They took out huge ads in Vegas for re:invent. Personally that set my alarm bells off pretty badly.
18,360 karma · joined April 10, 2020
That's a straw man.
> For the most part, people learn languages because they are useful.
Duh. But how useful learning a new language is to you is mediated by where you're living and it's local influence. As an American, I would have to go way out of my way in order to use a new language, let alone find it useful. This is largely due to the cultural and economic weight that America exerts on the region. Literally everyone I've done business with who isn't a native English speaker taught themselves English specifically to move to or do business with Americans. The UK is not in this position.
Also, again, size. I have to travel a very long way before I hit anywhere where English is not the overwhelming majority language. This also is a factor. If I want to learn French and use it, it's a $600 and 14hr flight for me to actually make it to Paris and use it, while a Eurostar ticket from London is $60 and 2hrs. This absolutely affects how useful a new language might be, even for pleasure, and is exactly why my attempts to learn French petered out.
> I'm happy enough with that because speaking another language well represents thousands of hours of effort that I was happy to spend elsewhere - it is a huge opportunity cost.
YMMV.
No surprise there. Same language (no translation barrier) and a shared background as former British colonies (well, or being British) really seals the deal there. But also there's really no language aspect to analyze here; we can't say that America's media culture undermined the local non-English speaking of say, New Zealand, because most of the people there already spoke English already.
Although the impact on accents is another matter, I am sure.
> There must be more to this; places like Nigeria, India, China, Japan all make more feature films compared to the US. Countries like Spain, France, Germany, UK make about half as many. Mexico, Brazil are in the top 15..
Some of those other countries definitely fall under my criteria. Japan and India both have their own traditions to preserve (Bollywood is a thing), and my understanding is that the CCP has made resisting Hollywood's influence an explicit goal.
The rest of it? Dunno. There's clearly just some other factor at play here that I don't have my thumb on. I can't explain why Brazil and Mexico produce that many movies, this is the first time I've heard that.
> Population size probably matters more and gdp less
I think that's really close, but not quite it. I think the real thing here is having the cultural and economic circumstances that allow people to go and produce media and art for consumption. For some forms of media (especially movies) this is going to largely be a factor of money and population, since that is expensive. But that might not be true for all types of national media. Manga in particular is a fairly small industry, with roughly 40,000 workers and a mere 4,000 artists. Hollywood alone is 10x bigger.
My mind also jumps here to Russia, and how important its literature scene is to both the country and the language. Population is certainly a factor, producing great literature at the country level is often about giving a lot of people the chance to try and seeing what happens, but money really isn't as much a factor given that novels are cheap to produce. Funding great novels is pretty cheap once you've identified worthwhile novelists, since it involves paying maybe the living expenses of a few people.
Perhaps my takeaway here is that Movies are the national media of America (and India too, to be fair), and what we're seeing in some countries is the competition between American movies providing pressure to move to English, and other forms of local media grounding the country in question in its native tongue. That idea might need more fleshing out.
> but having some unique to say helps.
Oh yes, that is certainly very important.
0 - Although for a short while the UK definitely punched above its weight, from the 60s until the 80s or so. The theory I've heard is that this was a side effect of having a really good welfare system; people were able to quit their jobs easily and create music and art, and some of it was really good.
America is also huge in the way that few countries are. This means that you can trivially go your entire life enjoying vacations without leaving the country. Nobody in the EU has that luxury.
The UK though is not the local hegemon. They’re peers and close trading partners with several non English speaking countries, many of which are extremely close physically too. The UK is not politically and economically powerful enough to expect all the other European countries to learn English in order to do business with them.
Also, even when such media cultures exist, they’re competing against the incredible might of Hollywood, Netflix, Disney, etc. It is very difficult to compete with the budget and production quality that these companies can maintain if you’re a smaller economy. Disney’s revenue last year was 12% of Sweden’s GDP ($65B vs $541B). Sweden would have to sink a massive chunk of its GDP into movies in order to compete with just Disney, let alone all the other streaming services.
My suspicion is that there needs to be not only a tradition to act as a bulwark, but also some national self identity that causes people to reject the homogenizing effect of foreign media. That can either be pride in extant local media (I understand that the Paris novel scene is rather hostile to non-native involvement, for example), or an explicit rejection of the foreign media for more explicitly political reasons.
The former is about the government fixing its own mess, the latter foists responsibility for dysfunctional government systems onto individuals who may or may not do the correct song and dance to please whichever agency they’re dealing with. If we’re going to demand photo ID everywhere, the government should fix its own crap first before demanding more of the citizens.
I’d be fine with getting a federal ID and using it for my taxes. I’m deeply opposed to having to provide my own photo to fill out my taxes, especially since if they’re unhappy with my photo for whatever inscrutable reason, they can throw me in jail for not doing my taxes right.
Are there actually any evidence that there are more unfilled jobs though? Unemployment is actually at 3.9%, which is down to pre-pandemic levels. That's better than 2017 and most of 2018, actually.
Heck, now that I'm pulling up real numbers (should've done this earlier), unemployment spiked up to 14.7% in April of 2020, and was on a continuous downward slide after that, including before any state cut its enhanced UI. Nationwide unemployment was at 5.9% when states began cutting UI. This is more consistent with "crisis over, we don't need to keep this" than "oh god we have to cut UI or they won't go back to work. My state had an unemployment rate of 3% when they turned off enhanced UI, no need for a stick there!
For comparison the official unemployment rate was above 5.9% between August 2008 and October of 2014.
I think that the best argument for here "UI lets people be lazy and not work" is not that people stopped working during the pandemic because of it. I think the best argument is that people knew that this system was temporary and that they had to get a new job and start working when they felt it was safe, because it was temporary. One might expect different results if the system was more generous permanently, I don't know.
> And if "general re-evaluation of life choices" leads to quitting your job, aren't the only two possibilities that you either get a new job, or you don't work anymore?
Either possibility is incompatible with the general thesis that UI was why people stopped working, and we had to cancel UI in order to get people back into work. Either they didn't need the job and no amount of UI tweaking will bring them back, or they decided to get a different job and no amount of UI tweaking will fill their old one.
> But what about the rest of the states? And the federal government left their money faucet on until September.
I could be wrong here, but UI is administered through the states. The federal government had the money tap on to the states who then gave it out through their system.
It's not obvious that that's the guaranteed outcome of pensions, or a consequence of an unexpected change in lifespan in the mid 20th century.
The issue is that the story of enhanced UI isn't internally consistent. Apparently UI made all the (implied) lazy people stop working because it was more profitable to not work than work[0], which made it critical to turn off the benefits as soon as possible in order to force people back into the office. Except once they turned off the benefits people decided not to work and spend down their savings because ... erm, why would people do that? And doesn't this undermine the premise that people stopped working because it was cheaper to not work, if they're deciding to go broke not working for funsies?
Personally I think that the story of the labor shortage is explained as such:
1. Loss of workers due to death, disability, retirement, changing careers, and general re-evaluation of life choices in the face a deadly pandemic
2. For those that remained in the service industry, a brief exposure to being treated with dignity and as an essential part of the economy was a real awakening moment for a lot of them, and many are no longer willing to put up with workers that pay poorly and treat them as sub human. In my parts the restaurants that offer good wages always seem to be fully staffed, while everywhere else has signs crapping on people's work ethic and apologizing for slow service. Coincidence? I think not.
I think UI was critical to get people through the early period of the pandemic due to the chaos and the uncertainty of the early pandemic, but I am extremely dubious about the effect that UI had as compared to the deadly pandemic.
> And didn't unemployment bonuses only end 4 months ago?
Oh lord no. A lot of states started disabling enhanced UI back in June and July. My state ended it July 19th, nigh upon 7 months ago. I am doubtful many working Americans
0 - I've seen this floated a lot by CNBC types, and they never seem to engage with the fact that the most lethal profession during the pandemic was line cook.
It's genuinely really funny that you thought that this would be a rebuttal. Based on this entire conversation, what do you think my opinion about President's Day is? I'll give you two guesses, first doesn't count.
> We celebrate Washington's birthday despite him having been a slave owner. If you think that it's impossible to compartmentalize people, so be it.
I think Washington is an even easier case to argue here than MLK. This isn't a simple case of not agreeing with every aspect of someone's entire body of work. This is a case of a man waxing poetic about freedom and the rights of man while at the same time engaging in crimes against humanity by buying and selling human beings as property. This fact isn't merely inconvenient, it bathes his life's work in a hypocrisy that is impossible to ignore.
Personally I wish we didn't celebrate his birthday. I think in general it's a bad idea to put people on pedestals for a variety of reasons, including if they turn out to be monsters in some ways. For Washington this specifically puts us all in the invidious position of explaining why we're venerating a man who could look another human being in the eyes and then sell them off like property.
> If you think that the reason we venerate MLK is in part due to his contributions to socialism, and that's what he means to you, so be it.
I'm split on whether this is fantastically bad reading comprehension on your part, or a bad faith interpretation of what I've said. It's 50/50 for me. Because at no point did I indicate that MLK even made a contribution to socialism, or even that I thought he was a socialist. All of that is entirely a fabrication on your part, completely unsupported by what I said.
My entire point is that I find it a bit sus that after MLK's death people only ever seem to engage with one very specific aspect of MLK's work and legacy, and it's I think the part that is selected is politically convenient for those in power. That's it. That's my entire point.
> feel entitled to celebrate that without having to celebrate the entirety of his beliefs.
Again, I never said you had to agree with everything that he said. You've made that up to get angry at me about.
Please point where I said that. I think you made that up out of whole cloth.
> Of course the rest of what he said were ideas, the point is that arguments/positions aren't bundled together arbitrarily simply because you would like them to be.
They’re bundled together because they’re all part of one man’s body of work. Specifically the body of work for a man whose holiday were commemorating today. So yes, everything he said and did is bundled together when we are discussing him, and if we cherry pick what he said and did when we’re discussing his work, then we’re not being honest to him and history. Literally my entire point is that his legacy and quotes are cherry picked in a suspicious way when we discuss him.
If we’re discussing color blindness in the abstract unrelated to MLK, then sure, you’d be right. But we aren’t, and it’s incredibly clear that my original point had everything to do with MLK specifically, not color blindness in the abstract.
> Agreeing that the sky appears blue doesn't mean you have to agree that there is a god.
Please point out where I said that you were obligated to agree with everything thing King said because you agree with him on one thing. I’ll wait.
It’s also incongruous with the other hair on fire arguments you see about UI causing labor shortages; it’s inconsistent to say that UI makes people not work, then hand wave away why months and years after cutting the benefits were still facing a “labor shortage” in a lot of job markets. If it’s really down to UI, then you’ve got to propose some mechanism for why canceling UI didn’t fix the supposed labor shortage.
I always see people blaming benefits for people not working, but nobody ever seems to offer an explanation why these same people didn’t return to work once the benefits were cut down to their pre-pandemic levels.
I think the exact opposite. I think if you’re cherry picking pieces of thought from a figure and ignoring the bits you don’t like then you’re just using them as a prop.
There is of course some complexity when someone changes over the lifetime and renounces early beliefs. But that isn’t the case here, we’re talking about people ignoring a large chunk of a celebrated man’s work because it makes them uncomfortable. I don’t think you can actually do that, and I think it does him and his legacy a great disservice to even try.
> We don't talk about King's socialism as much … and many people don't find socialism to be compelling (myself included).
Thank you for proving my point.
> Hence, remembering ideas.
What, so the rest of what he said wasn’t ideas? Or that the rest of them have less value because someone said so? If so, who decides which ideas are the real ones to be remembered? You? Me? Our political chattering classes?
Here’s the thing, powerful people and instituons have long had a use for editing and celebrating dead radicals as a way to reinforce their legitimacy while also signaling that Those Times are Now Gone. You see the exact same behavior out of the July Monarchy in their rewriting the history of the three glorious days (see Mike Duncan for more). For King it is extremely convenient to make his story the story of official segregation and legal discrimination and nothing more. That neat narrative of “first segregation, then MLK made it all better, end story” only works if you ignore the rest of his work on war and poverty. Because if that is brought into the light then his work looks only half done, rather than done and finished.
This phrase is usually used to force through otherwise unpopular economic policies. But here’s the thing, this isn’t actually an argument. You’re unilaterally asserting that you’re right and that anyone who disagrees with you is a child that refuses to accept “hard truths”. But you have offered literally no evidence for your assertions, only bluster. This is mere abuse of rhetoric, not an argument.
Oh, and it’s funny how only other people have an “agenda”. As if you aren’t also expressing a policy preference too.
Here’s a choice quote he gave in 1967 in his “Three Evils of Society” speech.
> Again we have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that Capitalism grew and prospered out of the protestant ethic of hard word and sacrifice, the fact is that Capitalism was build on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor – both black and white, both here and abroad.
Not exactly mild mannered stuff.
Cynically I think there has been a political project to expunge most of King’s ideas from the public memory, leaving only those that everyone is comfortable with. The public image of the man has been watered down to merely opposing segregation and legal discrimination, and all of his more radical economic proposals and opinions tend to be politely ignored. The March on Washington also included a demand for a $2 minimum wage ($17 in 2020 dollars) and self governance for Washington DC, funny how that isn’t mentioned often.
Hell, he was helping support a strike when he was assassinated. How many people were taught that before?
It’s also not the developers job to consider the long term maintenance and tax implications of these developments. That’s the responsibility of the city itself through plan approval and zoning.
Any solution for resumes is going to fall into the much harder category of social change, rather than technical solutions.
Try a bit over 100. The House of Windsor ascended to the throne of the United Kingdom in the misty past of … 1901. Even if we disregard royal houses and look at just successions then you run into some awkward situations pretty early, including a nice run of kings born in Hanover and speaking primarily German.
A lot of royalist propaganda is an attempt to tie relatively short lived dynasties into some mythical long lived chain of succession, mostly to reinforce the idea that they rule by right rather than by force or accident of history. In reality royal houses are regularly discarded when they become too inept, too inbred, or (in England’s case) too Catholic for the people to tolerate.
The whole “the queen is just this beloved and powerless figurehead” is propaganda.
So as far as child abuse is concerned, the call appears to be coming from inside the house.