Everybody thought the internet was going to make music better.  Instead it and phones destroyed it. 

Jeez jake, you need to get away from that awful Cincinnati radio (besides WAIF) and take a hit off of some CD102.5 on the 'net or something. Good stuff's still getting made, you just aren't going to hear it on WEBN or any of the other turd stations down there. What's that one alt-rock-ish station that showed a little promise after that other really good station (can't remember the name) shut down in 2007-2008?

Boomers Replace Their Children as No. 1 Market for Autos

By Keith Naughton - Aug 5, 2013 10:38 AM ET

 

Last year, Dave Rodham bought two Ford Mustangs -- a red one because it looked cool and then a white one with a big V-8 engine because it sounded cool. For Rodham, 63 and retired, those were his 50th and 51st cars.

 

“I have to have a new car every year-and-a-half to two years,” said Rodham, of Virginia Beach, Virginia, who said he pays cash for his cars. “After I retired 10 years ago, I didn’t have anything else to do, so I went out and bought new cars.”

 

For generations, car buying declined as consumers entered their golden years. Now, boomers are refusing to follow their parents’ lead and go quietly into the car buying night.

 

READ MORE AT:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-05/automania-strikes-boomers-supplanting-kids-as-buyers.html

 

 

Baby boomers now buying more new cars than their children

By Damon LowneyRSS feedGoogle+

Posted Aug 7th 2013 11:32AM

 

Could it be that the automobile's luster has faded over the years, that cars have become less synonymous with youth and freedom to Generation Y? A study by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute clearly says yes, but that's not the whole story, Bloomberg reports. Though young people are buying fewer new cars, baby boomers, the crowd born between 1946 and 1964, are buying more new cars.

 

People aged 55-64 had the highest rate of new-vehicle purchases in 2011, according to the study, and they've become the age group most likely to buy a new car. Just four years ago, the population aged 35-44 was most likely to buy a new car, which goes to show how much the auto industry and its customer base has changed since the recession in 2008. But the decline in miles driven by Americans started in 2004, according to another study by the University of Michigan, much of which has been related to lifestyle choices, such as urban living and public transit.

 

READ MORE AT:

http://www.autoblog.com/2013/08/07/baby-boomers-buying-more-new-cars-than-their-children/

 

Cab drivers, of course. I am now enlightened.

 

Only partially. You're forgetting the airport itself which makes a ton of money off parking revenues, plus independent parking lot owners around the airport, plus private shuttle bus services some of which are owned by various large venues like convention centers and tourist sites.

 

I know this is old, but I recently saw something online (either here or on Columbus Underground) that said that over 50% of CMHs revenue is parking fees.

Yeah. I don't like how the internet has to dominate nearly everything today. Sometimes that's why I envy old people. They're about the only ones around whose brains haven't been rewired by computers. There's one lady in her 40s who comes into work and has Aspberger's who has never used the internet. It's like talking to someone from 1990.

 

The ‘net and its corollary e-mail get involved in pretty much everything where communication is important, which as you say is pretty much everything.  Personally, I don’t have any problem with it, in fact I prefer it.    It’s an evolutionary step on the level of written language and printing. 

^ a woman in her 40's??! she must come to work using a walker!

Jeez jake, you need to get away from that awful Cincinnati radio (besides WAIF) and take a hit off of some CD102.5 on the 'net or something. Good stuff's still getting made, you just aren't going to hear it on WEBN or any of the other turd stations down there. What's that one alt-rock-ish station that showed a little promise after that other really good station (can't remember the name) shut down in 2007-2008?

 

This.

 

Music's gotten tremendously more diverse.  The "popular" stuff may have gotten worse, but that's because it's what's spoon fed to those too lazy, unmotivated, or unskilled to seek stuff out.

^ a woman in her 40's??! she must come to work using a walker!

 

ah, that's not what I meant, I was saying she was awfully young for someone who doesn't know how to use the internet. I'll be 40 soon enough.

Could another factor be that we might be nearing a sort of peak-suburb situation?  Sprawl has been marching outwards for so long now that even in relatively small cities cars are no longer about "freedom" and "escape" but mere necessity.  Everything has gotten so far away from everything else, and what's in between is so unpleasant that there's just no point in dealing with the hassle anymore.  It's like the saying, "a car is a great servant but a terrible master."  Well we've become so enslaved by cars that there's little point in expanding their dominance any further, so it's causing shifts in behavior.  All this is on top of everything else discussed of course.

I don't think that argument works because if it had become so dominant that it was no longer worth fighting, we wouldn't see so many people starting to fight it.

I think that's a good point. I'd imagine that with a few exceptions that current suburbs will generally be fine but that the growth they once saw will basically slow to a crawl or stop entirely while inner areas start to see the bulk of growth. I don't thikn we'll be seeing ghost town suburbs in most of the nation for quite a while, if ever, but the days of plopping new cookie cutter homes out in green fields seems to be coming to an end. I'd venture a guess that the current extents of many city's regions will remain pretty similar in coming decades, quite the opposite of the last half century of massive outward expansion.

Could another factor be that we might be nearing a sort of peak-suburb situation?  Sprawl has been marching outwards for so long now that even in relatively small cities cars are no longer about "freedom" and "escape" but mere necessity.  Everything has gotten so far away from everything else, and what's in between is so unpleasant that there's just no point in dealing with the hassle anymore.  It's like the saying, "a car is a great servant but a terrible master."  Well we've become so enslaved by cars that there's little point in expanding their dominance any further, so it's causing shifts in behavior.  All this is on top of everything else discussed of course.

 

I think "peak-suburb" is one explanation. Another is that the core area of our cities have gotten past the shock of being carved up for roads and the upheaval of years ago and that people are looking at where they want to locate with an eye toward efficiency and economy. That means settling in closer knit communities, where the auto is not a necessity.

 

BTW, it isn't just the young who want to drive less. I've seen several articles that strongly suggest that Boomers are tired of mowing the lawn and are looking to downsize and drive less. I can personally attest to that. Keep in mind that as they retire, they will not be driving to work anymore.

Listen to this Millennial summing it up for him and his peers all the way back in 1997: (at 1:14)

 

 

In addition to all of the other reasons already mentioned, it is harder to get a driver's license these days. In most states, kids under 18 have to get extensive driver training, and there are restrictions such as no driving at night, etc. If one can put off getting a license, the requirements are much easier.

 

States did this because statistics showed that teenagers have a much higher rate of accidents. I guess they helped reduce the number of accidents all right, not just by training the kids, but by making it such a hassle to get a license that fewer kids are driving.

After 2 minutes I've seen way too much.  That family is WAY FAKE AND WAY LAME.  That's a LONELY OUTPOST OF THE 80S LIKE 7 OR 8 YEARS *AFTER* ALL THAT CRAP WAS OVER WHO CARES ABOUT THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER. 

I WANT TO PUNCH THAT KID. THJE DUD.E 

Think about also what went on in the '70s and '80s too, where guys would drive around looking for girls trying to get them in the sack. That would get you arrested in seconds today.

 

Another thing to think about is that most young people today demand constant visual stimulation. Driving past the same Applebee's 10 times a week isn't good enough, while cities provide the constant visual rewards they seek. And now Cincinnati and Cleveand have these sound walls all over the freeways (we'd have a lot more of 'em in Columbus too if most of our freeways didn't run through industrial parks) removing nearly all visual stimulation. You might as well be in a subway then anyway. Except you gotta pilot your own vehicle through the soundwall "subway tunnel" so they can't use their phone safely. Maybe if driving was actually interesting like it was in the '50s and '60s instead of wretchedly boring kids would still want to do it.

 

Great point--you can't really keep in tune to your phone while driving.  Well, you shouldn't anyway....

Listen to this Millennial summing it up for him and his peers all the way back in 1997: (at 1:14)

that video would be better if the sound was all warbly

Whoops, wrong thread. Ignore this.

Listen to this Millennial summing it up for him and his peers all the way back in 1997: (at 1:14)

that video would be better if the sound was all warbly

 

Like all those self-help videos from the '90s that everybody spoofs now? Apparently a ton of those tapes got made but I don't remember any of them coming out. Maybe I just didn't need that much self-help at the time. I've siad it once and I'll say it again. The early '90s were NUTS. Nuts, nuts, nuts. Clothing, music, hair, dancing, decor, all of it. Nearly everything that was redecorated in the early '90s got re-re-decorated by 1996. You always know you're in a dead mall if it looks early '90s inside.

 

The early '90s were so bonkers that I was forced to make an "Early '90s Sucked" web page by late '90s.

 

In addition to all of the other reasons already mentioned, it is harder to get a driver's license these days. In most states, kids under 18 have to get extensive driver training, and there are restrictions such as no driving at night, etc. If one can put off getting a license, the requirements are much easier.

 

States did this because statistics showed that teenagers have a much higher rate of accidents. I guess they helped reduce the number of accidents all right, not just by training the kids, but by making it such a hassle to get a license that fewer kids are driving.

 

The training level of our drivers resembles that of a third-world country. We needed more stringent training for not only teens but adults need it as well. Somehow adults think that more than a year of driving in a straight line on interstates hours and hours a week makes you a better driver when in reality that is impossible. Just like anything else, you must push your limits and maintain your skills in order to be any good at driving. People somehow forget this. Most Americans are positively terrible drivers, yet there aren't nearly as many crashes as there could be since interstates are so mindless.

The deadliest roads in Ohio--I think by a good margin, actually, in terms of fatalities per passenger-mile traveled on them--are undivided two-lane 55-MPH rural roads.

 

In addition to all of the other reasons already mentioned, it is harder to get a driver's license these days. In most states, kids under 18 have to get extensive driver training, and there are restrictions such as no driving at night, etc. If one can put off getting a license, the requirements are much easier.

 

States did this because statistics showed that teenagers have a much higher rate of accidents. I guess they helped reduce the number of accidents all right, not just by training the kids, but by making it such a hassle to get a license that fewer kids are driving.

 

The training level of our drivers resembles that of a third-world country. We needed more stringent training for not only teens but adults need it as well. Somehow adults think that more than a year of driving in a straight line on interstates hours and hours a week makes you a better driver when in reality that is impossible. Just like anything else, you must push your limits and maintain your skills in order to be any good at driving. People somehow forget this. Most Americans are positively terrible drivers, yet there aren't nearly as many crashes as there could be since interstates are so mindless.

 

Beginners make more mistakes than experienced people do.

That being said, I had drivers ed thru my high school & I have seen a big difference between people who learned that way & people who use private schools.

We need better training instead of just handing out licenses like party favors.

And training for older people, yeah, there's all the bike signage now that most drivers don't understand - folks just put the arcane runes out there.

^^Yes. And many of those areas are full of teenagers because people somehow think those exurban areas are a "safe" place to raise teens. It's not. You go to some of these areas and they're just crawling with teens crashing into stuff. Or at least they were until teens started cutting back on driving.

Listen to this Millennial summing it up for him and his peers all the way back in 1997: (at 1:14)

that video would be better if the sound was all warbly

 

Like all those self-help videos from the '90s that everybody spoofs now? Apparently a ton of those tapes got made but I don't remember any of them coming out. Maybe I just didn't need that much self-help at the time. I've siad it once and I'll say it again. The early '90s were NUTS. Nuts, nuts, nuts. Clothing, music, hair, dancing, decor, all of it. Nearly everything that was redecorated in the early '90s got re-re-decorated by 1996. You always know you're in a dead mall if it looks early '90s inside.

 

The early '90s were so bonkers that I was forced to make an "Early '90s Sucked" web page by late '90s.

 

That’s because the drivers of fashion overreacted to the staying power of the 80s.  The alternatives they came up with sucked.  Dressing like homeless people (grunge)?  Hell, the music was actually called “alternative”.  Alternative to what??    The 80s, for whatever faults they had, were an optimistic era so the “reaction” was gloomy pessimism.  Plus, the kids were voting conservative and this scared liberals.  I still believe this had something to do with the urgency and nature of the reaction.

 

By the mid to late 90s the ‘net was beginning to provide independence from the culture directors.  They had to react or become irrelevant.

 

It was all manufactured, and badly so, and this was reinforced by the “20 year nostalgia” cycle corresponding with another crappy era in American fashion and pop culture. This is also part of why we’re not seeing grunge nostalgia now, and why 80s nostalgia has lingered.

There were indeed some screechy liberals in the '90s. '80s MTV wasn't really all that into politics, but if anything '80s MTV did lean more to the conservative side overall simply due to the nature of the programming and videos; just not the religious conservative side. None of those metal or hair rock bands really appealed to most liberals. I suppose New Wave did but Pop's, well, Pop. For most of the '90s MTV was SuperLib, though, jeez. MTV wouldn't lean back to the conservative side until they began increasingly filling their schedule with consumption-related content in the late '90s. All those shots of Escalades, mansions and Sweet-16 type programming is straight up conservative propaganda.

'90s nostalgia is huge right now. I'd ask what rock you were living under, but I know -- it's the E Rocc. ;)

We're drifting off topic.......

Let's drift back on!

 

>That’s because the drivers of fashion overreacted to the staying power of the 80s.  The alternatives they came up with sucked.  Dressing like homeless people (grunge)? 

 

I don't think you grasp just how horrible being a non-conformist kid in the 80s was, with the LA-based entertainment industry heaping one totally horrible thing after another upon the defenseless Midwest.  I never felt, even for a moment, that anything on TV or on Top 40 radio from the 80s in any way reflected my reality.  Yet the cool kids latched onto all of it, forming a hierarchy around things that they themselves had no firsthand experience with and seemingly didn't recognize to be mechanisms constructed for that very purpose.  It was Freud's Narcissism of Small Differences in 4-dimmensions, if you include time.  Where I grew up, nobody actually made anything, they just bought things or aligned themselves with pop ideas. If you made something out of thin air, the jocks immediately destroyed it, like Mao or Stalin in their primes.   

 

"Creativity" amongst socially dominant males was very much directed toward cars.  Rap appeared at just about the same time as car stereo bass, and much of the energy directed toward cars shifted from modifying muscle cars to California-style cruising.  Overnight the California-style low rider truck supplanted the 4wd lift kit pickup with knobby tires and smiley faces on the rally bar.  Hydraulics were very rare but low riders and rims were common, and of course bass. 

 

 

>Hell, the music was actually called “alternative”.  Alternative to what??   

 

Alternative to the LA pop machine...duh.  First it was Boston, then Seattle became the hotbeds of so-called anti-LA music.  People focus way too much on the clothes, it should be quite obvious that the emotional territory of say, The Pixies, was *way* different than, say, Guns N Roses. 

 

 

>It was all manufactured, and badly so, and this was reinforced by the “20 year nostalgia” cycle corresponding with another crappy era in American fashion and pop culture. This is also part of why we’re not seeing grunge nostalgia now, and why 80s nostalgia has lingered.

 

No, not much money was thrown behind entire counter-cultural realms in the 90s.  The punk (Green Day, etc., were definitely not real punk bands), goth, ska, etc. things were never really picked up, ripped up, then left for dead by the entertainment industries.  The totally horrible swing music revival was, by contrast, quite obviously constructed by the record industry because they bet that they could get a lot of girls to buy those records and go to those shows, and the nerdy nice guys would show up since they were fooled into thinking those girls in poodle skirts wanted nice guys.  The ska revival died because of the circa-1997 embezzlement scandal at Moon Records.

 

 

And now there's no major car fad for young people to get into. Autocross has gotten a lot bigger because it's cheap and you can use your regular car for it, but that was always around, people of all ages do it and it's not merely about looks -- it's about ability. You have to get good at it rather than just being able to put on drip tint, wire up a booming system and airbrush pictures of kids with baggy pants and a can of spraypaint on the back. Then there's the LeMons and ChumpCar crapcan racing that got big, but that's not visible on the street because the events happen at racetracks and most of the cars aren't street legal.

 

Now there is one stupid annoying teenager trend that has come around called "stance" but it's not even remotely as popular as the import tuner (or pejoratively, "ricer") thing from the '90s and early 2000s. Here's an example of a Stance car:

 

 

They're mostly Japanese or European.

I don't think you grasp just how horrible being a non-conformist kid in the 80s was, with the LA-based entertainment industry heaping one totally horrible thing after another upon the defenseless Midwest.  I never felt, even for a moment, that anything on TV or on Top 40 radio from the 80s in any way reflected my reality.  Yet the cool kids latched onto all of it, forming a hierarchy around things that they themselves had no firsthand experience with and seemingly didn't recognize to be mechanisms constructed for that very purpose.  It was Freud's Narcissism of Small Differences in 4-dimmensions, if you include time.  Where I grew up, nobody actually made anything, they just bought things or aligned themselves with pop ideas. If you made something out of thin air, the jocks immediately destroyed it, like Mao or Stalin in their primes.   

 

I do, it was called the late 1990s/early 2000s, popular music was TERRIBLE at that time, it was like they took everything bad about grunge and amped it up as well as angsted it up and turned it into cheap plastic crap.  I was so happy circa 2004 when the Internet began to take over popular culture.  Even if today there is an overabundance of echoy hipster bands, its still a heck of a lot better than the sh!tty boybands and wah wah wah nu meta/rap of that era.

 

The early 1990s as terrible as they were (though laughably bad) at least had some damn good rap music until the music industry decided to take gangsta rap and make it about glorifying being in a gang instead of critically looking at inner city life.  I think I would have been happiest being a teenager in the mid 90s.  I like flannel too ;)

 

To bring this back to driving, being an early millennial I'm kind of at the cusp of both perspectives - I still lived in a time at least in SW Ohio when owning a car meant something, (and gas was dirt cheap) but got to experience the beginnings of the more stringent rules they have today, the two strikes and your out policy left me without a car for about 6 months while I slowly worked through the classes they required me to take (this was for a speeding ticket and an accident where I was at fault).

 

As gas prices rose, I became less enamoured of a car, even took the bus to work when I worked in Downtown Cincinnati during my co-op, and these days in Chicago have a car, but barely use it.

Well, one thing about being a teen in the mid-90s is that if you called out the post-Biggie/Tupac rap like Ma$e and Puffy as being inferior to the P.E./N.W.A. era you were shunned because the other teens somehow didn't notice the difference. And most kids were all rap all the time (or nu-country), so even being into the gigantic Nirvana was considered strange. And being into muscle cars was considered strange, like you were Todd from Beavis and Butthead. There was one kid at my school that won nearly all the superlatives in the raw vote including Best Car simply because he knew a ton about rap. But the school had a policy that a student could only win one superlative so my souped-up IROC ended up beating his bone stock '90 Toronado with a big stereo (even though my stereo was even bigger at the time, but I used it to blast Savatage and Helloween rather than Ma$e so no one cared)  That's how rap-obsessed kids were at my all-white-with-a-few-Asians semi-rural school system. Of course, that was teens as a whole at the time. Now as mid-30s, the student body would look back at those raw voting results and be like "Wow, all we could think about was rap back then, couldn't we?"

The rap thing was absolutely ridiculous.  It was attractive to the jocks for two reasons -- it was hypermasculine, and then second even if you didn't know a single black person and had never so much as driven through a black neighborhood, you won points at your all-white school by presenting the image that if you were to find yourself around real live black people, you could better navigate that social situation than other white people who didn't know any black people. 

 

I don't think you grasp just how horrible being a non-conformist kid in the 80s was, with the LA-based entertainment industry heaping one totally horrible thing after another upon the defenseless Midwest.  I never felt, even for a moment, that anything on TV or on Top 40 radio from the 80s in any way reflected my reality.  Yet the cool kids latched onto all of it, forming a hierarchy around things that they themselves had no firsthand experience with and seemingly didn't recognize to be mechanisms constructed for that very purpose.  It was Freud's Narcissism of Small Differences in 4-dimmensions, if you include time.  Where I grew up, nobody actually made anything, they just bought things or aligned themselves with pop ideas. If you made something out of thin air, the jocks immediately destroyed it, like Mao or Stalin in their primes.

 

 

 

 

Here you go, a video recap of what you're talking about:

 

 

 

"The totally horrible swing music revival was, by contrast, quite obviously constructed by the record industry because they bet that they could get a lot of girls to buy those records and go to those shows, and the nerdy nice guys would show up since they were fooled into thinking those girls in poodle skirts wanted nice guys."

 

Aw yuck, I hate seeing stuff like that throw down in person. The flip side of that is seeing fat girls with terrible personalities prowl around metal venues trying to get with guys they otherwise had no chance with by using a passing amount of metal knowledge hoping the guy gets real sappy when he meets a girl who knows who the band Sodom is. But, that's dried up too since most metal venues have to be driven to, rockers have notorious transportation problems in the U.S. and it's really easy to get a DUI now.

The rap thing was absolutely ridiculous.  It was attractive to the jocks for two reasons -- it was hypermasculine, and then second even if you didn't know a single black person and had never so much as driven through a black neighborhood, you won points at your all-white school by presenting the image that if you were to find yourself around real live black people, you could better navigate that social situation than other white people who didn't know any black people. 

 

Well, allegedly, but if the only thing those hayseed kids had in common with black people was extremely mainstream music I doubt they were all that impressed.

Oh by the way, I bought my IROC off of a guy in Fairfield just down the street from a car stereo shop called "Car Tunes" In the '90s I'm pretty sure every major strip mall across the country had a car stereo shop called Car Tunes, all owned by different people who couldn't sue each other because it was such a generic thing to do. I tried to find the strip mall when I moved to Cincinnati but I think it got ate by Jungle Jim's. I can only hope that the stereo that was in there was purchased from Car Tunes.

>Aw yuck, I hate seeing stuff like that throw down in person. The flip side of that is seeing fat girls with terrible personalities prowl around metal venues trying to get with guys they otherwise had no chance with by using a passing amount of metal knowledge hoping the guy gets real sappy when he meets a girl who knows who the band Sodom is. But, that's dried up too since most metal venues have to be driven to, rockers have notorious transportation problems in the U.S. and it's really easy to get a DUI now.

 

Those dancing events, especially ones held at "neutral" locations like Fountain Square, are ones that put the women in total control over nice guys.  It happens every time: girl acts happy to see nice guy when he shows up, he's got his hopes all up (hell, he's made up his mind he's going marry this girl! The women in his family will love her!), then after dancing together dorkily to one or two songs the girl goes and dances with Sergio from Brazil.  Girl comes over at some point and introduces Sergio ("we're good friends!!!") to nice guy, nice guy crumbles.  Even worse is when there is no Sergio, and the girl makes the trying-too-hard white guy (usually wearing a preposterous hat if not full period costume, and possibly shorter than girl and nice guy) a substitute Sergio.  Instead of simply folding, Nice Guy swells up inside, and there very well might be some dork drama.     

 

 

I don't think you grasp just how horrible being a non-conformist kid in the 80s was, with the LA-based entertainment industry heaping one totally horrible thing after another upon the defenseless Midwest.  I never felt, even for a moment, that anything on TV or on Top 40 radio from the 80s in any way reflected my reality.  Yet the cool kids latched onto all of it, forming a hierarchy around things that they themselves had no firsthand experience with and seemingly didn't recognize to be mechanisms constructed for that very purpose.  It was Freud's Narcissism of Small Differences in 4-dimmensions, if you include time.  Where I grew up, nobody actually made anything, they just bought things or aligned themselves with pop ideas. If you made something out of thin air, the jocks immediately destroyed it, like Mao or Stalin in their primes.

 

I took the opposite approach lol, and ended up being semi-successful at it.  It helped that my football team was small so that while I may have been the worst player in the history of the Maple Heights Mustangs to letter, that last part was important.  Plus, dad went through second teen-hood about the time I went through my first, hence the best car in the senior class when he let me use it. 

 

Hence my take:  the non-conformists largely chose to be that way and maintained a certain pride in it.  Morrisey's line about the DJ "says nothing to me about my life" is in its own way just as narcissistic as any preening quarterback dating a cheerleader and "seeing" the hottest of the party girls on the side.

 

 

"The totally horrible swing music revival was, by contrast, quite obviously constructed by the record industry because they bet that they could get a lot of girls to buy those records and go to those shows, and the nerdy nice guys would show up since they were fooled into thinking those girls in poodle skirts wanted nice guys."

 

It was a case of "let's promote the opposite and hope it sticks so we can sell stuff.  Annoying but benign.

Aw yuck, I hate seeing stuff like that throw down in person. The flip side of that is seeing fat girls with terrible personalities prowl around metal venues trying to get with guys they otherwise had no chance with by using a passing amount of metal knowledge hoping the guy gets real sappy when he meets a girl who knows who the band Sodom is. But, that's dried up too since most metal venues have to be driven to, rockers have notorious transportation problems in the U.S. and it's really easy to get a DUI now.

 

Mean but hilarious with a Maple High alumni on bass.  In a way, that's the counterpoint of the guys who go to strip clubs by themselves.

We're drifting off topic.......

 

Not really.  If "kids are driving less" is true, are they eschewing private independent transportation, or is this part of a general cultural trend?

>Aw yuck, I hate seeing stuff like that throw down in person. The flip side of that is seeing fat girls with terrible personalities prowl around metal venues trying to get with guys they otherwise had no chance with by using a passing amount of metal knowledge hoping the guy gets real sappy when he meets a girl who knows who the band Sodom is. But, that's dried up too since most metal venues have to be driven to, rockers have notorious transportation problems in the U.S. and it's really easy to get a DUI now.

 

Those dancing events, especially ones held at "neutral" locations like Fountain Square, are ones that put the women in total control over nice guys.  It happens every time: girl acts happy to see nice guy when he shows up, he's got his hopes all up (hell, he's made up his mind he's going marry this girl! The women in his family will love her!), then after dancing together dorkily to one or two songs the girl goes and dances with Sergio from Brazil.  Girl comes over at some point and introduces Sergio ("we're good friends!!!") to nice guy, nice guy crumbles.  Even worse is when there is no Sergio, and the girl makes the trying-too-hard white guy (usually wearing a preposterous hat if not full period costume, and possibly shorter than girl and nice guy) a substitute Sergio.  Instead of simply folding, Nice Guy swells up inside, and there very well might be some dork drama.     

 

 

Sometimes I can just feel the pain coming through your fingertips, into your keyboard, and out the back of your computer out into to the world.

"@DaleCalkins: Here is the demand for transit and bikes. “@urbandata: 1/5 of young adults in USA don’t plan to ever learn to drive. http://t.co/Ux1NrmYxan”"

Just replying to thread title without reading any of the posts, but could the increase in people going to college be responsible for the decline in driving? Also people are staying in college longer, meaning they are older when they finally "need" a car because they are no longer living on/near a campus.

The NPR version

Why Millennials Are Ditching Cars And Redefining Ownership

 

http://www.npr.org/2013/08/21/209579037/why-millennials-are-ditching-cars-and-redefining-ownership?utm_source=NPR&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=20130821

TransForm ‏@TransForm_Alert 8m

Recent polls show Millennialls prefer to own smartphones not cars http://n.pr/13G6CbE

 

I don't think you grasp just how horrible being a non-conformist kid in the 80s was, with the LA-based entertainment industry heaping one totally horrible thing after another upon the defenseless Midwest.  I never felt, even for a moment, that anything on TV or on Top 40 radio from the 80s in any way reflected my reality.  Yet the cool kids latched onto all of it, forming a hierarchy around things that they themselves had no firsthand experience with and seemingly didn't recognize to be mechanisms constructed for that very purpose.  It was Freud's Narcissism of Small Differences in 4-dimmensions, if you include time.  Where I grew up, nobody actually made anything, they just bought things or aligned themselves with pop ideas. If you made something out of thin air, the jocks immediately destroyed it, like Mao or Stalin in their primes.

 

I took the opposite approach lol, and ended up being semi-successful at it.  It helped that my football team was small so that while I may have been the worst player in the history of the Maple Heights Mustangs to letter, that last part was important.  Plus, dad went through second teen-hood about the time I went through my first, hence the best car in the senior class when he let me use it. 

 

Hence my take:  the non-conformists largely chose to be that way and maintained a certain pride in it.  Morrisey's line about the DJ "says nothing to me about my life" is in its own way just as narcissistic as any preening quarterback dating a cheerleader and "seeing" the hottest of the party girls on the side.

 

 

"The totally horrible swing music revival was, by contrast, quite obviously constructed by the record industry because they bet that they could get a lot of girls to buy those records and go to those shows, and the nerdy nice guys would show up since they were fooled into thinking those girls in poodle skirts wanted nice guys."

 

It was a case of "let's promote the opposite and hope it sticks so we can sell stuff.  Annoying but benign.

Aw yuck, I hate seeing stuff like that throw down in person. The flip side of that is seeing fat girls with terrible personalities prowl around metal venues trying to get with guys they otherwise had no chance with by using a passing amount of metal knowledge hoping the guy gets real sappy when he meets a girl who knows who the band Sodom is. But, that's dried up too since most metal venues have to be driven to, rockers have notorious transportation problems in the U.S. and it's really easy to get a DUI now.

 

Mean but hilarious with a Maple High alumni on bass.  In a way, that's the counterpoint of the guys who go to strip clubs by themselves.

 

Man, Steel Panther cracks me up. On one of the linked videos on there, they invite Vinny Paul down to the stage and sum up Pantera's lyrics perfectly while he's on the way down.

The NPR version

Why Millennials Are Ditching Cars And Redefining Ownership

 

http://www.npr.org/2013/08/21/209579037/why-millennials-are-ditching-cars-and-redefining-ownership?utm_source=NPR&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=20130821

I still think there's a lot of exceptions being presented as the rule here, but this touches on another point.  Internet shopping has expanded so that there's much less need to go to physical stores.  This would reduce the miles driven, and since transit's always been seen as way more suitable for commuting than shopping, also even the perceived need for a car.

 

Man, Steel Panther cracks me up. On one of the linked videos on there, they invite Vinny Paul down to the stage and sum up Pantera's lyrics perfectly while he's on the way down.

 

I admit to having discovered them off the Maple Heights Facebook group, but they're beyond hilarious, a dead on parody of that time, and becoming iconic for a genre of artists which has never taken themselves too seriously.  Sebastian Bach has also done some songs with them.

 

Of course, they are also pulling off the "getting away with what I got away with then despite the aging process" that Brett Michaels and (locally) Dave Brooks have done such a good job of....

I realize that i-Phones, online shopping and college debt are all part of the undercurrent of the decline in auto use and ownership. But it's not as if twentysomethings are sitting at home and ordering cheap goods on their smartphones and saving all their money for the debt collectors. What I see in the evenings is a steady increase over the years in young people on buses, on bicycles and walking. People are out & about and spending money and enjoying the freedom of a bike or a bus (or train -- we can dream, cant we?) and not feeling chained to the expense and hassle of owning a car.

It's hard to see from the suburbs the major changes being written about in these articles. Ride the Rapid occasionally. I do, and I see many more young people riding than I did compared to just five years ago.