I may be the only person in the US who never heard Limbaugh. I knew who he was, but I never heard his show - perhaps because I rarely drive so don't listen to the radio.
I have always believed that Rush's reach via national AM radio had every bit to do with his ascension and popularity as his message did. Before satellite radio, if I wanted to listen to talk radio at a certain point of the day...it was going to be Rush or sports talk. So I listened to Rush quite a bit back 20+ years ago. Eventually I could read through his BS. Not to say I didn't ever agree with him and not to say he was always wrong, but I would just as soon listen to Ed Schultz (who is also dead) or my favorite liberal radio show is Thom Hartman. I just didn't have an alternative back then, it was talk radio with Rush from 12-3 or something else not related like music or sports. Depends where you live and what you get on the dial. That fact that he just happened to be on for so many people that grew the fan base.
Good riddance I say...That’s about as kind a phrase I can use to describe his passing.
Definitely complicated. Society will likely always try and find the happy medium between regulation and free market. Game Stop debacle is a prime example of how the market can be manipulated. The Texas power grid failure is a prime example of deregulation failure (combined with crazy weather). The housing crash in 2008 a prime example of both.
New York City is complicated. I think you overstate the homeless, it's definitely an issue but it's an issue in every metro area. Miami has a homeless issue. Key West has a homeless issue. Some areas are more successful at sweeping it under the rug away from tourists. And many homeless know tourists are easy marks. Only commuters and tourists go to Penn Station.
NYC leans liberal yet elects conservative Mayors. It has high taxes to run its numerous public services (public transportation, parks, schools), yet is the international center of capitalism. The cost of living has soared there since the 1990s, only banks and chains could afford commercial rents in some areas of Brooklyn and Queens that were once home to family-owned businesses. I think the development and greed hit a breaking point, the pendulum needed to swing back the other way. It's still the greatest city.
I can't really comment on isms, but the point about wealth is disingenuous. All those fabulous estates & penthouses seen in wealthy areas in the US aren't necessarily owned by wealthy Americans w/wealth derived from capitalism. A significant percentage is owned by international entities & individuals who got their money from oil (Saudis), finance, entertainment, & electronics (Japan), & niche booms (South America & Scandinavia).
There are US banking/financial institutions who devote entire subsidiaries to the acquisition of real estate portfolios for off-shore clients. Way back when TFP (the former president) was flogging his early NYC condos, his market was Japanese because the US economy was in the toilet at the time.
Things are changing. Entertainment/sports used to be an enormous $$$ sector - when the "talent" made multi-year astronomical deals. I don't think a career rise like Limbaugh's would happen today; he'd be doing a podcast like everyone else hoping to attract enough SM followers to get noticed. The icon is Kylie Jenner who became a self-made billionaire (Forbes) before 21 as an Influencer.
What we have now is a truly global economy & a global pandemic is making everyone dance to a new tune.
Of course, there are still those who make money the old fashioned way - like McConnell - by marrying it & increasing his net worth from $2.5mm to $35mm.
@porkchopbob6 My dad was a dealer for Sylvania TVs and Acoustic Research high fidelity speakers and amps and AR for years had a sound proof demonstration room in the 1950's and 1960's at Grand Central Station. I would go to New York City with him for a month every summer and in my early adult life lived in New York.
You are right. It is a fantastic city and hopefully will rebound Post pandemic.
In the 1950's the docks on the Hudson had many huge ships in and out. It was exciting to see the Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth, Rex, The SS United States and others.
First time I visited the top of the Empire State Building was 1953.
Times Square was a neon mecca. Kleenex tissue sign where the neon was animated to look as if an arm and hand was removing a tissue from the box. Two giant Pepsi- Cola bottles, dazzling Coke and Canadian Mist signs and a huge neon Camel cigarette sign that blew a smoke ring across Broadway.
I attended the 1964 World's Fair and saw a model of the proposed World Trade Center twin towers. I remember when Tower one was topped out in 1970. The ABB was in town more and more then.
New York City is indeed a monument to capitalism and the American way.
Times Square neon and blubs in 1957.
Very little neon there now. Mostly LED.
@cyclone88 Kylie Jenner was born into an incredibly wealthy family who also happen to have a TV show. I'm hesitant to call anyone like Trump or the Kardashians "self-made". But I get your point, Alex Jones isn't getting Sirius XM money.
A good microcosm of capitalism in the USA is Palm Beach, FL. Full of just the kind of affluent people who hit it big such as Trump and Limbaugh. Beaches are mostly private, lined with mansions that may only be used a few days out of the year.
Just across the bridge in West Palm Beach (where Butch Trucks lived) is a small downtown that was blighted for years and still has a homeless issue, which makes it hard for the restaurants and businesses to attract customers. There are condos, but nothing like the money across the water. Unlike other municipalities along the intra-coastal they don't benefit from the wealth along the beach. Definitely a tale of two cities.
A lot of those mansions are owned by people who gain and lose fortunes quickly. "Broke on a bigger budget" - the term I use to describe them.
Rush Limbaugh ... "talk radio" in general - came to be circa 1987 when the Fairness Doctrine was nullified by Dennis Patrick's FCC under President Ronald Reagan. The Fairness Doctrine was a basic tenet of broadcasting. It mandated that broadcast stations give equal access to opposing points of controversial issues. Once it was gone, the doors were swung wide open for anybody with enough money to purchase as many stations as they wanted and then flood the airwaves with whatever dogma that they saw fit without having to worry about being correct or anything like that.
I studied this stuff many years ago (almost 45!). There was once a "rule of threes" that went something like,: " ... In a radio market with 14 or fewer radio stations, an entity may own up to five radio stations, no more than three of which may be in the same service, as long as the entity does not own more than 50 percent of all radio stations in that market ... (Wikipedia quote).
With the removal of the Fairness Doctrine, the Equal Time Rule and this "rule of threes" - the guy with the most money can effectively CONTROL the thoughts of the population. If every button that you push on your car radio (for example) brings up a guy talking (in between songs that are waaaaay over-played - but I digress) voicing the same opinions about political or other controversial issues - people will begin to absorb these thoughts and ideas and even construe them as "truths". If you think about it, it's a very dangerous idea.
So Limbaugh and his ilk (Rupert Murdoch, Sinclair Media Group, Breitbart et al) can BUY the media and use it to carry out their message (read: BULLSHIT) without having to worry about giving fair time for rebuttal or correction. They also do what politicians have been doing for eons - make people feel like they're VICTIMS and play to their fears ... and wallets/pocketbooks.
Sorry about the long diatribe.
@cyclone88 And John Kerry married Senator Heinz's widow and stepped in to the world of the super rich.
I understand Kerry is sick of having to put Heinz Ketchup on everything now and said if he saw one more jar of Heinz pickles he is going to faint.
His wife has 57 varieties of mustard to smear on his hotdogs too.
The climate czar. And admitted if the US went to zero tomorrow the problem wouldn't be fixed at all because 90% of CO2 being spewed into the atmosphere comes from outside the US.
Whatever France tries to do will cause the yellow vests to throw rocks and burn cars.
@robertdee that's awesome, I love hearing stories of old NYC. Is this from your dad's shop?
Have you seen they opened Moynihan Station in the old Post Office across from Penn Station?
I lived in Brooklyn for over 10 years, most of it in the Red Hook neighborhood. It's also a complicated neighborhood. It was a waterfront neighborhood (On the Waterfront was based there), lots of dockworkers until they removed the dry dock there and the shipping mostly moved to NJ. It has the largest campus of public housing projects, but it was also cut off from a lot of Brooklyn when Robert Moses built the BQE. With no work or transportation, it became blighted harder than most neighborhoods (the grade school across the street from me was named after the principal who was shot and killed while looking for truant students).
Fast forward to today, it's waterfront property to developers. Lots of new condos popping up around an area no one wanted to live in. Bars and restaurants constantly popping up for the first time in 40 years. There's even an IKEA with a water taxi to Manhattan. They reopened the cruise terminal and the Queen Mary II now docks there. A lot of the old-timers who lived there when no one else wanted to are getting priced out of their own neighborhood, especially after Hurricane Sandy left owners without flood insurance high and dry with flooded basements.
But like you say, it's complicated. The problem with living somewhere nice is that everyone wants to live there.
found some chatter about your Dad's AR Room: https://community.classicspeakerpages.net/topic/10071-ar-demonstration-room-in-grand-central-station-photo/
Forbes described Kylie as self-made not me. She may have had family name & money but she is only one of many zillionaire celebrity families to reach the Billion mark w/HER brands.
I am very familiar w/Palm Beach & there's plenty of non-US money there. They hold their nose as they zip through WPB on the way to their equestrian estates in Wellington. A lot of money was poured into downtown WPB w/modest success, but the rest of it could be Anywhere, FL. Don't see any communities benefitting from water access until much further south at Deerfield/Deerfield Beach. FL's southeast coast is pockets of wealth, municipalities of middle class, & crime/poverty & a mishmash of government entities & planning scrapping w/each other.
@cyclone88 I'm still not sure if it's a good thing or a bad one - but with social media everybody/anybody can get a spot on the ol' soap box. Some aren't taken seriously - some more so than they should be (perhaps).
@cyclone88 she definitely built her brands, but I'm just saying she had a pretty comfortable head start.
Downtown WPB has come a long way. It was starting to turn the corner before the pandemic hit. The towns between WPB and Deerfield all have public beaches, Deerfield is just more of a tourist spot.
A final thought. Early radio bursting into the stratosphere made me think of podcasts which seemingly everyone, including their dogs & cats, have & they're unregulated.
What's more insidious is tiktok - where not only do algorithms push to make videos go viral but there are tiktokers whose entire account is how to make the algorithm work for you or whatever you're selling or promoting.
As I said, Forbes called her self-made & pointed out celebrity children aren't billionaires in their own right by 21; they couldn't name one. Maybe that should be our next "Things that___________" topic. Celebrity kids who made a fortune in a field separate from their parents. 😊
@porkchopbob Wow porkchopbob! That is it!! Brings back such sweet memories. Can't count the time I stood at that beautiful marble wall looking down at the huge concourse in Grand Central. I even loved the way things sounded in there. People walking and talking and the sound just bounced around and traveled with a different sound and experience in there.
I still have a pair of AR3 speakers my dad had hooked up to my stereo. They still sound great. Man crank up my old vinyl At Fillmore East and it stomps!! Berry Oakley's bass sounds as if it's in the room.
My dad knew a man who worked for RCA in the Empire State Building. They had installed a television antenna on the roof of the Empire State Building in 1950 and he was an engineer there. We got to tour the tower in 1953 and I clearly remember being on the 103rd floor and we were afraid to step out onto the little circular balcony at the 103rd floor as the wall only came up to your waist.
And below the 102nd floor observatory the floors were steel mesh like a grate and you could see the floors below as you could look through each floor and on the four sides of floors 91 to 101 was large light blubs that illuminated the spire at night. And running in a circle around the 103rd floor were smaller lights that they stopped using in the late 1950s.
The next time I noticed them on was in 1986 so I called the building the next day to ask why they had been left off for 3 decades and the lady said they just recently discovered those " halo" lights were there!! 
I should have called in the 1960's:) In 1964 they added lights that lit the building from about floor 70 to 86.
Did you ever take the Circle Line boat ride around Manhattan?
Here is Jack Beers singing on the 103rd floor and notice the halo lights ringing the circle just below the TV antenna.
@porkchopbob Thanks again porkchopbob! I spent so much time there as a kid and teenager in the summer.
Wish I had know about this in 2018 and joined their conversation.
When stereo was introduced and you then needed a modern stereo stylus on your turntable and two high fidelity speakers instead of one, AR came out with a demonstration record I may still have. It was blue vinyl and not only did it have some music tracks in stereo, it had tracks that were very novel for its day.
A firetruck with siren moving from left to right, a ping pong match with the ball going left right, left right etc, a locomotive passing by etc.
With stereo high fidelity and color TV coming out we were absolutely in modern times!! How could technology get anymore advanced?
When my dad got his first color television and we sat in the living room watching, there wasn't any color. Just black and white. Then two days later on Sunday night FINALLY color!!
This suddenly appeared on the screen!
