When's the last time you tried to eat or drink wealth?
Uh, right now? Food, potable water, these too are forms of wealth, albeit it minor ones in a food rich society (much more so in a agrarian society during famine where the King holds the grain stores). We may be talking at cross-purposes if you interpreted wealth to mean something other than that which has utility to us.
Saying that wealth is destroyed in a shrinking population... not quite. If the population is shrinking, then these excess houses and cars (you're talking about a very rapid reduction in population mind you, more than I had in mind, I think) are in fact no longer "wealth" because they are no longer needed. Much like vast reserves of coal are less wealth when a society has ample nuclear power and fuel. Would it be right in that case to say that nuclear power was destroying wealth? It's a misunderstanding to say that things losing their utility to us is a loss of wealth. It may be if our need remains the same, but if they lose their utility because we no longer need them, then that is an increase in wealth. To illustrate the principle with a hypothetical, which would be the wealthiest community? The one that needed large amounts of coal and had lots of coal, or the society that (hypothetically) had self-sustaining renewable energy and needed no coal and had none? If there is no need / desire or potential need / desire for something, then no amount of that something can be considered wealth. Might as well print a few extra billion bank notes and say that the wealth of the USA has increased. We don't mourn a loss of wealth due to no longer having a plentiful supply of horse-drawn carts on hand. Nor would we mourn a "loss of wealth" due to no-longer needing the houses to shelter several billion people.
That's one of the most absurd false dichotomies I've ever heard and easily refuted. Your fundamental premise is that wealth is a constant, not creatable. Were that true, the four-thousand cavemen our species used to be would be each orders of magnitude wealthier than the billions we are today. Were your premise true, no community by itself could enrich itself. Were your premise true, there would be no value to scientific or cultural discoveries as your premise states that value can only come from taking from others. You might be able to type Nash Equlibrium into wikipedia, but I don't think you actually understand what it means.
Well it's a massive economic bust because our economy is structured entirely about selling things constantly, rather than wealth production and retention. And the most effective proven way of reducing birth rates is increased educational opportunities, particularly for women. But agreed, as things are currently set up, it's a big problem.
It sounds more like you're saying there needs to be a very large population for technological progress. I'm not convinced of this. If the population of our planet were 1 billion instead of the current amount, I think we could still keep up a steady rate of technological progress, perhaps the same rate. After all, the average level of living (and accompanying educational opportunities) of the 1 billion, could be much higher than the level of 7.5 billion for the same amount of planetary resources.
You say yourself that technology requires affecting the biosphere to a greater or lesser degree. The idea is that the "lesser degree" is what we aim for and we clean up after ourselves. afterwards
There's nothing in the movie that makes it "anti-technology" save that the bad guys have it and the good guys don't. Thus you could project onto the movie that it is therefore anti-technology if you expect it to be. But the Pandorans do have a very sophisticated technology it seems. The moon may well be an engineered biosphere. You can't even say that they've since lost the knowledge they once had as it is presumably still contained within the trees as their ancestors memories. But even if the Pandorans are not the result of technology, there's nothing in the movie that actually says "technology is bad". It says thoughtless plundering of resources is bad. It says displacing people so you can take their land is bad. If it's the belief of some that development of technology is inseparable from destruction of the biosphere, then I call those people pessimists. For them, maybe they see it as anti-technology, but I challenge people to actually find something that supports that rather than merely their being inclined to see it that way.
Uh, oil props up the Saudi Arabia government. The USA does not purchase that much oil from there, so the focus of hate is incorrect.
Firstly, the Saudi's have a great deal of influence over world oil prices which affects the US economy greatly. Secondly, the Saudis are an ally of the US in the Middle East (at least the ruling regime is, the people are a different matter). For example, the Saudi's are fighting an on-off proxy war with Iran in Yemen (a small country on the Southern border of Saudi). They fly US supplied F-15s. The US navy has intervened at their request to carry out bombings. Up until 2003, (i.e. post 9/11) the US had around 4,500 troops stationed in the country. I hate to pull out Wikipedia as its often used as a lazy way to find facts that support ones case out of context, but in this case I'm going to post a link: US & Saudi Relations. Note that the US provided both training and modern weaponry to the Saudi military in order to "combat shiite extremism". Extremism of course means revolutionaries that you don't like. Bahrain isn't legally part of Saudi Arabia, but I think you'll forgive me if I roll them in together given their indivisible strategic and military circumstances and united political positions. The US Fifth Fleet is based there (normally). If you think those forces wouldn't (and haven't) got involved in putting down any revolutionary efforts, you're mistaken.
I think that demonstrates US support for the Saudi regime. The US wants a strong presence in the Middle East and the Saudi regime is happy to be their loyal ally and base of operations at the expense of the people. It's a fucking monarchy for fucks sake. As regards your statement that Al Quaeda being "a big baby using the excuse of "OMG they stepped on our sand, get em'", Bin Laden himself stated that their one of their main motivations was US presence in Saudi. Why should that be false? Al Quaeda wanted to overthrow the Saudi regime. The US protects the Saudi regime. What is your reason for disputing their given motivations? It's a piss-poor sort of terrorist that goes about striking terror for causes other than their own.
By "ignoring them" I assume you mean their message not their attempts to kill people.
That's not necessarily a good idea. What demand was Al Quaeda making when they attacked the World Trade Centre? They wanted the US to stop propping up the undemocratic Saudi regime which survives due to US support. If more people of the USA understood just how bad that regime is and how their government supports it in their name, they might stop it and then you'd get less extremists striking out at the US. Ignoring the motivations of terrorists does nobody any good. But instead the US media wants to portray these people as if they are some evil that just comes out of nowhere.
You're right - dismantling your own democracy as a response to terrorists is definitely not the right response. Particularly when the countermeasures are so stupid. Worth noting that there *is* an effective way of combating terrorists however. Remove their community support. They don't come from nowhere and they don't arrange all these plans and have these beliefs without some friends and neighbours wondering. But a people that see occupations of their countries or US support for regimes like the Saudis are a people that are angry enough that they become less willing to stop such individuals themselves. And these communities are the best defense against terrorists.
Both missing the point. A racist joke is a bad thing because it neglects who someone is in favour of a false generalisation. It may be worse when a majority make it about a minority, because unlike the other way around it suggests there will be an accompanying abuse of power which is even worse than just insults. The poster that says that the acceptability of such comments is dependent on whether its a minority member making jokes about the majority (acceptable) or a majority member making jokes about a minority (unacceptable) is presenting a false view. It's not okay by most of us whichever way the racism goes. Why is that? Because if one is not racist, then one does not see it as a case of one ethnicity making jokes about another ethnicity, because people are not defined by their race. What makes it okay for individual A to make insulting comments about individual B? They are individuals. The actions or positions or numbers of the ethnicities they belong to have no effect because A does not gain any special privilege to insult people based on their ethnicity, and B should not be unwillingly appointed a suitable target for your opinions about an entire ethnic group that he happens to belong to. People are people. Treating them as representatives of people they aren't (the rest of their ethnic group) is prejudice.
The very notion of applying different standards to an individual because of their race is inherently racist. Saying someone gets less right to be offended by an insult because you think their race is privileged is racist - you're treating them, against their volition, as a component of an arbitrary race, rather than as the individual they are.
Nothing is wrong with going to see a movie on your own, unless you're comparing the experience to going to see it with a friend. Talking abotu the movie before and after, discussing what you liked about it / didn't like about it. A pleasure shared is a pleasure doubled. Also, it makes a nice date.
Just like with music, the publishers have to be convinced that DRM is worthless (as it actually is for the vast majority of text) so that we will eventually be able to buy non-DRMed ebooks.
Actually, they have to become convinced that DRM is uneccessary. The addiction to DRM came as a response to piracy. Get piracy down and we may see the back of DRM. If piracy remains a big concern of the producers, then they will continue to either use whatever DRM promises to help, or be reluctant to embrace digital distribution models. Remember that DRM doesn't have to be 100% effective to be worthwhile, it just has to reduce piracy. And in the light of that, efforts such as Amazon's DRM aren't worthless.
They are however very irritating to those of us who buy products which are limited because of DRM. For example, getting Blu-Ray to play on my Linux box was a journey of epic proportions. DRM is a response to piracy.
So it seems there is a dichotomy, but that it is not purely a problem of stereotypes as I'd said, but includes a large educational component. The problem remains the same - the USA has trouble reconciling people who are interested in both sports and academia. The solution seems to require not just the ditching of the US's "nerds" and "geeks" stereotypes (which they've unfortunately exported to the UK to a lesser extent), but also support and recognition from the educational system. When I was at school in the UK, they had a similar (though less extreme) problem reconciling Arts and Sciences, as I ultimately had to choose between English Literature and Chemistry. But that was more of a resourcing issue (there were few children that wanted to do both, so the school conceded that these classes would overlap rather than others). The problem with sports vs. academia in the US sounds pretty bad.
Few children will go on to become professional athletes. It's great to do sports and almost every child should. But the US is doing most of these children a big disservice if they are damaging children's academic progress for the sake of temporary school prestige. The child may leave with lesser academic skills and find themselves tossed on a heap of all the other high school level athletes from former years, so that the coach or the school can boast to parents for another year. I think this is actually unique to the USA as far as I know. If the country wants to achieve its full potential, it needs to get rid of this dichotomy, both the social one and the one apparently fostered by their schools.
And in the UK, we play rugby with similar effect. First thing the US needs to do? Get rid of this fucked up idea that there is any dichotomy between being good at sports and being good academically. Second thing it needs to do is to ditch the idea that because you have an interest or work in a particular field, you have to be some media stereotype of that field.
Then people can do what the fuck they want without society telling them they fall into some particular clique.
My original post said that I object to it being socially acceptable to mock people for their weight. I also said that I didn't like how my friend was made miserable because people threw abuse for her about her weight. That's pretty much the extent of what I said. I got a response telling me that she was at fault for other people coming up to her and insulting her. My logic is not an opinion, it was explaining the falsity of that statement. As both respondents were so loud on the subject of personal responsibility you'd think they'd expect responsibility for verbal abuse to lie with the person shouting it, but apparently not. I dislike all variants on "she was asking for it" which is what these two posters came up with.
You want obesity to be looked on as unhealthy - fine. It is. But if someone came up to a good friend of yours in the street and yelled insults at her, I'm sure you'd view that behaviour as unacceptable as well. That obesity is a short-hand way of showing someone is stupid or corrupt in mainstream Hollywood movies, we can also file away as nasty, I think. I don't know, but I expect you'd agree with me on that too - "we need more laughs in this movie, lets add a fat friend." If nothing else, making people depressed and self-conscious about their weight more often leads to further weight game (eat to compensate, ashamed to go to the gym or go for a run or ask someone out) than it does to sudden slimming. If you're unhealthy because you're overweight, you know that. Mockery is not a positive motivation for most people and the people mocking certainly aren't doing it out of the goodness of their heart - they're doing it because they find it fun to pick on someone. And that attitude is something I see as destructive so I'm sure you don't object to it being discouraged either.;)
Regards,
H.
You might try actually registering an account and using it. You would find that it massively increases the number of people who see your comments and, given that the above is something I agree with, I'd consider that a good thing. Also, you get notified of replies and you reduce the risk of other people pretending to be you. Some of us would even like to be able to Friend you so that we can note other things you might post.;)
Wouldn't you think that if you wanted to send a message to a company not to do something the best way wouldn't involve giving them lots of money for doing the thing you want to discourage?
It's your supposition that the motivation is to discourage Sony from doing something. As far as I've read, he and the group just wanted to displace the X-Factor song. Mission accomplished.
If you're selling something that requires a certain amount of sophistication to appreciate, you're targeting everyone above that level of sophistication. You then maximize your audience by lowering the sophistication
Note the word "if". I can release "Mary Had a Little Lamb" in C Major and four year olds up and down the land will "get" it. Will it sell? No, because it is too simple for everyone else. Clearly music is not a case of everything above a certain level is acceptable. Clearly hitting a point where the majority of tastes lie is more profitable than targeting the lowest common denominator and somehow thinking everyone above that finds it acceptable. You are accusing the big labels of trying to please everyone by targeting a minority audience. That obviously doesn't match the facts. And all this is allowing your contention that quality in musical terms is a scale from unsophisticated to sophisticated. Unless you're also auggesting that the nature of "sophisticated" changes from generation then it makes no allowance for the popularity of different styles. What's more sophisticated - Rolling Stones' Sympathy for the Devil or Beethoven's Fifth? Now which piece is best. Objectively. Which music is best for dancing to in a club - something with some simple harmonies and a thumping bassline or Tori Amos' Yes, Anastasia. According to you the one with the greatest level of artistry. Yeah - you're right. I love jumping around to Tori Amos.
As regards your statement that just because lots of people like something it doesn't mean that it is good... please could you define "good" as regards music without referring to the quality of whether or not people like it, which would be self-referential.
I cannot provide a list of necessary and sufficient conditions for a work to be good, no. However plenty of examples exist to show that popularity is neither necessary nor sufficient for a work to be good.
Well if you can't state a criteria for "good" then its my contention that when saying "good" you mean "the property of being liked". In which case how do you distinguish music people like from music that is good? If that's not the case, then define "good" in terms of music other than "it is liked".
You're right here. They really do like it. Why? Because they're stupid. The lowest common denominator is common after all.
Oh dear, somebody needs to explain the concept of the Bell Curve to you. You see if Stupid is toward left part and Smart is to the right, then the maximal target audience is in the middle, not to the "Stupid" end. Unless you're somehow going to argue that "Stupid" isn't a relative term which it certainly is. Why would anyone market to the lowest common denominator? Lowest Common Denominator would mean that you're pitching your product at some drooling idiot and hoping that everyone else bizarrely likes it too. No, you pitch toward the middle of the Bell Curve.
Now that can mess up some things when you try to please everyone and fail to please anyone, but that tends to happen with big budget movies where the studios are desperate to include everyone in their potential audience, rather than in music which is accepted as being inherently limited in appeal.
As regards your statement that just because lots of people like something it doesn't mean that it is good... please could you define "good" as regards music without referring to the quality of whether or not people like it, which would be self-referential.
I vote Lib Dem every election, I just don't hold any hope it will actually make a difference to anything in the long run.
I would take your disagreement with me and your voting over ten people who mod me up and don't vote.
You're right - one of the big battles is not with other parties, but with the civil service. However, it's a battle that must be fought and I'd sooner have the Lib Dems fighting that battle than Labour or the Conservatives.
It undermines the claims that piracy is responsible for the declining sales firstly because it shows that a *lot* of people are prepared to pay for music after all, so clearly not everyone is a "freetard" who just downloads everything via P2P.
Ah, I see. Well we already knew that not everyone is a freetard because clearly some people are buying the music. That people are now buying things by download doesn't demonstrate anything different though because these same people are now buying their music as downloads instead of on physical media. I am one of these people. Downloads are just more convenient for me. It doesn't mean that I've bought any more or any less music than I would have, or that those who pirated previously are now purchasing instead. Particularly a campaign like this where you have to buy it to help it climb the charts (the point of why some are buying it). Pirating it would get you the song but it wouldn't do anything toward displacing the X-Factor song.
Not only that, but it also shows that they are so fed up with the recycled Pop/R&B performances that labels churn out over and over again, that they are prepared to pay for a song quite a few of them probably won't even listen to in protest.
You haven't identified "they" in the above. If you take it to mean people in general, I'm afraid it doesn't show that people are fed up with music like this X-Factor song. After all, if people were fed up with it, they wouldn't be buying it and you wouldn't need tens of thousands of sales of Killing in the Name to displace it. What this shows is that many people are willing to put a bit of money toward displacing the song. We can suppose that these people are fed up with music like the X-Factor one. I would suggest that some are just perverse enough that they like hearing the word "Fuck" shouted on Radio 5 and messing up predictable and dull progressions (I certainly am). But regardless, the X-Factor song has sold plenty, so "they" the people clearly can't be said to be fed up.
The problem as I see it isn't so much that the quality music isn't there, because it is. The real problem is that if an act doesn't fit the cookie-cutter Pop/R&B model then they'll get next to no marketing support from the studios, making it all but impossible for potential fans to find them amidst all the dross that's also out there in music's long tail. Frankly, I think that the music industry has got so caught up in its "War against Piracy", that it's forgotten just how wonderfully diverse music can be and that not everyone likes to hear nothing but Pop and R&B.
That's why its great that people are paying for online music. So long as piracy stays low enough, it creates a very lucrative area that artists can directly sell to and that opens up the field to everyone.
The Lib Dems are 'orders of magnitudes better' BECAUSE they've never been in power
The Lib Dems have 62 members in the Houses of Parliament at present and being a power-broker faction, courted by both sides, is a position rich in corruption possibilities. So if they are an order of magnitude better (you exaggerated and misquoted me), then it speaks well of them. Additionally, they have 71 members in the House of Lords, 11 in the European Parliament, 3 on the London Assembly and over 4000 seats at Local Councils. You don't have to have anywhere near a majority just to be a voice in politics, but the more votes you get the louder that voice becomes. For example, the then leader of the Lib Dems Charles Kennedy led the opposition to the Iraq war. The vote was very close and just a handful more Lib Dems in parliament would have changed the outcome.
So your 'personal bet' is that if they got in you'd give them 6 months tops before they were as bad as New Labour or the Conservatives. Well, logic suggests you're better going with the chance of something good than accepting the certainty of something bad. Is it really that much effort to vote? Anyway, their current position as demonstrated already provides enough opportunities for compromise and corruption if need be, but their policies are still very good so far. You only have to look at the differences in individual corruption, e.g. the expenses scandal, between the different parties to develop a higher regard for the Lib Dems than Labour and the Conservatives. (And also unlike the USA, the Conservatives and Labour are not just mild variations on each other - the Conservatives really are much worse, believe it or not).
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, right now? Food, potable water, these too are forms of wealth, albeit it minor ones in a food rich society (much more so in a agrarian society during famine where the King holds the grain stores). We may be talking at cross-purposes if you interpreted wealth to mean something other than that which has utility to us.
Saying that wealth is destroyed in a shrinking population... not quite. If the population is shrinking, then these excess houses and cars (you're talking about a very rapid reduction in population mind you, more than I had in mind, I think) are in fact no longer "wealth" because they are no longer needed. Much like vast reserves of coal are less wealth when a society has ample nuclear power and fuel. Would it be right in that case to say that nuclear power was destroying wealth? It's a misunderstanding to say that things losing their utility to us is a loss of wealth. It may be if our need remains the same, but if they lose their utility because we no longer need them, then that is an increase in wealth. To illustrate the principle with a hypothetical, which would be the wealthiest community? The one that needed large amounts of coal and had lots of coal, or the society that (hypothetically) had self-sustaining renewable energy and needed no coal and had none? If there is no need / desire or potential need / desire for something, then no amount of that something can be considered wealth. Might as well print a few extra billion bank notes and say that the wealth of the USA has increased. We don't mourn a loss of wealth due to no longer having a plentiful supply of horse-drawn carts on hand. Nor would we mourn a "loss of wealth" due to no-longer needing the houses to shelter several billion people.
That's one of the most absurd false dichotomies I've ever heard and easily refuted. Your fundamental premise is that wealth is a constant, not creatable. Were that true, the four-thousand cavemen our species used to be would be each orders of magnitude wealthier than the billions we are today. Were your premise true, no community by itself could enrich itself. Were your premise true, there would be no value to scientific or cultural discoveries as your premise states that value can only come from taking from others. You might be able to type Nash Equlibrium into wikipedia, but I don't think you actually understand what it means.
Well it's a massive economic bust because our economy is structured entirely about selling things constantly, rather than wealth production and retention. And the most effective proven way of reducing birth rates is increased educational opportunities, particularly for women. But agreed, as things are currently set up, it's a big problem.
Nice sig., btw.
It sounds more like you're saying there needs to be a very large population for technological progress. I'm not convinced of this. If the population of our planet were 1 billion instead of the current amount, I think we could still keep up a steady rate of technological progress, perhaps the same rate. After all, the average level of living (and accompanying educational opportunities) of the 1 billion, could be much higher than the level of 7.5 billion for the same amount of planetary resources.
You say yourself that technology requires affecting the biosphere to a greater or lesser degree. The idea is that the "lesser degree" is what we aim for and we clean up after ourselves. afterwards
There's nothing in the movie that makes it "anti-technology" save that the bad guys have it and the good guys don't. Thus you could project onto the movie that it is therefore anti-technology if you expect it to be. But the Pandorans do have a very sophisticated technology it seems. The moon may well be an engineered biosphere. You can't even say that they've since lost the knowledge they once had as it is presumably still contained within the trees as their ancestors memories. But even if the Pandorans are not the result of technology, there's nothing in the movie that actually says "technology is bad". It says thoughtless plundering of resources is bad. It says displacing people so you can take their land is bad. If it's the belief of some that development of technology is inseparable from destruction of the biosphere, then I call those people pessimists. For them, maybe they see it as anti-technology, but I challenge people to actually find something that supports that rather than merely their being inclined to see it that way.
Firstly, the Saudi's have a great deal of influence over world oil prices which affects the US economy greatly. Secondly, the Saudis are an ally of the US in the Middle East (at least the ruling regime is, the people are a different matter). For example, the Saudi's are fighting an on-off proxy war with Iran in Yemen (a small country on the Southern border of Saudi). They fly US supplied F-15s. The US navy has intervened at their request to carry out bombings. Up until 2003, (i.e. post 9/11) the US had around 4,500 troops stationed in the country. I hate to pull out Wikipedia as its often used as a lazy way to find facts that support ones case out of context, but in this case I'm going to post a link: US & Saudi Relations. Note that the US provided both training and modern weaponry to the Saudi military in order to "combat shiite extremism". Extremism of course means revolutionaries that you don't like. Bahrain isn't legally part of Saudi Arabia, but I think you'll forgive me if I roll them in together given their indivisible strategic and military circumstances and united political positions. The US Fifth Fleet is based there (normally). If you think those forces wouldn't (and haven't) got involved in putting down any revolutionary efforts, you're mistaken.
I think that demonstrates US support for the Saudi regime. The US wants a strong presence in the Middle East and the Saudi regime is happy to be their loyal ally and base of operations at the expense of the people. It's a fucking monarchy for fucks sake. As regards your statement that Al Quaeda being "a big baby using the excuse of "OMG they stepped on our sand, get em'", Bin Laden himself stated that their one of their main motivations was US presence in Saudi. Why should that be false? Al Quaeda wanted to overthrow the Saudi regime. The US protects the Saudi regime. What is your reason for disputing their given motivations? It's a piss-poor sort of terrorist that goes about striking terror for causes other than their own.
That's not necessarily a good idea. What demand was Al Quaeda making when they attacked the World Trade Centre? They wanted the US to stop propping up the undemocratic Saudi regime which survives due to US support. If more people of the USA understood just how bad that regime is and how their government supports it in their name, they might stop it and then you'd get less extremists striking out at the US. Ignoring the motivations of terrorists does nobody any good. But instead the US media wants to portray these people as if they are some evil that just comes out of nowhere.
You're right - dismantling your own democracy as a response to terrorists is definitely not the right response. Particularly when the countermeasures are so stupid. Worth noting that there *is* an effective way of combating terrorists however. Remove their community support. They don't come from nowhere and they don't arrange all these plans and have these beliefs without some friends and neighbours wondering. But a people that see occupations of their countries or US support for regimes like the Saudis are a people that are angry enough that they become less willing to stop such individuals themselves. And these communities are the best defense against terrorists.
Image search is probably not the best way to learn who the president of a country is. Wolfram Alpha seems the best approach to this sort of thing:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=who+is+the+president+of+the+USA
Both missing the point. A racist joke is a bad thing because it neglects who someone is in favour of a false generalisation. It may be worse when a majority make it about a minority, because unlike the other way around it suggests there will be an accompanying abuse of power which is even worse than just insults. The poster that says that the acceptability of such comments is dependent on whether its a minority member making jokes about the majority (acceptable) or a majority member making jokes about a minority (unacceptable) is presenting a false view. It's not okay by most of us whichever way the racism goes. Why is that? Because if one is not racist, then one does not see it as a case of one ethnicity making jokes about another ethnicity, because people are not defined by their race. What makes it okay for individual A to make insulting comments about individual B? They are individuals. The actions or positions or numbers of the ethnicities they belong to have no effect because A does not gain any special privilege to insult people based on their ethnicity, and B should not be unwillingly appointed a suitable target for your opinions about an entire ethnic group that he happens to belong to. People are people. Treating them as representatives of people they aren't (the rest of their ethnic group) is prejudice.
The very notion of applying different standards to an individual because of their race is inherently racist. Saying someone gets less right to be offended by an insult because you think their race is privileged is racist - you're treating them, against their volition, as a component of an arbitrary race, rather than as the individual they are.
Nothing is wrong with going to see a movie on your own, unless you're comparing the experience to going to see it with a friend. Talking abotu the movie before and after, discussing what you liked about it / didn't like about it. A pleasure shared is a pleasure doubled. Also, it makes a nice date.
Fair enough. I'll just have to keep an eye out interesting posts from AC's. ;)
Regards,
H.
Actually, they have to become convinced that DRM is uneccessary. The addiction to DRM came as a response to piracy. Get piracy down and we may see the back of DRM. If piracy remains a big concern of the producers, then they will continue to either use whatever DRM promises to help, or be reluctant to embrace digital distribution models. Remember that DRM doesn't have to be 100% effective to be worthwhile, it just has to reduce piracy. And in the light of that, efforts such as Amazon's DRM aren't worthless.
They are however very irritating to those of us who buy products which are limited because of DRM. For example, getting Blu-Ray to play on my Linux box was a journey of epic proportions. DRM is a response to piracy.
So it seems there is a dichotomy, but that it is not purely a problem of stereotypes as I'd said, but includes a large educational component. The problem remains the same - the USA has trouble reconciling people who are interested in both sports and academia. The solution seems to require not just the ditching of the US's "nerds" and "geeks" stereotypes (which they've unfortunately exported to the UK to a lesser extent), but also support and recognition from the educational system. When I was at school in the UK, they had a similar (though less extreme) problem reconciling Arts and Sciences, as I ultimately had to choose between English Literature and Chemistry. But that was more of a resourcing issue (there were few children that wanted to do both, so the school conceded that these classes would overlap rather than others). The problem with sports vs. academia in the US sounds pretty bad.
Few children will go on to become professional athletes. It's great to do sports and almost every child should. But the US is doing most of these children a big disservice if they are damaging children's academic progress for the sake of temporary school prestige. The child may leave with lesser academic skills and find themselves tossed on a heap of all the other high school level athletes from former years, so that the coach or the school can boast to parents for another year. I think this is actually unique to the USA as far as I know. If the country wants to achieve its full potential, it needs to get rid of this dichotomy, both the social one and the one apparently fostered by their schools.
And in the UK, we play rugby with similar effect. First thing the US needs to do? Get rid of this fucked up idea that there is any dichotomy between being good at sports and being good academically. Second thing it needs to do is to ditch the idea that because you have an interest or work in a particular field, you have to be some media stereotype of that field.
Then people can do what the fuck they want without society telling them they fall into some particular clique.
My original post said that I object to it being socially acceptable to mock people for their weight. I also said that I didn't like how my friend was made miserable because people threw abuse for her about her weight. That's pretty much the extent of what I said. I got a response telling me that she was at fault for other people coming up to her and insulting her. My logic is not an opinion, it was explaining the falsity of that statement. As both respondents were so loud on the subject of personal responsibility you'd think they'd expect responsibility for verbal abuse to lie with the person shouting it, but apparently not. I dislike all variants on "she was asking for it" which is what these two posters came up with.
You want obesity to be looked on as unhealthy - fine. It is. But if someone came up to a good friend of yours in the street and yelled insults at her, I'm sure you'd view that behaviour as unacceptable as well. That obesity is a short-hand way of showing someone is stupid or corrupt in mainstream Hollywood movies, we can also file away as nasty, I think. I don't know, but I expect you'd agree with me on that too - "we need more laughs in this movie, lets add a fat friend." If nothing else, making people depressed and self-conscious about their weight more often leads to further weight game (eat to compensate, ashamed to go to the gym or go for a run or ask someone out) than it does to sudden slimming. If you're unhealthy because you're overweight, you know that. Mockery is not a positive motivation for most people and the people mocking certainly aren't doing it out of the goodness of their heart - they're doing it because they find it fun to pick on someone. And that attitude is something I see as destructive so I'm sure you don't object to it being discouraged either.
Regards,
H.
You might try actually registering an account and using it. You would find that it massively increases the number of people who see your comments and, given that the above is something I agree with, I'd consider that a good thing. Also, you get notified of replies and you reduce the risk of other people pretending to be you. Some of us would even like to be able to Friend you so that we can note other things you might post.
It's your supposition that the motivation is to discourage Sony from doing something. As far as I've read, he and the group just wanted to displace the X-Factor song. Mission accomplished.
Somebody please mod the above post up. Even if disagreed with (and I don't), it deserves an Interesting or an Informative mod.
I hope they see it whichever way is accurate. ;)
Note the word "if". I can release "Mary Had a Little Lamb" in C Major and four year olds up and down the land will "get" it. Will it sell? No, because it is too simple for everyone else. Clearly music is not a case of everything above a certain level is acceptable. Clearly hitting a point where the majority of tastes lie is more profitable than targeting the lowest common denominator and somehow thinking everyone above that finds it acceptable. You are accusing the big labels of trying to please everyone by targeting a minority audience. That obviously doesn't match the facts. And all this is allowing your contention that quality in musical terms is a scale from unsophisticated to sophisticated. Unless you're also auggesting that the nature of "sophisticated" changes from generation then it makes no allowance for the popularity of different styles. What's more sophisticated - Rolling Stones' Sympathy for the Devil or Beethoven's Fifth? Now which piece is best. Objectively. Which music is best for dancing to in a club - something with some simple harmonies and a thumping bassline or Tori Amos' Yes, Anastasia. According to you the one with the greatest level of artistry. Yeah - you're right. I love jumping around to Tori Amos.
Well if you can't state a criteria for "good" then its my contention that when saying "good" you mean "the property of being liked". In which case how do you distinguish music people like from music that is good? If that's not the case, then define "good" in terms of music other than "it is liked".
Oh dear, somebody needs to explain the concept of the Bell Curve to you. You see if Stupid is toward left part and Smart is to the right, then the maximal target audience is in the middle, not to the "Stupid" end. Unless you're somehow going to argue that "Stupid" isn't a relative term which it certainly is. Why would anyone market to the lowest common denominator? Lowest Common Denominator would mean that you're pitching your product at some drooling idiot and hoping that everyone else bizarrely likes it too. No, you pitch toward the middle of the Bell Curve.
Now that can mess up some things when you try to please everyone and fail to please anyone, but that tends to happen with big budget movies where the studios are desperate to include everyone in their potential audience, rather than in music which is accepted as being inherently limited in appeal.
As regards your statement that just because lots of people like something it doesn't mean that it is good... please could you define "good" as regards music without referring to the quality of whether or not people like it, which would be self-referential.
I would take your disagreement with me and your voting over ten people who mod me up and don't vote.
You're right - one of the big battles is not with other parties, but with the civil service. However, it's a battle that must be fought and I'd sooner have the Lib Dems fighting that battle than Labour or the Conservatives.
Ah, I see. Well we already knew that not everyone is a freetard because clearly some people are buying the music. That people are now buying things by download doesn't demonstrate anything different though because these same people are now buying their music as downloads instead of on physical media. I am one of these people. Downloads are just more convenient for me. It doesn't mean that I've bought any more or any less music than I would have, or that those who pirated previously are now purchasing instead. Particularly a campaign like this where you have to buy it to help it climb the charts (the point of why some are buying it). Pirating it would get you the song but it wouldn't do anything toward displacing the X-Factor song.
You haven't identified "they" in the above. If you take it to mean people in general, I'm afraid it doesn't show that people are fed up with music like this X-Factor song. After all, if people were fed up with it, they wouldn't be buying it and you wouldn't need tens of thousands of sales of Killing in the Name to displace it. What this shows is that many people are willing to put a bit of money toward displacing the song. We can suppose that these people are fed up with music like the X-Factor one. I would suggest that some are just perverse enough that they like hearing the word "Fuck" shouted on Radio 5 and messing up predictable and dull progressions (I certainly am). But regardless, the X-Factor song has sold plenty, so "they" the people clearly can't be said to be fed up.
That's why its great that people are paying for online music. So long as piracy stays low enough, it creates a very lucrative area that artists can directly sell to and that opens up the field to everyone.
The Lib Dems have 62 members in the Houses of Parliament at present and being a power-broker faction, courted by both sides, is a position rich in corruption possibilities. So if they are an order of magnitude better (you exaggerated and misquoted me), then it speaks well of them. Additionally, they have 71 members in the House of Lords, 11 in the European Parliament, 3 on the London Assembly and over 4000 seats at Local Councils. You don't have to have anywhere near a majority just to be a voice in politics, but the more votes you get the louder that voice becomes. For example, the then leader of the Lib Dems Charles Kennedy led the opposition to the Iraq war. The vote was very close and just a handful more Lib Dems in parliament would have changed the outcome.
So your 'personal bet' is that if they got in you'd give them 6 months tops before they were as bad as New Labour or the Conservatives. Well, logic suggests you're better going with the chance of something good than accepting the certainty of something bad. Is it really that much effort to vote? Anyway, their current position as demonstrated already provides enough opportunities for compromise and corruption if need be, but their policies are still very good so far. You only have to look at the differences in individual corruption, e.g. the expenses scandal, between the different parties to develop a higher regard for the Lib Dems than Labour and the Conservatives. (And also unlike the USA, the Conservatives and Labour are not just mild variations on each other - the Conservatives really are much worse, believe it or not).