Quotulatiousness

December 8, 2011

The Law of Misguided Subsidies

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:44

T.J. Rogers explains the latest corollary to the well-known Law of Unintended Consequences (for examples of that law in operation, see your local, regional, or national government):

Wall Street understands how to make money, up-market or down. “Margin Call” may fuel Occupy movement ire, but in creating mortgage-backed securities, Wall Street did nothing other than facilitate home-financing access to the next tier of less-qualified home buyers, as demanded by every president since Bill Clinton. After that, the bankers did exactly what their shareholders wanted: bundle those risky loans into securities, sell them to lock in the profits, and dump the risk right back onto the federal government — where it belonged.

My purpose is not to debate the morality of mortgage-backed securities but to update the Law of Unintended Consequences with the corollary Law of Misguided Subsidies: Whenever Washington disrupts a market by dumping subsidies into it, Wall Street will find a way to pocket a majority of the money while the intended subsidy beneficiaries are harmed by the resulting market turmoil.

Rogers also explains why so many “special Limited Liability Corporations (LLCs)” are getting into the solar power business — not the manufacturing side, but the retail side. The profit margins are obscene. If the government hadn’t set up the market to work this way with their subsidies, the profit margins would be much lower.

November 28, 2011

Charles Stross on worldbuilding for SF stories

Filed under: Books, Economics, History, Media, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:46

This is the sort of thing that more science fiction authors should take into account before they write, but not enough seem to do:

So here are some rules of thumb I use, tending towards an increasingly narrow focus. (Sorry if you were expecting me to address the broader uses of confabulation as a fictional tool; this is very much a set of practical guidelines rather than an examination of the theory behind the activity.)

1. Humans are interested in reading fiction about humans.

Constraint #1 on any work of fiction is that it needs to provide an environment in which recognizable human protagonists can exist. If they’re not human (e.g. “Diaspora”, by Greg Egan; “Saturn’s Children”, by me) you need to provide some sort of continuity with the human and give the reader reasons to feel concerned for them. Or you can go for the “they’re not human, don’t look human, and they have no connection with us”, but what you get is either borderline-unreadable at best, or suffers from human-mind-in-a-giant-land-snail-body syndrome (which risks demolishing the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief).

So I’m going to focus on providing a human environment …

2. In general, High Fantasy steals its dress from pre-modern history; Urban Fantasy buys off-the-shelf in TK-Maxx: and Science Fiction goes for that bold futurist look.

Which is to say, if you’re going to write a trilogy with a young soldier on the rise and a throne and an evil emperor, you can do a lot worse than plunder the decline and fall of the Roman Empire for your social background. Note, however, that you’ll do a lot better if you read some social history texts rather than believing what you see in the movies.

That last bit is especially good advice, as the more you know about cultures other than the one you were raised in, the better you can understand why things are different. Ancient Babylonians were not just Englishmen with funny clothes. Classic Greece, for all that it provided a lot of the underpinnings of our western culture, was functionally very different from life as we know it now.

November 27, 2011

Scalzi tweets the Lord of the Rings movies

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:28

Stream of consciousness tweets as John Scalzi has an at-home movie marathon:

“The Mimes of Moria” is the name of my next band.

Wife is at a rock concert tonight. I’m watching cable TV at home. Thus are illustrated the differences between us.

OSHA clearly has no jurisdiction in Moria.

[. . .]

The Two Towers now I on. I hold the minority view that it is the best film of the trilogy.

That said, I’d’ve trimmed back the ent scenes pretty severely.

I SWEAR I did not realize I was making a tree pun in that last tweet.

I am suddenly aware of just how little difference there is between Orlando Bloom’s Legolas and certain sparkly vampires one could name.

Orcs vs. Stormtroopers. GO. On second thought, never mind. Neither side aims well enough for it to be interesting.

[. . .]

Fun fact: Shadowfax, the horse Gandalf rides, had a younger, hipper sibling named “Darktweet.”

I wonder what dentists think when they look at Orcs. I suspect “that’s a sailboat right there.”

They could have just distracted the Wargs by throwing a bunch of red bouncy balls and yelling “fetch.”

The orcs would be awesome in a Road Warrior movie. The orcs probably WERE in a Road Warrior movie.

November 26, 2011

TV commercials don’t have to be irritating

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:21

Scott Jordan Harris explains that the purpose of TV advertising isn’t — despite all the evidence to the contrary — to irritate the hell out of viewers:

Many of the best short films I see each year are adverts, and this shouldn’t be surprising. There is a small audience for shorts that aren’t shot by Pixar and shown before Disney films, and there are miniscule budgets available for them. Most shorts are apprentice pieces, showy announcements of the skills of film-makers who want to be making features, and display so many signs of it that they fail as individual films.

Adverts do not suffer these problems: their budgets are relatively big, their audience numbers are assured, and they are by nature self-contained. What’s more, they have to be good — very, very good — if they are going to outcompete their rivals.

To disregard commercials as beneath consideration — to adopt the ‘it’s just an advert for a shop!’ mentality that Brooker has, or pretends to have — is naïve, and flows from the feeling that adverts are inherently artistically bankrupt, or rather that they are any more artistically bankrupt than the majority of movies.

This is simply not the case. Most movies are designed to sell us something, from popcorn and DVDs to high-end items advertised through the sophisticated trickery of product placement. Compared to blockbuster films, which charge admission to sell us merchandise, a television advert is relatively benign: it does not pretend to be anything other than it is and it honestly announces its intentions.

This why a good advert is so pleasing: being won over by one is like being won over by a magician’s illusion. We know that it wants to suck us in, and so we are on guard against it. When, despite ourselves, it manages to amuse us, we know it has worked hard to do so.

November 5, 2011

George Jonas: A plot too crazy not to be true

Filed under: Media, Middle East, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:37

The alleged Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador is too unrealistic for Hollywood, but George Jonas says it’s also too crazy not to be real:

If someone came up with an outlandish plot in which two Iranian agents, acting on behalf of government circles in Tehran, scheme with Mexican drug lords to blow up a Saudi ambassador on American soil, would a California screenwriter buy into it before a Virginia intelligence analyst, or would it be the other way around?

Place your bets.

[. . .]

Iranians are smart. If they weren’t smart, we wouldn’t have to worry about them building bombs. Do smart people come up with stupid plots? Not plausible. And look at the amateur pitch. Here’s a story that not only sounds like a B-movie, but is unveiled at a press conference that looks like a poster for a low-budget diversity flick: An African-American Attorney-General (Holder) flanked by a male Caucasian FBI Director (Robert S. Mueller) and a female Caucasian Assistant Attorney-General for National Security (Lisa Monaco) with a male Asian-American U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (Preet Bharara) hovering in the background. It’s early Hollywood multicultural chic. All that’s missing is the line “Coming to a theatre near you.”

This amuses the intelligence analyst. “The trouble with Hollywood-types,” he says, “is that they’ve manipulated reality for so long, they can’t even recognize it when they see it. Does your friend think Holder and Mueller and Monaco and Bharara are from Central Casting? Hello! They are who they are. Life has caught up with multicultural chic. It imitates art — or at least imitates Hollywood.”

My spook friend goes further. “Yes, it’s a stupid plot and that’s why it rings true to me,” he says. “Most true stories of international intrigue sound like B-movies.”

November 4, 2011

The libertarian subtext to . . . Harold and Kumar?

Filed under: Humour, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:05

David Boaz reviews the philosophical and economic underpinnings of the Harold and Kumar movies:

Escaping persecution, poverty, and hunger . . . to find ample food and unlimited choices . . . the pursuit of happiness . . . the American Dream. Yes, I think writers Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg were on to something.

And then in the sequel, Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, after another improbable road trip, the fugitive youths literally dropped in on George W. Bush’s Texas ranch. In the increasingly fantastic plot, the president invited them to join him in hiding from the scary Cheney, shared his pot with them, and then promised to clear up the unfortunate misunderstanding that landed them in Guantanamo Bay. An uninhibited but still skeptical Kumar said, “I’m not sure I trust our government any more, sir.” And President Bush delivered this ringing libertarian declaration:

    Hey, I’m in the government, and I don’t even trust it. You don’t have to trust your government to be a patriot. You just have to trust your country.

Harold & Kumar: more wisdom than a month of right-wing talk radio. Hurwitz and Schlossberg get what America is about.

Not having seen any of the movies, that certainly sounds like the kindest treatment George W. Bush has ever received from Hollywood.

October 28, 2011

Peter Foster suggests a rewritten plot for the Atlas Shrugged movie

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:38

Peter Foster reviews the Atlas Shrugged movie:

The movie is set in today’s not-too-distant future, but has kept Dagny in railroads and Hank in metals by positing a massive oil crisis due to the implosion of the Middle East. The Dow at 4,000 we can believe, but oil at $37.50 a gallon? At that price, a Chevy Volt might actually not be such a bad deal. Domestic oil is once again king (despite being utterly unaffordable) but is being carried by train. Whatever happened to pipelines?

None of this makes much sense. Perhaps the plot should have been left as a future-of-the-past, like, say, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, or it should have been thoroughly reformulated to reflect statism’s new threats. How’s this for a rewrite? Dagny now runs a pipeline company trying to build a huge new system for a form of oil previously uneconomic but now made available by wonderful advances in capitalist technology. Let’s say this oil is located in Alberta and her line is to go to the U.S. refineries of the Gulf Coast, to replace imports from dictatorships.

Hank is still in the steel industry but his new wonder metal is now to be used to build a cheaper, stronger and safer type of pipe. However, he is opposed not by other steel or pipe makers, but by a pack of meretricious, politically-savvy environmental NGOs. These organizations are fronted by naive chanting muddle heads, who have no idea where their rich lifestyles originate, and backed by capitalist foundations (the irony!) that have been hijacked by socialists, and by CEOs either too cowardly or stupid to say no (or by those who seek to take advantage of government handouts to produce throwback technologies). These NGOs claim that the oil is “dirty” and destroying the climate and that Hank Rearden’s new and better steel in unsafe, and threatens aquifers and environmentally sensitive areas. Their hysterical claims are eagerly swallowed by a gullible liberal media. Meanwhile politicians, despite high unemployment, are prepared to sacrifice tens of thousands of jobs because they, too, are cowed by the ENGOs, and in any case attracted by the unparalleled power prospects of aspiring to control the weather.

I know this is all a bit far fetched, but we are talking a movie plot here.

October 1, 2011

The inspirational power of science fiction

Filed under: Books, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:36

Neal Stephenson on the ability of science fiction to inspire:

In early 2011, I participated in a conference called Future Tense, where I lamented the decline of the manned space program, then pivoted to energy, indicating that the real issue isn’t about rockets. It’s our far broader inability as a society to execute on the big stuff. I had, through some kind of blind luck, struck a nerve. The audience at Future Tense was more confident than I that science fiction [SF] had relevance — even utility — in addressing the problem. I heard two theories as to why:

1. The Inspiration Theory. SF inspires people to choose science and engineering as careers. This much is undoubtedly true, and somewhat obvious.

2. The Hieroglyph Theory. Good SF supplies a plausible, fully thought-out picture of an alternate reality in which some sort of compelling innovation has taken place. A good SF universe has a coherence and internal logic that makes sense to scientists and engineers. Examples include Isaac Asimov’s robots, Robert Heinlein’s rocket ships, and William Gibson’s cyberspace. As Jim Karkanias of Microsoft Research puts it, such icons serve as hieroglyphs — simple, recognizable symbols on whose significance everyone agrees.

Researchers and engineers have found themselves concentrating on more and more narrowly focused topics as science and technology have become more complex. A large technology company or lab might employ hundreds or thousands of persons, each of whom can address only a thin slice of the overall problem. Communication among them can become a mare’s nest of email threads and Powerpoints. The fondness that many such people have for SF reflects, in part, the usefulness of an over-arching narrative that supplies them and their colleagues with a shared vision. Coordinating their efforts through a command-and-control management system is a little like trying to run a modern economy out of a Politburo. Letting them work toward an agreed-on goal is something more like a free and largely self-coordinated market of ideas.

September 13, 2011

She was “the only good girl in Hollywood”

Filed under: Books, History, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:59

Robert Fulford reviews a new biography of Myrna Loy:

The making of The Thin Man forms the centrepiece of Emily W. Leider’s well-researched and shrewdly conceived biography, Myrna Loy: The Only Good Girl in Hollywood (University of California Press), out at the end of this month.

MGM produced The Thin Man on a B-movie budget but made a fortune and then turned out five sequels. (At the moment a remake is said to be in preparation, with Johnny Depp as Nick.)

That first film was the great event of Loy’s career. During half a century in movies she co-starred with Cary Grant, Clark Gable and many others, but she made her reputation in the part of Nora Charles, opposite Powell.

[. . .]

The Thin Man began as a novel by Dashiell Hammett, himself a private eye in his pre-literary life. He based the characters on his own decades-long affair with Lillian Hellman, the eminent playwright. Hellman was renowned as a fire-breathing dragon when angry and Hammett was notoriously a morose drunk. We are to understand that Nick and Nora were not precisely modelled on Dash and Lillian.

[. . .]

Loy and Powell got along well as professionals but, despite their fans’ wishes, were romantic only on the set. Powell went for blonds, notably Carole Lombard and Jean Harlow. Loy had four marriages, each of them ending in divorce, none of them lasting as long as the 13 years Nick and Nora kept turning up on the movie screens.

A line attributed to the great John Ford, who directed Loy in The Black Watch and Arrowsmith, provides Leider with the subtitle of her book. Ford called Loy “the only good girl in Hollywood.” In the argot of the day, Ford had “a yen for her.” He may have been teasing her as a response to rejection. Leider says he meant she was not a habitual bed-hopper, like other girls. Apparently she boasted that she never ran off with her leading man, though with both Leslie Howard and Tyrone Power she was tempted.

Hammett’s book came out just after Prohibition ended (in Roosevelt’s first year, 1933), when to drink liquor was to strike a blow for liberty. Many blows are struck in The Thin Man. Nick and Nora are major martini drinkers and proud of it. Nora keeps up with Nick; when she meets him in a bar and he confesses to having five martinis already, she tells the bartender to set up a row of five for her. At one point she complains about Nick “sneaking off, getting drunk … without me.”

The Thin Man movies are among my all-time favourites.

July 22, 2011

“I never, ever, ever want to get involved in anything this complicated again”

Filed under: Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:58

Just in case you don’t already have multiple versions of the Lord of the Rings movies, there’s now the extended Blu-ray version, and Steve May thinks it’s worth getting:

The set is beautifully packaged. Three fat Blu-ray cases sit within a substantial, faux gold-leaf book. Within are elongated versions of each movie. Previously available as DVD special editions, these plump out the trilogy with cutting-room floor detritus. In Fellowship multiple small scene edits and additions increase its running length by around 30 minutes.

The Two Towers is even more substantially altered. With more than 40 minutes of additional footage cut into proceedings, plus some reframing and tweaks, it’s a significantly different beast from the original theatrical release. There’s also a smidgeon more action inserted into the Helm’s Deep battle, which contrary to popular opinion I believe can only be a good thing.

Return of the King tops Towers with nigh-on 50 minutes of extra material. Once again the movie has been substantially re-cut to accommodate the multiple changes and insertions. This engorged version would never play theatrically because of its length, but on disc, where you can watch and take a break at will, it’s a marvellous indulgence. For those that want to spend as much time in Middle Earth as possible, these extended versions are a gift. For the less enthusiastic, they’re more like a marathon.

As I joked when the first extended version of Return of the King came out, they’ve added another half-dozen endings!

June 2, 2011

It actually does explain why the “prequels” sucked

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 16:11

H/T to Cory Doctorow for the link.

May 30, 2011

Cory Doctorow: “Every pirate wants to be an admiral”

Filed under: Economics, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:09

May 29, 2011

Ace declares his lust for Christina Hendricks

Filed under: Media, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:42

I dropped by Ace of Spades H.Q. to steal borrow their nifty little “DOOM” graphic to slap on to the last post about the coming collapse of the US dollar, when I happened to read a paean to the lovely Christina Hendricks by Ace. He out-and-out declares his lust for her.

No, I mean he really does:

By The Way: Christina Hendricks Is Hot

I guess I didn’t telegraph this enough, but I was kidding when I said I might not “hit” Christina Hendricks.

I mean: Seriously.

It looks like two polar bears in a Greco-Roman wrestling match.

I didn’t have an “I’d hit that like…” joke so I went the other way and pretended she wasn’t hot. I thought it would be obvious I was kidding.

I’ve written fan fic for an attempted Firefly spin-off series I call Saffron: Intergalactic Space Whore (Moderate Content Warning).

I know I didn’t telegraph this because people are still asking, “Dude, do you not think she’s hot?” So it’s on me.

So, for the record: She’s hot.

I’d hit that with the berserker fury of a dozen Norsemen. I’d hit that so hard she’d sing the aaa-aaa chorus of The Immigrant Song.

As the cool kids used to say . . . THIS.

May 25, 2011

Netflix now the 500lb gorilla sitting on your internet bandwidth

Filed under: Economics, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:41

In a shocking display that if you make something legally accessible, people are willing to pay for it (who’d ever have expected that?), Netflix has supplanted Bittorrent as the largest user of peak-time internet traffic:

Is solving the copyright “wars” really so difficult? New traffic research shows that Netflix has overtaken Bittorrent as America’s favourite internet application, knocking http into third place. “P2P is here to stay,” note the authors in Sandvine’s Global Internet Report, Spring 2011 edition, which shows that demand for legal, paid-for stuff is the single biggest internet traffic trend.

Copyright-holders who are slow to bless legal services, by contrast, find themselves being swamped by pirates.

Netflix now accounts for 24.71 per cent of peak time aggregate traffic in the US, pushing Bittorrent into second place with 17.23 per cent. By contrast, the Sandvine numbers show that in markets where there are no legal services, pirate services flourish. In Latin America, file-sharing program Ares grabs 15.48 per cent of peak-time (fixed line) internet traffic, behind http. In Europe, Bittorent rules, with 28.4 per cent of peak-time traffic, ahead of http. Here, YouTube grabs third place, with almost 12 per cent of peak-time traffic.

We signed up for a month-long trial of Netflix (on the recommendation of Dark Water Muse) and have been quite happy with the service. In fact, it was a major factor in our buying a PS3 over the weekend, as our existing Blu-Ray player was incompatible with Netflix.

May 9, 2011

Gadgets from science fiction

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:55

Caleb Cox rounds up ten geeky gadgets from science fiction shows and movies that he thinks we’d all like to have:

Tomorrow is always round the corner in the world of tech, and gadgets that started life in the imaginations of mad folk are starting to become a possibility.

Tools that give us superpowers may seem impossible, but ultramobile computing is a reality these days, with commonplace kit that seems more capable than devices Gene Roddenberry dreamt up.

As we’ve already looked at fantasy blades you wished you owned, it’s about time we talked-up the fantasy tech, after all, we are Reg Hardware. So here’s ten of our favourite gadgets from popular culture that may or may not be the tech of the future.

Let us know if there’s anything you think we’ve missed and give us your views on its commercial prospects in the comments section at the end.

His choices are:

  • Cloaking device — Predator
  • Holodeck — Star Trek: The Next Generation
  • Hologram communication — Star Wars
  • Orgasmatron — The Sleeper
  • Peril Sensitive Sunglasses — The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
  • Personality glasses — Joe 90
  • Sonic Screwdriver — Doctor Who
  • Timebooth — Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure
  • Telepathic Lens — The Lensman series
  • Teleportation belt — The Tomorrow People
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