Yes, even news value in the ‘news’paper is disappearing. It is just another severe shift everyone faces in culture’s future. Over four hundred medium and large market newspapers have been bought by hedge funds and venture capitalists. In every case except a very few, the newspapers are stripped of expensive investigative reporting and local news reporting thereby reducing overhead to gain an average of fifty percent profit versus fifteen percent.

The latest round includes Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, New York Daily News and major metro papers from Hartford, Conn. to Fort Lauderdale, Fla. These newspapers have been bought by the hedge fund, Alden Global Capital, referred to as the ‘Vulture Fund’. Fortunately, a very few newspapers are picked up by altruistic investors, e.g., Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post to assure full, unadulterated coverage of news.

So add newspapers to movie theaters, department stores, coffee houses and bars. Notice how these things all required physical movement and personal commitment to achieve? Mariner has decided not to wish for a new Maserati for Christmas.

Instead he only needs a hover board to go to the post office.

Mariner is reading a book titled, “The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For – How a new generation of leaders will transform America” By Charlotte Alter. Mariner swears that some of the points in this book were lifted from his Blog. Alter, like mariner, says we must wait until the old timers get out of the way, that it is the millennials who know the answers. She cites emerging personalities in several fields of endeavor like science, business, international politics and local government (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is one of several in government).

Alter says we won’t really know what things will look like until the millennials are pretty much in charge of everything. For one example, they know more intuitively what a cloud is and what it can do besides make it rain.

So, millennials, will mariner and his wife ever go to the movies again? Will they ever meander among racks of new sweaters and shirts? Will they be able to go on a cheap date to McDonald’s instead of waiting for a drone?

Ancient Mariner