Probably still won’t recognize it, thinks Democratic Socialism is a good thing. Probably does not see the difference between communism and socialism. Saddest of all the folks who want socialism think “communism” is name calling.
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Some people would recoil from this.
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2 words: Smart TVs. This includes older not so smart TVs with a fire stick/Roku plugged into an HDMI port.
I used to work for a cable company. They were smart enough to acknowledge that more people are streaming now, & pushed to keep their internet infrastructure up to date, and stopped adding new channels to their TV lineup.
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Cable is going the way of Blockbuster.
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Yeah, but smart TV / Roku / Apple TV is basically just internet. You choose what you watch. So why would you choose to watch something that insults you?
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$40 for a Roku stick,high speed internet, and Roku organizes shows for you. Currently I am workign my way through 1950s series Alfred Hitchcock Presents (the 30 minute shows), Dragnet frem 1953 forward, and One Step Beyond; and 60s series Danger Man (the original Brit release of what became Secret Agent Ma in USA) with Patrick McGoohan, Have Gun Will Travel, Bat Masterson, and other early tv westerns, and Outer Limits. All that with no subscription cost. Can’t beat it.
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Love Love Love Outer Limits!!
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@Zavier_D I agree. The TV portion is dead, most people haven’t gotten the memo, just like the telcos were slow to abandon home phone lines.
The cable industry has sunk a lot of money into researching how to stretch their coax infrastructure to provide higher bandwidth to the end user. Combine that with the fiber to the node, it is going to be a long time before they die off.
@Ouade5 the first part of your reply was my point. Could you please explain the last sentence in your statement? I am having difficulty connecting it to my comment.
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Keep your friends close and your enemies closer!
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That’s why I gave up DirectTV and the like. Got a digital antenna for local channels and Roku movies. I rarely watch local TV anymore. TV bill went from $140 to $40 or less. Most local channels have an app to watch them.
Edit: not to mention having to fight with satellite TV because they add channels you don’t want to up your bill.
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Sad part about telephone infrastructure was abandonment of an excellent reliable design. Old phone lines (copper) were 90 vdc, with large battery backups. Current phone system is cable or fiber voice over internet protocol. Old phone system was designed to survive a nuclear attack and resistant to emp. Also did need to be tapped by radio (wireless phone) or direct connection, had more privacy. Sad, the tools that are able to improve our life make civilization more fragile and susceptible to attack by foreign powers, bad actors or hackers.
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Companies did a lot of things like that because of government mandates due to the cold war. We wanted to nuke whoever nuked us in return.
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A long time ago in a land far far away I knew this guy that discovered if you hooked alligator clips to the Blue/White, White/Blue pair of an existing phone wire and attached them to the same colors on the patch panel you could make long distance phone calls for free while on base. The only problem was gaining access to the patch panel and every now and then somebody was listening (circa 1987). If you don’t know what a long distance call is, this will certainly make no sense to you.
Cheers,
Craig6
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Listening in was always fun. Too bad they did away with party lines.
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I used to drive past my girlfriend’s house to an A&W Root Beer that had a pay phone in the parking lot so my parents wouldn’t have to pay for a long distance phone call. It also helped that every body on the party line wasn’t listening to my puberty voice cracking 
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One time I had 0-4 watch on Mt Fugi and got bored so I picked up the field phone this was in the 70s cranked it got the base operator and asked for the overseas operator then asked for the USA got an operator in the USA and gave them my home phone number next thing I know I’m talking to my family in NJ we talked for quite awhile finally my dad said this is going to cost a fortune and we hung up a month goes by and I get a letter from my parents and they said however I did it they only got charged from CA to jersey and do it again if I got the chance all from a field phone in Japan
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I don’t know how true this is but my elderly uncle told me about how farmers and ranchers had a device they could clip on a strand of barbed wire and could talk. Of course was before radios and cell phones.
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