People cheering for anything like what happened are idiots because even if you're perfectly compliant with today's rules, the people in charge can change and suddenly the precedent you were happy to set against your enemies will be used against you.
I was listening to a video about the new Star Wars stuff that came out, and it brought back up something I keep on tripping over every time the discussions come up: Blazing Saddles.
Blazing Saddles is a comedy Movie produced by Mel Brooks in 1974. The main character is a black man in 1874 who is working on the railroad. He gets himself in trouble, and eventually finds himself the sheriff of a town who hates him because he's black. He goes through a typical western plot of the scheming senator trying to destroy the town to make himself rich, but the twist is that part of the way he was going to do that was by making a black guy the sheriff. Instead, the new sheriff comes up with a plan to save the town by building a fake town nearby and slowing down the bandits by building a toll booth. The fake town is booby-trapped with explosives. The rest of the movie descends into a fourth wall breaking gong show. All throughout, the movie constantly made jokes dragging the racism of 1874 into the limelight as an object of ridicule.
I saw it for the first time a few years ago, and it was absolutely hilarious. It was massively successful at the box office, making 119 million dollars on a 2.6 million dollar budget.
What does Blazing Saddles have to do with the new Star Wars?
Two things:
First, the movie was as I understand it pretty cutting edge for the day, but it was a decade where many cutting edge movies were being put out. It had a black lead, it directly addressed racism as a core plot point, and as I recall it had more n-bombs than the freeside of the fediverse.
Second, 1974 was (sorry, my Gen-X mutuals) 50 years ago. A child born the day that movie came out (sorry! sorry!) are starting to look at retirement, and anyone who saw it in theatres is likely already well past retirement age (sorry Boomers!). The key point here is that it's a movie that's been around for a long time.
Really, there are things we can criticize the boomers as a bloc for, but it's historical revisionism to look at this movie and say "they didn't have black people in movies, they didn't discuss racism, and if they had black people in those movies white people wouldn't watch them" -- obviously all of that is wrong.
Star Wars was released in 1977, and it did a lot of things too -- Everyone knows Princess Leia was one of the early girlboss characters, but besides that the assault on the death star had a lady named Mon Mothra in charge, and in the movie it wasn't a big deal, everyone was focused on the mission.
The Empire Strikes back introduced a black character, Lando Calrissian (If I get the Star Wars names wrong here, I'm not even sorry) who was the black leader of an entire city and a really cool character to boot. Everyone remembers Lando.
In Return of the Jedi in 1983, it explicitly reveals Leia was Luke's sister and also strong in the Force, so if Luke fails, she would be the galaxy's last hope, not directly showing a female jedi because that's not what the story was about, but making it clear girls could be jedis.
The Prequel trilogy introduced Motherfuckin Samuel L. Jackson playing a Motherfuckin black motherfuckin jedi. Everyone was made of planks of wood in that movie, but apparently other media helped flesh out his character as incredibly interesting.
I'm enumerating all these things to show that Star Wars already hit all these notes before many of the actresses rambling on about diversity were even born. They're acting like they're doing something really amazing that will change the world, but the world already changed, and it was the Baby Boomers that changed it. These people are walking into the middle of Washington DC and pretending they founded America.
In short, it's literally not progress. Considering how poorly done these diversity roles are done and how poorly the media is taken because they focus first on pretending to be groundbreaking and then maybe sometime after with making something people actually want to see, it's worse than nothing because we already have had competent people make good works people look back on fondly. When a bad piece of media carries your message, it hurts the cause as much as a good piece of media carrying your message helps your cause.
The marketing juggernaut has taken stuff that just kind of "Was" and changed it into a bullet point for the marketing blurb. "Star wars 4: we no longer murder women and minorities, and we're also no asbestos free!"
I also feel like it lets people who aren't nearly as competent as their parents generation pretend they're doing something important when in reality they're just failing to live up to the standards of those who came before. "Well even if our movie sucks you need to watch it because we have black people!" -- Nobody cares. If you take Star Wars as a whole continuity, there isn't really any sort of real minority that isn't somehow represented. What they're doing isn't important, which is a deathblow because it also isn't competently produced or entertaining.
Some might call the problem tokenism, I think that's wrong -- the problem isn't necessarily tokenism, it's worse: With tokenism, you include a black character to meet a quota. That can mean the black character is a token addition but otherwise inoffensive (and in fact can end up as a great character in their own right under a good writer). This is an active, religious thespiannic diversity. It's shouting from the streetcorner so everyone can see you being ever so pious. And as part of the performative aspect it stops being inoffensive and starts actively trying to be offensive. You see it in the interviews around the modern movies -- nobody's seen the movie yet, but they're railing against fans who hate the movie, especially "STRAIGHT WHITE MEN" because they hope that muckraking will cause controversy and attacking the core demographic of the film was a good way of doing that. Thankfully, people are getting wise to the grift, and so instead of getting outraged when these people say stupid things, they just ignore them, and now that the money is running out we're seeing the trickling of a sea change. It goes beyond merely performative, and into the thespiannic -- like a stage actor screaming their lines so everyone in the back row can hear.
"Oh, this movie [that was just announced and nobody knows about yet] there's so many people attacking me, I got death threats!" uh huh? On the Internet, even? Sounds scary. And they were just lurking, waiting to jump on you, they didn't even wait for the film to be announced! Horrifying.
If you're actually breaking barriers, you don't get full backing of the Hollywood hype machine. The suits aren't going to want to support you because you're trying something new and dangerous. In that sense, Gina Carano's actions are more cutting edge than any of the management approved controversy being drummed up, and they fired her and blacklisted her.
This concept of "Safe edgy" is interesting to think about, but it isn't new. TV in the 90s was filled with TV shows or advertisements pretending they were pushing the edge when in reality they were doing exactly what the execs wanted them to be doing. Once you know what you're looking at (Don't you DARE spell "Extreme" with an E at the beginning because we're XTREME here! "No way!" WAAAAAYYYY!) the verisimilitude (appearance of being real) breaks down and you realize you're looking at a square pretending to be edgy and cool. And to be clear on something, there was a lot of fake edgy back then, but there was also a lot of real edgy and those guys were constantly one quip from having their show canceled by the networks. A lot of them didn't make it, but they left behind great works.
The veneer of fake edgy hid milquetoast products back in the day, and often you'd get your XTREME LEMONADE and find that it was competent lemonade, not great but not horrible, just boring. I think part of the problem today is that fake edgy often is a mask over a mask; You're obviously being fake and so under that mask is something, but the boring underneath the fake edgy mask is the actual mask over what is often the absolutely horrible people inhabiting Hollywood and other media industries.
But we found that in the following decades that a lot of our heroes in Media were terrible. You'd have some actress up on the big stage and she would make a point to heartfeltedly thank Harvey Weinstein who that actress probably needed to do something unspeakable to in order to get the part, right before they paid lip service to whatever social cause is trendy this week. We didn't know, but they did and they were complicit. And anyone who thinks that that was an isolated incident and that everything is fine now is in denial. For all the "we just love women and minorities!", it's a paper thin facade intended to cover up the window through which you can see Jeffrey Epsteins private island.
I know, that's a lot to think about from just a bunch of idiotic hollywood actors pretending they're saving the world by selling you a shitty movie, but it isn't like I'm interested in the movies themselves anymore.
Blazing Saddles is a comedy Movie produced by Mel Brooks in 1974. The main character is a black man in 1874 who is working on the railroad. He gets himself in trouble, and eventually finds himself the sheriff of a town who hates him because he's black. He goes through a typical western plot of the scheming senator trying to destroy the town to make himself rich, but the twist is that part of the way he was going to do that was by making a black guy the sheriff. Instead, the new sheriff comes up with a plan to save the town by building a fake town nearby and slowing down the bandits by building a toll booth. The fake town is booby-trapped with explosives. The rest of the movie descends into a fourth wall breaking gong show. All throughout, the movie constantly made jokes dragging the racism of 1874 into the limelight as an object of ridicule.
I saw it for the first time a few years ago, and it was absolutely hilarious. It was massively successful at the box office, making 119 million dollars on a 2.6 million dollar budget.
What does Blazing Saddles have to do with the new Star Wars?
Two things:
First, the movie was as I understand it pretty cutting edge for the day, but it was a decade where many cutting edge movies were being put out. It had a black lead, it directly addressed racism as a core plot point, and as I recall it had more n-bombs than the freeside of the fediverse.
Second, 1974 was (sorry, my Gen-X mutuals) 50 years ago. A child born the day that movie came out (sorry! sorry!) are starting to look at retirement, and anyone who saw it in theatres is likely already well past retirement age (sorry Boomers!). The key point here is that it's a movie that's been around for a long time.
Really, there are things we can criticize the boomers as a bloc for, but it's historical revisionism to look at this movie and say "they didn't have black people in movies, they didn't discuss racism, and if they had black people in those movies white people wouldn't watch them" -- obviously all of that is wrong.
Star Wars was released in 1977, and it did a lot of things too -- Everyone knows Princess Leia was one of the early girlboss characters, but besides that the assault on the death star had a lady named Mon Mothra in charge, and in the movie it wasn't a big deal, everyone was focused on the mission.
The Empire Strikes back introduced a black character, Lando Calrissian (If I get the Star Wars names wrong here, I'm not even sorry) who was the black leader of an entire city and a really cool character to boot. Everyone remembers Lando.
In Return of the Jedi in 1983, it explicitly reveals Leia was Luke's sister and also strong in the Force, so if Luke fails, she would be the galaxy's last hope, not directly showing a female jedi because that's not what the story was about, but making it clear girls could be jedis.
The Prequel trilogy introduced Motherfuckin Samuel L. Jackson playing a Motherfuckin black motherfuckin jedi. Everyone was made of planks of wood in that movie, but apparently other media helped flesh out his character as incredibly interesting.
I'm enumerating all these things to show that Star Wars already hit all these notes before many of the actresses rambling on about diversity were even born. They're acting like they're doing something really amazing that will change the world, but the world already changed, and it was the Baby Boomers that changed it. These people are walking into the middle of Washington DC and pretending they founded America.
In short, it's literally not progress. Considering how poorly done these diversity roles are done and how poorly the media is taken because they focus first on pretending to be groundbreaking and then maybe sometime after with making something people actually want to see, it's worse than nothing because we already have had competent people make good works people look back on fondly. When a bad piece of media carries your message, it hurts the cause as much as a good piece of media carrying your message helps your cause.
The marketing juggernaut has taken stuff that just kind of "Was" and changed it into a bullet point for the marketing blurb. "Star wars 4: we no longer murder women and minorities, and we're also no asbestos free!"
I also feel like it lets people who aren't nearly as competent as their parents generation pretend they're doing something important when in reality they're just failing to live up to the standards of those who came before. "Well even if our movie sucks you need to watch it because we have black people!" -- Nobody cares. If you take Star Wars as a whole continuity, there isn't really any sort of real minority that isn't somehow represented. What they're doing isn't important, which is a deathblow because it also isn't competently produced or entertaining.
Some might call the problem tokenism, I think that's wrong -- the problem isn't necessarily tokenism, it's worse: With tokenism, you include a black character to meet a quota. That can mean the black character is a token addition but otherwise inoffensive (and in fact can end up as a great character in their own right under a good writer). This is an active, religious thespiannic diversity. It's shouting from the streetcorner so everyone can see you being ever so pious. And as part of the performative aspect it stops being inoffensive and starts actively trying to be offensive. You see it in the interviews around the modern movies -- nobody's seen the movie yet, but they're railing against fans who hate the movie, especially "STRAIGHT WHITE MEN" because they hope that muckraking will cause controversy and attacking the core demographic of the film was a good way of doing that. Thankfully, people are getting wise to the grift, and so instead of getting outraged when these people say stupid things, they just ignore them, and now that the money is running out we're seeing the trickling of a sea change. It goes beyond merely performative, and into the thespiannic -- like a stage actor screaming their lines so everyone in the back row can hear.
"Oh, this movie [that was just announced and nobody knows about yet] there's so many people attacking me, I got death threats!" uh huh? On the Internet, even? Sounds scary. And they were just lurking, waiting to jump on you, they didn't even wait for the film to be announced! Horrifying.
If you're actually breaking barriers, you don't get full backing of the Hollywood hype machine. The suits aren't going to want to support you because you're trying something new and dangerous. In that sense, Gina Carano's actions are more cutting edge than any of the management approved controversy being drummed up, and they fired her and blacklisted her.
This concept of "Safe edgy" is interesting to think about, but it isn't new. TV in the 90s was filled with TV shows or advertisements pretending they were pushing the edge when in reality they were doing exactly what the execs wanted them to be doing. Once you know what you're looking at (Don't you DARE spell "Extreme" with an E at the beginning because we're XTREME here! "No way!" WAAAAAYYYY!) the verisimilitude (appearance of being real) breaks down and you realize you're looking at a square pretending to be edgy and cool. And to be clear on something, there was a lot of fake edgy back then, but there was also a lot of real edgy and those guys were constantly one quip from having their show canceled by the networks. A lot of them didn't make it, but they left behind great works.
The veneer of fake edgy hid milquetoast products back in the day, and often you'd get your XTREME LEMONADE and find that it was competent lemonade, not great but not horrible, just boring. I think part of the problem today is that fake edgy often is a mask over a mask; You're obviously being fake and so under that mask is something, but the boring underneath the fake edgy mask is the actual mask over what is often the absolutely horrible people inhabiting Hollywood and other media industries.
But we found that in the following decades that a lot of our heroes in Media were terrible. You'd have some actress up on the big stage and she would make a point to heartfeltedly thank Harvey Weinstein who that actress probably needed to do something unspeakable to in order to get the part, right before they paid lip service to whatever social cause is trendy this week. We didn't know, but they did and they were complicit. And anyone who thinks that that was an isolated incident and that everything is fine now is in denial. For all the "we just love women and minorities!", it's a paper thin facade intended to cover up the window through which you can see Jeffrey Epsteins private island.
I know, that's a lot to think about from just a bunch of idiotic hollywood actors pretending they're saving the world by selling you a shitty movie, but it isn't like I'm interested in the movies themselves anymore.
I've seen the occasional post from Robert fourth Reich here on the fediverse. I bite my tongue every time because I have a policy against arguing with braindead morons.
People living outside of places like the rust belt might disagree, but I definitely agree. The manufacturing base was getting hollowed out after that, and most of the people in today's rich areas don't realize how cataclysmic it has been for many places. A lot of cities are like ghost towns, filled with houses you can buy for less than $1,000 because the plants shut down and moved to China and the cities were left to rot. And they go "so? Who cares?" But the reality is something was lost when that heartland that was once the core of western power and it's all been globalized away.
Globalization isn't going to last forever. The world is becoming more dangerous because there isn't a superpower to keep it in check anymore, and given how much has been destroyed (including generations of workers), it's not going to be a nice process getting it back.
Globalization isn't going to last forever. The world is becoming more dangerous because there isn't a superpower to keep it in check anymore, and given how much has been destroyed (including generations of workers), it's not going to be a nice process getting it back.
I posted a more permanent link on lotide about a year ago: https://lotide.fbxl.net/posts/32322
There's a site called shadowstats that simply takes the inflation calculation they did in 1990, and it consistently shows the inflation rate as being incredibly high. It's well-recorded that many changes were made to CPI calculations in ways that reduce CPI, such as hedonic adjustment or substitution.
https://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts
There's a site called shadowstats that simply takes the inflation calculation they did in 1990, and it consistently shows the inflation rate as being incredibly high. It's well-recorded that many changes were made to CPI calculations in ways that reduce CPI, such as hedonic adjustment or substitution.
https://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts
Yesterday I posted a big thing talking about why nobody wants to win the next US election, but I want to make a slight correction: I wrote that "Most alarm lights that haven't had masking tape put over them by the government are screaming imminent stagflationary depression, maybe one of the worst in American History", but I think we're already in that depression and have been for a while.
If they're lying about the inflation rate (which I've written at length that they are), and it's actually been 15-20% per year and not 20% over 3 years, how would that change the way we look at the current economy? Well for one thing, it would mean that every developed country is in double digit recession and has been for years. So some might say "but employment is at record levels!" -- well, if we assume arguendo that they aren't fudging those numbers, it makes perfect sense from a market economics standpoint -- If you are a business and your labor costs are going down 15-20% per year, why not keep that labor? With the labor getting cheaper every year for the same or greater output, it's just rational decisionmaking to keep everyone working. It's the same as what libertarians have said for years about the minimum wage -- if there was no minimum wage there might be 100% employment because you'll even hire the most useless worker if it's for a dollar a year.
I think we can look at the tent cities that never existed in many communities before as evidence that things are not as rosy as the government claims. I've never seen that before in my life, and now they're everywhere.
Instead of looking at my post as talking about the economy from the viewpoint of actors who are in bed with the government. For them, the actual economy doesn't matter as much as the numbers since that's what they'll look at to discuss reality. We saw that recently when the press was attacking individuals for saying things are bad when the numbers claim otherwise -- "The numbers say you're not doing so badly!" oh well then I guess I don't live in a tent this year! Great! I'll tell the bank!
If they're lying about the inflation rate (which I've written at length that they are), and it's actually been 15-20% per year and not 20% over 3 years, how would that change the way we look at the current economy? Well for one thing, it would mean that every developed country is in double digit recession and has been for years. So some might say "but employment is at record levels!" -- well, if we assume arguendo that they aren't fudging those numbers, it makes perfect sense from a market economics standpoint -- If you are a business and your labor costs are going down 15-20% per year, why not keep that labor? With the labor getting cheaper every year for the same or greater output, it's just rational decisionmaking to keep everyone working. It's the same as what libertarians have said for years about the minimum wage -- if there was no minimum wage there might be 100% employment because you'll even hire the most useless worker if it's for a dollar a year.
I think we can look at the tent cities that never existed in many communities before as evidence that things are not as rosy as the government claims. I've never seen that before in my life, and now they're everywhere.
Instead of looking at my post as talking about the economy from the viewpoint of actors who are in bed with the government. For them, the actual economy doesn't matter as much as the numbers since that's what they'll look at to discuss reality. We saw that recently when the press was attacking individuals for saying things are bad when the numbers claim otherwise -- "The numbers say you're not doing so badly!" oh well then I guess I don't live in a tent this year! Great! I'll tell the bank!
In a Japanese accent, the word "earth" in eglish sounds a lot like "ass" and you can't ignore it afterwards.
Watching one mage in an anime this season casting "ass wave" or watching the new anime "goodbye ass" makes the world a little more amusing.
https://youtu.be/mQTEgWRi7FU
Watching one mage in an anime this season casting "ass wave" or watching the new anime "goodbye ass" makes the world a little more amusing.
https://youtu.be/mQTEgWRi7FU
In private, some Republicans are saying it would be better if Trump loses the next election.
From a non-partisan standpoint, we're cutting it really close. Most alarm lights that haven't had masking tape put over them by the government are screaming imminent stagflationary depression, maybe one of the worst in American History, and everyone with eyes and basic math skills can see the looming sovereign debt crisis. Nobody wants to be holding this hot potato because whoever is in power at that time is almost certainly going to preside over a disaster and there's nothing to be done about it.
From a totally non-partisan standpoint, Kamala Harris is a terrible candidate for President. She speaks to the American Public like they're 4 year olds, her record as Vice President is basically free real estate for the Republicans, she was the least liked vice president in US history, her only primary campaign was the weakest of all the Democrats on stage with her dropping out first, There are better people within the Democratic party to run, but they didn't and they aren't -- instead they installed Kamala more or less by fiat. I think part of the reason for that is they're not stupid and they know full well winning the next election is a phyrric victory, and whoever is president during that term is effectively ending their political career so might as well let the weakest candidate either lose and end her career or win and end her career. In so doing, they keep their powder dry for the next viable election cycle.
Notwithstanding concerns that Trump will try to crown himself dictator (concerns that I think the conservative response to January 6th prove unfounded -- conservatives want to conserve the constitution and violating that would not go over well), he's only got one term left as president, and he's getting quite old so this is probably his last kick at the can so regardless of whether the party wants to win or not, he clearly does. He seems to be going all-in on a big tent strategy this time, which is why he's brought former democrats like RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard into the fold and adopted compromise positions on wedge issues such as abortion. Personally, as long as he retains his core identity and brand, I think it's a winning strategy, insofar as such a thing can exist.
From a non-partisan standpoint, we're cutting it really close. Most alarm lights that haven't had masking tape put over them by the government are screaming imminent stagflationary depression, maybe one of the worst in American History, and everyone with eyes and basic math skills can see the looming sovereign debt crisis. Nobody wants to be holding this hot potato because whoever is in power at that time is almost certainly going to preside over a disaster and there's nothing to be done about it.
From a totally non-partisan standpoint, Kamala Harris is a terrible candidate for President. She speaks to the American Public like they're 4 year olds, her record as Vice President is basically free real estate for the Republicans, she was the least liked vice president in US history, her only primary campaign was the weakest of all the Democrats on stage with her dropping out first, There are better people within the Democratic party to run, but they didn't and they aren't -- instead they installed Kamala more or less by fiat. I think part of the reason for that is they're not stupid and they know full well winning the next election is a phyrric victory, and whoever is president during that term is effectively ending their political career so might as well let the weakest candidate either lose and end her career or win and end her career. In so doing, they keep their powder dry for the next viable election cycle.
Notwithstanding concerns that Trump will try to crown himself dictator (concerns that I think the conservative response to January 6th prove unfounded -- conservatives want to conserve the constitution and violating that would not go over well), he's only got one term left as president, and he's getting quite old so this is probably his last kick at the can so regardless of whether the party wants to win or not, he clearly does. He seems to be going all-in on a big tent strategy this time, which is why he's brought former democrats like RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard into the fold and adopted compromise positions on wedge issues such as abortion. Personally, as long as he retains his core identity and brand, I think it's a winning strategy, insofar as such a thing can exist.
I've been playing solitaire lately and one thing I find fascinating is that the game has many iterations that are unwinnable, for example if you've got too many reds or too many blacks or non-consecutive cards. And you can screw up your game and make it unwinnable as well. So many times, part of the game is knowing when it's time to hit the reset button because the game can no longer be won. It sounds simple, but sometimes just as you're about to reset you see the next move. So there's an element of uncertainty as to whether it's really time to reset, and there's an element of having faith in yourself if you think a run can be salvaged.
I just saw data that 99% of employee contributions from Fox News and Wall Street journal parent company news corp go to Democrats.
Controlled opposition much?
Controlled opposition much?
Huh, no but after looking into it that's really something else. The nih published study showing it does make people have a lower heart rate was interesting in particular.
In the US for works created after January 1 1978, it's life of the author plus 70 years. For works for hire, it's 95 years.
I was thinking in the shower about the idea of a "fidelity floor".
Ever listened to music from the 1940s? It doesn't quite sound right. On the other hand, starting around the late 1950s, sound recordings got increasingly high fidelity to the point that you could slap an old audio recording on a new MP3 and the audio might be out of date but it sounds just fine.
Same with film. Early early film looks like crap, but very quickly it became good enough, and today a remastered version of Snow White can be sold on the market. If you think about it, that movie is old enough to be a great grandfather, but the masters can create media that's just fine.
Even the Internet has something like this. Early early video was really poor since it had to be playable or downloadable on a 56k modem or less, but I pretty routinely watch videos from 10 years ago, and if they're a decently recorded 480p, that's good enough for my eyes.
This even occurs with video games. The Atari 2600 might not really be something a kid would play today, but SNES games are at a level that kids may be fully OK playing a final fantasy or a Super Mario World. GOG has an entire business model on selling games that are decades old because they're just fine.
The reason to think about this idea is copyright law. Early books did degrade over time, and early recordings did too. But as forms of media hit a fidelity floor, they become timeless. That timelessness is beneficial in a work of media, but if you give a company a virtually unlimited monopoly on that work, then some conglomerate can own an increasing amount of our cultural history, and I think there's something important in that fact we need to think about. If your great great grandmother sang a song from Snow White and you integrated that song over generations, doesn't it seem odd that you might die of old age before the public owns that song?
To an extent I think it's a great argument for creative commons or for dedicating works to the public domain (something I've written into the legal page of The Graysonian Ethic, releasing it to the public domain or licensing it as Creative Commons Zero 15 years after first publication), letting someone own that much of our culture isn't healthy from a societal standpoint.
Ever listened to music from the 1940s? It doesn't quite sound right. On the other hand, starting around the late 1950s, sound recordings got increasingly high fidelity to the point that you could slap an old audio recording on a new MP3 and the audio might be out of date but it sounds just fine.
Same with film. Early early film looks like crap, but very quickly it became good enough, and today a remastered version of Snow White can be sold on the market. If you think about it, that movie is old enough to be a great grandfather, but the masters can create media that's just fine.
Even the Internet has something like this. Early early video was really poor since it had to be playable or downloadable on a 56k modem or less, but I pretty routinely watch videos from 10 years ago, and if they're a decently recorded 480p, that's good enough for my eyes.
This even occurs with video games. The Atari 2600 might not really be something a kid would play today, but SNES games are at a level that kids may be fully OK playing a final fantasy or a Super Mario World. GOG has an entire business model on selling games that are decades old because they're just fine.
The reason to think about this idea is copyright law. Early books did degrade over time, and early recordings did too. But as forms of media hit a fidelity floor, they become timeless. That timelessness is beneficial in a work of media, but if you give a company a virtually unlimited monopoly on that work, then some conglomerate can own an increasing amount of our cultural history, and I think there's something important in that fact we need to think about. If your great great grandmother sang a song from Snow White and you integrated that song over generations, doesn't it seem odd that you might die of old age before the public owns that song?
To an extent I think it's a great argument for creative commons or for dedicating works to the public domain (something I've written into the legal page of The Graysonian Ethic, releasing it to the public domain or licensing it as Creative Commons Zero 15 years after first publication), letting someone own that much of our culture isn't healthy from a societal standpoint.
If you were to ask me where someone could put their money to best retain its value in the near future, I think it'd be gold. I'm not talking about growth, there's still an outsized role for other financial implements in that regard, I'm just talking about wealth preservation.
Lots of people chose real estate, but I have a feeling that's a supercycle that's almost over.
Basic economics still exist, and with the upcoming population collapse, and the boomers all getting to that age where they start dying en masse, and many people suggesting we've already seen the lowest mortgage rates of our lifetimes in 2020, you're going to have a lot fewer people chasing a lot more supply with a lot less buying power and so eventually those prices are going to collapse on their own. By contrast, if you have a Spanish gold coin from 500 years ago, it is still highly valuable and is likely to continue to be.
Gold only needs to exist and will remain in its current form effectively forever. A house requires maintenance, annual tax payments, insurance, in many parts of the world you absolutely must pay for heating or your house will be destroyed. It takes a lot of money to own a home. Yes, you can rent them out, but if the same supercycle applies, it's possible rents will go sideways for a long while or even substantially down, meaning you have an asset you expected to profit from that could not just be losing value but actively costing you money every month.
Some people would then point out that net immigration will help recover the lost population, but to that I have 2 counter-points. First, the west is quickly fading as the "land of opportunity" so even at this moment many migrants make it to the west and realize it's expensive to live and taxes are insanely high so they return home and I don't see that getting better. Right now, there are houses in the Greater Toronto Area which have 25 migrants living in an unfinished basement. I've heard people say "Oh, that's just their culture" but the fact is it isn't -- India for example may have large families, but they don't have 25 strangers living in the same room and paying 1000 a month for the privilege. Second, many of the places we're net importing people from have their own issues. Many of the countries we presently net migrate people from are facing shrinking populations themselves, so it isn't like they have unlimited people to pick from. In a world that isn't like today, it's likely that other examples such as Africa which are facing some of the highest growth rates will actually have big problems maintaining those because a lot of that money is coming from western investment and so if the west has fewer people investing less money there won't be as much money to fund growth as there is right now.
Now some people might go "use stocks or bonds", but reality is that over history, 99.9% of stocks went bust. Huge names from the past such as E. F. Hutton, Eatons, AMC, and many more simply disappeared after being unable to keep up in a changing world market. For growth you need to go to the market, but for long term wealth preservation, you need something you can be sure will continue to exist. As for bonds, they have an expiration date as a matter of their function, and in addition many entities that issue bonds no longer exist. If you buy corporate bonds from the above companies you won't be getting your money back for example, and many countries have had big changes that mean you can't always rely on them -- 100 years ago many south american countries looked like they would be rivals to the US for example, but eventually defaulted on their debts. The US may therefore be considered a safe jurisdiction, but with a massively growing debt it's highly likely a sovereign debt crisis is just around the corner. That doesn't mean you shouldn't invest in these things, but rather that you need to be cognizant that for wealth preservation, both stock and bond markets mean taking on substantial risk.
Lots of people chose real estate, but I have a feeling that's a supercycle that's almost over.
Basic economics still exist, and with the upcoming population collapse, and the boomers all getting to that age where they start dying en masse, and many people suggesting we've already seen the lowest mortgage rates of our lifetimes in 2020, you're going to have a lot fewer people chasing a lot more supply with a lot less buying power and so eventually those prices are going to collapse on their own. By contrast, if you have a Spanish gold coin from 500 years ago, it is still highly valuable and is likely to continue to be.
Gold only needs to exist and will remain in its current form effectively forever. A house requires maintenance, annual tax payments, insurance, in many parts of the world you absolutely must pay for heating or your house will be destroyed. It takes a lot of money to own a home. Yes, you can rent them out, but if the same supercycle applies, it's possible rents will go sideways for a long while or even substantially down, meaning you have an asset you expected to profit from that could not just be losing value but actively costing you money every month.
Some people would then point out that net immigration will help recover the lost population, but to that I have 2 counter-points. First, the west is quickly fading as the "land of opportunity" so even at this moment many migrants make it to the west and realize it's expensive to live and taxes are insanely high so they return home and I don't see that getting better. Right now, there are houses in the Greater Toronto Area which have 25 migrants living in an unfinished basement. I've heard people say "Oh, that's just their culture" but the fact is it isn't -- India for example may have large families, but they don't have 25 strangers living in the same room and paying 1000 a month for the privilege. Second, many of the places we're net importing people from have their own issues. Many of the countries we presently net migrate people from are facing shrinking populations themselves, so it isn't like they have unlimited people to pick from. In a world that isn't like today, it's likely that other examples such as Africa which are facing some of the highest growth rates will actually have big problems maintaining those because a lot of that money is coming from western investment and so if the west has fewer people investing less money there won't be as much money to fund growth as there is right now.
Now some people might go "use stocks or bonds", but reality is that over history, 99.9% of stocks went bust. Huge names from the past such as E. F. Hutton, Eatons, AMC, and many more simply disappeared after being unable to keep up in a changing world market. For growth you need to go to the market, but for long term wealth preservation, you need something you can be sure will continue to exist. As for bonds, they have an expiration date as a matter of their function, and in addition many entities that issue bonds no longer exist. If you buy corporate bonds from the above companies you won't be getting your money back for example, and many countries have had big changes that mean you can't always rely on them -- 100 years ago many south american countries looked like they would be rivals to the US for example, but eventually defaulted on their debts. The US may therefore be considered a safe jurisdiction, but with a massively growing debt it's highly likely a sovereign debt crisis is just around the corner. That doesn't mean you shouldn't invest in these things, but rather that you need to be cognizant that for wealth preservation, both stock and bond markets mean taking on substantial risk.
Absolutely true. It's been really strange seeing the massive shifts just in the past 5 years. It's like.... major parts of ideologies just suddenly change completely.
Thinking about it, I wonder if part of the reason we're not having kids is that we're often stuck in an extended childhood, and the reason for that is western society took our collective wisdom and threw it away.
We used to know marriage was something worth striving for, but then we threw it away because marriage is bad since you can get hurt in a divorce.
We used to know having kids was something worth striving for, but we threw it away because they're expensive and the world is going to end in a million years and life is suffering.
We used to know community was something worth striving for, but we threw it away because you might not like the people in your community and they might judge you.
In order to destroy this wisdom, and some of it is self-evident wisdom, you have to throw up hard barriers. You can't just forget it, you need to reject it. Postmodern western civilization did reject all these things and much more. It's no wonder that the whole of our lives exist in the pop culture era, and future generations are having to re-learn the wisdom that was self-evident only a few generations ago.
Our bodies and minds are evolved solely to help us survive and replicate, and we have rejected many of the instincts because we're supposedly enlightened and far past that, but in its place many people have left essentially nothing, and the truth has always been that if you're a nihilist, there's no reason not to just lay flat and let the world reclaim you into dust, and many people are doing exactly that with their lives.
I've learned that this rejection is wrong in my life. I didn't think I'd ever have any of the things that matter. I didn't think I'd find a wife. I didn't think I'd own a home. I didn't think I'd have a child. And I thought when I was young that I wouldn't want any of those things anyway. But I was wrong and learning I was wrong has been delightful.
Being married filled a hole in my heart I never knew I had, and people will scoff and go "Oh what a loser he needs a woman to feel complete", but I do and I'm unashamed of that. My wife is my partner and thank God for her coming into my life. Having a son has filled my life with meaning and purpose in a way I simply didn't have just a few years ago -- I looked around and thought "Oh, I'll be paid off on my house, and then I can retire, and then I can die" and what a sad thing that was. Again, some people will scoff and go "Oh what a loser he needs a child to feel complete", but I do and I'm unashamed of that. In my growing son I see myself, and I see my wife, and I see someone else who is neither of us but has grown in the culture we've created for him into a smart, hilarious, clever, interesting little guy. I won't say owning a home has filled a hole in my heart, but there's something primal about having a spot that isn't the place you stay, it's yours. I rented for a long time, and you are always aware of the fact that you are in a place that belongs to someone else that you are borrowing (for money), and it does change the way you act. What else has been lost in the postmodern generations? What might we never recover fully?
And rejecting these things as things that might make you happy in life is I think part of the reason we're unhappier than ever despite being richer in many ways, and also why we're looking at such low birth rates.
We used to know marriage was something worth striving for, but then we threw it away because marriage is bad since you can get hurt in a divorce.
We used to know having kids was something worth striving for, but we threw it away because they're expensive and the world is going to end in a million years and life is suffering.
We used to know community was something worth striving for, but we threw it away because you might not like the people in your community and they might judge you.
In order to destroy this wisdom, and some of it is self-evident wisdom, you have to throw up hard barriers. You can't just forget it, you need to reject it. Postmodern western civilization did reject all these things and much more. It's no wonder that the whole of our lives exist in the pop culture era, and future generations are having to re-learn the wisdom that was self-evident only a few generations ago.
Our bodies and minds are evolved solely to help us survive and replicate, and we have rejected many of the instincts because we're supposedly enlightened and far past that, but in its place many people have left essentially nothing, and the truth has always been that if you're a nihilist, there's no reason not to just lay flat and let the world reclaim you into dust, and many people are doing exactly that with their lives.
I've learned that this rejection is wrong in my life. I didn't think I'd ever have any of the things that matter. I didn't think I'd find a wife. I didn't think I'd own a home. I didn't think I'd have a child. And I thought when I was young that I wouldn't want any of those things anyway. But I was wrong and learning I was wrong has been delightful.
Being married filled a hole in my heart I never knew I had, and people will scoff and go "Oh what a loser he needs a woman to feel complete", but I do and I'm unashamed of that. My wife is my partner and thank God for her coming into my life. Having a son has filled my life with meaning and purpose in a way I simply didn't have just a few years ago -- I looked around and thought "Oh, I'll be paid off on my house, and then I can retire, and then I can die" and what a sad thing that was. Again, some people will scoff and go "Oh what a loser he needs a child to feel complete", but I do and I'm unashamed of that. In my growing son I see myself, and I see my wife, and I see someone else who is neither of us but has grown in the culture we've created for him into a smart, hilarious, clever, interesting little guy. I won't say owning a home has filled a hole in my heart, but there's something primal about having a spot that isn't the place you stay, it's yours. I rented for a long time, and you are always aware of the fact that you are in a place that belongs to someone else that you are borrowing (for money), and it does change the way you act. What else has been lost in the postmodern generations? What might we never recover fully?
And rejecting these things as things that might make you happy in life is I think part of the reason we're unhappier than ever despite being richer in many ways, and also why we're looking at such low birth rates.
Some people are confused as to how anti-vax sentiment can be considered progressive, since the dominant narrative has been that anti-vax is a right wing idea.
That only happened very recently. Prior to the pandemic, the largest constituency of anti-vaxxers were progressive women who were worried about the effects of vaccines on their children since they're drugs produced by big pharma who have several blockbuster examples of selling things that turned out to be horrible such as thalidomide. It appeals to the anti-corporate sector of progressivism, and there would be an element where instead of using big pharma chemicals they'd prefer to use more naturalistic methods to stay healthy such as diet, exercise, and herbal supplements.
There's data to back up the idea that anti-vaxxing is more of a left-wing idea, and that's the fact that many breakthrough cases of preventable diseases such as measles and mumps are in states such as California which have a lot more adherence to progressive ideology.
The right wing version of anti-vaxxing is actually a misnomer since it's typically only the one set of vaccines they're concerned about, and most right wing "anti-vaxxers" will fully vaccinate their kids except for the one. In reality it's more just linguistic propaganda being used to try to shame people into doing what they're told.
It's a simple logical argument: "Some As are B, which does not imply all As are B" some vaccines are effective and useful, but not all are. And some vaccines are particularly useful for some people at some times, but not as useful generally -- If you're bitten by a rabid dog, a rabies vaccine will save your life, but typically we don't blanket vaccinate people for rabies because the exposure to rabies is very low (most people will never be at risk), and the vaccine is highly effective after the initial bite if it's given quickly enough. Like many things, it's a decision relying on personal circumstances as well as blanket categorizations.
Some people go "But doctors said it was ok!" but doctors also prescribed thalidomide to pregnant women so let's chill out and accept that it's ok for people to use their brains and think for themselves even if they come to conclusions we don't agree with.
It is a first principle of medical interventions that every medical intervention has the potential to cause harm. Even something with no active medical ingredient such as sugar pill has recorded side effects due to placebo effect, and once you start injecting manufactured substances into the body the risk increases considerably. Therefore it's sensible to be careful about choosing medical interventions whose benefits outweigh the risks. That's true whatever your political ideology.
That only happened very recently. Prior to the pandemic, the largest constituency of anti-vaxxers were progressive women who were worried about the effects of vaccines on their children since they're drugs produced by big pharma who have several blockbuster examples of selling things that turned out to be horrible such as thalidomide. It appeals to the anti-corporate sector of progressivism, and there would be an element where instead of using big pharma chemicals they'd prefer to use more naturalistic methods to stay healthy such as diet, exercise, and herbal supplements.
There's data to back up the idea that anti-vaxxing is more of a left-wing idea, and that's the fact that many breakthrough cases of preventable diseases such as measles and mumps are in states such as California which have a lot more adherence to progressive ideology.
The right wing version of anti-vaxxing is actually a misnomer since it's typically only the one set of vaccines they're concerned about, and most right wing "anti-vaxxers" will fully vaccinate their kids except for the one. In reality it's more just linguistic propaganda being used to try to shame people into doing what they're told.
It's a simple logical argument: "Some As are B, which does not imply all As are B" some vaccines are effective and useful, but not all are. And some vaccines are particularly useful for some people at some times, but not as useful generally -- If you're bitten by a rabid dog, a rabies vaccine will save your life, but typically we don't blanket vaccinate people for rabies because the exposure to rabies is very low (most people will never be at risk), and the vaccine is highly effective after the initial bite if it's given quickly enough. Like many things, it's a decision relying on personal circumstances as well as blanket categorizations.
Some people go "But doctors said it was ok!" but doctors also prescribed thalidomide to pregnant women so let's chill out and accept that it's ok for people to use their brains and think for themselves even if they come to conclusions we don't agree with.
It is a first principle of medical interventions that every medical intervention has the potential to cause harm. Even something with no active medical ingredient such as sugar pill has recorded side effects due to placebo effect, and once you start injecting manufactured substances into the body the risk increases considerably. Therefore it's sensible to be careful about choosing medical interventions whose benefits outweigh the risks. That's true whatever your political ideology.