Was Wide-Screen Just a Fad?

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold5 at CNN 

Why does it seem like wide-screen video has become passé? The latest and greatest Samsung phone, when fully opened, is square!

After I started watching some old TV shows on my phone, and my wife and I were seriously considering going to streaming apps only for the first time, I started noticing something. At first, it was only the STARZ channels, but now it seems to have spread to HBO/max and Showtime. They'll show a movie in wide-screen format, but it will be letterboxed with black bars at top and bottom within a 4:3 picture—which is then surrounded by black bars on the left and right on my wide-screen TV!

Now, when I start the cable company's app on my Apple TV device, and tune it to the same channel, the same movie takes up the full width of my TV screen. It isn't contained in a 4:3 picture.

Maybe the networks are trying to get people to drop their cable providers and use their streaming apps only? That's the only explanation I can think of that makes sense. If it isn't that, then the cable company is just doing something stupid—oh, wait, that kind of makes sense, too.

By the way, as for those old TV shows like Columbo and Babylon 5, at first I thought it was kind of quaint the way they only took up the middle 1/3 or so of my phone screen. Now, I've gotten used to it and don't really think about it, except when I think that a wide-screen TV picture will take up the full width of my phone, too, but not my TV.

As for the folding phone, I guess being able to fold a screen like that is novel, and that may attract some, but I have never liked the idea of a phone that opens, even when flip-phones were all the rage back in the '90s. More moving parts means more things that can break, and I'm already a klutz.

Where do you do your best thinking?

 

Because I can't stand to use the Twitter app on my iDevice, I haven't had any place to post the random thoughts and observations that occur to me from time to time. So, after a 7-year hiatus, I've returned to this space.

Today's random thought is: feces. When I was in my twenties, a study was released whose conclusion was that one's stool should float in the toilet. The reasoning was that people should eat lots of fiber, and the more fiber present in feces, the more buoyant it is.

Some years (decades) later, a study was released whose conclusion was that one's stool should sink in the toilet. According to it, high fat content also makes feces float, and it could be caused by any number of unhealthy conditions.

What would they say if one's bowel movement half sinks, and half floats?

On a related topic, at one time I had this blog set up to flush its content onto Twitter. I don't know if that still works, but if you leave a comment please include your Twitter handle, if it isn't evident from your reader ID, and let me know you saw it post there. Thanks!

Basic Income: Not All It's Cracked Up to Be

Image obtained from Colorado Peak Politics

After I had published my previous post reacting to an article at FiveThirtyEight extolling some benefits of a Universal Basic Income, Michelle Ray (the same GaltsGirl) tweeted a link to an article at The Bloomberg View, by Paula Dwyer. Interestingly, the tweet for the article shows as something like “Basic Income might be the next big thing”, but the article is actually titled “A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing” (emphasis mine in both cases). But I digress.

Dwyer begins with a short description of the idea of UBI, then talks about trials and studies around the world. She links to an article from Boxing Day, 2015, in the English publication The Guardian, that talks about a pilot program in The Netherlands. That program is limited to 20 municipalities, and will include only “small groups of benefit claimants”, to be qualified by their current income. It is not universal, and the amount is only around $950/month. It is apparently intended to be a supplement to whatever odd jobs they can get, rather than the envisioned substitute for a meaningless job while the citizen pursues education, training, or practice to follow a higher calling.

Dwyer then explains that some see UBI as a way to reduce poverty and inequality. But how can that be? If every citizen gets the same amount from the government, but is still free to have any other career and make any amount of money they can on their own, the same inequality of income will exist. And poverty? It will just be “defined upward”—the poverty level income will go from $12,000 to $25,000 to $40,000 and beyond. People receiving the UBI and nothing else will still be considered poor, and people who find a lucrative market for their skills and work hard to sell themselves will still be considered rich, and people who raise an outcry against this inequality will continue to cry out.

Dwyer also mentions the “about $1 trillion” of current US welfare spending, and admits to the approximate $3 trillion price tag I came up with (even with a US citizen population of only 322 million, rather than the 350 million I presumed). She then attempts to reduce the expense by eliminating segments of the population: Social Security recipients, households earning more than $100,000 annually, children. Now I agree with this last, because a “citizen” must be an adult who is capable of fulfilling the obligations of citizenship in order to partake in its pertinent rights and benefits. But when you start excluding other groups, even high earners, not only is it not universal, it is not equal. It is no longer something that every citizen can enjoy, but once again simply a wealth-transfer program. (Not that it ever was not intended to be.)

Dwyer does write about how a UBI program could be designed to eliminate the multiple, overlapping assistance programs at the federal and state levels, and acknowledges that some totalitarian collectivists—whom she calls “liberals”—object to it because of this. She says they “worry” that the bureaucrats currently administering all those programs could lose their jobs. I say, oh, but then they would be receiving the UBI, and maybe they could get better private sector jobs, or even become artists, writers, and the like! (But they would no longer be dues-paying public-sector union members, and the size of the bureaucracy, and some administrators’ domains, would shrink. I suspect those are bigger worries for some.)

In conclusion, Dwyer expresses hope that perhaps this isn’t so fantastic, this approach she calls “Social-Security-for-all”. Well, all but those evil rich folks.