Not really. Aristotle assumed this philosophical god of his had some form of "knowledge", yes. However, he concluded it had only knowledge about itself, not about anything else, and particularly not about the stuff over which it caused change to happen. The universe and us existing would be unknown and utterly indifferent to it.
Besides, Aristotle doesn't limit the concept of a first mover to be unique. You can have several first movers, each one completely indifferent to anything but itself, they all causing stuff other than themselves to move, and their different moving abilities interacting with each other to cause, among other things, us. And they'd be ignorant of each other too, since they, being first movers, aren't moved by anything, including other first movers, so there's no way for them to detect other first movers.
For an analogy, think of this like different physical laws interacting while they (the laws themselves) don't change in any way due to such "external" interactions. That basically covers it, except for the fact that first movers are way more "general", so to speak, than "mere" physical laws.
Try it with any discipline. Do like a children and ask from any established knowledge "why?". Then to that answer ask "why?" Proceed a few cycles and you'll reach a point in which you start looping. That's the analogue of the first mover in that knowledge set. If the set you're looking at is "all knowledge about everything", the same will apply: you reach a base point that loops over itself. That's an actual first mover. (And there can be many such.)
Doing this however yields very little information, something like this (using jargon): "a first mover is simple being in pure actuality acting over pure potentiality". And that's it, everyone goes back home happy as there's nothing else to say on the subject. Which is indeed what Aristotle himself did. He spent a few pages on the subject and then moved on to more interesting stuff as there wasn't much else to do with this other than thinking "Neat, that's solved! So, what's next in my todo list?"
This is also why Christians trying to generalize from this Aristotelian "god" to their tribal one makes no sense really.
Why must there have been a base? If that base could be uncaused, why couldn't the universe just be uncaused?
Ah, that's easy! Because the universe is composed of changing stuff, and we're trying to thing that which causes changes but doesn't suffer any change. For example, math fits. All the in-universe changes happen under mathematical laws that don't change no matter how much the stuff "under" them goes around crashing all over itself.
See also my reply to the person who commented above your comment.
The Greeks were more subtle that you give them credit. It isn't "any form", it's one specific form: the totality of everything. You can have several infinite regresses within it, but not for the whole of it. For example, nothing prevents the universe having infinite causality and thus no beginning in time, so much so that's exactly what Aristotle thought was the case. However, the totality of the universe's set of causes and effects themselves is located "within" the finite set of formal causation extending from Physical laws down to the the basic axioms of logic, and stopping there. In other words, the "first mover" isn't physical, it's at least meta (beyond, outside) physical, and probably beyond even that.
You simply will not have it held against you on judgement day if he is wrong and you follow that bit of being wrong.
The moral problem isn't that being held against someone on judgment day. The moral problem is the notion of a "judgment day".
According Aquinas and other Christian authors, both ancient and recent, during it and afterwards all the saved will rejoice and cheer in utter delight seeing all the condemned, including their own children, spouses, parents etc. being thrown into a furnace of eternal suffering, because it'll be "just". And that'll be so because God will fuck up every saved's minds so that they don't give a damn about billions if not trillions of people being tortured for perpetuity, because "glory" of "justice" being served and whatever.
Oh, and the condemned will all have their minds fucked so as to also believe what they're going through is "just", so that none among them will ever be able to think along the lines of "at least I'm not serving as wired-like zombie under a sadistic tyrant". Nope, they all will "know" they've been infinitely sinful and hence that their infinite torture is somehow "right".
There are modern Christians who reject all of the above? Yep. But not surprisingly, they aren't considered true Christians by the older churches, being instead labeled heretics and, yeah, condemned to Hell by the later unless they repent and start looking forward towards becoming after-death sadistic torture cheerleaders themselves.
who the fuck created your creator? The God God? And then who made him? It's turtles all the way down no matter how you look at it.
That's the whole point. It cannot be turtles all the way down, at some point reality must have some base that is uncaused, and from which everything (causality itself included) arises. Aristotelian philosophy called this a "prime mover", since it's the first thing that "moves" (causes change) to anything else. And then it defined the word "god" as meaning "a prime mover".
Christianity took the idea, which in itself isn't problematic, and said "Oh, nice! We'll take this 'god' of theirs and confuse things by saying it refers to our desert tribal god of war rather than to a generic, neutral, philosophical concept as originally intended! Sweet!" And since then things became very confused indeed. But that's about it.
A Libertarian will be the ones trying to remove such laws.
Which is why, although I admire libertarian economics, I'm not libertarian myself. I know people who have had their livelihood destroyed by organized cyberbullying built around pure hate for the "wrong" opinions.
For a libertarian, a billionaire that decided to spend millions in a wide multi-front campaign to utterly destroy the life of someone, everyone they love, and their friends and friends of friends, using as many indirect proxies as possible, would be an entirely fine thing provided he didn't use direct violence, only speech.
That's not how a healthy society is build, that's ideology. Libertarians, liberals and conservatives, are all of them, each in his own peculiar way, disconnected from the real world. And we all suffer due to this.
"Shareholder capitalism is the doctrine that companies exist solely to make money for their shareholders. It is frequently contrasted with stakeholder capitalism, which holds that companies exist for the benefit of their customers, workers and communities, not just for ever-fluctuating number of mostly remote and unengaged passive investors who just happen to own stock in them, often without even being aware that they do.
"The rise of shareholder capitalism in the U.S. is often dated to an influential article in the Journal of Financial Economics in 1976, titled “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure” by Michael C. Jensen and William H. Meckling. They argued that shareholders should demand higher returns from complacent corporate managers. The idea of shareholder value was publicized by a 1981 speech in New York by Jack Welch, who had just taken over General Electric, and by Aflred Rappaport’s 1986 book “Creating Shareholder Value.”
"The shareholder value movement sought to persuade corporate managers to ignore the interests of all stakeholders like workers, customers and the home country, other than shareholders. Granting CEOs stock options, in addition to salaries, was supposed to align their interests with those of the shareholders.
"The theory had an obvious problem: Who are the shareholders and what are their interests? Most publicly traded companies have shares that are bought and sold constantly on behalf of millions of passive investors by mutual funds and other intermediates. Some shareholders invest in a company for the long term; many others allow their shares to be bought and sold quickly by computer software programs.
"Unable to identify what particular shareholders want, CEOs with the encouragement of Wall Street have treated short-term earnings as a reliable proxy for shareholder value. (...)
"Shareholder value capitalism in the U.S. since the 1980s has even failed in its primary purpose — maximizing the growth in shareholder value. As Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman Business School at the University of Toronto points out in a recent Harvard Business Review article, between 1933 and 1976 shareholders of American companies earned higher returns — 7.6 percent — than they have done in the age of shareholder value from 1977 to 2008 — 5.9 percent a year.
"For his part, Jack Welch has renounced the idea with which he was long associated. In a March 2009 interview with the Financial Times, the former head of GE said: “Strictly speaking, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world.”
"In the aftermath of the failed 40-year experiment in shareholder capitalism, Americans need not look solely to other democratic nations for models of successful stakeholder capitalism. The U.S. economy between the New Deal and the 1970s was a version of stakeholder capitalism, in which the gains from superior growth were shared with workers, CEOs were moderately paid and the rich engrossed far less of the economy. In reconnecting with America’s native tradition of stakeholder capitalism, American companies can learn from the example of Johnson & Johnson, whose credo was written by Robert Wood Johnson in 1943:
"We believe our first responsibility is to the doctors, nurses and patients, to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services.We are responsible to our employees, the men and women who work with us throughout the world.We are responsible to the countries in which we live and work and to the world community as wellWe must be good citizens.and bear our fair share of taxes.We must maintain in good order the property we are privileged to use, protecting the environment and natural resources.Our final responsibility is to our shareholders.When we operate according to these principles, the shareholders should realize a fair return."
Of course not. First, Physics Nobel prizes are given for experimentally tested stuff, not for pure theory, particularly when said theory can (in principle) be subjected to testing at some point. Second, Nobel prizes are never given posthumously. The methods for testing GR were only developed near Einstein's death, and GR was only fully experimentally confirmed after he had already died. Hence, by a+b, no Nobel prize for him. Had he lived a few more years and he'd have won it.
Yes, and Special Relativity is a minor antecedent to Einsten's real contribution, General Relativity. SR was a nice sum up of what was known until then, but not fundamentally novel, which is why he didn't earn his Nobel for it. Now, GR on the other hand was the kind of stuff that only happens once a millennium.
The usual way for something like GR to be developed would be by scientists noticing slight problems in measurements, then doing more experiments, then trying to generalize from those perceived mismatches, then testing again and again and again etc. It'd have taken several decades. Einstein took a different approach. He went on to think very hard on the fundamentals of Physics for about 10 years, then noticed that things couldn't work any other way and so formulated GR entirely. And it was so well done that it's been confirmed since the very first experiment that went to test its specific, outrageous claims (and there are a lot of those). He nailed it all correctly the very first try.
This is why he's recognized. E=mc2 is minor. GR is the true genius part.
Yeah, and they both stole geometry from Euclides, and numbers from India. Also, General Relativity, thousands of times more important (and difficult) that E=mc2, didn't happen. It was all a dream.
You're taking your first world, society of plenty as the parameter, when it isn't. As near as the 19th century, before the advances in food production, food consumption accounted for 80% or more of one's salary, and that's considering a very advanced civilization. Imagine what a not-so-advanced one would be like? Or, even worse, pre-agricultural ones? Traditional food production (not to mention hunting-gathering) techniques are extremely ineffective.
Thus anything that provided for less energy consumption, including the fact your muscles deflate very fast once you stop doing exercises (strong muscles consume more energy), and that eating even small amounts can build up to obesity, comes down to an actual, evolutionarily-sound reason of saving as much energy as possible. Ancient environments are quite energy poor, and nature selected for that.
Here in Brazil the government is the hugest advertiser in most of printed media, to the point of paying for 12-page advertisement at the biggest weekly news magazines for weeks on end. It has progressively forbidden the most lucrative private market companies (tobacco, alcohol, and now going for toys) from advertising due to this or that feel good policy, and so there's no one out there with enough money to pay for their existence other than the government itself, either directly or indirectly through State run corporations. As such, except for one major magazine that still refuses to run government ads, all the others are very tame in criticizing the government. If they don't, any of the State corps threatens to stop advertising, and that'd cause it to go bankrupt.
As for this single independent major news magazine, it is constantly attacked by the governing party's militants as "serving the interests of capitalism".
So, either corporations, or the government. Unfortunately the third alternative, of fair priced, no-ads, fully independent, consumer (not corp- of gov-) serving news, and thus expensive but worth its value to those willing to pay, is almost unheard of.
I'd say it touches the hearts and minds of quite a few, considering French titles dominate the French box office.
France has a restrictive system of screen time quotas. If the French were so in love with French titles forcing theaters, TV and other venues to show French titles wouldn't be necessary. The day France removes its quota system and French titles continue dominating box office is the day I'll believe in their strength.
As for your considerations on my knowledge or lack thereof of French cultural products, you assume too much. Or, rather, too little.
why spend 1B us$ for avatar if you can "convey" the same thing with 30K&euro
Because that's called "targeting profit". If your goal is art you do art and don't care about profit. If your goal is profit you do everything to increase profit, including extensive market analysis to make sure your audience will be the biggest possible, and that includes spending $1B to make a movie an unparalleled visual spectacle.
(it's called star wrecked: in the pirkenning...)
Yep, I know and loved it when I watched it a few years ago. Good memories.:-)
So either you say ok: let's forget about doing movies that are relevant to us, or you find different way of financing them....
No, you can adapt. Instead of making that super-duper scifi epic with real actors, sets etc., do it in animation, even Flash animation if needed. Adopt the means to convey the story you want told that are within your budget constraints. The story itself, and its cultural relevance, will remain intact and as meaningful as ever.
"Ah, but the target audience won't accept watchin this as an animation, they want actors etc.!"
Then you have a different problem that you need fixing first.
Problem is that the only yardstick you’re using to measure quality is profit. Things can be valuable yet unprofitable.
No, I'm not. I'm saying that if the director or similar wants to profit from their art, they must make art that targets being profitable. It is no surprise to anyone except the entitled that art that is valuable as art isn't profitable, and the other way around. Both criteria are orthogonal, and it's a lack of understanding of this orthogonality that lead so many to think that artistic value can and should be exchangeable into monetary value.
On the other hand, why does every single piece of art have to be solely judged by how much revenue it takes in?
That isn't the issue. The point is that if you want to do art for the art, why do you expect to also make a profit or even demand a profit? Do it from the goodness of your heart and be done with.
And I'm not joking. I participate in fanfic circles and it's usual for extremely good novels and epics, sometimes with 1 million words or more, to be written by excellent authors who do it for fun and of it and to please a following of sometimes only 50 readers. The get $0 monetary compensation, in fact they're prevented from ever getting any compensation due to their usage of copyrighted original material, and they just don't care either way. Doing it for the sake of doing it is all that matters.
Artistic merit and profit are entirely different matters. They shouldn't be mixed at all, including by those who otherwise demand money because they feel entitled to it. They aren't. Either do something that's profitable and profit, or do something artistic and enjoy the artistic benefits that come from it. If you're extra lucky both things might happen simultaneously, but that isn't how things usually work, and it shouldn't be expected.
The idea that "movies should pay for themselves" shows a lack of understanding of the economy.
Not, it show exactly a clear understanding of economy. If your target demographics is 10M people, you do something withing the budget constraints of 10M people, not that of 400M people.
They elected those politicians. The french wants their tax-funded movies.
I'd believe it if these matters were voted upon individually in a system of direct democracy, but as long as one must chose between parties that group thousands of different policies on the basis of "which of those mixed sets is the one I disagree less with?" I'll keep being doubtful that population specifically directly favors this or that secondary or even tertiary policy. No, when they vote they focus on the major issues and in those alone. Everything else comes as an added set of impositions they have no voice over because the system is set this way and there's no changing it short from a revolution. And revolutions only happen when the really big stuff is deeply messed up.
the corporations spend millions upon millions to brainwash the masses into believing that the corporate offerings are all there is
You're still talking like we're in the 1990's, and overthinking it at that. Anyone who ever browsed Youtube knows that's false and that the corporate offerings are a small part of what's out there. No, they still watch blockbuster movies because they like them. Then they get home (or open their mobile phones) and watch from dozens to hundreds of independently produced stuff per month.
the corporations actually have sent take down notices to block original content
An anecdote doesn't science makes. Yes, this happens. No, it isn't prevalent. If it were you wouldn't be citing one example to make your point, you'd be giving a statistic. If there's one it'll probably show such invalid takedowns amount to a small fraction of a percent.
What doesn't mean media corporations wouldn't love to be able to do it to everything they dislike. They just cannot. Whatever their power is, and it is certainly huge, it isn't that huge. And they're shrinking. Unless they change drastically to cope with the reality of an Internet that cannot be domesticated, in a few decades they'll have all but disappeared. And there'll be much rejoicing, for I'm with you in my dislike for them as corporations. As for the stuff they produce however, nope, those are neither "the" nor "a" problem. Both things are unrelated and shouldn't be mixed.
the French have an uphill struggle making a movie profitable even if it were the world's best movie, because they are in French.
The absolute best example to counter this line of reasoning is Japan. Their pop culture is so powerful that the almost unsurmountable fact of "it's in Japanese!" offers no obstacle for its spread all around. If French cultural production was culturally powerful people would be flocking to it, learning French for the sake of watching the original, organizing fansub efforts to illegally subtitle French movies, shows and comics into dozens of languages, create sites to host thousands of fanfics, fanarts etc. about their most beloved French shows, and so on and so forth. Nothing of this happens for the simple reason that French cultural production fails miserably at touching the hearts and minds of anyone but a small minority among even the French.
Also, while today almost no one is interested in learning the French language, until before WW2 it was the international language. Everyone everywhere learned French and talked with people from other countries in French. By capitalizing all that goodwill France had the opportunity to become not only the center of high culture and science it already was, but also of becoming the undisputed superpower in matter of global popular culture. It didn't want to, it still doesn't want to, and as such its cultural producers are reduced to begging the government for money.
As long as they continue accusing externalities such as the (utterly irrelevant) worldwide number of French speakers for their lack of success, they'll continue failing. No, they have no one other than themselves to blame. That's all there is to it.
Slashdot Mirror
but ultimately that set pattern holds true
Right. You told us of the history of the thing. Now explain why that having been the case means it should continue being the case.
Not really. Aristotle assumed this philosophical god of his had some form of "knowledge", yes. However, he concluded it had only knowledge about itself, not about anything else, and particularly not about the stuff over which it caused change to happen. The universe and us existing would be unknown and utterly indifferent to it.
Besides, Aristotle doesn't limit the concept of a first mover to be unique. You can have several first movers, each one completely indifferent to anything but itself, they all causing stuff other than themselves to move, and their different moving abilities interacting with each other to cause, among other things, us. And they'd be ignorant of each other too, since they, being first movers, aren't moved by anything, including other first movers, so there's no way for them to detect other first movers.
For an analogy, think of this like different physical laws interacting while they (the laws themselves) don't change in any way due to such "external" interactions. That basically covers it, except for the fact that first movers are way more "general", so to speak, than "mere" physical laws.
Why not?
Try it with any discipline. Do like a children and ask from any established knowledge "why?". Then to that answer ask "why?" Proceed a few cycles and you'll reach a point in which you start looping. That's the analogue of the first mover in that knowledge set. If the set you're looking at is "all knowledge about everything", the same will apply: you reach a base point that loops over itself. That's an actual first mover. (And there can be many such.)
Doing this however yields very little information, something like this (using jargon): "a first mover is simple being in pure actuality acting over pure potentiality". And that's it, everyone goes back home happy as there's nothing else to say on the subject. Which is indeed what Aristotle himself did. He spent a few pages on the subject and then moved on to more interesting stuff as there wasn't much else to do with this other than thinking "Neat, that's solved! So, what's next in my todo list?"
This is also why Christians trying to generalize from this Aristotelian "god" to their tribal one makes no sense really.
Why must there have been a base? If that base could be uncaused, why couldn't the universe just be uncaused?
Ah, that's easy! Because the universe is composed of changing stuff, and we're trying to thing that which causes changes but doesn't suffer any change. For example, math fits. All the in-universe changes happen under mathematical laws that don't change no matter how much the stuff "under" them goes around crashing all over itself.
See also my reply to the person who commented above your comment.
The Greeks were more subtle that you give them credit. It isn't "any form", it's one specific form: the totality of everything. You can have several infinite regresses within it, but not for the whole of it. For example, nothing prevents the universe having infinite causality and thus no beginning in time, so much so that's exactly what Aristotle thought was the case. However, the totality of the universe's set of causes and effects themselves is located "within" the finite set of formal causation extending from Physical laws down to the the basic axioms of logic, and stopping there. In other words, the "first mover" isn't physical, it's at least meta (beyond, outside) physical, and probably beyond even that.
You simply will not have it held against you on judgement day if he is wrong and you follow that bit of being wrong.
The moral problem isn't that being held against someone on judgment day. The moral problem is the notion of a "judgment day".
According Aquinas and other Christian authors, both ancient and recent, during it and afterwards all the saved will rejoice and cheer in utter delight seeing all the condemned, including their own children, spouses, parents etc. being thrown into a furnace of eternal suffering, because it'll be "just". And that'll be so because God will fuck up every saved's minds so that they don't give a damn about billions if not trillions of people being tortured for perpetuity, because "glory" of "justice" being served and whatever.
Oh, and the condemned will all have their minds fucked so as to also believe what they're going through is "just", so that none among them will ever be able to think along the lines of "at least I'm not serving as wired-like zombie under a sadistic tyrant". Nope, they all will "know" they've been infinitely sinful and hence that their infinite torture is somehow "right".
There are modern Christians who reject all of the above? Yep. But not surprisingly, they aren't considered true Christians by the older churches, being instead labeled heretics and, yeah, condemned to Hell by the later unless they repent and start looking forward towards becoming after-death sadistic torture cheerleaders themselves.
So, uhm, no.
who the fuck created your creator? The God God? And then who made him? It's turtles all the way down no matter how you look at it.
That's the whole point. It cannot be turtles all the way down, at some point reality must have some base that is uncaused, and from which everything (causality itself included) arises. Aristotelian philosophy called this a "prime mover", since it's the first thing that "moves" (causes change) to anything else. And then it defined the word "god" as meaning "a prime mover".
Christianity took the idea, which in itself isn't problematic, and said "Oh, nice! We'll take this 'god' of theirs and confuse things by saying it refers to our desert tribal god of war rather than to a generic, neutral, philosophical concept as originally intended! Sweet!" And since then things became very confused indeed. But that's about it.
A Libertarian will be the ones trying to remove such laws.
Which is why, although I admire libertarian economics, I'm not libertarian myself. I know people who have had their livelihood destroyed by organized cyberbullying built around pure hate for the "wrong" opinions.
For a libertarian, a billionaire that decided to spend millions in a wide multi-front campaign to utterly destroy the life of someone, everyone they love, and their friends and friends of friends, using as many indirect proxies as possible, would be an entirely fine thing provided he didn't use direct violence, only speech.
That's not how a healthy society is build, that's ideology. Libertarians, liberals and conservatives, are all of them, each in his own peculiar way, disconnected from the real world. And we all suffer due to this.
"Shareholder capitalism is the doctrine that companies exist solely to make money for their shareholders. It is frequently contrasted with stakeholder capitalism, which holds that companies exist for the benefit of their customers, workers and communities, not just for ever-fluctuating number of mostly remote and unengaged passive investors who just happen to own stock in them, often without even being aware that they do.
"The rise of shareholder capitalism in the U.S. is often dated to an influential article in the Journal of Financial Economics in 1976, titled “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure” by Michael C. Jensen and William H. Meckling. They argued that shareholders should demand higher returns from complacent corporate managers. The idea of shareholder value was publicized by a 1981 speech in New York by Jack Welch, who had just taken over General Electric, and by Aflred Rappaport’s 1986 book “Creating Shareholder Value.”
"The shareholder value movement sought to persuade corporate managers to ignore the interests of all stakeholders like workers, customers and the home country, other than shareholders. Granting CEOs stock options, in addition to salaries, was supposed to align their interests with those of the shareholders.
"The theory had an obvious problem: Who are the shareholders and what are their interests? Most publicly traded companies have shares that are bought and sold constantly on behalf of millions of passive investors by mutual funds and other intermediates. Some shareholders invest in a company for the long term; many others allow their shares to be bought and sold quickly by computer software programs.
"Unable to identify what particular shareholders want, CEOs with the encouragement of Wall Street have treated short-term earnings as a reliable proxy for shareholder value. (...)
"Shareholder value capitalism in the U.S. since the 1980s has even failed in its primary purpose — maximizing the growth in shareholder value. As Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman Business School at the University of Toronto points out in a recent Harvard Business Review article, between 1933 and 1976 shareholders of American companies earned higher returns — 7.6 percent — than they have done in the age of shareholder value from 1977 to 2008 — 5.9 percent a year.
"For his part, Jack Welch has renounced the idea with which he was long associated. In a March 2009 interview with the Financial Times, the former head of GE said: “Strictly speaking, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world.”
"In the aftermath of the failed 40-year experiment in shareholder capitalism, Americans need not look solely to other democratic nations for models of successful stakeholder capitalism. The U.S. economy between the New Deal and the 1970s was a version of stakeholder capitalism, in which the gains from superior growth were shared with workers, CEOs were moderately paid and the rich engrossed far less of the economy. In reconnecting with America’s native tradition of stakeholder capitalism, American companies can learn from the example of Johnson & Johnson, whose credo was written by Robert Wood Johnson in 1943:
"We believe our first responsibility is to the doctors, nurses and patients, to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services.We are responsible to our employees, the men and women who work with us throughout the world.We are responsible to the countries in which we live and work and to the world community as wellWe must be good citizens.and bear our fair share of taxes.We must maintain in good order the property we are privileged to use, protecting the environment and natural resources.Our final responsibility is to our shareholders.When we operate according to these principles, the shareholders should realize a fair return."
The failure of shareholder capitalism, Salon, Mar 29, 2011
Of course not. First, Physics Nobel prizes are given for experimentally tested stuff, not for pure theory, particularly when said theory can (in principle) be subjected to testing at some point. Second, Nobel prizes are never given posthumously. The methods for testing GR were only developed near Einstein's death, and GR was only fully experimentally confirmed after he had already died. Hence, by a+b, no Nobel prize for him. Had he lived a few more years and he'd have won it.
See my reply to the commenter above you.
Yes, and Special Relativity is a minor antecedent to Einsten's real contribution, General Relativity. SR was a nice sum up of what was known until then, but not fundamentally novel, which is why he didn't earn his Nobel for it. Now, GR on the other hand was the kind of stuff that only happens once a millennium.
The usual way for something like GR to be developed would be by scientists noticing slight problems in measurements, then doing more experiments, then trying to generalize from those perceived mismatches, then testing again and again and again etc. It'd have taken several decades. Einstein took a different approach. He went on to think very hard on the fundamentals of Physics for about 10 years, then noticed that things couldn't work any other way and so formulated GR entirely. And it was so well done that it's been confirmed since the very first experiment that went to test its specific, outrageous claims (and there are a lot of those). He nailed it all correctly the very first try.
This is why he's recognized. E=mc2 is minor. GR is the true genius part.
Yeah, and they both stole geometry from Euclides, and numbers from India. Also, General Relativity, thousands of times more important (and difficult) that E=mc2, didn't happen. It was all a dream.
You're taking your first world, society of plenty as the parameter, when it isn't. As near as the 19th century, before the advances in food production, food consumption accounted for 80% or more of one's salary, and that's considering a very advanced civilization. Imagine what a not-so-advanced one would be like? Or, even worse, pre-agricultural ones? Traditional food production (not to mention hunting-gathering) techniques are extremely ineffective.
Thus anything that provided for less energy consumption, including the fact your muscles deflate very fast once you stop doing exercises (strong muscles consume more energy), and that eating even small amounts can build up to obesity, comes down to an actual, evolutionarily-sound reason of saving as much energy as possible. Ancient environments are quite energy poor, and nature selected for that.
Here in Brazil the government is the hugest advertiser in most of printed media, to the point of paying for 12-page advertisement at the biggest weekly news magazines for weeks on end. It has progressively forbidden the most lucrative private market companies (tobacco, alcohol, and now going for toys) from advertising due to this or that feel good policy, and so there's no one out there with enough money to pay for their existence other than the government itself, either directly or indirectly through State run corporations. As such, except for one major magazine that still refuses to run government ads, all the others are very tame in criticizing the government. If they don't, any of the State corps threatens to stop advertising, and that'd cause it to go bankrupt.
As for this single independent major news magazine, it is constantly attacked by the governing party's militants as "serving the interests of capitalism".
So, either corporations, or the government. Unfortunately the third alternative, of fair priced, no-ads, fully independent, consumer (not corp- of gov-) serving news, and thus expensive but worth its value to those willing to pay, is almost unheard of.
I'd say it touches the hearts and minds of quite a few, considering French titles dominate the French box office.
France has a restrictive system of screen time quotas. If the French were so in love with French titles forcing theaters, TV and other venues to show French titles wouldn't be necessary. The day France removes its quota system and French titles continue dominating box office is the day I'll believe in their strength.
As for your considerations on my knowledge or lack thereof of French cultural products, you assume too much. Or, rather, too little.
why spend 1B us$ for avatar if you can "convey" the same thing with 30K&euro
Because that's called "targeting profit". If your goal is art you do art and don't care about profit. If your goal is profit you do everything to increase profit, including extensive market analysis to make sure your audience will be the biggest possible, and that includes spending $1B to make a movie an unparalleled visual spectacle.
(it's called star wrecked: in the pirkenning ...)
Yep, I know and loved it when I watched it a few years ago. Good memories. :-)
So either you say ok: let's forget about doing movies that are relevant to us, or you find different way of financing them....
No, you can adapt. Instead of making that super-duper scifi epic with real actors, sets etc., do it in animation, even Flash animation if needed. Adopt the means to convey the story you want told that are within your budget constraints. The story itself, and its cultural relevance, will remain intact and as meaningful as ever.
"Ah, but the target audience won't accept watchin this as an animation, they want actors etc.!"
Then you have a different problem that you need fixing first.
Problem is that the only yardstick you’re using to measure quality is profit. Things can be valuable yet unprofitable.
No, I'm not. I'm saying that if the director or similar wants to profit from their art, they must make art that targets being profitable. It is no surprise to anyone except the entitled that art that is valuable as art isn't profitable, and the other way around. Both criteria are orthogonal, and it's a lack of understanding of this orthogonality that lead so many to think that artistic value can and should be exchangeable into monetary value.
On the other hand, why does every single piece of art have to be solely judged by how much revenue it takes in?
That isn't the issue. The point is that if you want to do art for the art, why do you expect to also make a profit or even demand a profit? Do it from the goodness of your heart and be done with.
And I'm not joking. I participate in fanfic circles and it's usual for extremely good novels and epics, sometimes with 1 million words or more, to be written by excellent authors who do it for fun and of it and to please a following of sometimes only 50 readers. The get $0 monetary compensation, in fact they're prevented from ever getting any compensation due to their usage of copyrighted original material, and they just don't care either way. Doing it for the sake of doing it is all that matters.
Artistic merit and profit are entirely different matters. They shouldn't be mixed at all, including by those who otherwise demand money because they feel entitled to it. They aren't. Either do something that's profitable and profit, or do something artistic and enjoy the artistic benefits that come from it. If you're extra lucky both things might happen simultaneously, but that isn't how things usually work, and it shouldn't be expected.
The idea that "movies should pay for themselves" shows a lack of understanding of the economy.
Not, it show exactly a clear understanding of economy. If your target demographics is 10M people, you do something withing the budget constraints of 10M people, not that of 400M people.
If this particular law is passed, hundreds of thousands of us, maybe millions, will become convicted felons.
And yet all it'll accomplish will be to slightly delay pirates, hackers and the like for a few days, if at all. :-)
"responding well to carefully planned psychological campaigns"
Those work but not perfectly. If they did the media conglomerates wouldn't have been shrinking over the last decade.
They elected those politicians. The french wants their tax-funded movies.
I'd believe it if these matters were voted upon individually in a system of direct democracy, but as long as one must chose between parties that group thousands of different policies on the basis of "which of those mixed sets is the one I disagree less with?" I'll keep being doubtful that population specifically directly favors this or that secondary or even tertiary policy. No, when they vote they focus on the major issues and in those alone. Everything else comes as an added set of impositions they have no voice over because the system is set this way and there's no changing it short from a revolution. And revolutions only happen when the really big stuff is deeply messed up.
the corporations spend millions upon millions to brainwash the masses into believing that the corporate offerings are all there is
You're still talking like we're in the 1990's, and overthinking it at that. Anyone who ever browsed Youtube knows that's false and that the corporate offerings are a small part of what's out there. No, they still watch blockbuster movies because they like them. Then they get home (or open their mobile phones) and watch from dozens to hundreds of independently produced stuff per month.
the corporations actually have sent take down notices to block original content
An anecdote doesn't science makes. Yes, this happens. No, it isn't prevalent. If it were you wouldn't be citing one example to make your point, you'd be giving a statistic. If there's one it'll probably show such invalid takedowns amount to a small fraction of a percent.
What doesn't mean media corporations wouldn't love to be able to do it to everything they dislike. They just cannot. Whatever their power is, and it is certainly huge, it isn't that huge. And they're shrinking. Unless they change drastically to cope with the reality of an Internet that cannot be domesticated, in a few decades they'll have all but disappeared. And there'll be much rejoicing, for I'm with you in my dislike for them as corporations. As for the stuff they produce however, nope, those are neither "the" nor "a" problem. Both things are unrelated and shouldn't be mixed.
the French have an uphill struggle making a movie profitable even if it were the world's best movie, because they are in French.
The absolute best example to counter this line of reasoning is Japan. Their pop culture is so powerful that the almost unsurmountable fact of "it's in Japanese!" offers no obstacle for its spread all around. If French cultural production was culturally powerful people would be flocking to it, learning French for the sake of watching the original, organizing fansub efforts to illegally subtitle French movies, shows and comics into dozens of languages, create sites to host thousands of fanfics, fanarts etc. about their most beloved French shows, and so on and so forth. Nothing of this happens for the simple reason that French cultural production fails miserably at touching the hearts and minds of anyone but a small minority among even the French.
Also, while today almost no one is interested in learning the French language, until before WW2 it was the international language. Everyone everywhere learned French and talked with people from other countries in French. By capitalizing all that goodwill France had the opportunity to become not only the center of high culture and science it already was, but also of becoming the undisputed superpower in matter of global popular culture. It didn't want to, it still doesn't want to, and as such its cultural producers are reduced to begging the government for money.
As long as they continue accusing externalities such as the (utterly irrelevant) worldwide number of French speakers for their lack of success, they'll continue failing. No, they have no one other than themselves to blame. That's all there is to it.