Sunday, November 12, 2017

excuse for TV


EXCUSE FOR TV
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note: Peak Prosperity just had an article quoting Bloomberg.  Supposedly,  until the last year or two, Saudi Arabia and the Petrodollar were super double top secret and only Bloombergs investigation revealed the truth.  WHATTTTT!!??????  What a load of horseshingles!  I've read about this for decades.  There are two books on the subject for sale right now at Amazon,  printed in 2009 and 1985.  1985!!  I always knew Bloomberg "news" sources were per 1% propaganda.  And I knew Peak Prosperity has been suspect since they cashed in on Crash Course ( getting Happy Super Optimistic for a supposed Doomer Dude ).  I guess we now get the worst of both worlds combined for easy viewing.
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Like I’ve said, YouTube is just another excuse to watch TV.  Although I would argue that it isn’t a reason necessarily to watch more.  It fills in for crap that was just wasting your time.  Let me give you my example.  Come seven at night, sometimes if my book isn’t interesting enough my eyes start drooping.  The weather isn’t getting cold enough ( although knock on wood it doesn’t get too darn cold ) to sleep much past four or five in the morning and I find myself back to the sleep schedule from when I was working.  Six hours normal, seven when lucky and eight only once in a great while.

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Once I’m too tired to read, it is time to turn on the TV.  Being a creature of habit who is anal retentive enough to schedule everything, I like to limit myself to TV from eight to nine thirty.  If I start at seven, that is too much wasted time.  I was watching Netflix cartoons ( Family Guy, American Dad ) to pass the time and while, like most shows, they have about a three year run time quality wise, it goes to quantity after that.  I was wasting my time watching that crap season after season binge watching.  YouTube was the default new viewing, so at least I felt I wasn’t doping up my brain like with regular TV.

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Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather be reading.  It just isn’t always feasible if I’m not alert enough mentally.  Reading used to actually keep me awake.  When I was 21 I could work the graveyard shift as long as I had a book.  But back then, the quality was better ( Loompanics compared to Kindle, libraries full of books compared to libraries full of DVD’s ) and I was still in full blown knowledge acquisition mode.  Now, it is hard to find a new book that learns me something.  I’ve already encountered it before multiple times, or far less effort is being made to get the book above WikiPedia levels ( like everything else, after 2008 the book industry went from mediocre or beginning to fail to Full Retard and Complete Failure ).

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This isn’t new, the last two to three years has been nearly a complete waste of money and time buying and reading books.  I’m at the point I mostly just read fiction on Kindle Unlimited ( the non-fiction has improved considerably but is usually not paper print worthy most times ) and to learn I’m on the Web reading more short topical updates rather than lengthy background information.  And for instructional needs, I’m watching YouTube.  Sometimes at seven at night it is just stupid Top Ten Things About Movies.  Other times it is the Green Valley farming series ( thanks again, Green Mountain Dude ).

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Or similar.  Previously, working two jobs, I didn’t have time for videos.  I wanted a short five minute Web article that cut to the chase.  YouTube is infamous for stretching out video time as if bandwidth and storage is no longer a consideration.  Bad enough FaceButt and Netflix use up most of the Internet capacity, YouTube is trying to waste the rest not devoted to hackers stealing all your identification information.  But, guess what.  I’m learning more from YouTube than from a lot of books I paid good money for.  Which is leading up to a point.

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I’m not just shilling for the channel.  I don’t need to do that.  Like they need my help at all.  I’m talking about minimizing your cost of getting information.  And then moving on to retention.  Retention is important.  We all have either failing memories due to age, or due to information overload.  But back to cost, mixed with retention.  Get yourself a set of encyclopedias at a thrift store.  Don’t pay too much.  After the Sixties you won’t find them at all useful compared to earlier.  You know, the 1960’s, when our economic collapse started.  When everything started going to crap in quality, from relationships to culture to government to consumer products. 

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A few used affordable books getting you to a starting place on unfamiliar skills.  A few in depth books on your hobbies ( along with specialty tools, obviously ).  And then I would call it good.  Number one, books are no longer cheap, or in some cases not even that good of material ( some Print On Demand uses a paper/print similar to those glossy register receipts that fade rapidly-the books less so but terrible compared to traditional printing ).  Number two, they are padded to an atrocious degree.  You waste hours searching for the nuggets.  And waste storage space.  And waste money.  At this point, baring the above mentioned books, it is almost better to invest the time in YouTube videos.  You waste less time, even with searching and eliminating useless versions.  And it ONLY costs time, not money. 

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Now, what about retention of the information?  I’ve been told about storage mediums and software to play videos you save.  NOW you are wasting serious money.  Watch the video.  If it is good, watch it again.  Then practice what you just learned.  Muscle imprints on the brain.  Not so much eyeballs.  Actually do the task, however poorly.  In theory, you can return to it years later and, though fumbling, remaster the task with patience.  Even if you haven’t been under the hood of a car in years, after a bit of screwing stuff up, you quickly return to the mastery. 

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The other day, I decided to quit dinking around and assemble another cartridge belt.  I have one ready to go, a M1 Garand style clip belt.  But I had bought a bunch of leather WWII surplus pouches to improve on that.  I had figured to keep them on a leather belt but I ran across a pack of web belts I had forgotten I had ( Sportsman’s Guide, four for $16 or close to it.  Didn’t know if I needed them but I was throwing money at preps and prep accessories at the time ).  Why not?  Leather is better but I use those and wanted a unit in storage ready to go, not needing assembly.  It had been thirty years since I took one of those suckers apart to thread on holsters and what not ( you have several weird metal fasteners to disassemble and refasten ).

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And yes, it was a bit slow getting back in my stride, but after ten minutes I was playing with the contraption like I learned yesterday.  Muscle memory-don’t short change it.  Use it.  Live it.  Love it.

END ( today's related link http://amzn.to/2yetZdw )
 
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12 comments:

  1. I've spent a fair amount of time on youtube over the last few weeks and the retarded minutia is monotonous. So far I've downloaded almost 11gb of the British Farm Series shows and find them very enjoyable. Every show I've watched I learn 5 or more thing I didn't know before, and might be worth knowing in the future. If you palpitate the muscles on either side of the back close to the tail of a pregnant cow you can tell if she is within 24 hours of delivery. Normally, the muscles are very taught but as delivery nears the muscles go slack. That was from last night show of The Edwardian Farm episode 7. If the show participants were not british and spoke proper english I'd probably gain even more info from each show. I've never done well with steep british lingo.

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    1. I have far more problems with an Irish accent. It is gibberish more often than not. I wonder how many more generations before they return to their original lingo.

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  2. I read a comment on some blog (or a reply to some blog post) about "this is what a civilisation wide collapse looks like". I'm pretty sure that's what we are experiencing. Time and time again I've said to people whilst (wasting) my time on social media that "no-one can stop what's coming". Kinda depressing to be honest. I'm guessing it's what life was like in the Soviet Union. Being told everything is A when what you're seeing is B but the reality is, as Douglas Adams said in Hitchikers guide to the galaxy
    "Forty-two," said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.”

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    1. Douglas Adams was darn funny, for a Brit. Hell, I barely get 10% of the humor of Monty Python and I thought I had a dry humor. The movie Hitchhikers was a bit too...something, though. I prefer the book.

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  3. I don’t think I’ve watched tv for over 6 months now. Part of that has to do with my sound going out, but even before that, I only watched a few shows, such as family guy, or the survival type shows that you see on Discovery.

    I know what you mean though when you mention that reading retention is poor when you’re not fully alert, as I experience this as well. At one time I went through a phase where I purchased a ton of survival and homestead related books. Generally, they all go over the same exact techniques, though occasionally you learn something new, or find an author that can explain something in more meaningful manner.

    The last few years I have taken to reading historical diaries that have been converted to E-books. There are many of these available on Kindle, and they generally only cost a dollar. I find them enjoyable because they are a connection to the past, and are told from the standpoint of the individual explorer, so they’re all unique in this sense. I learned of some pretty interesting events that I had never heard of before. In The Gold Hunters, By J.D. Borthwick, I learned that a popular sporting event that took place in the California gold fields at the time, was to take to the hills, and capture a live Grizzly. The Grizzly was put up against a healthy bull in a contest to the death. As one might imagine, the Grizzly was almost always the victor. But on occasion, the bull would catch the Grizzly just right, and would win the contest. Such was the fate of General Lee (Yes, that was the Grizzlies name) one fateful day, after a long string of successful battles

    That Video DownloadHelper software for Firefox, that I mentioned in the last post is free Jim. Unless you want to count the extra disk space as an added cost. Heck, even my operating system was free, Linux Mint 18.1, and it’s a great system too. But I don’t feel comfortable using it for free, and sent off a small donation.

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    1. I didn't even have enough extra disc space to upgrade to the new Windows. Not that I wanted to but I'm trying to avoid buying another one as this is only about three years old. I start larding it up with videos and I'd worry about my publishing or surf speed ( which are both problematic enough ).

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    2. The good news Jim is that those USB thumb drives are dirt cheap these days, and come in pretty large storage sizes as well. You can download your videos onto one of those. You would only be downloading the most important topics anyways, such as “how to make antibiotics” or certain medical procedures, or the such. If your computer supports USB 3.0 that’s the way to go because it has much faster data transfer rates than the 2.0. But this is optional, and you don’t need the 3.0.

      By the way, most of the Linux OS Distros are designed to be loaded onto a thumb drive as an option, and you can boot your computer right into it, providing that your PC allows you to boot from USB. But you can still keep your windows if you wish. This is what I did, and eventually I installed Linux on my system permanently. I’m poor, and I didn’t want to spend the $100 for the already outdated Windows 7, and windows sucks anyways, so it was a no brainer for me.

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    3. Windows does blow. I use it because I started out on Mac ( which I only dropped due to the original high hardware cost )( I want computers for what they deliver, not what they demand ) and because publishing on it is pretty across the board. Even PDF isn't universal. If I was self-publishing, yes, but I want the sites that collect payment and download.

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    4. Video Downloader on *Firefox* is what I use too and it is mostly problem free. BTW, if you down a file that has the .webm extension you can just change it to mp4 and it will play on most machines. Last year I bought a Seagate 2 TB portable USB hard drive and save everything to it. I have 2 computers fully backed up on it, over 18,000 mp3 files, thousands of video files and over 90,000 ebooks in 10 different formats along with all the readers. It's an amazing device that derives it's power thru the USB port and fits in a shirt pocket with room to spare, and only cost about 60 bux. I've had it for over a year and use it extensively and have had no problems with it.

      **The only thing I use Firefox for is for downloading videos and other than Video Downloader it has no add-ons or extensions for I do not browse with it.

      All my browsing is done with Chrome and it is loaded with every kind of blocking add-on and extension I can find, so it won't even see video let alone download it. I remember back in the mid 90's when I used Netscape Navigator and the world was a much nicer place to live. Now, everything has dangerous pointy edges all over the place and you always have to look over your shoulder in cognito.

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    5. 90k books! How can you even know what you have? :)

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  4. I've learned a new trick or two on the Dave Canterbury videos. What I like about his is that he gives out his advice using a budget as a guide. Why spend $$$$$ when using this costing $$ will do the same job. Why indeed.

    Good fiction - hard to find. Lately, been re-reading Gary Paulson teen fiction, the Brian four book series (Hatchet among the most famous) and Tuckett series of five are pretty good. Animal behavior - he nails it, in my experience.

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