The best example I can think of is the “The Girl with The Dragon Tatoo” and the two sequels. I’m not talking about the recently released U.S. version, but the original Swedish films. They are on Netflix and were three of the best films I’ve seen my entire life. Part of why I liked them was that the films didn’t have that Hollywood sheen to them.

So, I am quite sure that you are correct about the creators, at least, in the U.S., where we have become fat and lazy, but I think that there are plenty of hungry artists in the rest of the world that will still set their sights higher than “Snooki”. At least, that is what I hope.

Julie and I lost heart when we fell in love with Journeyman a few years ago. It was a fantastic show that was cancelled half way through the season.

A couple of years ago I hunted down the first season of Seinfeld. There is no way that show would make it now. The first season was awful!

Everyone wants to eat but nobody wants to join the hunt. When the hunters are getting rewarded less and less for their conquests, the pack will starve. I think that is what we are seeing here.. fewer and fewer people want to go through the pain of creating (hunting) simply because the rest of the pack devalues that contribution. The end game is that we all will be less nourished as time goes by, existing on empty mental calories until even those don’t satisfy. By then, everyone will have forgotten how to create (hunt)

We have been without cable for a couple of years. For the Super Bowl I decided to go ahead and put up an antenna. Now we get 24 over-the-air channels. I still can’t find anything worth watching and no one else in the family even wants to try.

My kids read more than I ever did at their age. Dumping cable for so long had a very positive affect on our family.

I have two cousins who, at fifteen, started looking for work. Due to the economy being in the can, they were competing against thirty and forty years olds who had tons more experience. When they finally found work, they soon found that they couldn’t get the hours that they would need to even cover their car insurance premiums. Throughout college, they struggled to make enough to keep their tanks full.

Originally, they had considered moving into an apartment together, but even after combining incomes, they realized that there was no way they could afford even the lowest end apartment where they were AND keep the power on AND be able to get to work.

They ended up both staying home until they were about to graduate, when they finally found full time work. Before then, no one would even consider giving them full time work.

But even if the law said otherwise, I agree – giving gifts with strings attached teaches a lesson that nobody does something without expectation of something in return. Not just an expectation, in fact, but an entitlement to something in return.

That may not seem like much, but consider a study done of teenagers – a majority of responders, both male and female, said that if a boy pays for a date, the girl owes him sex. And that it’s OK for him to force her to comply. As adults, we may want to say “Oh, please, that’s not even close to the same thing.” And it’s not. The problem is, these kids have for some reason learned differently. They have the idea that the person with the money has the authority to do as they please, and that if you’re given something, you have to give up something in return. Which is exactly what this man is modeling, whether he intends to or not.