Moving to the coast made me feel like I finally woke up, after growing up perpetually stuffy and sniffly. Turns out I'm not a mouth breather after all!
Just moving away from what your body decided to be allergic to when you were a kid with a bored immune system seems to help a lot, I moved from the Gulf Coast to the West Coast and my allergies receded a lot. I eventually moved back to where I grew up and they didn't really return except on days when the whole city's collective nose is running because all the trees are having an orgy up in there.
The more time goes on the more I appreciate Lady Bird Johnson's (first lady to Lyndon B Johnson) beautification of America project [0]. It's impressive how precise a response to modern urban hellscape woes it is: more greenery, native gardening, more pedestrian-friendly spaces, public transit, litter reduction, less billboards and advertising. The perspective that aesthetic beauty and things that just make a place nice to live tend to go hand-in-hand is an underrated one.
> “Though the word beautification makes the concept sound merely cosmetic, it involves much more: clean water, clean air, clean roadsides, safe waste disposal and preservation of valued old landmarks as well as great parks and wilderness areas. To me…beautification means our total concern for the physical and human quality we pass on to our children and the future.”
Sigh. It's like one of those clickbait YouTube videos (10 Reasons Why Modern Movies SUCK!) but with big words and literary citations to make it seem more respectable. The author completely disregards historical and traditional storytelling to squeeze every possible type of story into a vague narrative of commercialism.
> Franchises, sequels and box-set formats are extending stories in multiple directions to eke out ever more revenue, bringing to mind Musk’s intergalactic ambitions, which imply there’s a franchise option for human life: late capitalism, it would seem, respects neither narrative nor planetary boundaries. ‘It’s outrageous, really,’ Yorke says of endless sequels. ‘If you think of it in basic terms, a story is a question and answer, dramatised. And when the question is answered, there is nowhere else to go.’
Arthurian legend, Robin Hood, the Greek pantheon, Sun Wukong, Coyote? Trash. No, shared worlds are a modern invention by commercial entities looking to make a quick buck. A story is a question and an answer after all.
> Annabel ends the day much as she started it, the essay incomplete (although Brown does not reject story structure altogether: Annabel relaxing her grip on her timetable is an enlightenment of sorts).
> [...]
> Even art-house films that self-consciously depart from the three-act structure nonetheless define themselves against it.
So we're using 'three act structure' to mean 'something changes between the beginning and end'. By that definition, yes, movies do tend to be pretty samey in structure.
> Being told a story is to be infantilised, somewhat: to suspend one’s critical faculties. In contrast to polemic, stories are covertly persuasive. Even if their message is good for us, the sugaring of the pill represents a lowering of intellectual expectations.
I don't have a snarky comment for that bit, it's funny enough on its own.
It's hard to make a substantive and non-nitpicky comment on the article because there is no cohesive point being made here. It's a random collection of vague ideas that don't mean anything at all when put together, using criticism of modern film as a loose framework - yet written by someone who clearly is not interested in exploring the wide world of film and its fringes where the interesting stuff accumulates.
To play the devil's advocate, one could argue you are attempting to subvert the natural order of things. Try making an argument for your case rather than shifting the burden.
edit: I'm saying don't just assume it. Otherwise I can simply assume the counterposition.
OP asserted that equality amongst humans is not necessarily a good thing. I am not trying to argue otherwise - not yet, at least - I am asking them to expand upon and clarify the claim as to understand better.
Because I do assume equality to be a good thing; if that is an incorrect assumption I would like to know.
Fair enough. I do think that "equality is good" is the claim that would need to be justified if this were a formal debate, but I can give some more details on what I think.
Roughly, my feeling is that perfect equality is unstable, or at least enforcing it would cost a lot more than allowing for (limited) inequality. I don't think that perfectly free markets are desirable (or efficient) but I think that how do distribute resources in a way that maintains equality while also keeping the median wellbeing high (relative to other systems) is a huge ask.
It's a good thing this isn't a formal debate then, because neither I nor the paper claim equality is good nor am I debating the assertion otherwise.
Thank you for the clarification, your position makes more sense now. It sounds like you're not saying there's something inherently bad about equality, but rather that the practical cost of enforcing absolute equality top-down makes it actually a net negative in well-being for the population of a state?
(I can't help but point out that if there's someone with the power to enforce it, things are very far from equal - but I'm guessing you mean 'equality' more in a monetary / real goods sense)
You correctly describe my position, but I'd add that I don't yet see that perfect equality would be more desirable than some small amount of inequality.
Even behind the veil of ignorance I can imagine that, say, a society with a small amount of inequality would have higher average wealth and that most people would be happy with such a system even if, say, 10% of people were worse off than under perfect equality.
(For balance, maybe you could have a "crabs in a barrel" style of enforcement where all of the equal society members equally ensure that nobody becomes richer or poorer than anyone else. See e.g. this old story https://granta.com/the-black-sheep/ )
This is off-topic but I just wanted to say I appreciate your presence on HN. I see your name pop up often, and your comments are always insightful and clear. You consistently identify the root of complex topics (and disagreements/misapprehensions surrounding them) and are able to distill them in a non-argumentative way. Thanks for helping make this site a nicer place.
Clue did something like this in 1985. It has a few different endings which were shown randomly in theaters, no indication of it either. It didn't go over well though.
That AI is dangerous and the closer we get to the danger zone the better it would be if the companies developing these technologies understand it might be better to slow down and make sure it's safe vs pushing ahead at maximum speed.
