Its evident that great societies of the past suffered when they became to decadent
"Correlation does not imply causation," even in the social sciences.
We are spending a great deal of time being entertained and entertaining, and most of us our enjoying it. I don't propose we stop doing that as individuals or as a society but It might be a good idea to step back now and then and ask what else might we be doing?
People who trundle out the old "decadent civilization" saw usually do so to argue that the civilization in question would recover its old virtues by fighting a few really good wars. Indeed, wherever we find "decadence," we usually find an organized pro-war political constituency actively pushing the "decadence" line in order to tar anti-war objectors as "soft" and coerce them into supporting their adventures. I'd go so far as to say that the modern concept of "social decadence" was invented by British Tories in the late 19th century in order to shame Whigs into supporting the conquest of South Asia.
I think a lot of the "decadence" you might see here and there are merely symptomatic of a professional class/intelligentsia that find their culture no longer has use for professionalism or intellect.
Interest in a demand checking account is completely uncompetitive with interest in a savings, money market or CD account. In any case, your payee is making you do a lot of work maintaining liquidity just so he can have the convenience of depositing a check whenever he wishes. The point is that the money you've written to your payee is in suspense: it is yours, and you could allocate it if you knew when it was going to be demanded, but you don't.
The whole idea of a check is that it is as good as the makers word for cash, and in the real world, the quality of someone's promise to pay money is only good in a certain time and place. A check is not a contract, and even if it were, a perpetually-active promise to pay would be unconscionable and illegal (under common law).
If you're payees could hold a check and deposit it at any arbitrary time t, after five years it's possible your checking account would have to have a balance in tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of dollars. You're passing up hundreds of dollars a month in interest or dividends on other uses of that money, in order to absorb the risk of other people cashing the check whenever.
If we're going to get into the film brands, no conversation is complete without a mention of Lucasfilm THX. Originally conceived as a quality-control system for movie sound, and having very strict technical requirements in the theater; George fired the inventor in the 90s and now they just slap the plaque on any theater that can write the check for the $100,000 licensing fee, and the THX name is stuck on cellphones and car stereos. Puke.
Without getting TOO judgemental about it (too late_, maybe this expresses the difference better: Dell and Sony products have design that says "Buy Me," Apple and Braun products have design that says "Use Me."
Without actually knowing the people involved I guess I couldn't say who designs what, but to be honest, I'm really sorta dubious that the people who design Dell laptops really studied industrial design. Most laptops and phones embody this weird dogs-breakfast techno-baroque sensibility that might be art if every other computer and phone on the planet didn't have the exact same aesthetic. The look like commercials, and like all commercials, they age very very poorly.
TFA says that Amazon sold more ebooks than physical books "[o]n Christmas Day" only. Which makes sense, considering everyone is flush with gift certificates and Exmas morning s probably the slowest mail-order purchase day of the year.
Because judgements about looks are an entirely subjective matter. Personally, I think the white plastic on MacBooks looks cheaper than even most netbooks, and that while the MBPs look nice, Sony's high-end Vaios look far better, though neither hold a candle to a good Thinkpad.
I think a lot of designers for Sony and Lenovo are just engineers/technical draftsmen that have a hard-on for Ralph McQuarrie illustrations and quasi-military design, so when they do a case it has lots of 60-degree angles, accented seams and reveals, and lots of non-functional detail and relief work -- the idea is to make the laptop feel like it's in place on the Millenium Falcon. Most of the designers at Apple are people that are actual professional consumer product designers, they don't know a nut from a bolt, but have spent their entire education on gettings hard-ons for 1960's-era German coffee makers and learning the difference between Zigzag Moderne and true Art Deco.
So yeah, taste. But just looking at my mom's Dell versus my MacBook, I can't help noticing how "busy" the Dell is, and how really none of it is really designed to make the thing more "useful," aside from making it stand-out on a showroom shelf.
Right, I'm from Minnesota and a lot of people would have heating oil tanks in the back yard -- there's all kinds of solutions to this problem. The cleverest thing to do would be to arrange your home's power management in such a way that you don't need current to run most of the functions in the cold. Just about every appliance in the house can be run with gas but for the fridge, and in the winter it's pretty easy to see to that by just keeping it in an unheated part of the house.
A number of other mathematicians went over this and claimed it complete, sure, it took them a few years, but thats pretty much the standard now anyway.
Uhh.... sorta. It's not that his proof was very complicated, it was in fact pretty sketchy, and important parts of it, arguments that were novel and unestablished and critical to the proof, he left unargued and simply presented them as obviously true. The sweep of the thing was there, and people looking at it could intuit that he was at least making good assumptions, but as far as what was on paper, they were assumptions.
Most people who read it could see it was there, but if you were to construct an airplane in 2006, which relied upon Perelman's proof of the Poncaire Conjecture in order to fly, no one would board it.
Of course Perelman would say it was a complete proof, and supporters of others would say these others provided valuable details.
I followed this story at the time as well, and though it pretty clear at this point that Perelman understood how the proof worked, it's not at all clear he knew how to explain it, or that he had the capacity to teach it to anyone... You ask what it means to prove something, and I think something a big part of how we understand "proof" at least in the sense of the Academy (our "corrupt" "politics" as Perelman would say) is that one can demonstrate the proof to others, can explain it in plain language and can fulfill the responsiblities of an Educator. That's certainly what Richard Feynman believed, a man perhaps as brilliant but as different as night and day from Perelman.
In the western literary tradition, there's this certain tendency to romanticize a "Natural," a hermit, particulary a Russian one with wild hair that deals in abstruse mathematics (see Nabokov, Vladimir: The Luzhin Defense; Stoppard, Tom: Arcadia, etc). But we should try to recognize it for what it is: romanticism, the desire to tell a good story about an unusual aspect of human nature, and the fact that Perelman was "right" about his proof isn't particularly useful, considering other folks had to come along and write 300 page journal articles in order to confirm the issue. "Proof" is a social thing, and a mathematician is only practically right, insofar as he can explain himself and rigorously defend his argument.
This is a pretty pragmatic argument I'm making, I guess, because I'm not really putting much stock in the simple "knowing" of a fact over and above the "teaching" and "using" of the fact. If we just start handing out credit to people who "know" things and handwave when we ask them "how," what's to keep us from celebrating mystics or prescients? You can't just reward people for being right in retrospect.
Because he didn't have a good agent... And he is motivated by a self-destructive personal ethics, as opposed to Garbo, who didn't want to be alone as much as she simply wanted to be let alone, and pursued seclusion as a conscious strategy to maintain a certain lifestyle. As the TFA states, he got offers from all over the world to be paid handsomely to teach and do maths, but he rejected them all, because he thinks getting paid to do work is some sort of prostitution.
Paramount recently announced they were starting a unit to produce films exclusively at the $100,000, because they see dollar signs when a film like Paranormal Activity make tens of millions of dollars.
Several friends of mine are writer-directors and independent producers, and when they were making the rounds at AFM this year, and when they take meetings now, executives tell them in no uncertain terms that "YouTube has lowered the standards of what we have to make," so now where their pitch might have been for a $7-$10 million film that might make $20-$30M all in, the backers are constantly asking if it can be done like "Paranormal Activity" or some comedy series they saw on funnyordie. What they don't seem to realize is that films at this level are labors of love, and that if the people who made these things were actually making them commercially, they wouldn't be able to obtain the millions of dollars in favors they get from everyone involved.
On the other end, a studio exec once told a partner at my company that they were "only making 'hits' from now on," with no trace of irony. By this they mean they're only going to produce HUGE $100M+ features, and they will no longer be making the programmer/$10-$50M films. These films aren't bad, a lot of them do very well and at this level they have to have good stories, but because the upside is limited, and even terrible $200M films tend to make a profit (viz, Transformers), they will pursue this direction.
Because of my work I've seen a lot of features, shorts and series in the sub $300k range, and more than a few web series in the sub $50k range, and they can be some of the punkest films you've ever seen -- people don't want to watch them, the only reason films like this succeed is explicitly because a studio isn't involved, and only the barest few make their money back. The only reason a film like "Paranormal Activity" makes $50 million is because (1) the studio had nothing to do with the making, and (2) the studio spends $20 million marketing it, and (3) five "Paranormal Activity" films haven't already come out this year (the novelty is still there). The studio comes out all the better, because they paid nothing for the original film, and the people who made it are nobodies who won't get a good deal off this film and will probably never be heard from again.
If you've ever seen The Player, at one point Peter Gallagher's character goes into a board meeting and declares that the studio no longer needs to hire directors or writers, and will simply cast mega-stars into adaptations of newspaper articles. This latest development of cinema-by-youtube is just another variation on this theme, except in this case they don't even need to hire actors! The studios are just trying to create a situation where they make all the upside and inflict a rent on the people who want to have their films seen, instead of those people partaking in the spoils as well as the studio.
I think the main point is that their fall-back plan was a DRM-free acetate film strip
DRM has vanishing utility when the medium in question requires a $100,000 worth of equipment to play.
Of course, then again, D5 decks aren't exactly cheap either...
A nation can march itself right off a cliff in order to spite an enemy, almost as easily as an individual.
Obama Bi den -- coincidence or not, this example is just too eerie to ignore.... I am however concerned about the social and legal changes that such a massive collective effort brought about in American society.
You sound like Noam Chomsky in 2003, mutatis mutandis -- and he was probably just as "correct". This claptrap about the great nation falling on her sword at the height of her power is a lazy rhetorical fallacy of an opposition, an attempt on their part (regardless of their party) to wash their hands of their nation's "sins" and to assert their moral superiority.
That's really all you're saying: the outcome of our free and fair elections are not a symbol of our strength as a nation, but of our people's decadence and our imperial decline. I disagree with the way our country is going, but instead of taking responsibility for the actions my country takes one way or the other, my nation's mistakes are symptomatic of an INCONTROVERTABLE HISTORICAL PROCESS that harkens our nation's end. So all I really have to do is stockpile canned goods and bullets.
It's like your're taking Marx's Theory of Historical Dialectic and using it in service of Ron Paul.
Talk to conservatives about the financial crisis and you enter an alternative, bizarro universe in which government bureaucrats, not greedy bankers, caused the meltdown. It’s a universe in which government-sponsored lending agencies triggered the crisis, even though private lenders actually made the vast majority of subprime loans. It’s a universe in which regulators coerced bankers into making loans to unqualified borrowers, even though only one of the top 25 subprime lenders was subject to the regulations in question.
Oh, and conservatives simply ignore the catastrophe in commercial real estate: in their universe the only bad loans were those made to poor people and members of minority groups, because bad loans to developers of shopping malls and office towers don’t fit the narrative.
Then I'd suggest nothing needs to be done. I don't think the state needs to step in to remove annoyances. At the end of the day people voluntarily decide to watch TV. No-one forces them to.
At the end of the day, the only reason we have television at all is because the FCC assigns spectrum and tighly regulates who is permitted to radiate X amount of energy in Y frequency band, and without that we probably never would have had a radio or television "market," because the system would have been captured by David Sarnoff and Wiliam Paley who would have self-regulated their private system into a rent-seeking oligopoly. (viz. the basically unregulated US cell phone market; just about every other first world nation on earth has more regulation but a hell of a lot more consumer choice).
Ruining broadcasting as a useful medium is probably not an acceptible outcome, just to give a few bad actors their "freedom" to pollute the commons.
It's really not a question of how loud the commercials are.
It's how much "compression" and "limiting" are used on the audio
"Loudness" when measured by Leq will give a measurement that approximates the subjective loudness of a program, accounting for any dynamic processing. As a matter of fact, I think you're confusing "loudness" with "level" -- regulating the latter would not be very effective, but we have ways of measuring the former, and imposing limits on it definitely makes the program sound quieter. Movie trailers in the US have been voluntarily limiting their levels to cumulative Leq levels for several years now with very positive results.
If you're doing percentages and ratios, and you do genuinely care about the rounding, you'd be much safer doing it with modular arithmetic than with floats.
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Its evident that great societies of the past suffered when they became to decadent
"Correlation does not imply causation," even in the social sciences.
We are spending a great deal of time being entertained and entertaining, and most of us our enjoying it. I don't propose we stop doing that as individuals or as a society but It might be a good idea to step back now and then and ask what else might we be doing?
People who trundle out the old "decadent civilization" saw usually do so to argue that the civilization in question would recover its old virtues by fighting a few really good wars. Indeed, wherever we find "decadence," we usually find an organized pro-war political constituency actively pushing the "decadence" line in order to tar anti-war objectors as "soft" and coerce them into supporting their adventures. I'd go so far as to say that the modern concept of "social decadence" was invented by British Tories in the late 19th century in order to shame Whigs into supporting the conquest of South Asia.
I think a lot of the "decadence" you might see here and there are merely symptomatic of a professional class/intelligentsia that find their culture no longer has use for professionalism or intellect.
Interest in a demand checking account is completely uncompetitive with interest in a savings, money market or CD account. In any case, your payee is making you do a lot of work maintaining liquidity just so he can have the convenience of depositing a check whenever he wishes. The point is that the money you've written to your payee is in suspense: it is yours, and you could allocate it if you knew when it was going to be demanded, but you don't.
The whole idea of a check is that it is as good as the makers word for cash, and in the real world, the quality of someone's promise to pay money is only good in a certain time and place. A check is not a contract, and even if it were, a perpetually-active promise to pay would be unconscionable and illegal (under common law).
If you're payees could hold a check and deposit it at any arbitrary time t, after five years it's possible your checking account would have to have a balance in tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of dollars. You're passing up hundreds of dollars a month in interest or dividends on other uses of that money, in order to absorb the risk of other people cashing the check whenever.
No multitouch? Okay.
No physical keyboard? Okay.
No multitouch AND no physical keyboard? Sorta fatal combination.
And don't get me started on Dolby.
I for one was surprised to hear they made radios in the Elder Times. I was completely unaware.
Without getting TOO judgemental about it (too late_, maybe this expresses the difference better: Dell and Sony products have design that says "Buy Me," Apple and Braun products have design that says "Use Me."
Without actually knowing the people involved I guess I couldn't say who designs what, but to be honest, I'm really sorta dubious that the people who design Dell laptops really studied industrial design. Most laptops and phones embody this weird dogs-breakfast techno-baroque sensibility that might be art if every other computer and phone on the planet didn't have the exact same aesthetic. The look like commercials, and like all commercials, they age very very poorly.
TFA says that Amazon sold more ebooks than physical books "[o]n Christmas Day" only. Which makes sense, considering everyone is flush with gift certificates and Exmas morning s probably the slowest mail-order purchase day of the year.
I think a lot of designers for Sony and Lenovo are just engineers/technical draftsmen that have a hard-on for Ralph McQuarrie illustrations and quasi-military design, so when they do a case it has lots of 60-degree angles, accented seams and reveals, and lots of non-functional detail and relief work -- the idea is to make the laptop feel like it's in place on the Millenium Falcon. Most of the designers at Apple are people that are actual professional consumer product designers, they don't know a nut from a bolt, but have spent their entire education on gettings hard-ons for 1960's-era German coffee makers and learning the difference between Zigzag Moderne and true Art Deco.
So yeah, taste. But just looking at my mom's Dell versus my MacBook, I can't help noticing how "busy" the Dell is, and how really none of it is really designed to make the thing more "useful," aside from making it stand-out on a showroom shelf.
Interesting, thanks.
Right, I'm from Minnesota and a lot of people would have heating oil tanks in the back yard -- there's all kinds of solutions to this problem. The cleverest thing to do would be to arrange your home's power management in such a way that you don't need current to run most of the functions in the cold. Just about every appliance in the house can be run with gas but for the fridge, and in the winter it's pretty easy to see to that by just keeping it in an unheated part of the house.
I would, since the status quo is no battery at all.
I'll agree with that in a moment, no question! But I don't think proof isn't a matter of personal satisfaction.
Uhh.... sorta. It's not that his proof was very complicated, it was in fact pretty sketchy, and important parts of it, arguments that were novel and unestablished and critical to the proof, he left unargued and simply presented them as obviously true. The sweep of the thing was there, and people looking at it could intuit that he was at least making good assumptions, but as far as what was on paper, they were assumptions.
Most people who read it could see it was there, but if you were to construct an airplane in 2006, which relied upon Perelman's proof of the Poncaire Conjecture in order to fly, no one would board it.
I followed this story at the time as well, and though it pretty clear at this point that Perelman understood how the proof worked, it's not at all clear he knew how to explain it, or that he had the capacity to teach it to anyone... You ask what it means to prove something, and I think something a big part of how we understand "proof" at least in the sense of the Academy (our "corrupt" "politics" as Perelman would say) is that one can demonstrate the proof to others, can explain it in plain language and can fulfill the responsiblities of an Educator. That's certainly what Richard Feynman believed, a man perhaps as brilliant but as different as night and day from Perelman.
In the western literary tradition, there's this certain tendency to romanticize a "Natural," a hermit, particulary a Russian one with wild hair that deals in abstruse mathematics (see Nabokov, Vladimir: The Luzhin Defense; Stoppard, Tom: Arcadia, etc). But we should try to recognize it for what it is: romanticism, the desire to tell a good story about an unusual aspect of human nature, and the fact that Perelman was "right" about his proof isn't particularly useful, considering other folks had to come along and write 300 page journal articles in order to confirm the issue. "Proof" is a social thing, and a mathematician is only practically right, insofar as he can explain himself and rigorously defend his argument.
This is a pretty pragmatic argument I'm making, I guess, because I'm not really putting much stock in the simple "knowing" of a fact over and above the "teaching" and "using" of the fact. If we just start handing out credit to people who "know" things and handwave when we ask them "how," what's to keep us from celebrating mystics or prescients? You can't just reward people for being right in retrospect.
Because he didn't have a good agent... And he is motivated by a self-destructive personal ethics, as opposed to Garbo, who didn't want to be alone as much as she simply wanted to be let alone, and pursued seclusion as a conscious strategy to maintain a certain lifestyle. As the TFA states, he got offers from all over the world to be paid handsomely to teach and do maths, but he rejected them all, because he thinks getting paid to do work is some sort of prostitution.
Garbo never stopped making movies, even in her "seclusion," and she made sure Louis B. Mayer paid her very, very well.
Lehman no longer exists, so I guess that makes us a one-party state? :p
Paramount recently announced they were starting a unit to produce films exclusively at the $100,000, because they see dollar signs when a film like Paranormal Activity make tens of millions of dollars.
Several friends of mine are writer-directors and independent producers, and when they were making the rounds at AFM this year, and when they take meetings now, executives tell them in no uncertain terms that "YouTube has lowered the standards of what we have to make," so now where their pitch might have been for a $7-$10 million film that might make $20-$30M all in, the backers are constantly asking if it can be done like "Paranormal Activity" or some comedy series they saw on funnyordie. What they don't seem to realize is that films at this level are labors of love, and that if the people who made these things were actually making them commercially, they wouldn't be able to obtain the millions of dollars in favors they get from everyone involved.
On the other end, a studio exec once told a partner at my company that they were "only making 'hits' from now on," with no trace of irony. By this they mean they're only going to produce HUGE $100M+ features, and they will no longer be making the programmer/$10-$50M films. These films aren't bad, a lot of them do very well and at this level they have to have good stories, but because the upside is limited, and even terrible $200M films tend to make a profit (viz, Transformers), they will pursue this direction.
Because of my work I've seen a lot of features, shorts and series in the sub $300k range, and more than a few web series in the sub $50k range, and they can be some of the punkest films you've ever seen -- people don't want to watch them, the only reason films like this succeed is explicitly because a studio isn't involved, and only the barest few make their money back. The only reason a film like "Paranormal Activity" makes $50 million is because (1) the studio had nothing to do with the making, and (2) the studio spends $20 million marketing it, and (3) five "Paranormal Activity" films haven't already come out this year (the novelty is still there). The studio comes out all the better, because they paid nothing for the original film, and the people who made it are nobodies who won't get a good deal off this film and will probably never be heard from again.
If you've ever seen The Player, at one point Peter Gallagher's character goes into a board meeting and declares that the studio no longer needs to hire directors or writers, and will simply cast mega-stars into adaptations of newspaper articles. This latest development of cinema-by-youtube is just another variation on this theme, except in this case they don't even need to hire actors! The studios are just trying to create a situation where they make all the upside and inflict a rent on the people who want to have their films seen, instead of those people partaking in the spoils as well as the studio.
I think the main point is that their fall-back plan was a DRM-free acetate film strip
DRM has vanishing utility when the medium in question requires a $100,000 worth of equipment to play. Of course, then again, D5 decks aren't exactly cheap either...
You sound like Noam Chomsky in 2003, mutatis mutandis -- and he was probably just as "correct". This claptrap about the great nation falling on her sword at the height of her power is a lazy rhetorical fallacy of an opposition, an attempt on their part (regardless of their party) to wash their hands of their nation's "sins" and to assert their moral superiority.
That's really all you're saying: the outcome of our free and fair elections are not a symbol of our strength as a nation, but of our people's decadence and our imperial decline. I disagree with the way our country is going, but instead of taking responsibility for the actions my country takes one way or the other, my nation's mistakes are symptomatic of an INCONTROVERTABLE HISTORICAL PROCESS that harkens our nation's end. So all I really have to do is stockpile canned goods and bullets.
It's like your're taking Marx's Theory of Historical Dialectic and using it in service of Ron Paul.
To wit...
At the end of the day, the only reason we have television at all is because the FCC assigns spectrum and tighly regulates who is permitted to radiate X amount of energy in Y frequency band, and without that we probably never would have had a radio or television "market," because the system would have been captured by David Sarnoff and Wiliam Paley who would have self-regulated their private system into a rent-seeking oligopoly. (viz. the basically unregulated US cell phone market; just about every other first world nation on earth has more regulation but a hell of a lot more consumer choice).
Ruining broadcasting as a useful medium is probably not an acceptible outcome, just to give a few bad actors their "freedom" to pollute the commons.
"Loudness" when measured by Leq will give a measurement that approximates the subjective loudness of a program, accounting for any dynamic processing. As a matter of fact, I think you're confusing "loudness" with "level" -- regulating the latter would not be very effective, but we have ways of measuring the former, and imposing limits on it definitely makes the program sound quieter. Movie trailers in the US have been voluntarily limiting their levels to cumulative Leq levels for several years now with very positive results.
If you're doing percentages and ratios, and you do genuinely care about the rounding, you'd be much safer doing it with modular arithmetic than with floats.