Stephen Maturin switches from opium to coca leaves about halfway through the Master and Commander series (around 1800). Ensuring a steady supply of the leaves becomes a recurring theme as is his sharing of their wonders with the various scientific personalities he comes across.
There was at least one study during the pandemic that showed efficacy of these things. The problem for studies is knowing exactly how much they're used. I've used the Boots version in the UK for a long time on the basis that there's half decent evidence that it's effective and the only real side effect is on my wallet. It would be great to see a challenge study of these things but I'm going to keep using them regardless.
It's amusing that they actually use the word guild. If the medieval guilds had their way London would still only have one bridge. The irony here is that creatives have an advantage that workers in every other industry lack. Humans value and will continue to value artisinally produced goods. Creatives will always have that in a way that 18th Century weavers and spinners did not. That appreciation also leads to the creative industries being subsidised essentially everywhere in a way that is likely to increase over time rather than decreasing.
Will the rise of AI reduce opportunities for creatives? Almost certainly, but unlike essentially all other industries, it won't be wiped out by the rise of automation because humans won't stop liking things that are created by humans. As in music, there will be a shift to performance where customers / clients are engaged in the creative process. In many ways, it will be a return to something like the golden age of portraiture as people pay for engagement.
There are huge opportunities for creatives in the age of AI to create new art forms, created in new ways for new kinds of consumer. Creatives can choose to engage with that or to throw sabots. As London's liverymen show, guilds cannot stop the tide, the opportunity is to become something new that floats on the rising waters.
This. Entertainment is not a zero-sum game, people are quite happy to enjoy two great works rather than one. The margins of profit might be lowered, but so too will be the costs of production in AI.
> That appreciation also leads to the creative industries being subsidised essentially everywhere in a way that is likely to increase over time rather than decreasing.
Not only had it been decreasing for some time now, people are excited about making good-enough music in AI generators. I'm even surprised by your use of "subsidised" rather then "paid for".
We had a chance for the sponsors during the best times of Patreon. Now it's just going to get worse.
if it weren't from guilds all towers and bridges would have collapsed and Maritime trade world never have happened.
then, many centuries later, and land owner elite capture, the guilds become in England just an extension of the peerage system and then it becomes what that phrase above describes. btw most medical labour organizations today work like that protectionism scheme and nobody complain much.
It might well be neoliberal dogma but the rose that got walked through London last week by the Watermen is a reminder that it is also true.
People should complain much more about doctors’ guilds. There are limits on how many doctors can be trained in the US and the U.K. largely as a result of lobbying by doctors’ guilds. They’re called professional associations these days but let’s not pretend they confine themselves to enforcing professional standards.
There’s a line in one of the Aubury Maturin books, Clarissa Oaks when pumping the ship bilges, a sailor remarks, “she flows as clear and sweet as Hobson’s conduit”.
Fresh water was consumed in prodigious quantities in the Royal Navy, not least for watering down grog but also for extracting the salt from salted meats.
Other way around -- grog wasn't so much diluted with water as the grog was applied TO the fresh water as an antiseptic.
Fresh water on ships had typically been sealed inside a barrel for months or even years before it was consumed, growing all manner of unhealthy pathogens. Pre-germ theory people read this as "it smells and tastes bad," which is a pretty good first-order approximation of germ theory.
When you cut that contaminated water with alcohol, that greatly reduces illnesses from drinking it, especially in those whose GI systems are already somewhat adapted to tolerate the pathogens. Strong spices in grog such as cloves also helped mask the taste of drinking years-old barrel water.
It's the real disease of the EU. There's no problem of failed policy that shouldn't be addressed by deepening the policy and making it harder to back track. The only possible response to problems of complexity is to make the complexity more intractable.
The real shocker for me is that the authors completely ignore the difference between grid integration and market integration. They seem to hold a maximalist line where the market can and should drive planification of the power grid, and where "managerial-governance" can emerge from that abstraction.
Reading the comments, it seems that absolutely no one is happy about this. It is either a lie, insufficient or a pointless response to a non-problem.
But it’s a clear achievement. An achievement with lots of nuance. And one that runs counter to many strongly held and arguably ideological positions on all sides of the political spectrum.
Reading responses to it here and on Twitter has been rather depressing.
It's not helped that the messenger is a highly polarising source that piggybacks on the facts to a) attack the mainstream media as unpatriotic liars and b) downplay the severity of climate change that they've been actively denying, because of the success of policies they've actively fought against at every turn.
The Spectator often makes valuable points that are hard to accept but true. One of them is that British climate efforts are pointless, it accounts for such a tiny percentage of world emissions that it could drop to zero and be a rounding error. Therefore the "success" of this policy is a mirage. Yes the UK had reduced emissions. No it won't have any effect on the climate. Both these things can be true simultaneously: the policy succeeded and failed.
Meanwhile, The Spectator has employed some of the worst climate deniers in british journalism, who specialize in the production of exactly that commodity.
> James Delingpole announced in The Spectator that he was going to “put his money where his mouth is” and invest in a fund named Cool Futures with the aim of short-selling renewable energy stocks. Delingpole describes climate change as an “outrageous scam” and says he will bet “on the Big Short principle” and call “this rigged market’s bluff.”
...
In June 2016, Joanne Nova finally published about the new fund on her own blog, asking readers to donate money to get the Cayman Island-based hedge fund started. The Cool Futures Fund Management needs at least $375,000 to get off the ground, of which it has already raised $42,530, reported Daily Kos
> In a Spectator article titled “The true cost of renewable energy”, Clark wrote that “the price of green energy is a form of terrible segregation, where the rich will have access to light and heat, and those who need it most, the poor, will shiver in the dark”.3
> Young criticised the youth climate strike movement in a Spectator column where he claimed the protestors just wanted “a day off school”. He wrote that Greta Thunberg had been “living on another planet for the past 16 years” and concluded the article by writing: [25]
“If children really must wag their fingers at older generations for some imaginary sin, I wish they’d do it at the weekend. Better yet, they could combine it with picking up litter, which really might do something for the environment. The fact that so many students have been taken in by Greta Thunberg’s crude propaganda is an argument for raising the voting age to 21, not lowering it to 16
The first is someone who is disagreeing with you and actually putting their money where their mouth is, which is the opposite of sophistry. You don't argue with any specific claim of his so it's impossible to know what you think is bullshit there.
The second is a good example of what I just said - hard to accept but true. If the price of energy goes up a lot then the poorest will do without, and the richest will just outbid them. He wrote that article in November 2022. A few months later the Guardian was writing that millions can't afford to heat their own homes due to high energy prices:
The third is a guy who doesn't like Greta Thunberg, the girl famous for most recently arguing that Palestine has something to do with climate change. Are you saying that anyone who thinks Thunberg is an idiot is engaged in "cynical sophistry"?
Like it or not (and I don't like it), that is the culture of this website. Positive comments are actively discouraged, and even if you want to make one they are difficult to write. To criticize you only need to find one thing wrong, but to substantively support you really need to understand the whole subject.
In my opinion, there has also been an eternal summer effect following the reddit protests, which manifests as 1) more anti-curious doomerism and joke comments
I guarantee you if that was USA the comments would be much more positive. HN is as biased and indoctrinated as Reddit simply because Americans are the largest group of commenters here
Ah. A simpler time when people were still able to access the operating system internals of products they bought and alter their function without first having to jump through hoops that risked bricking the product they bought.
There’s an irony that the products we buy now which are so thoroughly locked down have learned all the lessons of Windows NT both in terms of product marketing and the security improvements which protect the product companies even more than their users.
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