCD panels for the home PJs were made by Epson, so I just went to Epson when my Pana died at 6500 hrs. I really need to get it fixed, the AE-8000 is shockingly good if you have a proper room for it. I do. The Epson's fine, but the Pana was a league above. Punched above its weight.

Worse news, now.

When everyone is neurodivergent, no one is.

Remember when a person would exit high school, and companies like GM, Ford, Pratt & Whitney and such would get these kids, train them up, turn them into machinists, welders, electricians and more, and then built things.

One could even concievably work at that one company your entire career, and retire with pension.

Yeah. I remember. I was little at the tail end of that era. Do any of you remember?

This sounds like a return to that, but.. I'm sure it's all for show and virtue-signalling.

"Authenticity" died sometime in the past 30 years.

We need to get back to this kind of thing. You want skilled labor to make things? Train them up yourselves. It's how it was done, and we won wars and went to the moon like that.

Now we just moan and whine on social media.

All the more reason to fix, not replace.

Fuck the automakers and their insatiable appetite for money, which manifests in robbing you of your privacy and data.

Do the world a favor. If you have a pre-2014 car, treat it with love, respect and care. Maintain it so it doesn't break much, and when it does, fix it --- don't replace it. They literally don't make 'em like that anymore.

Different skill set. I loathe managing. My manager doesn't like turning wrenches. But, this one listens to their people, and if we say "This is retarded, this is a really poor decision team x is making," they will absolutely be the tip of the spear and if possible, kill it.

A rare thing, this one.

Now.. I've had the other kind, the kind you're talking about. They manage because they can't wrench. Not won't, -- can't. Maybe they're the kind that strips screws (no mechanical sensibility) and thinks latest / shiniest is best. Many.. or most.. times, it isn't. And FFS stop stripping my ##@% rack screws, and your network wiring is an outright disgrace. Can't wrench, can't manage, makes for a miserable shop. I've had to escape such joints.

In all this time, since I started w-2 working in 1987, i've had one tech boss who swung wrenches with us and also was a tremendously skilled manager. Seems like the impossible combination, but when you find it, it's very nice. An engineer that can design, wrench and manage. Sounds like Kelly Johnson..

Munch's TheScream.jpg

Having managed twice before, I'd rather stick red hot pokers in my eyes.

I fear for the future worker. Sounds worse than The Matrix and Office Space combined.

Business owners, especially you obstinate luddites that run cube farms: Fuck off.

None of your cheap Jedi Mind Tricks will work. None of them will entice us to go to the "office" because that means traffic, gridlock, upsetting my own cicardian rhythm, all to support your arbitrary start time.

Better lighting and environmental condition is a welcome change, but nothing you can offer me -- including piles of cash -- will ever take the edge off having to go to the office.

We used to joke at this one place I worked at early 00's that had these little speaker grilles over our work area, and they made white noise. We used to joke that those were the Zyklon-B nozzles for when we get to uppity.

So you got your info from Facebook? Explains a lot.

Happily out of Facebook since 2019 when Berkeley Brethed forgot that a cartoonist is supposed to scorch everyone, not just one side.

Never had IG, and I look upon people who use it as a curious breed of extreme narcissist. I don't care how cool your venti triple crappuchino that you got at some coffee-shop-du-jour.

Wow. Such fantasies. Much wow.

Listen, pendejo: Come the end of his term, he either leaves by his own two feet, or gets carried out.

All this talk of "no more elections" is 100% Democrat fear-mongering to work up their base.

That's because the donkeys keep growing it to criminally wasteful sizes. You don't feel it? You don't see it? Have you ever dealt with VA, or any other government agency? You don't see the layers, the paper (literal paper, as in pulped dead trees), the built-in drag / negative work? The "Not my job" attitude? It's a gravy train! One I stayed the *hell* out of when I left the service! On purpose! I was *done* with it!

The Bureaucracy's job is to perpetuate itself. The thing needs pruning. Badly. And one side wants to prune, and the other side clutches pearls and starts with the whining. Same thing in 1980 with Reagan. Oh man. The Reagan Cuts. You act like this is a new thing, the desire to "fix" the government and have the Dems cockblock every attempt to do so. It happened then, it's happening now, and one day, someone will get it right, and the fat will be trimmed, and the various cancers cut out.

The Fed gov't isn't supposed to be what it now is. It's been perverted into a monstrosity the framers of the original would not recognize.

Have a good look at the beginning of Wall-E. There's a shot of Earth, in space, from afar, and there's a brown haze surrounding the planet. That "haze" is a layer of dead satellites and debris, not the atmosphere.

Wall-E is Idiocracy for 5 year olds and hyper-sensitive people. Same message, different delivery.

Very simply, by staying home we're telling them "STOP WITH THE BULLSHIT MOVIES."

It's telling my shelf has a dearth of post-2010 films. Why? Something snapped in Hollywood around that time. Shit story writing. Writing that tries to pound a certain, unwelcome, unwanted agenda into our heads with a railroad spike and maul. Writing that treasures shiny CGI and mindless action and virtue-signalling over storytelling.

If i wanted to be preached at I'd go to church or join a Democrat rally or something.

Fuck off, Hollywood. You died sometime in the mid-2010's. You've become as irrelevant, intolerant and incoherent as those who you try to prop up politically.

You know what? Fuck it. Keep digging. Keep digging your own grave 'til you can fit all of Hollywood in it. I will not cry or moan when you get buried under your own hubris. I will roast marshmallows over the glowing embers of your burnt, charred corpse.

*spits on Hollywood's grave, and then takes a piss on it.*

A smaller part of staying home instead of going to a movie house is -- at least around here, the amount of decent, well-ran, clean, well-EQ'd movie houses with crisp projection and great sound are so slim I built my own 20 years ago.

But that's a different problem than making shit movies.

They are one and the same, many times. I've had to deal with many industrial electricians and the good ones are worth what they charge. And most of them do side gigs, or the company they work with are both industrial and residential.

What you don't want is "the guy that can do it cheaper." Seen a couple of those, always called in by a skinflint store owner trying to save a buck. Yes, he did go out of business because of how he did everything.

Don't spend much time in the server room or datacenter cage, do you?

Dell is the compute and storage backbone of where I am now, and where I was back in the early 00's. And also in the 10's.

It's more than desktops and laptops aimed at the public, if I had to venture a guess, I'd say they make more $ off enterprise than they do selling to the public.

the UI for appleTV has been a mess for years, and an update 2 years ago broke it even harder.

Then, that disease spread to all the other HiDive "apps" for Roku, TVs, gaming consoles, etc.

The only thing that "kinda" works is the website, and even that has trouble remembering where you are in any given ep, has trouble with subtitles..

It's like AMC doesn't care.

There's no difference. All of them are the product of greed.

They saw what Netflix was doing and wanted that slice of pie for themselves, so they took their content and made their own streamers... which are now bleeding cash hand over fist.

But to be fair, there's one streamer that's head and shoulders worse than all the others, and it's HiDive.