Personal computers have become a distraction, like TV sets. People watching TV are generally not very productive.1 Before the internet we referred to TV as "the opiate of the masses".2 Not only do we now have a worse figurative opiate than TV in the form of today's www,3 we have the legalisation of literal opiates for the masses thanks to Purdue Pharma.

1 A plaintiff's lawyer specialising in class action securities fraud litigation might be one exception. He might be watching CNBC and drafting a new complaint at the same time. :)

2 https://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,809673...

3 Circa 1996 https://github.com/mikemurr/nc110/blob/master/scripts/web

"The web sucks. It is a mighty dismal kludge built out of a thousand tiny dismal kludges all band-aided together, and now these bottom-line clueless pinheads who never heard of "TCP handshake" want to run commerce over the damn thing. Ye godz. Welcome to TV of the next century -- six million channels of worthless shit to choose from, and about as much security as today's cable industry!"

I am still using original netcat every day to deal with the dismal kludges band-aided together, now run by pinheads. Although I use scripts I write myself instead of those of the author, netcat's simplicity, portability and reliability over 26 years is one of the few things I still enjoy about the www. In the rare chance he still uses the www and reads HN, thank you Mr Walker for one of the best programs ever written, not to mention the entertaining source code comments.