What ever happened to dream that if we work had and sacrifice now, and get our degrees in math or science or engineering, the world will open up to us in the future.
The social contract, between people and corporations, was broken. I'm not entirely sure when, but sometime in the 90's, 'serial eployment' -- people bouncing from one job to the next -- became the norm. There was no longer any advantage or benefit to staying at a company for 20+, 30+ years. Besides, companies would drop you in a moment if it would lower their bottom line and make someone else a few more stock points, so why return that sort of douchebaggery with loyalty? Pensions became a thing of the past. Well, except for the people filling executive positions. But even they've gone to bouncing from company to company like a manic rubber ball.
So, yeah. No more social contract. It died sometime when Reagan was President.
As First and Second World corporations seek cheaper and cheaper labor, they leave in their wake populations who are just wealthy enough for the corporations to not see it as profitable anymore to employ them. As the corps move on to other labor markets, the populations they leave behind experience increased unemployment and vastly decreased buying power. Eventually, companies come back to one of these artificially depressed populations for new, cheap, labor, and the cycle will continue.
Hope you don't mind your descendants shoveling goat dung.
As an aside... I actually agree to a point. The cultural and economic divides are currently far too dramatic. Maybe someday the world will unite, since, you know, 'Hang together... hang separately,' that sort of thing. But for now, it can't happen, and there are a lot of reasons -- besides the 'one' you said -- as to why we shouldn't even bother considering global unification.
It might be kinder to say that a society that can afford to research alternative ways, and with a sufficiently large percentage of the populace being educated, will care about the environment.
That being said, you're essentially correct. Most developing nations are just trying to get up to speed and don't have the time, inclination, and/or money to worry about environmental concerns.
Climate change is pretty well established. 'Global Warming' is the proper if confusing term for it; average temperatures throughout the world are going up. But people with fewer brain cells than fingers didn't bother to read beyond 'warming' and yukked it up when whole swathes of the world get buried under snow as part of the wildly changing weather patterns. So it became convenient to use the vaguer and less accurate -- but still somewhat accurate -- term 'climate change.'
Global climate change/warming is not in question. The questions are: Is it anthropogenic? and Should we do something about it? One is not necessarily linked to the other, and there are some good reasons to NOT try to stave off climate change even if it is anthropogenic.
At the same time... reducing the use of unrenewable fuels and cleaner air is a pretty good reason, even if you don't believe the world is heating up. I don't think it's worth going all Oceania, though. Either we'll do something about it, or we can't or won't.
The glib answer I'm about to give makes it seem clear-cut, but it really isn't.
Punitive sentences for the unrepentant, rehabilitative for those who are misguided or simply mentally ill.
The problem is, how do you tell when a convict is one or the other? Quasifunctional sociopaths are accomplished, convincing liars (they even convince themselves, sometimes) and could act like they're all cured. The mentally ill, once rehabilitated, might be overwhelmed by guilt and retreat into the 'easy' path of seeking punitative sentencing. There are a lot of other combinations that can lead to false negatives or false positives.
Besides, right now, most "justice" and "corrections" systems are not set up to be rehabilitative. I don't even think modern psychiatry and psychology knows *how* to reliably rehabilitate most sorts of criminals; it strikes me as a complex problem requiring a multidisciplinary solution that we as a culture are not capable of solving right now.
And, heaven help me, I'm the sort of person who thinks Robert Fuld got off too easy with just being cold-cocked.:(
> Suicide makes you the victim, the bullies the bad guys. All a Columbine does is make the bullies the victims and you the bad-guy.
But making the bullies your victims; making them beg and plead with you for their lives in much the same way as you see yourself as having done; and, having been denied their mercy, taking great joy in showing no quarter to them as you scatter their brains across the far wall; saying 'no more, asshole,' with double-ought buckshot; giving the finger to a system that let them bully you by taking away from that system -- teachers, administrators, parents -- their special little snowflakes that were oh so good and could do no wrong, even as they were pounding you into the pavement or making you feel like less than shit; and finishing it all with one last grand 'FUCK YOU!' to the world in a whirlwind of violence and chaos and police-assisted suicide....
And maybe some of them think, 'Maybe if this happens enough times, bullying will stop forever. Maybe if I kill enough football captains and Heathers in sufficiently gruesome ways, all the other football captains and Heathers of the world will stop. Maybe this one action of mine can help stop it... or at least make other bullies think twice about being assholes.'
At the point when a kid decides to go Columbine, the kids don't really give a tinker's damn about the bullies. To them, if the bullies are the victims, then that's AWESOME. "It's about fucking time." And if they're made out to be the bad guy, so what? For once in the four years of hell that the rest of us call High School, they see themselves as having some measure of power: over their tormentors, and over themselves and their own lives.
It's not rational; it's not mentally healthy; it's rather tragic. But from a twisted perspective, it also makes sense.
Hum, where's Jon Katz? These articles would be right up his alley.
There are all sorts of caveats to the statute of limitations. It's not as bulletproof as it is made out to be. Obviously, Class A felonies are exempt from the statute, but there are likely other caveats and exemptions.
In this case, however, it appears that the programmers were hired *since* 1990 and 1991, and have continued to work with Bernie and the Boffers till at least 2006.
If that is not the case, it's possible that the court decided that they aided and abetted a criminal action which continued on to the present day, thus exempting them from the statute of limitations.
It's not just the CO2 that's getting pumped into the atmosphere, but all the other crap that gets put out when we burn fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuels does more than release carbon dioxide; it is not a pure 'oil + oxygen -> combustion -> carbon dioxide' reaction. No amount of 'purification' can really remove all the impurities in coal and oil, and most companies would find it prohibitively expensive to do so anyway. This really almost need not be said; you've seen pictures of the infamous LA smog in the morning. In New York, when an inversion layer hit, Manhattan was blanketed by this thick black-brown coverage; thinking back on it, I have to ask myself why I would want to breathe that crap.
Plus there's only so much CO2 the ecosystem can process. Just like humans and oxygen, too much CO2 is Not Good for plants. Photosynthetic plants can only process so much CO2 into O2.And a big part of the CO2 cycle is not just the photosynthetic process, but also the oceans absorbing a large chunk of that carbon dioxide, and it appears that the oceans are reaching a saturation point with how much they can absorb.
Perhaps it's not a matter of Utah's ranking in the country's production of coal and oil, but what percentage of those industries make up Utah's economy? Just throwing that out there; I don't know what Utah's economy is like, though I suspect it's not in the upper 50% of the country.
Plus, we simply don't know if the human race will die off because of the climate. To say that we must act because we'll all die if we don't is nothing more than sensationalism. No hard evidence supports that.
There's also no evidence that says it won't.
Admitedly, humans are adaptable... but there's only so much our biological adaptability will take us as far as surviving a hypothetically increasingly-hostile environment. Our technological adaptability will cover the rest... but since we are, as a whole, a capitalist species, that technology will come at a cost. That cost will have to be paid. Who will pay that cost? and what strings might they deem desirable to attach to paying that cost?
This is a flavor of Newton's Paradox writ large. Humanity MAY or MAY NOT become extinct from climate change in the future. o If we MAY, and we DO NOTHING, then we perish as a species. o If we MAY NOT and we DO NOTHING, then we survive anyway (and a bunch of people eventually eat crow.) o If we MAY and we DO SOMETHING, then we (might) survive. o If we MAY NOT and DO SOMETHING, then we survive anyway.
Seems to me that if we do something, we (might) survive (or at least our chances of survival increase.) While if we do nothing, we've a 50-50 chance of going the way of the dinosaurs based on the premise that we know jack shyte about what climate change is capable of doing to us as a species. It kind of boils down to... how badly do we want to gamble with the species?
Hell, speaking of paradoxes, for all we know global climate change might be one of the factors of Fermi's Paradox.
Rupert Murdoch's been doing that for a while, as has the Chinese government, so I don't think anything's really stopping you from doing that, this decision notwithstanding.
The right to assembly is separate from incorporation. A corporation is granted a charter to conduct its business in accordance with the laws of the land. It is granted this charter because it is not merely an assembly of equal individuals, but rather a machine for a specific fiduciary goal (that goal being either to minimize costs amongst its members, or to maximize profits for the owner(s) of the corporation while (sometimes but not always) providing some service(s).)
Right to assembly specifically addresses the ability of people to personally and peacefully gather together without fear of the police -- or, when the Constitution was written, the military -- coming by and breaking them up, or even just breaking them.
I do hope that the difference is clear. Conflating 'peaceful assembly' with 'corporation' is not being accurate. They are two very, very different things.
The real issue in question here is the extent of constitutional protections that a corporation has, in that since the mid-1800's corporations have acquired a legal fiction of 'pseudo-personhood.' (Interestingly, if I recall correctly, the case which is used as precedent was a corporation suing someone for libel and slander, and winning on the judge's premise that a corporation is entitled to protection from libel and slander.) So, in a nutshell: How much is a corporation considered a 'person' insofar as Constitutional protections?
Well, large amounts of money can strongly affect the outcome of a campaign. It's not the voicing of a political opinion or platform that is at issue; it's the volume that platform is being voiced at. Or rather more to the point, (a) the bandwidth and (b) the spin of that platform.
Most of the money spent in a campaign is not used merely to put out ads and send sandwich-board guys walking around, but to craft the message in specific and directed means; to conduct studies as to how that message should be framed; and to spin that message for specific audiences in specific regions. It is here that metric buttloads of money dumped into a particular campaign see the tides of a campaign shift. More money in a campaign's war chest allows it to buy resources to target their message to specific audiences. Remember, most campaigns are not 'preaching to the choir,' they are aiming to win over the 50-60% self-identified 'swing voters.' To do this, they spin their platform; if they have enough money, they can spin that message many different ways, for specific segments of the population, than if they could not afford to do that. You would be appealing to the values of, for example, Detroit auto workers in a different way than you would Chicago-school economists, and the local chapter of the Daughters of the Revolution. Money lets you buy the resources that lets you tailor the spin of your platform in different ways.
So let's talk about bandwidth. This is a lot simpler. More money lets you get your message out through more channels. More money lets you be more creative and more diverse with the presentation of that message. Also, if you can send that message out through different channels, you can tailor the presentation of the message to the channel. You can have different ads going out to the various regional TV and radio afiliates, and web sites. Money lets you open more channels.
The two -- bandwidth and spin -- are synergistic. An ad tailored to a specific group, sent out on a channel that is frequented by that group, will have much, much greater impact than a generic ad just launched out into the media. Money allows the maximal diversification of the message in terms of bandwidth and spin.
This is where things become problematic, because corporations have a great deal of money at hand, typically much, much more than an individual might. An influx of this money into a campaign's coffers has an effect that, while it might be denigrated as simply 'paying for propaganda,' must not be underestimated.
It's not so much that 'spending more money means you win the vote,' though that is the ultimate conclusion to a successful campaign. Of course, if any of this memetic warfare bothers you, then, yes, campaigns with massive war chests should bother you as well.
Some of the more remarkable philosophical implications of this is tie into not only Plato's Cave but also the Buddhist belief that 'reality' is an illusion.
Also, the holographic screen does not necessarilly need to be two-dimensional. Our universe might simply be the N-dimensional interior of an (N-1)-dimenional sphere that exists in an (N+1) dimensional space. How wild would that be?
The difference between arXiv and a peer-reviewed journal is approximately similar to the difference between Wikipedia and primary sources. While a lot of cool things are up on arXiv -- and can provide plenty of fodder for science fiction writers, particularly those inspired by the likes of Stephen Baxter -- it's not peer reviewed, and (figuratively speaking) any fruitbat can post their plans for a perpetual motion machine there. (I'm not sure how long it would last before it was yoinked, but there you go.) I'm probably exaggerating a bit; nobody speaks of arXiv in the same way that Wikipedia is spoken of and excoriated. Still, best to take things on arXiv with a bit more than just a grain of salt.
Actually, one of the pieces of evidence for curved spacetime has been that Pythagoras's Theorem does not seem to hold true at large distances through gravity wells. I forget the exact numbers -- it was several years ago -- but using parallax observations and some industrial-strength maths, it was found that over large distances, the sum of the angles of a triangle come out to *less* than 180-degrees. We're talking about fractions of a degree, and for all practical purposes in our frame of reference -- i.e. the surface of the Earth -- Pythagoras's Theorem holds 'true enough.' But it's at the scales of the very large or the very small, of course, that observations like that start to break down.
Slashdot Mirror
The social contract, between people and corporations, was broken. I'm not entirely sure when, but sometime in the 90's, 'serial eployment' -- people bouncing from one job to the next -- became the norm. There was no longer any advantage or benefit to staying at a company for 20+, 30+ years. Besides, companies would drop you in a moment if it would lower their bottom line and make someone else a few more stock points, so why return that sort of douchebaggery with loyalty? Pensions became a thing of the past. Well, except for the people filling executive positions. But even they've gone to bouncing from company to company like a manic rubber ball.
So, yeah. No more social contract. It died sometime when Reagan was President.
It's odd, yes, because I hardly hear the same complaints about tax dollars going towards capital punishment.
Oh, I know that those complaints are out there. It's just that the ones about abortion are turned up to 11.
As First and Second World corporations seek cheaper and cheaper labor, they leave in their wake populations who are just wealthy enough for the corporations to not see it as profitable anymore to employ them. As the corps move on to other labor markets, the populations they leave behind experience increased unemployment and vastly decreased buying power. Eventually, companies come back to one of these artificially depressed populations for new, cheap, labor, and the cycle will continue.
Hope you don't mind your descendants shoveling goat dung.
As an aside... I actually agree to a point. The cultural and economic divides are currently far too dramatic. Maybe someday the world will unite, since, you know, 'Hang together... hang separately,' that sort of thing. But for now, it can't happen, and there are a lot of reasons -- besides the 'one' you said -- as to why we shouldn't even bother considering global unification.
Not to mention that those spearmen can take out your battleship.
And then Ghandi comes up to you and says that his words are backed by nuclear weapons. Dammit Ghandi!
It might be kinder to say that a society that can afford to research alternative ways, and with a sufficiently large percentage of the populace being educated, will care about the environment.
That being said, you're essentially correct. Most developing nations are just trying to get up to speed and don't have the time, inclination, and/or money to worry about environmental concerns.
Climate change is pretty well established. 'Global Warming' is the proper if confusing term for it; average temperatures throughout the world are going up. But people with fewer brain cells than fingers didn't bother to read beyond 'warming' and yukked it up when whole swathes of the world get buried under snow as part of the wildly changing weather patterns. So it became convenient to use the vaguer and less accurate -- but still somewhat accurate -- term 'climate change.'
Global climate change/warming is not in question. The questions are: Is it anthropogenic? and Should we do something about it? One is not necessarily linked to the other, and there are some good reasons to NOT try to stave off climate change even if it is anthropogenic.
At the same time... reducing the use of unrenewable fuels and cleaner air is a pretty good reason, even if you don't believe the world is heating up. I don't think it's worth going all Oceania, though. Either we'll do something about it, or we can't or won't.
I guess that means LHC was a triumph.
The glib answer I'm about to give makes it seem clear-cut, but it really isn't.
Punitive sentences for the unrepentant, rehabilitative for those who are misguided or simply mentally ill.
The problem is, how do you tell when a convict is one or the other? Quasifunctional sociopaths are accomplished, convincing liars (they even convince themselves, sometimes) and could act like they're all cured. The mentally ill, once rehabilitated, might be overwhelmed by guilt and retreat into the 'easy' path of seeking punitative sentencing. There are a lot of other combinations that can lead to false negatives or false positives.
Besides, right now, most "justice" and "corrections" systems are not set up to be rehabilitative. I don't even think modern psychiatry and psychology knows *how* to reliably rehabilitate most sorts of criminals; it strikes me as a complex problem requiring a multidisciplinary solution that we as a culture are not capable of solving right now.
And, heaven help me, I'm the sort of person who thinks Robert Fuld got off too easy with just being cold-cocked. :(
> Suicide makes you the victim, the bullies the bad guys. All a Columbine does is make the bullies the victims and you the bad-guy.
But making the bullies your victims; making them beg and plead with you for their lives in much the same way as you see yourself as having done; and, having been denied their mercy, taking great joy in showing no quarter to them as you scatter their brains across the far wall; saying 'no more, asshole,' with double-ought buckshot; giving the finger to a system that let them bully you by taking away from that system -- teachers, administrators, parents -- their special little snowflakes that were oh so good and could do no wrong, even as they were pounding you into the pavement or making you feel like less than shit; and finishing it all with one last grand 'FUCK YOU!' to the world in a whirlwind of violence and chaos and police-assisted suicide....
And maybe some of them think, 'Maybe if this happens enough times, bullying will stop forever. Maybe if I kill enough football captains and Heathers in sufficiently gruesome ways, all the other football captains and Heathers of the world will stop. Maybe this one action of mine can help stop it... or at least make other bullies think twice about being assholes.'
At the point when a kid decides to go Columbine, the kids don't really give a tinker's damn about the bullies. To them, if the bullies are the victims, then that's AWESOME. "It's about fucking time." And if they're made out to be the bad guy, so what? For once in the four years of hell that the rest of us call High School, they see themselves as having some measure of power: over their tormentors, and over themselves and their own lives.
It's not rational; it's not mentally healthy; it's rather tragic. But from a twisted perspective, it also makes sense.
Hum, where's Jon Katz? These articles would be right up his alley.
For some reason I read that as 'Ernest Borgnine.'
Yes, it's early in the morning here.
There are all sorts of caveats to the statute of limitations. It's not as bulletproof as it is made out to be. Obviously, Class A felonies are exempt from the statute, but there are likely other caveats and exemptions.
In this case, however, it appears that the programmers were hired *since* 1990 and 1991, and have continued to work with Bernie and the Boffers till at least 2006.
If that is not the case, it's possible that the court decided that they aided and abetted a criminal action which continued on to the present day, thus exempting them from the statute of limitations.
A few points:
It's not just the CO2 that's getting pumped into the atmosphere, but all the other crap that gets put out when we burn fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuels does more than release carbon dioxide; it is not a pure 'oil + oxygen -> combustion -> carbon dioxide' reaction. No amount of 'purification' can really remove all the impurities in coal and oil, and most companies would find it prohibitively expensive to do so anyway. This really almost need not be said; you've seen pictures of the infamous LA smog in the morning. In New York, when an inversion layer hit, Manhattan was blanketed by this thick black-brown coverage; thinking back on it, I have to ask myself why I would want to breathe that crap.
Plus there's only so much CO2 the ecosystem can process. Just like humans and oxygen, too much CO2 is Not Good for plants. Photosynthetic plants can only process so much CO2 into O2.And a big part of the CO2 cycle is not just the photosynthetic process, but also the oceans absorbing a large chunk of that carbon dioxide, and it appears that the oceans are reaching a saturation point with how much they can absorb.
Perhaps it's not a matter of Utah's ranking in the country's production of coal and oil, but what percentage of those industries make up Utah's economy? Just throwing that out there; I don't know what Utah's economy is like, though I suspect it's not in the upper 50% of the country.
There's also no evidence that says it won't.
Admitedly, humans are adaptable... but there's only so much our biological adaptability will take us as far as surviving a hypothetically increasingly-hostile environment. Our technological adaptability will cover the rest... but since we are, as a whole, a capitalist species, that technology will come at a cost. That cost will have to be paid. Who will pay that cost? and what strings might they deem desirable to attach to paying that cost?
This is a flavor of Newton's Paradox writ large. Humanity MAY or MAY NOT become extinct from climate change in the future.
o If we MAY, and we DO NOTHING, then we perish as a species.
o If we MAY NOT and we DO NOTHING, then we survive anyway (and a bunch of people eventually eat crow.)
o If we MAY and we DO SOMETHING, then we (might) survive.
o If we MAY NOT and DO SOMETHING, then we survive anyway.
Seems to me that if we do something, we (might) survive (or at least our chances of survival increase.) While if we do nothing, we've a 50-50 chance of going the way of the dinosaurs based on the premise that we know jack shyte about what climate change is capable of doing to us as a species. It kind of boils down to... how badly do we want to gamble with the species?
Hell, speaking of paradoxes, for all we know global climate change might be one of the factors of Fermi's Paradox.
Rupert Murdoch's been doing that for a while, as has the Chinese government, so I don't think anything's really stopping you from doing that, this decision notwithstanding.
Isn't that already the case with Rupert 'Carpetbagging Asshole' Murdoch and his News Corp.? Or did he finally become a US citizen after all?
The right to assembly is separate from incorporation. A corporation is granted a charter to conduct its business in accordance with the laws of the land. It is granted this charter because it is not merely an assembly of equal individuals, but rather a machine for a specific fiduciary goal (that goal being either to minimize costs amongst its members, or to maximize profits for the owner(s) of the corporation while (sometimes but not always) providing some service(s).)
Right to assembly specifically addresses the ability of people to personally and peacefully gather together without fear of the police -- or, when the Constitution was written, the military -- coming by and breaking them up, or even just breaking them.
I do hope that the difference is clear. Conflating 'peaceful assembly' with 'corporation' is not being accurate. They are two very, very different things.
The real issue in question here is the extent of constitutional protections that a corporation has, in that since the mid-1800's corporations have acquired a legal fiction of 'pseudo-personhood.' (Interestingly, if I recall correctly, the case which is used as precedent was a corporation suing someone for libel and slander, and winning on the judge's premise that a corporation is entitled to protection from libel and slander.) So, in a nutshell: How much is a corporation considered a 'person' insofar as Constitutional protections?
Not only that. The Zombie Corporatocracy!
Though the term 'Kleptocracy' does have it's appeal....
Well, large amounts of money can strongly affect the outcome of a campaign. It's not the voicing of a political opinion or platform that is at issue; it's the volume that platform is being voiced at. Or rather more to the point, (a) the bandwidth and (b) the spin of that platform.
Most of the money spent in a campaign is not used merely to put out ads and send sandwich-board guys walking around, but to craft the message in specific and directed means; to conduct studies as to how that message should be framed; and to spin that message for specific audiences in specific regions. It is here that metric buttloads of money dumped into a particular campaign see the tides of a campaign shift. More money in a campaign's war chest allows it to buy resources to target their message to specific audiences. Remember, most campaigns are not 'preaching to the choir,' they are aiming to win over the 50-60% self-identified 'swing voters.' To do this, they spin their platform; if they have enough money, they can spin that message many different ways, for specific segments of the population, than if they could not afford to do that. You would be appealing to the values of, for example, Detroit auto workers in a different way than you would Chicago-school economists, and the local chapter of the Daughters of the Revolution. Money lets you buy the resources that lets you tailor the spin of your platform in different ways.
So let's talk about bandwidth. This is a lot simpler. More money lets you get your message out through more channels. More money lets you be more creative and more diverse with the presentation of that message. Also, if you can send that message out through different channels, you can tailor the presentation of the message to the channel. You can have different ads going out to the various regional TV and radio afiliates, and web sites. Money lets you open more channels.
The two -- bandwidth and spin -- are synergistic. An ad tailored to a specific group, sent out on a channel that is frequented by that group, will have much, much greater impact than a generic ad just launched out into the media. Money allows the maximal diversification of the message in terms of bandwidth and spin.
This is where things become problematic, because corporations have a great deal of money at hand, typically much, much more than an individual might. An influx of this money into a campaign's coffers has an effect that, while it might be denigrated as simply 'paying for propaganda,' must not be underestimated.
It's not so much that 'spending more money means you win the vote,' though that is the ultimate conclusion to a successful campaign. Of course, if any of this memetic warfare bothers you, then, yes, campaigns with massive war chests should bother you as well.
If you go this route, incorporate yourself first to protect your family's assets, your home and vehicle, and everything else you need to live.
Some of the more remarkable philosophical implications of this is tie into not only Plato's Cave but also the Buddhist belief that 'reality' is an illusion.
Also, the holographic screen does not necessarilly need to be two-dimensional. Our universe might simply be the N-dimensional interior of an (N-1)-dimenional sphere that exists in an (N+1) dimensional space. How wild would that be?
Cue the Science Montage!
The difference between arXiv and a peer-reviewed journal is approximately similar to the difference between Wikipedia and primary sources. While a lot of cool things are up on arXiv -- and can provide plenty of fodder for science fiction writers, particularly those inspired by the likes of Stephen Baxter -- it's not peer reviewed, and (figuratively speaking) any fruitbat can post their plans for a perpetual motion machine there. (I'm not sure how long it would last before it was yoinked, but there you go.) I'm probably exaggerating a bit; nobody speaks of arXiv in the same way that Wikipedia is spoken of and excoriated. Still, best to take things on arXiv with a bit more than just a grain of salt.
An interesting reframing of Newton's Paradox. =)
Actually, one of the pieces of evidence for curved spacetime has been that Pythagoras's Theorem does not seem to hold true at large distances through gravity wells. I forget the exact numbers -- it was several years ago -- but using parallax observations and some industrial-strength maths, it was found that over large distances, the sum of the angles of a triangle come out to *less* than 180-degrees. We're talking about fractions of a degree, and for all practical purposes in our frame of reference -- i.e. the surface of the Earth -- Pythagoras's Theorem holds 'true enough.' But it's at the scales of the very large or the very small, of course, that observations like that start to break down.
I read somewhere that there are only ten basic plots in Western literature. (I could be wrong about that number.)
Offhand, I'd say that they've all be done again... and again... and again...