At least I think this was the "Ponyo" plot. It's very difficult to figure out what that was actually about. Sometimes I think that animated Japanese films stray, just a bit, from conventional western story telling forms. A bit.
How can I trust any of the statistics you quote when everybody involved in the industry lies through their teeth?
Because the information isn't from the industry. It's from the hospitals, families, and everyone else who actually knows the people who die in what are inevitably major, highly scrutinized events. Not to bug you with details that might upset your ludicrous rant, of course.
the fact that it ended so badly doesn't help though...
That's what they want you to think!:-)
Actually, much like the Apollo program, the Glomar project spun off all sorts of serious engineering benefits on the side. They had to invent a lot of tools and techniques to even consider attempting that retrieval. Quite the undertaking.
And that's because they are attracting and using very large chunks of Eeeeevil Corporate Money. You know, the sort of financing that makes large scale, professionally produced and acted works possible. People have no idea what it takes to put together something HBO's Game Of Thrones episodes, for example. The set construction and horse wrangling alone costs more, for legitimate reasons, than most bad "indie" productions will ever muster. And it shows.
He's not being brave and challenging Hollywood. He's being brave and challenging his audience to tolerate this method getting a film in front of them. He's being brave and running the risk that box office receipts, reduced in advance by the long availability of the work at no charge, won't be so reduced that it spells too much financial trouble. He's being brave in taking the chance that there are enough people both vain enough to want to see their name on IMDB for bankrolling three frames of the film, and simultaneously able to hang onto the willing suspension of disbelief required to ignore the fact that dilution of production credit by large-scale credit-bloat will make that as silly as it sounds, on the face of it.
There are plenty of people with very deep pockets. If he can put together a persuasively compelling package, he can concentrate on getting the project financed up front, in one shot, and then concentrate on - without interruption - actually doing the creative work. The results will be far better than a project put together piecemeal during the equivalent of non-stop campaign fundraising and glad-handing that will pepper the entire life of the production effort, the way he's doing it now.
The people who wrote the Consitution also shot people who were acting as spies, or who treacherously told enemies about sensitive information. That you can't understand that a person sworn to protect sensitive information was acting wronly when blindly dumping untold thousands of records into the wild, and that an entity that actively helped him do so was complicit in that, and that people who are actively financing that complicity (using their credit cards) are part of that picture... never mind, you know all of that, and you're just trolling. Nice.
there was no farmland, there was no United States, and the human population at the time was only in the tens of thousands.
The human population 15,000 years ago was a lot more than tens of thousands. Regardless, you're missing the point. The last Ice Age scraped forests down to bedrock, destroyed all sorts of species and ecosystems, etc. Just because now there's more people sitting on the same spot doesn't make climate change good or bad, per se. It just makes it more inconvenient for the people who've decided to live where shit happens. That's why coastal storms have become more destructive... not because the storms are particularly worse, but because millions of people keep building fragile lives and infrastructure right where the storms show up. Same thing with tornados and earthquakes.
Continuous natural change is neither good nor evil
Likewise with abrupt natural change, which has just as long a track record. Likewise with long-term change punctuated by dashes back and forth into various climactic extremes, which has also been happeneing for as long as it's worth discussing. There is no "correct" climate, or "correct" pace of change.
Like the gradual build-up of a mile-thick sheet of ice over much of the US's most productive farmland? Why is change good just because it happens gradually? That recurring event wasn't good, from many points of view.
The only flood insurance you can buy is part of a government program. It's a tax redistribution mechanism, and comes nowhere close to paying for itself the way that standard (life, fire, theft, etc) insurance does.
Corporation v. Community... Corporation will win every time
The companies that actually run the networks, including the mom-and-pop operations in small towns, "win," in the sense that they're the ones actually providing the service. "Community" doesn't run a giant network of networks. You might have something to go on, there, if you could point to the success of municipal networks that don't more or less immediately run out of cash and fold up (see countless recent examples that city taxpayers all across the country have become fed up paying for, and kill off). If you want to set rules that make it intolerable for a business to run a particular business in your city, just don't complain when they simply stop providing that service. The people who invest in, and work for those companies are also people, and part of "the community." Right? Or do you like to ignore that part? Yeah.
that is the last group of people that I want operating in secret.
You are so right. There should be some sort of web site where the names, home addresses, and family profiles of under-cover cops are listed. Also, all investigations and pending busts should be announced before hand, so that criminals can modify their behavior and hide evidence before things get ugly for them. All in-progress rape investigationss or child abuse cases should be listed publicly, with names of everyone involved, of course, with all related police activity on public display so you can go about your day better informed. And definitely, when the police have a lead on a potential bank robbery or a group of people who are planning a mass murder, they should never be allowed to operate covertly to gather information about those involved, or to take non-public steps to prepare for arrests of those involved. And definitely all procedures related to things like security details and travel plans for people like governors (with police protection details) should be made public, with everything about the detail's members, parking arrangements, timing, etc., announced online before each event.
And, of course, all investigations of white collar crime should include advance notice and public display of every lead and the daily activities of every investigator who is following up on a suspect's money laundering, tax evasion, extortion, etc... this has to happen BEFORE an arrest, of course, so that you can be comfortable that they're handling each step of the case correctly. Hopefully the bad guy who is trafficking in underage sex slaves, laundering money from the sale of stolen pain meds, and similarly civic-minded activities will be too busy to notice the information you're saying should be public. You really should run for office so that your fine ideas can get a better public hearing.
Which has absoltely nothing to do with the fact that it's an infringing piece of derivative art that he didn't license. Here's a guy who clearly bothered to think about this stuff when he thought it (the music) would be under more scrutiny, or when it had to do with an artist he respected. He didn't bother thinking through the use of a different artist (whom he clearly doesn't respect), but even when he's had Fair Use explained to him (and this is in NO WAY an instance of fair use), he won't admit that he was wrong.
And your strange mentioning that he paid someone to produce the infringing results, and that it was "hand-drawn," shows that you're either just as clueless as he is, or you're being a disengenuous troll.
So, when you steal from the husband and wife while they're in the small dry cleaning shop they started and run for a living, that's different than waiting for them to be out on the sidewalk, walking to their apartment, and stealing from them there, instead? Are you even listening to yourself?
You don't see that if I start a company, and incorporate it so that it can continue to function even if I get hit by a car, that it's still me, or my fellow owners (and/or investors, and staff, and customers) that you're hurting when you steal from the company. Steal from a company, and you're stealing from the people that make up that company. Of course you know that, and you just want license to steal. I'm guessing it's an elaborate mental construction you use to make yourself comfortable ripping off movies and music you don't feel like paying for. That's a common bit of intellectual laziness.
It's theft of something very valuable. Just like when you decide to steal cash, or someone's car, etc, that's also worth thousands of dollars. Prison is the right thing to do with people who think it's cool to put a bunch of money in their own pocket by violating someone else's privacy and carefully held secrets under the circumstances like those involved in this story.
That's the whole point. He doesn't like his job. He wants to force the person who's providing that job to provide it for him on his terms, instead of on their terms. He doesn't want his current job, he wants an imaginary job that doesn't exist. And he wants to use twists and turns of politically loaded labor law and all of the law suits that surround it, along with the usual rhetoric of the you-owe-me-the-lifestyle-I-want camp to bend someone else to his will (rather than making himself more valuable to them, so that they'll gladly offer him more money, leave, and benefits because they don't want him to leave for some other retail job that does.
ALL of these people deserve a fair deal and some dignity
And that's exactly what these retail workers have: better wages and benefits than the vast majority of their counterparts.
As is the attitude that people don't deserve better until they're up the ladder pissing down on little people
And YOU'RE lecturing about disdain? Do you really think that showing enough dedication and hustle to become a manager, or to work farther up the corporate structure involves nothing more than "pissing down" on people who aren't showing the same hard work and commitment? Retail store clerk jobs are supposed to be entry-level positions. You're not supposed to aspire to a career of doing something that's oriented around entry-level people with little experience. Disdain? You're the one showing disdain by assuming that's all people can or should be good for after a couple of years of doing it. Talk about pigeonholing people with your low expectations. It's people like you that shovel illiterate, useless kids out of school with the same diploma that's given to the ones who actually apply themselves.
I'm not looking to him for "perfect solutions," I'm complaining that he has proposed a perfectly awful "solution" to a problem that exists only in his own mind. He proposes a massive new intrusion of government into millions of day-to-day transactions and requiring the tracking of writers, readers, and downloads in order to allocate confiscated funds according to whichever distribution/reward strategy a given administration would have in mind that particular moment. How can you crow about a guy who talks dreamily about that sort of nanny state craziness? His idea is the polar opposite of protecting rights. It trashes privacy, allows government to force people to buy products/services they actively do not want, and establishes government as the arbiter of who is and who is not a "writer," and worse. If there's room in his head for those direct and purposeful assaults on liberty (to say nothing of his publicly pitching the idea), you have to question his entire agenda.
Slashdot Mirror
At least I think this was the "Ponyo" plot. It's very difficult to figure out what that was actually about. Sometimes I think that animated Japanese films stray, just a bit, from conventional western story telling forms. A bit.
How can I trust any of the statistics you quote when everybody involved in the industry lies through their teeth?
Because the information isn't from the industry. It's from the hospitals, families, and everyone else who actually knows the people who die in what are inevitably major, highly scrutinized events. Not to bug you with details that might upset your ludicrous rant, of course.
the fact that it ended so badly doesn't help though...
That's what they want you to think! :-)
Actually, much like the Apollo program, the Glomar project spun off all sorts of serious engineering benefits on the side. They had to invent a lot of tools and techniques to even consider attempting that retrieval. Quite the undertaking.
Can't be that much different than deep-sea cobalt nugget mining. Howard Hughes was all over that.
Never mind. That was actually a really cool ruse to raise a sunken Soviet nuclear sub. I can't believe it's not a movie, yet.
Now, they make the best "TV" on TV.
And that's because they are attracting and using very large chunks of Eeeeevil Corporate Money. You know, the sort of financing that makes large scale, professionally produced and acted works possible. People have no idea what it takes to put together something HBO's Game Of Thrones episodes, for example. The set construction and horse wrangling alone costs more, for legitimate reasons, than most bad "indie" productions will ever muster. And it shows.
He's not being brave and challenging Hollywood. He's being brave and challenging his audience to tolerate this method getting a film in front of them. He's being brave and running the risk that box office receipts, reduced in advance by the long availability of the work at no charge, won't be so reduced that it spells too much financial trouble. He's being brave in taking the chance that there are enough people both vain enough to want to see their name on IMDB for bankrolling three frames of the film, and simultaneously able to hang onto the willing suspension of disbelief required to ignore the fact that dilution of production credit by large-scale credit-bloat will make that as silly as it sounds, on the face of it.
There are plenty of people with very deep pockets. If he can put together a persuasively compelling package, he can concentrate on getting the project financed up front, in one shot, and then concentrate on - without interruption - actually doing the creative work. The results will be far better than a project put together piecemeal during the equivalent of non-stop campaign fundraising and glad-handing that will pepper the entire life of the production effort, the way he's doing it now.
The people who wrote the Consitution also shot people who were acting as spies, or who treacherously told enemies about sensitive information. That you can't understand that a person sworn to protect sensitive information was acting wronly when blindly dumping untold thousands of records into the wild, and that an entity that actively helped him do so was complicit in that, and that people who are actively financing that complicity (using their credit cards) are part of that picture ... never mind, you know all of that, and you're just trolling. Nice.
that does not mean it is down to what we expect of wired connections though
You're right. It's a complete rip-off and entirely useless until it's as fast a reading from a local disk drive.
there was no farmland, there was no United States, and the human population at the time was only in the tens of thousands.
The human population 15,000 years ago was a lot more than tens of thousands. Regardless, you're missing the point. The last Ice Age scraped forests down to bedrock, destroyed all sorts of species and ecosystems, etc. Just because now there's more people sitting on the same spot doesn't make climate change good or bad, per se. It just makes it more inconvenient for the people who've decided to live where shit happens. That's why coastal storms have become more destructive... not because the storms are particularly worse, but because millions of people keep building fragile lives and infrastructure right where the storms show up. Same thing with tornados and earthquakes.
Continuous natural change is neither good nor evil
Likewise with abrupt natural change, which has just as long a track record. Likewise with long-term change punctuated by dashes back and forth into various climactic extremes, which has also been happeneing for as long as it's worth discussing. There is no "correct" climate, or "correct" pace of change.
So, what happened in 18th century that made gray whale stray to the Northern Atlantic?
Obviously, in the 1800's, we went past a global tipping point of Crisis Doom Climate Change Horror. Until it went away by raising taxes.
Like the gradual build-up of a mile-thick sheet of ice over much of the US's most productive farmland? Why is change good just because it happens gradually? That recurring event wasn't good, from many points of view.
The only flood insurance you can buy is part of a government program. It's a tax redistribution mechanism, and comes nowhere close to paying for itself the way that standard (life, fire, theft, etc) insurance does.
Corporation v. Community... Corporation will win every time
The companies that actually run the networks, including the mom-and-pop operations in small towns, "win," in the sense that they're the ones actually providing the service. "Community" doesn't run a giant network of networks. You might have something to go on, there, if you could point to the success of municipal networks that don't more or less immediately run out of cash and fold up (see countless recent examples that city taxpayers all across the country have become fed up paying for, and kill off). If you want to set rules that make it intolerable for a business to run a particular business in your city, just don't complain when they simply stop providing that service. The people who invest in, and work for those companies are also people, and part of "the community." Right? Or do you like to ignore that part? Yeah.
Batmobile, fool.
that is the last group of people that I want operating in secret.
You are so right. There should be some sort of web site where the names, home addresses, and family profiles of under-cover cops are listed. Also, all investigations and pending busts should be announced before hand, so that criminals can modify their behavior and hide evidence before things get ugly for them. All in-progress rape investigationss or child abuse cases should be listed publicly, with names of everyone involved, of course, with all related police activity on public display so you can go about your day better informed. And definitely, when the police have a lead on a potential bank robbery or a group of people who are planning a mass murder, they should never be allowed to operate covertly to gather information about those involved, or to take non-public steps to prepare for arrests of those involved. And definitely all procedures related to things like security details and travel plans for people like governors (with police protection details) should be made public, with everything about the detail's members, parking arrangements, timing, etc., announced online before each event.
... this has to happen BEFORE an arrest, of course, so that you can be comfortable that they're handling each step of the case correctly. Hopefully the bad guy who is trafficking in underage sex slaves, laundering money from the sale of stolen pain meds, and similarly civic-minded activities will be too busy to notice the information you're saying should be public. You really should run for office so that your fine ideas can get a better public hearing.
And, of course, all investigations of white collar crime should include advance notice and public display of every lead and the daily activities of every investigator who is following up on a suspect's money laundering, tax evasion, extortion, etc
So yeah, starting a war rarely improves the situation.
Not responding to a war is usually even worse.
It was not a photoshop-filter job.
Which has absoltely nothing to do with the fact that it's an infringing piece of derivative art that he didn't license. Here's a guy who clearly bothered to think about this stuff when he thought it (the music) would be under more scrutiny, or when it had to do with an artist he respected. He didn't bother thinking through the use of a different artist (whom he clearly doesn't respect), but even when he's had Fair Use explained to him (and this is in NO WAY an instance of fair use), he won't admit that he was wrong.
And your strange mentioning that he paid someone to produce the infringing results, and that it was "hand-drawn," shows that you're either just as clueless as he is, or you're being a disengenuous troll.
Help him out? When he won't even acknowledge that he ripped off the other artist's work? Why reduce the pain for someone who's that obnoxious?
So, when you steal from the husband and wife while they're in the small dry cleaning shop they started and run for a living, that's different than waiting for them to be out on the sidewalk, walking to their apartment, and stealing from them there, instead? Are you even listening to yourself?
I don't see
Exactly. You don't see.
You don't see that if I start a company, and incorporate it so that it can continue to function even if I get hit by a car, that it's still me, or my fellow owners (and/or investors, and staff, and customers) that you're hurting when you steal from the company. Steal from a company, and you're stealing from the people that make up that company. Of course you know that, and you just want license to steal. I'm guessing it's an elaborate mental construction you use to make yourself comfortable ripping off movies and music you don't feel like paying for. That's a common bit of intellectual laziness.
Right, because the people that get together to form and run companies aren't actually people, or anything like that.
It's theft of something very valuable. Just like when you decide to steal cash, or someone's car, etc, that's also worth thousands of dollars. Prison is the right thing to do with people who think it's cool to put a bunch of money in their own pocket by violating someone else's privacy and carefully held secrets under the circumstances like those involved in this story.
maybe he likes his job
That's the whole point. He doesn't like his job. He wants to force the person who's providing that job to provide it for him on his terms, instead of on their terms. He doesn't want his current job, he wants an imaginary job that doesn't exist. And he wants to use twists and turns of politically loaded labor law and all of the law suits that surround it, along with the usual rhetoric of the you-owe-me-the-lifestyle-I-want camp to bend someone else to his will (rather than making himself more valuable to them, so that they'll gladly offer him more money, leave, and benefits because they don't want him to leave for some other retail job that does.
ALL of these people deserve a fair deal and some dignity
And that's exactly what these retail workers have: better wages and benefits than the vast majority of their counterparts.
As is the attitude that people don't deserve better until they're up the ladder pissing down on little people
And YOU'RE lecturing about disdain? Do you really think that showing enough dedication and hustle to become a manager, or to work farther up the corporate structure involves nothing more than "pissing down" on people who aren't showing the same hard work and commitment? Retail store clerk jobs are supposed to be entry-level positions. You're not supposed to aspire to a career of doing something that's oriented around entry-level people with little experience. Disdain? You're the one showing disdain by assuming that's all people can or should be good for after a couple of years of doing it. Talk about pigeonholing people with your low expectations. It's people like you that shovel illiterate, useless kids out of school with the same diploma that's given to the ones who actually apply themselves.
I'm not looking to him for "perfect solutions," I'm complaining that he has proposed a perfectly awful "solution" to a problem that exists only in his own mind. He proposes a massive new intrusion of government into millions of day-to-day transactions and requiring the tracking of writers, readers, and downloads in order to allocate confiscated funds according to whichever distribution/reward strategy a given administration would have in mind that particular moment. How can you crow about a guy who talks dreamily about that sort of nanny state craziness? His idea is the polar opposite of protecting rights. It trashes privacy, allows government to force people to buy products/services they actively do not want, and establishes government as the arbiter of who is and who is not a "writer," and worse. If there's room in his head for those direct and purposeful assaults on liberty (to say nothing of his publicly pitching the idea), you have to question his entire agenda.