In 2014 Esquire argued that great movies like The Matrix "predicted a revolution in film that never happened," adding "We are in many ways worse off now than we were 15 years ago as a culture. We seem to have run out of original ideas."

This week two film critics debated whether 1999 was in fact cinema's last great year. Slashdot reader dryriver writes: Notable films of 1999 are Fight Club, Magnolia, The Matrix, Eyes Wide Shut, Three Kings, The Sixth Sense, EXistenZ, Being John Malkovich, Man On The Moon, American Beauty, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Office Space, Boys Don't Cry, Election, Rushmore, Buena Vista Social Club, The Virgin Suicides, Sleepy Hollow, The Insider, Girl Interrupted, The Iron Giant and Toy Story 2.

According to Nicholas Barber, 1999 also was the beginning of the end for quality cinema:

"The release of Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace proved that long-dormant series could be lucratively revived. Toy Story 2, the first ever Pixar sequel, proved that cartoon follow-ups needn't be straight-to-video cheapies, but major, money-spinning phenomena. The Matrix proved that digitally-enhanced superhero action could attract audiences of all ages. And The Blair Witch Project proved that found-footage horror in particular, and microbudget horror in general, could be a gold mine. As wonderful as those films may have been -- The Phantom Menace excepted, obviously -- they taught Hollywood some toxic lessons. Instead of continuing to bet on young mavericks, studio executives twigged that there was a fortune to be made from superhero blockbusters, Disney sequels, merchandise-friendly franchises and cheapo horror movies. And that's what we get in 2019, week after week."
He also writes that the boom in DVDs in 1999 had "encouraged studios to fund offbeat projects," ultimately concluding 1999 was "the year when everything began to go wrong." He argues that today it's a different technology driving innovation. "In the 21st Century, streaming platforms have made the small screen the home of fresh ideas, as well as for conversation-starting communal cultural experiences."

But film critic Hannah Woodhead counters with a line from the 1999 film Magnolia: "We may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us."

"Nostalgia is often the enemy of progress when it comes to pop culture. We have a tendency to look back fondly on what came before, ironing out the flaws in our memory until the past is something that seems truly great, and even aspirational."

The Consumer Electronics Show will allow sex toys to win awards and be presented on the show floor next year under the show's health and wellness section. "The Consumer Technology Association, which runs the show, says they're being included on a 'one-year trial basis,' meant to assess how they fit into the category," reports The Verge. The group is also cracking down on "sexually revealing" clothing. From the report: The CTA is also updating the dress code policy for CES in an attempt to further crack down on companies hiring models to wear revealing clothing as a way to bring visitors to their booths. This kind of behavior has generally been banned already, but the CTA is now adding a punishment for violators: they risk losing rank in a tenure system that helps them attain a good position on the show floor. The new rules say that companies can get in trouble for outfits that are "sexually revealing or that could be interpreted as undergarments." If clothing reveals "an excess of bare skin" or "hugs genitalia," it will be banned as well. The guidelines apply to all staff. Pornography will remain banned on the show floor. The CTA says the ban will now be "strictly enforced with no exceptions," whereas some has slipped through in previous years.

CES has maintained confusing policies around sex tech for years, and those rules have never seemed to be evenly enforced. Some companies, like the sex toy company OhMiBod, have been able to find a place on the show floor for years; others, like the porn studio Naughty America, have been able to show VR demoes in private booths. But the show's policies have seemingly prohibited all of this, and it's meant that other companies interested in showing their sex-related products have been unable to present at the enormous annual convention.

sciencehabit writes: To gauge the performance of a supercomputer, computer scientists turn to a standard tool: a set of algorithms called LINPACK that tests how fast the machine solves problems with huge numbers of variables. For quantum computers, which might one day solve certain problems that overwhelm conventional computers, no such benchmarking standard exists. One reason is that the computers, which aim to harness the laws of quantum mechanics to accelerate certain computations, are still rudimentary, with radically different designs contending. In some, the quantum bits, or qubits, needed for computation are embodied in the spin of strings of trapped ions, whereas others rely on patches of superconducting metal resonating with microwaves. Comparing the embryonic architectures "is sort of like visiting a nursery school to decide which of the toddlers will become basketball stars," says Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at the University of Texas in Austin.

Yet researchers are making some of their first attempts to take the measure of quantum computers. Last week, Margaret Martonosi, a computer scientist at Princeton University, and colleagues presented a head-to-head comparison of quantum computers from IBM, Rigetti Computing in Berkeley, California, and the University of Maryland (UMD) in College Park. The UMD machine, which uses trapped ions, ran a majority of 12 test algorithms more accurately than the other superconducting machines, the team reported at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture in Phoenix. Christopher Monroe, a UMD physicist and founder of the company IonQ, predicts such comparisons will become the standard. "These toy algorithms give you a simple answer -- did it work or not?" But even Martonosi warns against making too much of the tests. In fact, the analysis underscores how hard it is to compare quantum computers -- which leaves room for designers to choose metrics that put their machines in a favorable light.

Maybe American kids will only have to live through one Christmas without Toys "R" Us. About a year after shuttering U.S. operations, the remnant of the defunct toy chain is set to return this holiday season by opening about a half dozen U.S. stores and an e-commerce site, according to a report. From the report: Richard Barry, a former Toys "R" Us executive who is now CEO of new entity Tru Kids, has been pitching his vision to reincarnate the chain to toymakers, including at an industry conference this week, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren't public. The stores are slated to be about 10,000-square feet, roughly a third of the size of the brand's big-box outlets that closed last year, the people said. The locations will also have more experiences, like play areas. The startup costs could be minimized with a consignment inventory model in which toymakers ship goods but don't get paid until consumers buy them, some of the people said.

Technology writer Matthew MacDonald began writing QuickBASIC code back in 1988 on the DOS operating system, sharing it on a 3.5-inch floppy disk. "I still remember writing code in white text on its cheery blue background..."

He tells his readers on Medium that "I have a confession to make. Before I became a respectable developer working with modern curly-bracket languages like C# and Java (and that hot mess of a platform we call JavaScript), I was a dedicated fan of the wildly popular misfit Visual Basic..."

At the same time that Microsoft released Windows 3.0 -- the first version that was truly successful -- they also launched Visual Basic 1.0. Here was something entirely new. You could create buttons for your programs by drawing them on the surface of a window, like it was some kind of art canvas. To make a button do something, all you had to do was double-click it in the design environment and write some code. And you didn't use cryptic C++ code, with piles of classes, complex memory management, and obscure calls into the Windows API. Instead, you wrote friendly-looking VB code, like a civilized person.

All the graphical pizzazz was impressive, but the real secret to VB's success was its practicality. There was simply no other tool that a developer could use to sketch out a complete user interface and get coding as quickly as VB... By the release of VB 6 -- the last version of classic Visual Basic -- it was estimated that there were ten times more coders writing in VB than in the unforgiving C++ language. And they weren't just mocking up toy applications. Visual Basic wormed its way into company offices and even onto the web through ASP (Active Server Pages), another monstrously popular technology. Now you could create web pages that talked to VB components, called databases, and wrote HTML on the fly...

Today, Visual Basic is in a strange position. It has roughly 0% of the mindshare among professional developers -- it doesn't even chart in professional developer surveys or show up in GitHub repositories. However, it's still out there in the wild, holding Office macros together, powering old Access databases and ancient ASP web pages, and attracting .NET newcomers. The TIOBE index, which attempts to gauge language popularity by looking at search results, still ranks VB in the top five most talked-about languages. But it seems that the momentum has shifted for the last time. In 2017, Microsoft announced that it would begin adding new language features to C# that might never appear in Visual Basic. The change doesn't return VB to ugly duckling status, but it does take away some of its .NET status....

Visual Basic has been threatened before. But this time feels different. It seems like the sun is finally setting on one of the world's most popular programming languages. Even if it's true, Visual Basic won't disappear for decades. Instead, it will become another legacy product, an overlooked tool without a passion or a future.
He remembers that the last versions of Visual Basic even supported object-oriented programming with interfaces, polymorphism, and class libraries, but argues that to create .NET, Microsoft "had to throw away almost all of classic VB."

For example, "Classic VB programmers had to change the way they counted array elements. No longer could they start at 1, like ordinary people. Now they had to start at 0, like official programmers."

"It took 10 months to get it done, but the Granite State is now officially a Geeky State," writes Concord Monitor science reporter David Brooks.

"The latest New Hampshire Historical Highway Marker, celebrating the creation of the BASIC computer language at Dartmouth in 1964, has officially been installed. Everybody who has ever typed a GOTO command can feel proud..." Last August, I wrote in this column that the 255 official historical markers placed alongside state roads told us enough about covered bridges and birthplaces of famous people but not enough about geekiness. Since anybody can submit a suggestion for a new sign, I thought I'd give it a shot.

The creation of BASIC, the first programing language designed to let newbies dip their intellectual toes into the cutting-edge world of software, seemed the obvious candidate. Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code has probably has done more to introduce more people to computer programming than anything ever created. That includes me: The only functioning programs I've ever created were in vanilla BASIC, and I still recall the great satisfaction of typing 100 END...

But BASIC wasn't just a toy for classrooms. It proved robust enough to survive for decades, helping launch Microsoft along the way, and there are descendants still in use today. In short, it's way more important than any covered bridge.
The campaign for the marker was supported by Thomas Kurtz, the retired Dartmouth math professor who'd created BASIC along with the late John Kemeny. "Our original idea was to mention both BASIC and the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, an early system by which far-flung computers could share resources. They were created hand-in-hand as part of Kemeny's idea of putting computing in the hands of the unwashed masses.

"However, the N.H. Division of Historical Resources, which has decades of experience creating these markers, said it would be too hard to cram both concepts into the limited verbiage of a sign."

The highway marker calls BASIC "the first user-friendly computer programming languages... BASIC made computer programming accessible to college students and, with the later popularity of personal computers, to users everywhere. It became the standard way that people all over the world learned to program computers, and variants of BASIC are still in use today."

In the original submission, an anonymous Slashdot reader notes that last month, Manchester New Hampshire also unveiled a statue of Ralph Baer, whose team built the first home video game sold as Magnavox Odyssey, sitting on a park bench. "The Granite State isn't shy about its geek side."

Last year, it was reported that Lego was investing $120 million and hiring about 100 people to eliminate its dependence on petroleum-based plastics, and build its toys entirely from plant-based or recycled materials by 2030. The effort has been seven years in the making, "but it keeps hitting brick walls," as The Wall Street Journal reports. From the report: Lego tried making pieces from corn, but they were too soft. Its wheat-based bricks didn't absorb color evenly or have the requisite shine. Bricks made from other materials proved too hard to pull apart, broke or had what executives call "creep," when bricks lose their grip and collapse. Lego has so far tested more than 200 combinations of materials, but just 2% of its products are made from plant-based plastic. The Danish company says it is still exploring several promising options, but finding the material to hit its target is proving difficult. Some materials proved problematic to mold with Lego's existing machinery. Recycled plastic is an option, but Lego needs large food-grade volumes with guarantees on provenance and quality.

Lego's slow progress is emblematic of a broader struggle to use plants like corn and sugar cane instead of oil to make plastic, which advocates say would lower greenhouse-gas emissions. Lego has had some success with plastic partly made of plants. So has Coca-Cola, which has sold bottles using 30% plant-based packaging since 2009. But unlike Coca-Cola, when Lego couldn't find a way to source the remaining 70%, it decided not to go to market. "Ultimately we want a zero-impact product," said Tim Guy Brooks, Lego's head of environmental responsibility. For now, there's always recycling -- Lego-style.

Boston Dynamics is about to launch its first ever commercial product -- a quadrupedal robot named Spot. The Verge reports: Spot is currently being tested in a number of "proof-of-concept" environments, Boston Dynamics' CEO Marc Raibert told The Verge, including package delivery and surveying work. And although there's no firm launch date for the commercial version of Spot, it should be available within months, said Raibert, and certainly before the end of the year. "We're just doing some final tweaks to the design," said the CEO. "We've been testing them relentlessly."

Rather than selling the robot as a single-use tool, it's positioning it as a "mobility platform" that can be customized by users to complete a range of tasks. A Spot robot mounted with 3D cameras can map environments like construction sites, identifying hazards and work progress. When equipped with a robot arm, it has even greater flexibility, able to open doors and manipulate objects. At Re:MARS, a Spot with a robot arm used it to pick up items, including a cuddly toy that was then offered to a flesh-and-blood police dog. The dog was unimpressed with the robot, but happy, at least, to receive the toy. Raibert says it's this "athletic intelligence" that Boston Dynamics will be selling through its robots. Think of it like Amazon's AWS business, but instead of offering computing power on tap, its robotic mobility. How much will Spot cost? Raibert only said that the commercial version will be "much less expensive than prototypes [and] we think they'll be less expensive than other peoples' quadrupeds."

He did, however, reveal that the company had already found some paying customers, including construction companies in Japan who are testing Spot as a way to oversee the progress of work on sites.

For more than three decades, Stephen Wolfram, a 59-year-old scientist, software designer and entrepreneur, has built software that has attracted an avid following among mathematicians and scientists. His Mathematica program for symbolic mathematical computation and its programming language, Wolfram Language, are favorites of the intelligentsia of the quant world in universities and corporations. Wolfram Alpha, one of his creations, is a unique search engine that does not forage the web, but culls its own painstakingly curated database to find answers. This week, the search engine turned 10. On the big occasion, Mr. Wolfram has shared some insight: It was a unique and surprising achievement when it first arrived, and over its first decade it's become ever stronger and more unique. It's found its way into more and more of the fabric of the computational world, both realizing some of the long-term aspirations of artificial intelligence, and defining new directions for what one can expect to be possible. Oh, and by now, a significant fraction of a billion people have used it. And we've been able to keep it private and independent, and its main website has stayed free and without external advertising.

As the years have gone by, Wolfram Alpha has found its way into intelligent assistants like Siri, and now also Alexa. It's become part of chatbots, tutoring systems, smart TVs, NASA websites, smart OCR apps, talking (toy) dinosaurs, smart contract oracles, and more. It's been used by an immense range of people, for all sorts of purposes. Inventors have used it to figure out what might be possible. Leaders and policymakers have used it to make decisions. Professionals have used it to do their jobs every day. People around the world have used it to satisfy their curiosity about all sorts of peculiar things. And countless students have used it to solve problems, and learn. The footage of the launch of Alpha, from 10 years ago.

The classic Windows game Solitaire has joined such landmarks as Doom, Tetris, and World of Warcraft in being inducted into the Strong Museum of Play's World Video Game Hall of Fame. The award recognizes Solitaire's role as a significant part of gaming's history. From a report: Solitaire was first bundled with Windows 3.0. Much like the other notable bundled game, Minesweeper, Solitaire was there to serve as a secret tutorial: in a time when the mouse was still regarded as a new and exotic piece of computer hardware, Solitaire honed clicking, double clicking, and drag-and-drop skills. As a computerized version of a familiar card game, it was instantly recognizable. It was bundled with every subsequent Windows version, up to Windows 7. Windows 8 replaced it with a much more varied set of card games. The combination of approachability and bundling means that the game has been installed on more than a billion PCs, and it has likely been played by many billions of people.

Anki, the San Francisco startup behind AI-imbued robotics toys like Overdrive, Cozmo, and Vector, today shuttered its doors after raising close to $200 million in venture capital from Index Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures, J.P. Morgan, Andreessen Horowitz, and other investors. From a report: According to Recode , it'll lay off its entire workforce of just over 200 employees, each of whom will receive a week of severance. A failed round of financing was reportedly to blame. CEO Boris Softman told employees last week that a deal failed to materialize "at the last minute," as did acquisition interest from companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Comcast. Anki claimed to have sold 6.5 million devices total, and 1.5 million robots last August alone. (Cozmo was the top-selling toy on Amazon in 2017 with a community of more than 15,000 developers.) And in fall 2018, the company revealed that revenue was close to $100 million in 2017, a figure it expected to beat the subsequent year.

Apple has unveiled a few different subscription services today at its "show time" event, including a new Apple Arcade game subscription service for titles that can be installed from the App Store. The company is aiming to curate some of the 300,000 games currently available from the App Store into this new ad-free subscription service. "There will be 100 new and exclusive games available on Apple Arcade, which will launch on the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV," reports The Verge. From the report: These games won't be available on any other mobile platform or any subscription service other than Apple Arcade. Games will be downloaded and played straight from the App Store, and subscribers will be able to try games whenever they want and resume them across devices. All of the game features, content, and future updates will be included, and there will be no ads shown within the games.

SimCity creator Will Wright is also making a game for the service. Apple is promising games from Annapurna Interactive, Bossa Studios, Cartoon Network, Finji, Giant Squid, Klei Entertainment, Konami, Lego, Mistwalker Corporation, SEGA, Snowman, ustwo games, and more. Apple isn't just curating the games for Apple Arcade; it's actually planning to contribute to the development costs of creating them. Apple might not have announced its own game studio today, but it's certainly a big step toward that. Apple Arcade is launching this fall in more than 150 countries, but Apple is not yet revealing pricing for this subscription service. Apple does say that "access for up to six family members," will be available, suggesting you'll be able to share the subscription. While the full list of games isn't available yet, some of the titles revealed on Apple Arcade's website include: LEGO Brawls, HitchHiker, Kings of the Castle, Where Cards Fall, and Frogger in Toy Town. If you're a game developer, you can sign up for more information about the service here.

Long-time Slashdot reader beckman101 writes: This week Electric Dollar Store opened its doors, selling interchangeable postage-stamp sized I2C-based modules for prices between $1.00 and $1.80. The modules include lights, buzzers, counters and sensors — the range is aimed at electronic makers. These aren't manufacturing rejects shipping from Asia — they're assembled, tested and shipped from a small farming town in California, where winter labor is cheap.

All the code for the project is BSD licensed.

The project is a spin-off from the popular open-source I2CDriver hardware debugger.

This weekend's annual LibrePlanet conference, hosted by the Free Software Foundation, prompted a new essay about "install fests" from Richard Stallman: Install fests invite users to bring their computers so that experts can install GNU/Linux on them... The problem is that most computers can't run with a completely free GNU/Linux distro. They contain peripherals, or coprocessors, that won't operate unless the installed system contains some nonfree drivers or firmware... This presents the install fest with a dilemma. If it upholds the ideals of freedom, by installing only free software from 100%-free distros, partly-secret machines won't become entirely functional and the users that bring them will go away disappointed. However, if the install fest installs nonfree distros and nonfree software which make machines entirely function, it will fail to teach users to say no for freedom's sake. They may learn to like GNU/Linux, but they won't learn what the free software movement stands for.... In effect, the install fest makes the deal with the devil, on the user's behalf, behind a curtain so the user doesn't recognize that it is one.

I propose that the install fest show users exactly what deal they are making. Let them talk with the devil individually, learn the deal's bad implications, then make a deal -- or refuse! As always, I call on the install fest itself to install only free software, taking a strict stance. In this way it can set a clear moral example of rejecting nonfree software. My new idea is that the install fest could allow the devil to hang around, off in a corner of the hall, or the next room. (Actually, a human being wearing a sign saying "The Devil," and maybe a toy mask or horns.) The devil would offer to install nonfree drivers in the user's machine to make more parts of the computer function, explaining to the user that the cost of this is using a nonfree (unjust) program... Those users that get nonfree drivers would see what their moral cost is, and that there are people in the community who refuse to pay that cost.

They would have the chance to reflect afterwards on the situation that their flawed computers have put them in, and about how to change that situation, in the small and in the large.
Stallman adds that the Free Software Foundation itself would never let a devil near its events. "But given the fact that most install fests quietly play the role of the devil, I think that an explicit devil would be less bad.

"It would convert the install-fest dilemma from a debilitating contradiction into a teaching experience."

Over at Quartz, Ephrat Livni reports that a 60 Minutes story about gender equality accidentally proved the persistence of patriarchy. Reader theodp shares the report: Good intentions are nice, but they aren't enough, the TV news show 60 Minutes recently proved. The show's producers apparently meant well when they decided to do a segment on women in technology and the gender gap, which aired on March 4. But they ended up punching women in the gut, as the founder and CEO of Girls Who Code, Reshma Saujani, puts it in her response to the segment. Ultimately, 60 Minutes featured a man, Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi. His [tech-backed] organization's mission is to expand access to computer science education in schools.

Women technologists like Saujani who were tapped to appear on the show about a year ago and worked with producers to provide research and interviews, ended up on the cutting room floor while Partovi spoke on their behalf. Here is the cruel irony: As a result, 60 Minutes' segment was accidentally exceptionally effective-it proved that women in tech really can't catch a break. [...] Ayah Bdeir, the founder of STEM learning toy company littleBits, also responded to the episode in a Medium post. She noted that she worked with 60 Minutes for a year, planning interviews, providing research, talking to the producers and reporters, telling her story and that of her organization, which is focused on closing the gender gap in technology. Yet producers wrote to her last August to say that the focus of the segment had shifted and that littleBits would no longer be central in the story. In an email, a producer explained to her, 'It's not that the important points you made in your interview are ignored in the story, or that you didn't make them very effectively, they're just made by others'.

An anonymous reader quotes CBS News: Parents are realizing that it's not just Santa who's keeping tabs on their kids. Many popular high-tech gadgets that may end up being given as holiday presents can actually track, monitor and record children. Because of that, there are some gifts Felicity and Alden Eute won't have under their Christmas tree. Their mother, Emily, has banned all tech gifts this season. "My husband and I both agree kids don't really need to be on technology or on social media," Emily said. "None of these extra gadgets that just expose you to things kids shouldn't be exposed to at their age."

While federal law requires a parent's permission to track and collect data on children under 13, a Federal Trade Commission complaint filed this week alleges widespread violations through apps that "send persistent identifiers to third parties without giving direct notice to parents." That means things like location data, phone numbers and contact information could be exposed, according to Serge Engleman of the International Computer Science Institute. The institute's surveillance system, under the direction of Engleman, collected evidence that is now before the Federal Trade Commission.... It's not only apps where there are potential violations. "Any kind of interconnected robot-type toys...interactive games that you may play online are collecting data," said Scott Pink, a privacy and cybersecurity specialist.

An anonymous reader writes: An updated version of the singing "Big Mouth Billy Bass" plastic fish toy now speaks (with synchronized lip movements) with the voice of Alexa. "Your humdrum life will be totally uprooted because you hung a talking fish on your wall," jokes Fast Company. "Just imagine setting an alarm and being woken up by a Big Mouth Billy Bass dancing and flopping around while it sings to you," adds Mashable.

But more than half the device's 100 reviews from Amazon customer's award it just one star (with another 15% awarding two stars). "The programming on these fish are awful," wrote one reviewer, complaining that the sound continues coming from the Echo device (rather than through the fish's speaker), and when it does actualy sync to the music, "the tail flaps and head movements are off-beat and look terrible."

Meanwhile, late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel recently staged a skit with a carolling "choir" of Amazon's smart speakers dressed in Christmas sweaters and caps — a skit which ends with the devices producing a horrific cacophony that Kimmel was unable stop. Kimmel then instructs a stagehand to bring the choir of singing Alexa units "to the ocean, and dump it in."

Sphero's hinted that it's getting out of the licensed product game, but this week CEO Paul Berberian confirmed that the company is clearing out its remaining licensed inventory and won't be restocking the supply. From a report: That means the company won't be producing any more BB-8s, R2-D2s, Lightning McQueen cars, or talking Spider-Mans. The listings for all the toys list them as "legacy products" that are no longer in production. App support will continue for "at least two years, if not longer," Berberian says. The Disney partnership lasted three years, but ultimately, the licensed toy business required more resources than it was worth, Berberian tells The Verge. These toys sold well when released with a movie, but interest waned over time as the movie became more distant, he says. Still, the company sold "millions" of BB-8s, although company data shows that the toys weren't used much after initial play time and eventually sat on shelves.

New submitter Bruce Henry shares a story: Today's aging workforce faces an uncertain future. The announcement this week that General Motors will lay off 15 percent of its salaried workforce and shutter multiple plants in North America was a sobering reminder of how far the American worker has fallen. Unlike most large private sector corporations today, thousands of employees at GM still enjoy some union benefits. The company has reportedly set aside $2 billion for layoffs and buyouts. It's not much, but it's something -- many workers, if they are laid off en masse, will be far less lucky. Some older Americans are lucky enough to have been grandfathered into generous pension plans and others hope social security and personal savings will be enough to sustain themselves. But for millions of younger people, the outlook is bleaker -- an ever-diminishing social safety net, with retirement dependent almost entirely on how well they manage savings. Two-thirds of millennials have nothing saved for retirement.

The private sector pension as we once knew it is all but dead. Public sector pensions, meanwhile, are under attack at the state level. "Companies don't offer pensions anymore. Social security, when it was established, was meant to be one leg of a stool," says Gerald Friedman, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "One leg would be the private pension through employment, a second leg personal savings, and a third leg social security. Social security is now the only source of income of a lot elderly have." What, if anything, are our politicians doing about this? Progressives rail against President Donald Trump, but real retirement security has not been a big enough part of the conversation on either side of the political spectrum. Millions of Americans are in danger of entering their final decades unable to afford ballooning medical bills and cost-of-living expenses. This is a huge problem, and one that liberals in particular should have capitalized on this election cycle.

Amazon is shipping its first-ever printed holiday toy catalog, titled "A Holiday of Play," to millions of customers in the U.S. starting this month, the company said. From a report: "Amazon is excited to offer a new way for customers to shop for toys this holiday season," Amazon said in a statement. The catalog comes with a distinct retro look, invoking memories of old Toys "R" Us catalogs that made the now-defunct toy retailer so successful. Some of the featured toys come with a QR code, allowing readers to instantly scan and shop for more products. Readers can also scan the product images in the catalog with their Amazon App to get more information and add them to their shopping cart. The move is Amazon's latest in following the playbook of traditional brick-and-mortar retailers.