Agreed, dictatorship is a gross exaggeration. Sliding toward fascism? Sure. Would Tump like to do away with election? He’s said he does, that they won’t be necessary.
In the bill that has recently been passed, the republicans have inserted a clause that means no administration official can be found guilty of criminal contempt by the federal courts.
This will mean that the courts are literally powerless against the administration's malfeasance. The executive will be able to do what they like, and even if this bill doesn't pass the senate, SCOTUS will likely strike down as unconstitutional any appointment by the courts of a private attorney to prosecute criminal contempt because it has been stuffed with useful idiots.
This isn't sliding towards fascism, this is speed running 30's Germany.
Wouldn’t the vast majority of those be incoherent broken messes, of various levels of inconsistency? Only a teeny tiny fraction would be coherent. So the expected experience fir any arbitrary Boltzmann brain would be all over the place.
I literally just finished watching Episode IV, the one with the CGI makeover. The extra alien CGI in Mos Eisley is awful. It doesn’t stand up at all, with the one exception of the Jaba scene which gets away with it because it is pretty fun. I wish we’d watched the original version.
Is it easy to find the original? I’d love a copy of each on my Plex server, but I have had trouble finding an original copy. I admit I may not know where or how to look; advice is welcome!
That comparison is really cool. I was mostly paying attention to the 4K77 vs 2011 bluray, and in most cases I thought 4K77 looked better. Not sure why they felt the need to mess with the colors so drastically in the 2011 version.
A 4K fan scan of a 35mm print the was in cold storage since 1980.
It's great to see OG Star Wars looking like in did in '77, with all the optical glitches and the lower contrast with slightly green shadow bias of prints from that time. True time travel that makes the reworked releases look silly.
Another project worth a look is Harmy's fan cuts of the original trilogy, which are tastefully re-assembled from multiple sources and graded.
Yeah that's fair lol. But I guess in the context of this discussion, Google can push stuff onto your phone with Google Play whether you want it or not.
When I was staying with a friend in Norway once we visited his mother, and to me she sounded like someone with a broad Durham/Newcastle accent (my mother is from there) speaking German. A lot of north east words are germanic, or Scandinavian. My grandfather was a farmer near Durham and pigs were swine, children were bairns.
As for American influence, my youngest daughter picked up a lot of that from Youtube at one point, and I once interviewed a girl from Gravesend with such a strong US accent I assumed she'd grown up over there.
You used to be able to get pie, mash and liquor round me in the Bexley area until about 10 years ago, but the ones I knew have closed now and I don’t know where the nearest place is.
Not sure if you can still get Jellied Eels in Eltham, which would be a shame if you can’t.
Arguably there is one company that did manage to make the transition from 8 bit hobby home computing and gaming. Apple.
The Apple II was a contemporary, in fact a predecessor of all these systems. So, what did they do right, or what went right for them, that enabled them to make it? I suspect it was the penetration of the Apple II into education and business that helped make it possible, but suppose Steve Jobs had been in charge at Commodore or Atari?
I've thought about this a bit, and what I can come up with is that Apple had the clear lead in the first wave of home PCs in the late 70s (the others being the Commodore PET and the TRS-80 model I), and maintained it. The Apple II had bitmap graphics and colour built-in, and a very fast and relatively cheap disk add-on, but also well thought out expandability. You didn't need to buy a sidecar unit; just throw a card in an empty slot. Importantly, it also worked with inexpensive TVs and monochrome monitors that you could purchase separately. The hardware was also high quality - it had a nice keyboard, and a switching power supply that didn't get hot.
Fast forward a few years, and the Apple II was still very usable and competitive, with RAM expansion options up to 128k, higher res graphics, and 80 column text, while still supporting the same software.
One other thing is that the Apple II was wildly profitable. It had no custom chips, just cleverly used commodity chips and some ROMs. This includes the fast and cheap disk system.
> I suspect it was the penetration of the Apple II into education and business that helped make it possible
I don't know how much it moved the needle but it was astonishing how much schools and home users - parents whose kids used the machines at school - were willing to pay for an Apple II well after it was a technically obsolete machine. It definitely helped them to some extent.
(don't get me wrong, I love those machines in my bones, but they were pretty overpriced after a while)
here's a guess: text was sharp on an Apple II with a decent monitor. font shapes were good. no matter how good graphics were on the C64 & Ataris, in comparison, text was always blocky & amateur looking. Tandy did better on this front, but it wasn't enough for them. pretty sure this is the same reason why the Amiga & the ST didn't make more inroads — people looked at them alongside the Mac & technical considerations were quickly forgotten. it's funny to me that this hasn't changed all that much — Windows font rendering looks awful to me, & I'll always pick a Mac or Linux box to use instead if there's a choice, just so I don't have to put up with the fonts. this wasn't always the case — the old system character sets used under DOS were pleasant to use.
Apple is indeed an extraordinary outlier (as is Jobs). If you look into the history of Apple's Gil Amelio days, very near-death and Steve's return, it was IMHO, a remarkable example of a series of fortunate miracles coinciding to allow Steve to brilliantly save the company when it had been only weeks away from death. Jobs calling Bill Gates and convincing him to quickly loan $400M to Apple averted disaster potentially by a matter of days. And Gates only did that because MSFT was being sued for anti-trust by the Justice Dept and needed Apple to survive as an example that Wintel still had some competition. Apple's survival in that period is the closest close thing I think the industry has ever seen.
To answer your last question, Jobs was undoubtedly incredibly brilliant but it took every ounce of that brilliance AND some crazy good luck for Apple to survive. Ultimately, it was Jobs plus flukes, so no, just Jobs without the flukes wouldn't have changed anything at Atari or Commodore. Even on its death bed Apple had a much better brand, distribution, market potential and talent than Atari or Commodore ever did. Plus Steve had his hand-picked entrepreneurial team from Next with him. The situations at Atari and Commodore were just much weaker in every way, so I don't think any single super hero, no matter how super, could have saved them.
Advertising increases sales, which can lead to economies of scale, which can reduce prices. It also encourages price competition, so it's nowhere near as simple as that. Some highly price disruptive activities such as direct to consumer marketing would be impossible without advertising.
You HAVE to advertise to get sales because everyone else advertises heavily already, and because advertising is so dominant that consumers have come to rely on it as the majority of how information enters the zeitgeist. It is a barrier to entry for competition.
If we could reduce the advertising footprint we could increase information flow from things like consumer reports or wirecutter, and we could reduce the dependence on advertising to get sales and increase the ability to get sales by making a better product.
Economies of scale are no doubt a very, very good thing but they are not tied to advertising. If we stopped spending 100s of billions of dollars every year competing for attention this only adds to the productive capacity of our society.
I find it eye opening to talk to local small businesses, the eye popping amount of money they have to spend on facebook, google, and yelp feels like a racket, not an opportunity. Many types of business that were capable of operating before digital advertising are now incapable of operating without paying the piper.
Of course there are businesses that couldn't operate before but now can because digital information flow is better than analog information flow. This is easy to confuse with it being enabled by digital advertising because our information flow is dominated by advertising.
But I don't advocate for just deleting advertising and going back to analog word of mouth; I'd prefer a market for digital information that isn't simply purchased by the person who wants my money but instead competes on the value of the information.
So they vote for the party that eviscerated the ACA and defends the medical insurance industry.
Look at Trump’s talking points. It’s all about immigrants, foreigners and wokeism that are coming to get what you have.
The US is a wealthy, prosperous nation, and I think even lower income segments of the US population are aware they’re night and day better off than people in the same economic segment in the countries immigrants come from. Wanting more is part of it, but it’s mainly about not sharing what Americans have, even though it’s not actually under threat. That doesn’t matter, people still feel threatened.
I’m a Brit. My mother is a wealthy middle class retired woman in a safe idyllic bit of countryside, but she is utterly obsessed with foreigners coming to rape and steal and destroy British society. They’re all coming to get us. She reads in the papers (The Daily Mail) and sees it on TV (GB News) every day.
This is the ability to mentally compose conceptual objects in complex relationships.
In fact I don’t think there really is one single significant differentiator. There are many. However without this one technology beyond simple single function tools such as a hand axe or pointed stick, and simple linguistic statements wouldn’t be be possible.
The linguistic composition described in the article sound similar if dramatically more primitive, but I don’t think we can assume it comes from a common ancestor. It may well be that this capability has a different neurological basis, since these animals don’t have a prefrontal cortex. So it seems plausible this is a case or parallel evolution of a very rudimentary similar feature. Fascinating stuff though.
