Sure

We're almost fully moved to being an oral culture. All the gains in education if they even meaningfully existed have been wiped out

You say that but trade paperback/overall book consumption peaked in the mid 80s, and the troubles started well before that. I think what you're identifying there with the men sleeping is the intense social stratification we've undergone that has removed well-read-people as you've put it from being able to influence those with power.

Right, yes, the whole knowledge verification problem. That's more of an intrinsic problem to the transmission of knowledge moreso than anything relating to interpretation/literacy thought.

Do these faux-literate people comprehend the text at all? Are they actually literate, and internalized wrong information; or are they memorizing the arrangement of words on a page and obtain meaning through social reactions to what's been reproduced in conversation?

Being literate isn't just being able to read there's a component of comprehending meaning through text in there too and I think a lot of people fail that.

'can faux literate people actually assign meaning to individual words and extrapolate the author's message from a sentence' would have been the shorter, better way to put it

Glad we're on the same page. There are people who use that sort of phrasing to refer to malinformed people rather than people who can't actually read.

Do you subscribe to the signal/noise terminology? I think this is more of a universal experience that is aided by the dominant information transmission technology. There is always someone trying to mislead you to make a buck, and they will send their message through the cheapest possible medium. I imagine the amerindians had telemarketers blowing copy for erectile dysfunction cures via smoke signal.

what? This is true but when did this come up in conversation?

You didn't say or even imply that. You wrote a non-sequitur. I don't believe that's true. The industry people I know who worked at the time blamed cheap music and video tapes. It isn't so much the woke (although they're a factor) but changing media consumption habits aided by the availability of new formats.

Bingo

''the woke'' in print media is more of a reverse colonization from ''new media''. It was a complex and robust ecosystem in its own right that was killed by technological obsolescence. Why there's only like five publishing houses globally. Tiny market.

"Executives in the 80s were woke idiots" is a silly line that doesn't apply here sorry friend. It's like how the internet cut newpaper print circulation in half, the VCR and walkman did that for pulp novels. Technological change can happen and remove the foundations from your industry.

@newmodel @f0x @SqvierJagvarHS @kirby schools teach "critical literacy" now which isn't "can you read and parse information for yourself" but rather "here's a selection of shitlib Marxist text and the woke slogan we summarized it with, be sure to memorize the slogan!"

To give a less recent example, there was a locomotive manufacturer in in PA called the Baldwin Locomotive Works. They decided, in the 30s after some early trials with diesel and gasoline engines they would make exclusively steam engines, and invested millions in building a new facility. Less than four years after their new facility opened in '36, new developments in internal combustion tech allowed a new competitor, General Motors, to eat their whole market share. They ended up winding down production in the 50s, and existed as a patent holding/pension company until the late 80s when they closed for good.

Sometimes the market can change wildly and randomly underneath you, and will destroy everything you've built. Nassim Taleb calls this a 'Black Swan' event.

There is a ginormous amount of money in offset printing and photosetting machines in a publishing house! The problem in the 80s wasn't that the publishing houses were printing woke nonsense, but that the market conditions had changed. Consumer demands had changed! They could no longer meet the revenue required to pay off their huge investments in the new printing tech! Transistorizing as they called it was expensive, and because they only worked with paper then, the publishing houses were blindsided and had a hard time adapting. You can't retool an offset lithography press to make magnetic tape!

WWII was the only time they got to use their eddystone facility at full production iirc, but it had been in the works since 1929 so it wasn't related to Wilson's (much hated) Railroad Administration board or the bastard nigger FDR's evil schemes but a rational business decision based on the best information they had available at the time.

OK, you're on a limited income. You like music and reading. You get a walkman and listen to a little more music than you would previously. You buy one or two less books to balance the budget. Extrapolate over a market of ~200,000,000.00 people and you have large losses in revenue.

They were craftsman products for that's what the railroads of the time demanded! They wanted products made to their exact specifications and needs, and nobody else's. They got better near the end, adopting standardized reversing links for example (in the very early days Mr. Baldwin hand filed and fitted every part). EMD's successes I'd argue weren't from their diseasels, being weaker in tractive effort and massively increasing the dead weight of a train with their ridiculous A B and C units, but being able to force the disagreeable RR companies to actually buy standard designs (The Wilsonian System of Idealism) with the promise of labor and maintenance savings.

100%. Baldwin did not have that network of suppliers or financing. My knowledge gets fuzzy beyond this point but I believe there used to be a whole series of specialized underwriters and banks who handled railroad orders and exclusively railroad orders for rolling stock and engines. I believe the railroads held a small army of very flexible fitters and turners used to handle the replacement of parts in service (everything up to and including the driving cylinders).

Baldwin could have held on if it wasn't for the post-war traffic scare happening almost immediately after conflict ceased, and city ordinances about visible exhaust. The RRs still held stockpiles of coal so large as to make fueling the beasts practically free, and setting up a new fueling network for oil wouldn't have been cheap. That's on top of some advantages wrt traction, torque and drawbar loading that modern diesels still haven't beaten. I'm looking for book recommendations on this transition period if you have any