The petroleum industry in the 1980s experienced a wave of multi-billion-dollar mega-mergers and hostile takeovers driven by a global oil glut, falling crude oil prices, and undervalued stock reserves. DuPont acquired Conoco in 1981, U.S. Steel bought Marathon Oil in 1982, and Occidental acquired Cities Service in 1982 after corporate raider T. Boone Pickens and Gulf Oil made previous attempts. Gulf was then acquired by Standard Oil of California in 1984.
My father was caught up in that merger mania. Cities Service Gas had left Bartlesville in 1948, moving its operations to Wichita and its headquarters to Oklahoma City. Dad was a field engineer for Cities Service Gas from 1951 to 1955, operating out of Garden City and Wichita, and then moved to Oklahoma City in 1957 when the company’s operations and executive offices were combined. He worked his way up to become the Manager of Gas Measurement in 1979, overseeing 89 employees.
My father’s company belt buckle
Cities Service Oil had remained in Bartlesville until 1968, but it then departed for Tulsa, leaving Phillips Petroleum as the dominant force in the community. T. Boone Pickens launched a hostile takeover attempt on Cities Service in June 1982, which was fended off only for Gulf Oil to make its own bid. Occidental acquired the company in August 1982, selling off the natural gas company to Northwest Energy in September 1982, which was then acquired by Williams a year later. Williams offered incentive retirements to all employees who were 55 years of age or older, and my father retired at the end of 1983 when he was 58 years old.
I was doing undergraduate work at the University of Oklahoma when T. Boone Pickens launched another hostile takeover bid in December 1984 against Phillips Petroleum. The company took on immense debt to keep him at bay, only for Carl Icahn to launch his own bid in February 1985. While the company avoided being taken over, becoming “the company that stayed home”, it was burdened with an enormous debt, and its earnings plunged.
By the time I arrived in Bartlesville in August 1989, the company had downsized from 9,086 local employees in 1981 to about 5,300. That dropped to 2,400 by the year 2002, when Phillips merged with Conoco to form ConocoPhillips.
Many Oklahoma petroleum companies relocated to Houston
Conoco had been based in Ponca City until 1950, when its headquarters shifted to Houston. Now ConocoPhillips would be based in Houston, and while the company would maintain a sizable presence in Bartlesville, the information technology, finance, accounting, human resources, and legal services positions that remained did not command the top-tier executive salaries that shifted south.
Over the decades more Oklahoma petroleum companies left for Houston. Tulsa’s Citgo, a spinoff of the retail, marketing, and transportation assets of Cities Service, left the former Oil Capital of the World for the new one in 2004. Oklahoma City’s Kerr-McGee was acquired by Houston’s Anadarko in 2006, and both Devon and Chesapeake/Expand shifted from Oklahoma City to Houston in 2026.
I spent 37 years working in Bartlesville Public Schools from August 1989 through June 2026. So I witnessed firsthand the demographic changes in Bartlesville from a few years after the corporate raids through the merger and relocation as the city struggled to diversify its economy. I could share countless anecdotes about how much changed, as well as how much did not, in Bartlesville over those decades.
However, my retirement afforded me time to compile and interpret more objective data on how Bartlesville changed from 1980 through 2025, which I am sharing in the presentation below or which you can view here. I’m still happy to live in Bartlesville, which the MORE Agency says is the “Best Small City Retirement Option” in Oklahoma. However, I recognize the many challenges we face.
Oklahoma is a poster child for the failure of trickle down economics. Mind you, few leaders in this ruby red state will admit that. In fact, many earnestly believe in that long discredited economic theory. Their policies have led to the state’s long slide toward the bottom of the barrel in its relative quality of life.
What is Trickle Down?
The idea is that tax breaks, financial benefits, and deregulation for corporations and the wealthy will stimulate the overall economy. By keeping more money at the top, the theory assumes the wealthy will invest in businesses, create jobs, and eventually “trickle down” prosperity to the working class.
The downsides include wealth hoarding, where top earners often use extra money for stock buybacks or savings, so it never reaches lower-income groups. Trickle down policies also tend to concentrate wealth at the top, increasing the income gap between the rich and the poor. In Oklahoma, it has gutted education and health care, leading to the state’s abysmal rankings in those areas.
Mike Mazzei, the Republican gubernatorial candidate in the November 2026 election, squeaked by his more moderate opponent in a primary runoff in late August 2026. Mazzei ran on a platform of yet more trickle down nonsense while loaning around $12 million of his own money to his campaign. After being endorsed by Donald Trump, Mazzei received 186,678 votes versus 184,631 for Gentner Drummond, winning by a tiny margin of 2,047 votes, or 0.28%.
Bear in mind there are almost 1.3 million registered Republicans in Oklahoma, so less than 30% of them bothered to vote, and Mazzei’s primary runoff supporters represented less than 8% of the state’s registered voters. However, given the partisanship in Oklahoma and immense voter apathy, he could easily become the next governor if Democrats and Independents don’t show up at the polls in November.
Mazzei’s Farcical “Plan”
Mazzei touts a “plan” to eliminate the state income tax in three years while also phasing out property taxes for seniors and veterans. The income tax provides roughly $6 billion in funding, or about 1/3 of the state’s budget. In 2025, the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy found that eliminating Oklahoma’s personal income tax would provide the richest 1% with an average annual tax cut of $55,295. The middle 20% of Oklahomans would only get a cut of $1,500. The poorest 20% would actually see their taxes increase by $9, since that would eliminate tax code components that return money to low-income residents. Does that sound fair to you?
Cutting property taxes as Mazzei proposes would reduce revenues for local school districts and city and county governments by around $250 million each year. That would mean severe cuts for schools, career tech, county roads and city streets, police, sheriff and health departments, courts, public libraries, etc. Bear in mind that Oklahoma already spends far less per pupil than any other state in the region, which is a major factor in it being ranked 47th in the nation in education.
Mazzei and his ilk love to point out how Texas has no income tax, but they conveniently never mention how its overall tax burden is considerably higher than Oklahoma’s. How is that possible? Texas has extremely high property, sales, and excise taxes.
Oklahomans are already going to vote on SQ 843 in November, which would eliminate property taxes on homesteads. The concept is bizarre, given that Oklahoma’s property taxes are already 46th in the nation. The only state in our region with lower property taxes is Arkansas, which has a much higher overall tax burden thanks to sales and excise taxes that are even higher than those in Texas, and a higher income tax burden than ours to boot.
If SQ 843 somehow passes, that will eliminate somewhere between $1.2 billion and $1.5 billion in local revenues and simply pulverize our public schools, CareerTechs, county road and bridge funds, city street and park funds, local police, sheriff departments and courts, volunteer fire departments and ambulance services, public libraries, and health departments.
Mazzei’s overall plan is, incredibly, far worse than even that, yet he offers no reasonable method for making up the enormous deficits it would create. He claims without evidence that county governments can “afford a decrease in tax collections” and the state can “capture growth-driven revenue” while “local voters get to decide if they want to replace lost tax collections”. That last bit translates into forcing school districts and city and county governments to ask voters for enormous property and sales tax increases.
MazzeiKnows His Plan is Nuts
During Mazzei’s time in the state Senate from 2004 to 2016, Oklahoma’s top marginal income tax rate was lowered from 6.65% to 5.0%. That led to declared revenue failures in 2009, 2010, 2015, twice in 2016, 2017, and 2018. Funding for the public schools and other state-funded services were repeatedly cut.
Mazzei in 2011
It was already so bad by early 2016 that Mazzei himself tried, in SB 1073, to delay a cut in the state income tax from 5.25% to 5.0%. He stated at that time: “Since 2004, when I first came to the Senate, we’ve reduced taxes by about $1.5 billion, thanks to a 25 percent drop in the top income tax rate, the elimination of estate taxes, the increase in the standard deduction, higher exemptions for retirement income, fewer companies subjected to the franchise tax, and the 100 percent exemption for military. … We are facing a shortfall of $1.3 billion. If we don’t delay this reduction and adopt other reforms, education funding, which makes up some 50 percent of the budget, will have to be cut by approximately $400 million. Other core services will also be slashed. Ultimately everyone in the state will be negatively impacted. As a fiscal conservative, I would much rather delay a tax cut than vote to increase taxes and start new taxes.”
The situation deteriorated so much that, two years after Mazzei was forced out of the senate by term limits, Bartlesville Public Schools led a statewide effort that successfully pressured a 75% supermajority of both houses in the legislature to pass $520 million in annual revenue increases by increasing taxes on gasoline, diesel, gross production, and cigarettes while limiting itemized deductions, expanding collections from online retailers, and allowing dice and roulette games at tribal casinos. That was only time the legislature was able to clear the 75% supermajority bar to raise taxes imposed by SQ 640 back in 1992.
That heroic act finally stabilized the state budget, although since then the legislature has continued to erode the tax base through additional income tax cuts, eliminating state sales taxes on groceries, various exemptions, and the like.
Yet now Mazzei’s back, with a plan that would eliminate over $6 billion in state funding? The truth is that he knows that the legislature will never pass his ludicrous plan. He is just spouting nonsense to get elected, but do not doubt that he will promote policies and bills to further cripple the state’s public schools and other services across all levels of government.
Needless to say, I won’t be voting for Crazy Mazzei in November; Cindy Munson will get my vote.
Mazzei & Munson
However, over half of Oklahoma voters are registered Republicans and many Democrats and Independents are too apathetic to vote.
We’re currently 47th in Education and 48th in Healthcare. Mazzei won’t help us improve in either ranking…and if he gets his way, we’ll be dead last, having gone belly up with trickle down.
These days the U.S. adult genre fiction market perhaps breaks down into about 2/5 romance, 1/3 crime/mystery/thrillers, and 1/4 science fiction/fantasy. Within the second genre group, I’m much more interested in mysteries than modern thrillers.
Years ago I did enjoy a few of Thomas Harris‘s crackling thrillers, which translated easily into theatrical films. Occasionally a cozier classic mystery author like Agatha Christie or Edith Pargeter (writing as Ellis Peters) would bring thriller elements into their stories, and recently I’ve enjoyed the decades-old suspense romance books of Mary Stewart.
Having read so many mysteries from the 1890s to the 1960s, a recent thriller from 2019 was a jolt. Needing a break from my Kindle, I had sauntered into my office and opened the glass doors to the retirement reading bookcase. For some time I’ve collected in it various physical books to be read when my pace of life slowed. Many were purchased over the years at Barnes and Noble, while others are more obscure out-of-print works, unavailable as typical e-books, which I ordered from used booksellers. My plan had long been to start whittling away at that woodpile in my retirement. Now I was a few weeks into that new phase of my life, with the miserable heat and humidity of July in Joklahoma restricting my walking to early mornings, leaving afternoons free for reading.
On one shelf I spied Never Tell by Lisa Gardner. I had never heard of her, and the trade paperback had been published in 2019. I figured it was something I spotted at Barnes and Noble that got lost in the COVID-19 pandemonium that disrupted my life for several years.
It turned out to be #11 in Gardner’s series with Boston detective D.D. Warren, consisting of a dozen novels and four shorter e-books from 2004 to 2020. Since then, Gardner has reportedly shifted to focus on a new thriller series featuring an amateur investigator.
Never Tell consists of chapters that continually shift between first person narratives of three women: Detective Warren, past crime victim Flora Dane, and a pregnant woman who may have killed her father and then, years later, her husband. The changing perspectives helped make the set-up more interesting, and I was grateful to not be stuck for an extended period in the damaged minds of Dane and the apparent killer. The pace eventually began to drag, with too many unresolved mysteries piling up, but then Gardner hit the gas with some breakthroughs and action.
I haven’t really been interested in solving whodunits since I was a kid, instead enjoying the ride with the characters. In this case, my suspicions proved accurate, but were sufficiently delayed to prevent me from skimming. However, I didn’t think some episodes were believable, especially the climax, which featured a long-winded and overly composed confrontation in extreme circumstances that reminded me of some of the unrealistic TV thrillers of my youth.
It was nice to read a tale with modern technology, and the female characters dominated this tale, being far more active and commanding than those in the older genre works. I deemed this extraction from the retirement case a success, but I certainly wouldn’t want to follow it with another thriller.
So instead I picked up a Kindle science fiction novel from 2018 by Alan Dean Foster. He has written dozens of novelizations of science fiction television shows and movies, and as a kid, I devoured his Star Trek Log adaptations of that franchise’s animated series from 1973-1974. Now I was finally reading one of his dozens of books that weren’t media tie-ins.
Relic started quite strong, with elegiac chapters about a man believed to be the last surviving human on a distant colony world. His tale of survival and becoming a research subject for conservation-minded aliens was fascinating, and Foster drew from his extensive world travels to help him flesh out alien environments.
However, eventually other humans entered the picture, and the book ended with an unsatisfying deus ex machina that relied upon advanced technologies that miraculously survive long periods of neglect, rather reminiscent of the unrealities of Tim Huntley’s One on Me I encountered last autumn.
After cleansing my palate with the penultimate finished Blandings Castle book, 1965’s Galahad at Blandings, I read an Ellis Peters/Edith Pargeter novella and then took up the Kindle version of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, a tearjerker about an aged British pensioner who embarks on a long walk across that immense island to see a woman in a hospice. Longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2012, the book had several moving chapters, with poignant vignettes of lost souls. However, once the protagonist gained various repulsive hangers-on, I was far less enthused. Thankfully they were eventually shed, but the bleak end of his journey was shattering. Various mysteries, the solutions to which I had already guessed at, were finally resolved, but the renewal of his fraught relationship with his wife was perhaps a bit too realistic. It was an existential read with few guideposts.
I guess my primary objection to The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry was how its manipulations did not feel organic to the story. The characters knew vital truths not shared with the reader for most of the walk, merely hinted at. I prefer characters who are as much in the dark as I am, lighting matches which they thrust into the surrounding gloom.
Back in March 2026, I reviewed the various radio receivers I used from childhood through the early 2000s. I documented my failed attempt to revive my 2003 Cambridge Soundworks 730 clock radio, and how I eventually created automations for our Google Home devices to stream Tulsa’s KWGS NPR station or Bartlesville’s KWON.
I’ve been retired for six weeks, and I will confess that I have yet to use either of those automations. However, I do listen to KWGS in the car. My 2014.5 Toyota Camry has HD Radio, so by default it can pick up the station’s three digital radio transmissions along with the regular FM analog signal. However, the KWGS HD digital signals are so weak that they frequently cut out in my car as it goes up and down the hills of Bartlesville. When 89.5-1 cuts out, the radio switches to analog 89.5, switching back to 89.5-1 when it regains signal strength. The repeated switching creates hiccups since the two are not in audio sync.
Now, when the radio hiccups, I go into Options to disable HD Radio. Sadly, I have not found a way to make that setting “stick”, but in mucking around with the radio, I was reminded that KWGS also broadcasts Jazz 89.5-2 and BBC World Service 89.5-3. I tuned in the jazz station, and I liked it. Too bad for me, though, since it also kept cutting out as I drove up and down in hilly Bartlesville, and there is no analog fallback for it.
A weak signal led me to turn off HD Radio on my 2014.5 Camry
I’ll be fine without HD Radio in the car, and I could always pay to restore the car’s SiriusXM satellite radio service if I wanted more options. However, I realized that I would enjoy listening to Jazz 89.5-2 at home when Wendy is away at work.
I watch Techmoan on YouTube, and in a recent post for his Patreon supporters, Mat showed his efforts to upgrade his garden shed workshop building’s external antenna to improve his reception of DAB/DAB+ and his search for a good DAB+ receiver for his component audio setup.
Open this for optional DAB/DAB+ and HD Radio specifics
DAB stands for Digital Audio Broadcasting and is used in Europe and some other areas, but not in the USA. Original DAB has broadcasts using the MP2 codec, typically at a bitrate of 128 kilobits per second or less. DAB+ offers subchannels using the HE-AAC v2 codec and is often 64 kbit/s and thus of worse audio quality than analog frequency modulation signals.
In the USA, FM HD Radio adds digital carriers to traditional 270 kHz-wide analog channels. KWGS HD1 runs at 48 kbit/s with the HDC/HE-AAC codec while it runs HD2 Jazz and HD3 BBC World Service at 24 kbit/s.
That got me to thinking about convenient ways to listen to Jazz 89.5-2 at home. I could buy a nice HD Radio like the Sangean HDR-19. However, it costs $200 and when I’m at home alone I would prefer the background music to be playing in my office, the living room, and the kitchen.
So I created a “Manor” speaker group in Google Home for the Google Nest Hubs in the office and the kitchen and the Google Home Mini in the living room. I discovered I could say, “Hey Google, play Tulsa Jazz radio on Manor” and it would play Jazz 89.5 HD2 on the various speakers via TuneIn. To shut it off, I can just say to any of the devices, “Hey Google, stop.”
In 2018 I purchased Google Nest Hub, Home Mini, and original Google Home devices
However, the audio quality was unimpressive in my office. The Nest Hub is 13′ from my desk, and it has a 1.7″ speaker. I had an original Google Home speaker from 2018 stashed away, and it has a 2″ high excursion speaker with dual 2″ passive radiators that readily outperforms a Nest Hub. So I pulled it out, plugged it in at my office desk, reset it by holding down its mute button for 15 seconds, and then added it back into our Google Home using the app on my iPhone.
That provided much richer bass, and I can now happily stream Jazz 89.5 HD2 across our home. It’s a good life.
Back in 1957, the Diffusion of Innovations theory was developed by Joe M. Bohlen, George M. Beal and Everett M. Rogers at Iowa State University. It was originally applied to agriculture and home economics, but it was later applied across disciplines. I generally think of myself as an Early Adopter in technology, but I decided to explore my actual categorizations.
The first 1/6 of folks adopting an innovation are split into a small group of Innovators, who desire to be the first to use the latest technology, and a larger fraction of Early Adopters who enjoy new innovations and are comfortable taking social risks but are largely motivated by how an innovation can drive their success. Another 1/3 are the Early Majority who adopt new innovations only after they are proven, with another trailing 1/3 in the Late Majority who are risk averse conservatives. A final 1/6 are Laggards who only use new technology when forced to do so.
I created a chart for 1980-2025 approximating when various innovative technologies appeared to have been in each stage of diffusion, adding a yellow outline for my initial year of investing in each of them. Please note that some innovations originated before 1980.
Approximate diffusion phases, based on Google Search AI queries, with yellow outlines denoting when I bought into a technology
I was an Innovator in home computers, the internet, and electronic books and an Early Adopter of CDs, MP3 players, and online audio. However, my aversion to telephones delayed my purchase of a cell phone until after the majority of American adults already had one, placing me in the Late Majority for that. I made up for that by being an Early Adopter of smartphones, for which telephony was just a minor feature to me.
You’ll notice that some digital audio formats never reached the Laggards stage, as they were steadily supplanted by later ones, as happened previously to the old analog formats of vinyl records, 8-track tapes, and compact cassettes. As for electronic books, they go way back, but they didn’t really get traction until the Amazon Kindle e-ink reader debuted in late 2007, and even now only about 1 out of 4 Americans read them, or about 40% of the 60% who read a book in a given year, so they’ve never even reached Late Majority status.
I found some interesting charts that document the rise, and sometimes the rise and fall, of different innovations. Here’s one on communications technologies:
Communication technologies in the USA during my lifetime [Source]
Telephone Service
The earlier chart shows that we have more than one mobile phone subscription per person these days since some people have multiple cell phones or have a subscription for their smartphone but another for a tablet or smartwatch. Pew Research has a different breakdown by adults, showing that in mid-2025 98% of them had a cellphone, with 91% of them having a smartphone.
While AT&T will be eliminating traditional landline telephone service in almost all states by 2029, about 1/4 still have fixed telephones, no doubt many of them VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) ones that rely on broadband internet. I switch from traditional landline to VoIP at Meador Manor in 2007 and two years later gave up VoIP.
Internet
Landline internet subscriptions per person is not as informative as per household. Pew Research showed that in the 2020s we plateaued with about 80% of U.S. adults subscribing to home broadband, and about 15% of U.S. adults don’t use broadband at home but do own a smartphone.
My parents owned vinyl records and 8-track tapes. When I was in high school and in my early years as an undergraduate, I bought vinyl records and created compact cassette mix tapes for use in my car. I bought my first compact disc player in 1986, and I have absolutely no use for any of the old analog formats, having endured their many limitations throughout my childhood, although I enjoy Techmoan‘s and Technology Connections‘ explorations of vintage audio tech.
I bought my first iPod back in 2004, making the switch from compact discs to MP3s. They commanded a tiny fraction of music sales revenue at the time, and only about 6% of households had an MP3 player, but Napster and Limewire had made music piracy commonplace at the start of the 21st century and steadily whittled down the immense profits being made on compact discs.
I was never a music pirate, and until 2018 I was listening to over 14,000 music files I had either purchased outright or converted from earlier digital and analog formats. I finally started using some streaming audio when we started using smart home speakers, first with Amazon’s Alexa and later Google Home. To this day, much of my listening is of tracks I purchased for my Apple Music Library, although I mostly stopped purchasing individual tracks before 2020.
Video Formats
I first experienced pre-recorded home video via some short movie excerpts on Standard 8 silent film I checked out from a public library. That was laughably bad, while VHS videotapes seemed a godsend. Until I was a year or more into my undergraduate years, VCRs were still so expensive that I rented them, and on at least one occasion I rented a Sony Betamax since a particular title I wanted to see was available on Beta, but not VHS, at my usual video rental store.
DVDs came out around 1996, and I imagine I was an Early Adopter for those, although I wasn’t an Innovator until HD-DVD came out, which was a mistake. Sometimes my higher risk tolerance does result in setbacks. I bought a Toshiba HD-DVD player in October 2007 amidst a format war between that format and the Blu-ray disc, but HD-DVD lost the war a few months later.
Thus in October 2008 I bought a Blu-ray player, shifting me back into Early Adopter status for the winning format, although I had squandered $350 in 2007 dollars, or over $550 in 2026 dollars, on my HD-DVD misadventure.
It was about then that physical media sales began their long decline, and the final physical format of Ultra HD Blu-ray never caught on with its sales peaking in 2017 and doing nothing to slow down the shift from physical media to streaming.
I wrote a year ago about AI’s potential impacts on employment, and a majority of Americans reported interacting with AI at least several times per week by September 2025. By February 2026, almost half of U.S. adults had used AI chatbots, and about 1 in 4 used them daily.
I have used AI to generate illustrative graphics for some of my blog posts, but now its imagery has flooded social media. It is busy, vibrant, glossy, and sterile.
Ugh…it is simply awful
I asked Google Gemini to apply the Diffusion of Innovations theory to the usage of modern AI, and it generated the following table:
Adopter Category
Cumulative %
Timeframe
Key Characteristics & Milestones
Innovators
2.5%
2017-2022
Initial ChatGPT launch; tech enthusiasts and developers.
Early Adopters
16%
2022-2024
Integration into professional workflows; “Pro” users and students.
Early Majority
50%
2024-2028
Cross-platform integration (Gemini, Copilot); 50% weekly use reached in early 2026.
Late Majority
84%
2028-2033 (Projected)
Use becomes a social/economic necessity; skepticism remains high.
Laggards
100%
2033+ (Projected)
Adoption only after the technology is fully embedded and unavoidable.
I attended multiple technology conference sessions on modern AI in June 2023, when it was still in the Early Adopter stage. I tested an AI chatbot for the school district website in 2024, although ultimately I opted not to deploy it. I led a district AI taskforce that developed a district policy on AI with student and staff usage guidelines and recommended rating scales. A few months out from my retirement, I built some Google Notebook LM tools on district technology and board policies that district administrators can access.
However, I am frankly relieved to have retired before AI enters the Late Majority stage. While I possessed a firm grasp of the impact of earlier technological innovations on our public schools, allowing me to successfully lead us through a 1:1 student computing initiative with learning management systems, I was less sanguine about, and frankly less interested in, adaptations to the world of AI.
I am hopeful that younger folks will be better suited to and more interested in navigating a turbulent time of white-collar job disruptions. In 2024, the Brookings Institution found that more than 30% of all workers could see at least 50% of their occupational tasks disrupted by generative AI, and in 2026 the International Monetary Fund said almost 40% of global jobs are exposed to AI-driven change.
Meador Manor 