Wordpress: What a Mistake

WordPress is confusing, clunky and difficult to use.   The confusion starts with which WordPress to use - dot com or dot org?   Like everyone else on the Internet today, they not only want you to use one site, but automatically sign you up for their associated sites as well!

I tried to move the blog to Wordpress.COM which for some reason is a different blogsite than Wordpress.ORG - although they both use the same logo.   Huh?

Wordpress is linked into Linked-in (sorry about the pun) so once again, I am sucked into someone's nefarious scheme to own the internet.   Once on Wordpress. COM you have an "account" which is part of other discussion groups (something called "Gravatars") and CANNOT BE DELETED.   This is a new thing on the Internet - not allowing users to control their own content or even delete their accounts.   I should have investigated this further before jumping so quickly.

Deleting Accounts

WordPress.com accounts cannot be deleted. However, you can easily delete your blog. If you wish to leave WordPress.com, you can just leave your account inactive. To unsubscribe from any email notifications from WordPress.com, go to your subscription settings and check the box that says Block all subscription emails from WordPress.com. Also: change/rename your username, and reuse email addresses.

 

Wordpress was clunky to use and many complained that the format was hard to read.   Wordpress.ORG has the same formatting problem.   You cannot use full justification (!) or change font sizes, colors, or types in the editing field.    It is not easy to edit entries without resorting to HTML tomfoolery.

Wordpress dot COM also allows comments and "occasional advertisements".   If you want to disable comments, you have to do it on a post-by-post basis.   Ugh!    And occasional advertisements?  Not in the cards.   Wordpress dot ORG supposedly doesn't have ads.    But I cannot fathom why there are two separate sites with the same name.

In order to use Wordpress.ORG, I have to DOWNLOAD the software, as opposed to editing and posting online.   However, once you download the software, publishing is free, and free of advertisements.   Maybe I will try this.   I had mistakenly assumed that the .COM and .ORG were the same thing (they use the same logo).   Very odd!

So, for now, I will stick with Blogger, even if it is part of the evil Google empire.

Sorry for the hassle!

Ten Annoying Restaurant Trends

Restaurants have started a lot of annoying trends in the last 50 years.

I was dining out with friends the other day, and I was thinking about how annoying eating at Restaurants has become.   It was not always thus!   When my parents ate out, they usually took the kids.  We had to behave, of course (and for the most part, did).   So I have been eating in restaurants for half a century now.  And a lot has changed - not for the better.

Here are ten annoying things that restaurants have decided to do in the last 50 years:

1.  The waiter giving you his name.  "Hello, my name is Steven, and I'll be your server tonight!" they chirp, as they come to the table.  This never happened back in 1969, at high-end or low-end restaurants.  You see, the meal wasn't all about Steven back then, and waiters were discrete and efficient, not chatty.   I chalk this one up to Corporate Restaurant Chains, who instruct their minions to do this, thinking that it equates to better service.   If you talk about service enough, maybe people will believe they are actually getting it.  Paul Zaloom, in one of his shows in the 1980's, parodied this trend with the line, "Hello, my name is Pat, and I'll be your butter...."

2. Leaving silverware on the table.  Many people remember the exact moment and where they were when 9/11 occurred.   Similarly, I remember the exact moment, the first time I went to a restaurant, and the server took silverware off my plate and put it back on the table.   Whoa.  Did she just do that?  The world just changed.   It was in the early 1980's, as I recall, and within a few years, almost every restaurant started doing it.   Again, I think the Corporate Chains started this, as it cut down on dishwashing expenses and labor.   But it just smacks of cheapness and it is also gross - utensils sitting on the table, with food crusted on them, leaving stains on the tablecloth, while you wait for the next course.   The best restaurants never did this, of course.   And today, I think the tide is turning back.   Let's hope, anyway.

3.  Servers who say, "How is everyone doing here?  Does everything taste good?"   You know the drill.  You and your friends are having a good time, talking, eating and then the server pops in with these idiot questions.  It started in the late 1980's with the "how is everyone doing here?" bit, which was annoying as you could not answer with a mouth full of food.  Again, it was Corporate Restaurant Chains that did this - trying to get you to think the server really cared, by showing up when they were not needed.   This morphed in the last decade to this "Does everything taste good?" line, which for some reason literally makes me want to gag.  "Garcon, bring me a bucket, I wish to vomit!"

4.  Servers who say, "Are you still working on that?"  Again, you know the drill on this.   You are sitting at the table and not done eating and they say, "Are you still working on that?" as if you were plastering a wall or something.   Again, this is Corporate Chain Restaurant Edicts (like the Flair required at T.G.L. McTchotchkis) and I think is designed to make you feel slightly ill - so you finish your meal and they can flip the table.  Again, bring me a bucket, I wish to vomit.

5.  Take home Styrofoam clamshells.  Back in the 1960's once in a great while, my parents would bring home a "doggie bag" with a steak bone or a small piece of steak as a treat for our dog.   That was then.  Today, it is almost standard procedure for most folks to take half their meal back home in a Styrofoam clamshell, to be eaten later on - by themselves, not their dog.   This is gross and disgusting and our European friends think we are insane for doing this (they are right).  It is unsanitary and unsafe - lukewarm meals in the trunk of your car are sure-fire recipe for food poisoning.   Today, the waiters no longer handle the food, but bring you bags and clamshells (no doubt due to a memo from the risk-management attorneys at the corporate chain) and you can scoop your food at the table, into boxes and bags.  Disgusting!

6.  Portion sizes.  Closely related to #5 above is the portion problem.  Rather than provide properly-sized portions of good quality food, Americans seem to prefer huge portions of really, really bad food.   A mountain of soggy french fries is apparently a good thing because you get more of it.   People look at restaurants like gas stations - how many calories are they getting per dollar.   And America's restaurants are up to the task, loading up meals with lots of cheap starches so you get "value" for your dollar, instead of quality.

7.  Restaurants as Kitchens.   And #5 and #6 morph into #7.  For many folks, the restaurant has replaced the kitchen as the place where most of their meals are prepared and consumed.   A lot of folks - even in the lower classes, eat out five nights a week.   They "fuel up" at a restaurant on high-sodium, high-calorie, and high-starch foods, and then justify the expense by bringing the leftovers to work as "lunch" the next day.   A restaurant is not a substitute for a kitchen, and eating out all the time is not cost-effective.  For the cost of one restaurant meal, you can make 5-10 meals at home (the subject of my next posting).

8.  Lines out the door and Pagers.   For some reason, Americans love their impersonal Corporate Restaurant Chains, and will line up out the door to eat there.   Most of these chains have bench seats near the door just so people can wait - and pagers that flash and buzz when they've flipped a table for you.  When we lived in Ithaca, New York, there was a great locally-run Tex-Mex place downtown.  It was busy, to be sure.   But most of the Cornell students would drive out to the strip malls to wait in line at Chili's - and pay more for a meal of lesser quality.   Americans, despite their pretensions at being "foodies" tend to be very conservative and frightened about food.   Having a bad meal is something they fear more than anything.   Suppose there are items on the menu they've never heard of?   How will they know what to order?   More than one American has told me that they "always" go to a chain restaurant, because "It is always the same and you know what to expect".    Hard to believe this is the same country that put a man on the moon (what with there being no Bennigans there and all).

9.  Chain Restaurants.   Which brings us to #9.   When I was a kid, there were few chain restaurants.   There was Howard Johnson's, which was usually located next to the Motel of the same name.   People ate at such places when traveling as it was easy to find (next to the Motel) and as noted above, "they knew what to expect".   And what they expected was pretty good, actually.  Jacques Pepin was actually their corporate chef, and he created a line of frozen entrees that were so good, they started selling them in stores.   Sadly, when the founder died, the next generation of owners let Pepin go, and the chain went downhill.   And new chains sprung up - not catering to travelers looking for a quick meal, but to the locals instead.   Fast-food chains put the Mom & Pop burger and breakfast joints out of business.   Denny's killed off the Diners (and replaced them with faked-up Diners, years later).   Upscale chain restaurants killed off local efforts, as they could charge less and market far more effectively.   Saturation advertisements on television just are not in the cards for the owners of the local Olde Tyme Gaslight Restaurant.

10. Table Clutter and Menu Clutter.   Back in the day, if you wanted ketchup on your french fries, they brought it to the table.  Today, there are napkin dispensers, salt and pepper shakers, ketchup, mustard, hot sauce, and a number of other condiments - left out on the table at room temperature.   Then there are table decorations, and at the chain restaurants, little (or large) tri-fold deals telling you about blender drinks or desserts.  Some chains even use "flip over" dealies like the scorecard from What's My Line?.  Menus are worse - often with inserts and specials (laminated, in Corporate restaurants) and so many choices that you can never really be sure what you want to order.  A good restaurant has a few basic things and does them all very well.  Today's restaurants try to do everything (Tex-Mex, Thai and Sushi!) and does none of them well.

* * *

Eating in a restaurant should be a real treat and a special occasion, not a chance to refuel your body by stuffing 1500 calories of bad food down your gullet.   Sadly, the trend in the last 50 years has been toward the latter.   Restaurants today are far more plentiful (in terms of per capita) than when I was a youth.   And today, they tend to be boring, mindless, faceless chain creations, complete with faux patinas and themes.

Why people eat at these places is beyond me.  They are bad for your body, and bad for your pocketbook.

Cost of Making Food at Home versus Restaurant: Breakfast

How much cheaper is it to prepare meals at home?  The answer may scare you.

In my last post I noted that using a restaurant as a kitchen is one sure way to go broke.   Many middle-class people do this, convinced they are "too tired" after work to cook (so they order a Pizza) and "too much in a hurry" to leave for work , so they waste 20 minutes at the drive-through at McDonald's.   They put this all on a credit card and wonder why, a few years later, they have thousands of dollars of intractable credit card debt.

If you took any aspect of your life budget and multiplied it by a factor of four you would end up in trouble, whether it is clothes, automobiles, or housing, or food.   When you take something that is cheap and make it really expensive, well, you create trouble for yourself.

We were in the grocery store the other day and buying breakfast supplies, and I marveled at how cheap it was to buy these basic foodstuffs - which constitute the cheapest meal of the day.   For the cost of one restaurant meal, you can make four or more at home!

Let's take as a simple example, the morning breakfast meal.   A simple egg sandwich on an English Muffin is easy to prepare and inexpensive.   It is also easy to compare with a similar meal from a fast-food restaurant:

Egg Sandwich with hash browns made at home:

Walmart English Muffins: $2.28 for package of 12 or 19 cents each.

WalMart brick of Cheddar/Swiss Cheese:  $19.98 per package of 120 or 16.65 cents each.

WalMart Eggs, average $1.25 per dozen, or 12 cents each.

Hash Brown Pattie, frozen, $2 for package of 10, or 20 cents each.

Coffee, 25 cents per cup.

TOTAL COST:   92 cents.

Same meal at McDonald's:

Egg McMuffin:  $2.79

Hash Browns: $1.00

Coffee:  $1.00

Total:  $4.79

Egg McMuffin "Meal" :  $3.99 (a savings of 80 cents!)

For the cost of one McDonald's meal, you can make four of the same meal at home, perhaps more.

Bear in mind that breakfast is the cheapest meal you can buy in a restaurant, too!

I did not calculate sales taxes as they vary from State to State.  Some States, such as New York and Georgia, do not tax groceries.   Other States tax restaurant meals more highly than other sales.  In Georgia, restaurant meals are taxed at 4% at the State rate, and there may be local taxes as well.   The McDonald's meal would likely cost $4.25 with State and Local sales taxes, enough to buy 1/4 of another meal.  The government here is encouraging us to buy basic foodstuffs and discouraging eating in restaurants.   Interesting, eh?

Overall, you can make four breakfast sandwiches with a side of hash browns and coffee for the cost of one meal at a fast-food place.

In other words, one meal at McDonald's costs nearly as much as an entire workweek of eating at home.

In other words, when you eat at a restaurant, even a "fast food" restaurant (which people claim are a bargain) you are multiplying your food budget by a factor of at least four.

Note that the source for the pricing data was online.  Local prices can vary.   For some reason, I have never gotten away from a McDonald's for $4.25, at least in recent times.   I suspect costs would be higher, particularly if you opted for a bagel sandwich or the like.

So, let's assume two people live side by side.   Fred wakes up every morning, makes his coffee (or tea, for additional savings) and while waiting for the pot to boil, fries an egg and makes toast.   He spends about a buck a day on breakfast, or about $365 a year.

Sam lives next door and is "too much in a hurry" to make his own breakfast, so he stops at the fast-food place, wastes 20 minutes in line at the drive-through, and spends $4.25 on the same meal Fred has.   Fred's tastes better, of course, as the English Muffin is actually toasted, not soggy and limp.   Let's also assume that on the weekends, Sam has more time and makes his own breakfast.   Sam spends $23.25 a week or $1209 a year on breakfast alone.

Now, we're talking just breakfast here.  Just one meal.   The cheapest meal in the day.   And the savings are $844 a year.

Now, some might say, "Well, I make a hundred grand a year!  I can afford a measly $844!"

And as I noted in an earlier post, you really can't.   If you make the vaunted six-figure salary, perhaps 10% of that is disposable income.   And you're going to spend over 8% of that on fast-food breakfast?

Now add in the cost of other meals.    If you "go out to lunch" as a cubicle dweller, and spend $10 on a sandwich, chips, and soft drink (not hard to do in the city) you are spending $7.50 more than the guy who brown-bags it with a sandwich.  Here, Fred spends $912.50 a year on lunch, while Sam spends $55 a week, or $2860 a year - or $1947.50 more than Fred dies.   We're up to nearly three grand now, and we haven't even touched dinner.

Assuming Dinner is $20 at a restaurant versus $5 at home and, well, Fred spends $1825 a year while Sam spends $110 a week or $5720 a year -  $3895 more than Fred.   Dinner is the most costly meal of the day, particularly at a restaurant.   The savings really add up here.

Overall, Sam spends $6686.50 a year by eating out in restaurants five days a week.   Invested over 30 years at 7% interest, that comes to $675,824.89 in your 401(k).   In case you were not listening, that is a shitload of money.

Now, you might argue with some of my assumptions here.   Say you "only" buy lunch at work and only go out two nights a week.   OK, let's say that.  Do the math again, and you will still see thousands of dollars in savings and hundreds of thousands missing from your 401(k).   And of course, Fred is going to go out to eat once in while, so you have to factor that in.   The point is, do the math and understand where all your money is going.

Today, many people in the middle class are falling behind and they cannot understand why.   They think the reason is that the "1%'ers" took all their money away.   The real reason is, they gave all their money away to the 1%'ers, who own the banks and credit card companies.   You see, in addition to money missing from retirement accounts, squandering money in restaurants is also how many people end up with a personal credit card crises at least once in their lives.

This is not to say one should never eat in a restaurant.   But if you are going out to eat on a weeknight, or ordering $20 worth of pizza, because you are "too beat to cook" - maybe you need to ask yourself where this is all going.   If you want to get ahead in life, you have to work hard and things and make sacrifices.   No one ever got ahead in the world by constantly indulging themselves.

UPDATE:  Restaurant prices have skyrocketed since I wrote this and since the pandemic.  Still, clueless idiots keep going to drive-thrus and then bitch about the prices, convinced that their complaints online will somehow lower prices.  So long as they keep buying, no one will lower prices.  Duh.  But even at the low prices of yesteryear, the savings are substantial.  And the labor involved is trivial.

And yes, since I wrote this ten years ago, the price of groceries has gone up, particularly in the last two years.  But eight Walmart hamburger buns are still $1.38 (as opposed to 88 cents before) and a dozen eggs is still less than three bucks.  No matter how you slice it, restaurant meals are four times as expensive as meals you have at home.

Save the restaurant meal for special occasions.  The savings are in the thousands!

Goodbye, Google!

Untangling yourself from the evil web of Google is harder than, well, untangling yourself from Facebook.   This is not by accident, but design.

One of the (unintended) genius things about Facebook was that it turned out to be a compulsive addiction.   People got onto Facebook, and most of them have to check it daily, hourly, or even every few minutes, to see what is on their "feed".   "Feed" by the way is what they give to cows.  To fatten them up to slaughter.

Facebook, I think, stumbled into this, and has since enhanced the feature.   As I noted in my Social Networking Seasickness posting, it is hard to see exactly what is on your Facebook page, as they use an algorithm to decide what you get to see, and if you dig around you can find other postings.   But some things appear on your "feed"  and then disappear after a time, so it encourages you to constantly check Facebook (via your smart phone "app" of course!) all the time, lest you "miss something".

It really is fucking brilliant, if you think about it - it has enslaved an entire generation to their cell phones, the Internet, and one website.   And the results are pretty frightening.   "Social Media" has become the number one source of misinformation, half-truths, and outright lies, as any daily perusal of Snopes.com will attest.   People on "Social Media" talk only to like-minded people, so if one posts a fraudulent video depicting Obama giving a speech that promotes Nazism, well, they all tend to believe it.

This shit is evil beyond belief, and if I swear it is because I am mad about it.   Each generation, it seems, is enticed by the siren song of some new form of media - and herded off a cliff as a result.   When newspaper chains were formed in the late 1800's, people could be made to believe most outlandish things.  William Randolph Hearst is alleged to have said, "You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war" - with regard to the Spanish-American war.   The point of the alleged quote is that Hearst, owning a lion's share of the nation's newspapers, could shape public opinion as he chose - enough to get the U.S. to declare a war, if he wanted to.  And he wanted to, just to sell newspapers.

The radio generation of the 1920's followed suit by falling into line behind "the Great Dictators" of Europe, who used radio broadcasts (and newsreels) to inflict their ideology on entire nations.  Even Roosevelt used his "fireside chats" to get him elected an unprecedented four terms.  He understood the power of this new medium and how to use it.   He was no fool - he knew that he had to use radio to get into power and stay there, if nothing else, for the good of the country.

Television brought us the first televised war, Vietnam, and the media in that war was cleverly manipulated to turn public opinion against the war.   By the time of Operation Desert Storm, the Pentagon had a better handle on controlling the media, and provided nice sound-bite ready video clips of "smart bombs" surgically excising bad guys with no collateral damage.

Today, it is the Internet, and in particular, social media, that has the brains of so many people utterly enslaved.   Many people get their news and information 100% from Social Media - where rumors and innuendo are the same common currency as the truth.   It is, to say the least, very scary.  

"You furnish me the YouTube Videos, I've furnish the war." - That is what Hearst would say today, if he were a Social Media titan.

But, once again, I digress.   Where was I?  Oh, yea, Google.

Google hasn't been sitting by quietly through all of this.   They sit on the sidelines and look at Facebook and wish they bought it when it was small.    That kind of mind control is priceless!   They tried, of course, to create their own social network, Google Plus, but that was viewed as the Zune of Social Networking.   Since no one signed up, Google made it mandatory that you have a Google Plus account if you want to use their other services (gmail, blogger, YouTube, Google Drive, etc.).   And it is annoying as shit and one reason I want to leave Googleworld for good.

Now, when you log into Gmail, you get this "status update" widget that tells you if someone commented on the same YouTube video that you commented on six years ago.   The only way to put a stop to this, it seems, is to click on each notification and then click "mute post".   It is annoying as all get out.

And even if you set all your settings on Google Plus to "private" you constantly get asked to join someone's circle, or worse yet, other people can add you to their circle (whatever that means) whether you like it or not.   As with Facebook, there is no "dislike", "unfriend", or "despise" button.    Actually, on Facebook, you can unfriend people - and people cannot be your "friend" unless you agree to.  On Google Plus, you can be added to someone's "circle" (jerk?) without your permission.   It is like being violated on a very small scale.

But alas, it is hard to untangle yourself from the web of Google.   Facebook is a little easier to quit.  All you have to do is erase all your content manually, and close the account.   That doesn't mean, of course, that Facebook doesn't keep all your content backed up somewhere.  That is the kind of level of creepy that raised my hackles about Facebook in the first place - and why I quit.   Of course, quitting Facebook does generate hostility from some folks - other "Facebookers" who wonder why you aren't part of their "feed" anymore.   So you run the risk of pissing off some friends, but they are just "Facebook friends" and not real friends, anyway, so the risk is pretty small.

Google, on the other hand is a little bit stickier.   When you log into one Google product, they start following you and tracking you.  You send an e-mail to a friend or client with the word "car" in it, and ads will appear on your Google pages for cars.   They not only track what sites you are going to, what words you are searching, but also what you write and what you e-mail.  This is far scarier than Facebook.

It also, I believe, slows down your internet connection.   While traveling recently, we used a WiFi hotspot, which gets 4G service, when it is available.   When not, it gets 3G, or 2G, or even "G" on occasion.  In "G" mode, it is about as slow as the old 56K modems of yore.  And loading Gmail takes forever (unless you load the stripped "HTML" version, which is missing most features).   Oddly enough, loading Hotmail takes less time for some reason.   Google has so much software tracking what you do that it bombs out slow connections.   And increasingly, it seems that Google products crash Firefox.   Google helpfully suggests that I use Google Chrome instead.   Funny how that works.

So, over the next year or so, I am going to try to wean myself from the tentacles of the Google Empire.  And it won't be easy, as almost everything you do on the Internet seems to touch or interact with Google.   Living without Facebook is a piece of cake compared to not touching Google at all on the Internet.

To completely disentangle myself from Google, I have to do the following:

1. Uninstall Google Drive
2. Uninstall Google Chrome
3. Move e-mail to commercial e-mail account (Cost: about $12 - $25 a year)
4. Migrate web page away from Google Pages
5. Move blog from Google Blogger to other host (or erase)
6. Move videos from Google YouTube to other site (or erase)
7. Move Google Picasaweb photos to other site (or erase)
8. Switch to another online search engine
9. Close Google Plus Account
10. Close Google Account.

 And that is a lot to do.  I am only on step 3 at the moment.   And this is one reason why I tell people never to store things in the "cloud".  The cloud can evaporate and leave you with nothing, as happened to me with my WebShots account - dozens of carefully tended photo albums with captions and comments, all dumped in the trash without so much as a moment's notice - and no way to easily move them elsewhere.  You rely too much on these online services, and when they go evil, well, you are stuck.

But these experiences only reinforce in me the desire to "unplug" from the media - television, social media, newspapers, etc.   They all hawk bad political ideas, consumerism, lies, outright lies, rumors, innuendo, and slander.  Even getting a basic weather report is dicey, even from the weather channel.

And the fact that I am sort of "stuck" using Google all the time makes me hate it even more.   I don't like the idea that I am beholden to one website or one service provider.   The Internet should be all about choices, not everything funneling into one company's websites.

So, off to another brave experiment.  Can you use the Internet without interfacing with those evil bastards at Google (and they are evil now, despite their "don't be evil" slogan)?

It will be interesting to try.

Why Television is the Enemy...

If you read this blog and still watch television, you won't get anything out of reading this blog.

It is hard to spend money carefully.   Today, I work maybe 20 hours a week, and it seems the rest of my time is occupied with taking care of the possessions I own, or shopping carefully for the things I need in life.  I look back at my old life and wonder, "how did I ever get anything done?"

And the answer is, I didn't.  Like most middle-class Americans convinced they were "making good money" I didn't bother to balance my checkbook every month, or keep track of my credit card bills.  I spend money on convenience items, convinced my time was more valuable than my money.  I hired people to do things I could easily do myself (wash my clothes, clean my bathroom, mow my lawn).

I made good money alright - and spend good money, too.

It was an easy trap to fall into.  At the end of a long day of work, it is easy to convince yourself that you are "bushed" and flop in front of the television and spend $20 on a delivery pizza (if you buy two, you get one free, and then there are cheesy sticks and a tip!).  Before long, you are mired in credit card debt and wondering why.

And you are staring the answer in the face - the television.

I harp on the television a lot in this blog and some folks read this and say, "Well, you have some good ideas here, I mean, besides the not watching television part."

But it IS the main idea of my blog and let me tell you why.

The average American watches 4.6 hours a day of television.   And yea, I was an Average American, at one time.   It takes up all of your non-waking, non-working, non-pooping, non-eating, non-showing hours of your life.  It dominates your life.   It consumes your life.   If you watch 4.6 hours a day, it is your life.

And not surprisingly, television tells us this is OK.   In an ad for "bathfitters" (a company that glues cheap plastic shells over your mildewed tiled bathtub) they show a guy laying on the couch watching television while the bathfitter man re-does the bathroom.   The message is clear: don't get up off the couch.   Why bother doing it yourself when the bathfitter man can just cover it all up?

(And incidental note on "bathfitters":  Like anything advertised on television, it is not a great bargain.   They put a plastic covering over your existing tub, and it looks better than mildewed tile and rusty tubs, to be sure.   But the underlying problems might still be there.  We've stayed in Motels which used such "renovations" and water got in-between the tub and the plastic lining, resulting in a waterbed-like feel to the bottom of the tub.   It is not a real remodeling, but a cosmetic one.  In many instances, a bathroom can be repaired rather than remodeled, for about the same amount of money, if not a lot less.   A rip-off?  No.  A good bargain?  Not in my opinion).

That 4.6 hours a day was the time - my time - that I should have been using to improve my own life.  I could have used it to do things I was paying other people to do - cook my food, clean my house, mow my lawn, fix my car.   I could also have used that time to better manage my finances by balancing my checkbook, keeping track of bills and debt.   And I could have used that time to shop smartly by carefully researching purchases and deciding whether I really needed something (as opposed to "going shopping" and just buying whatever caught my fancy).

In other words, television took up my life.  If you sleep 8 hours a night and work 8 hours a day, that's 16 hours out of 24 right there.  Throw in 2 hours for commuting, and maybe an hour to attend to personal things like bathroom and shower and you're up to 19 hours.   That leaves you five hours a day - and if you spend 4.6 hours of it watching television, well, your life is about 24 minutes a day - or about one minute for every hour to really think about things and make rational decisions.

And that is the second part of the problem.   While you watch television, you are bombarded with a lot of really bad ideas - that perpetual debt is normal, and sending out for pizza is a swell idea, and that the neighbors will be envious of you because you bought a new Acura.   If you watch this stuff long enough, you will start believing it, trust me.

We ridicule other folks for believing in nonsense or dangerous ideas.  How could the Russians embrace Communism when any 6-year-old could see the flaws in it?   How could the Germans think that Nazism was the answer to anything?   The reality is, if enough people start hammering the same ideas into your head long enough, you will start to believe it.   I tell you three times and it is true - that was the mantra of the propagandists.

And we fall for this in America all the time.   We are attacked by Saudi Citizens guided by a man living in Afghanistan, and are told that invading Iraq is the answer.   And people went along with it - all of us - either because we couldn't tell one middle-easterner from another, or we believed that "weapons of mass destruction" were present in Iraq, or whatever.  The television hammered the messages day after day and we all went for it.   Years later, few believe the Iraq war was a swell idea, and the new Iraq "government" is collapsing like a cheap tent.

You can't watch television and not be influenced by its normative cues.   You are not a superman or superwoman.  Your only choice is not to watch.

You can't just watch "a little bit" or "just my favorite shows" without being bombarded with ad after ad for credit card offers, payday loans, or new car sales.   And these ads will program your brain over time.   The only choice is to unplug from the programming entirely.

Was television always like this?   Perhaps, perhaps not.  The amount of advertising today, versus the 1960's is much higher.   On many cable channels, ads are nearly (or more than) 50% of airtime.   Much of the ads today are for more television - selling you the idea of watching more and more, so you watch the ads.   Back in the day, television shows would be "sponsored by" a company, and the ads were much less intrusive.   Today, you get snippets of programming followed by minutes of commercials.

Some programs, when viewed without the ads, are almost comical.  If you watch any History Channel program on Netflix (sans commercials), it seems repetitive and dull.  Why?  Because that cable channel cuts to five minutes of commercials after every five minutes of programming.  They have to "recap" what they said five minutes before, in order to keep their audience.   And then they constantly "tease" the audience with snippets of "great stuff coming up next!" which ends up being a 10-second video at the end of the show.   The entire program is devoid of content, other than the teasing and baiting used to keep you watching.

In other words, it is drivel.   The content is worse, in many ways, than the ads - it provides no coherent storyline or information.  It trains you to have a short attention span and to think in microsecond intervals.

But then again, this seems to be the wave of the future - with twittering and texting leading the way.   No longer do we think in book-length form, but instead in 140 characters (or emoticons) or less.  Television is just the largest of the Distractors.