cld8483

> The typical meme is that modern movies suck, but they're being made that way to pander to "the masses." But the numbers don't support this! When you see headlines like record breaking sales, it's measured in gross revenue. When you actually look at tickets sold, movies have been dying for decades.

Alternative read: the industry is dying so they double down on pandering in an ultimately futile attempt to bail out the sinking ship.

Consider anime: It has been a dying art ever since Japan's economic stagnation/recession in the early 90s. So the anime industry (generally, with some exceptions) turned hard into pandering to their most base fans, lonely dudes. Lots of waifu characters designed to sell body pillows and trash like that. This hasn't improved quality and sales continue to slump, but they're still trying.

> but that does not excuse Black actors being blasted with n-bombs and other slurs on Twitter and other social media,

I'm not denying, much less excusing that. What I am saying is that such trolls are an irrelevant minority who's voices are amplified by those to whom nutjobs are a convenient excuse for their own failures.

Black Panther sold many millions of tickets in America, and had maybe a few thousand 4chan-style trolls complaining about it. Am I really expected to believe those few thousand trolls were the reason the movie got less than flawless glowing reviews from critics, rather than flaws in the movie itself being to blame? And if the Star Wars trilogy failed to perform as Disney expected, it certainly wasn't the fault of trolls. Star Wars fans outnumber trolls a million to one. If the Star Wars trilogy under-performed, it was because the Star Wars trilogy was flawed. Trolls are just a convenient excuse for the people involved in the production who don't want to face the facts about the quality of their product.

In the mid 00s or so I would have said that movies were getting shorter. If anything, movies are getting longer again.

But there is no general relationship, direct or inverse, between the length of a movie and the quality of a movie. Some movies should be short and some movies should be long. It really depends on the movie in question.

Market failure? The demand for child care is a social and economic failure. Stay-at-home parents are no longer feasible for most families.

> [1] Black Panther and the 3rd Star Wars trilogy were surrounded by some of the most vile harassment campaigns I've seen, for example

Or, movie studios have exaggerated the impact of (real, but not very numerous) internet trolls to protect their own egos from valid criticisms. The third Star Wars trilogy was an incoherent mess. And for reasons I still don't understand, the end of Black Panther was released in a rough half-rendered state. But the people making these films don't want to hear criticism of their baby, so online critics get dehumanized as "trolls". Rare instances of real trolling from the likes of 4chan get highlighted and blown out of proportion as a defense mechanism.

I have gotten more enjoyment out of watching some silent-era movies than modern release movies. Particularly, the 1916 20,000 Leagues is great. In general I don't think there is any real relationship between the age of a movie and the quality of a movie; quality movies are more or less evenly distributed through time. Sometimes film makers strike gold through some fortunate coincidence of inspiration, talent and luck, and most of the time they don't. And yes, that means most old movies aren't good; but most new movies aren't good either.

The passage of time doesn't play a role, because even though individual directors/actors get more experience with age, they also age out of the industry and get replaced with new guys. And besides, it is very often the case that movies get worse as a director ages. Compare The Godfather to anything Francis Ford Coppola has made in the past 30 years. Or Michael Mann's Thief and Manhunter to anything he's done in the past 20. Or Ridley Scott's filmography. There are many examples like this; experience counts for something but old men often lose their edge.

If you're buying a DVD for your child, but only have the budget for one, would you buy Snow White, or Snow White 5: The Slushening? In most cases, the classic original is the no-brainer. The sequels to Disney movies are pale cash-grab imitations with far less cultural significance.

> (the original Oceans Eleven comes to mind—I don't drop many movies that I start, but I'm not sure I even made it to the 20 minute mark on that one).

Some movies were just never very good in the first place, I'd put the original Oceans Eleven in that category. On the other hand, compare the original The Italian Job to the remake. The remake has faster 'modern' editing but it's definitely a much worse movie than the (excellent) original.

For all their faults (Steam is glorified DRM), the people at Valve seem to actually understand gamers and have gaming in their own blood. Apple has never understood gaming and I doubt they ever will.

> How could an AI model trained on input generated by an AI ever be any better than the original AI?

Like a tennis player practicing tennis with a wall?

I strongly disagree, I don't think movies have gotten better in any regard except for the cost of special effects (cheaper than ever before, and so, used more often and generally with less thought and care.)

If I wound up in the hospital with cancer, getting a Hallmark card from HR is precisely the kind of insensitive BS I would expect. This is just the way organizations behave, you need friends/family if you want to receive genuine expressions of empathy.

You'd be hard pressed to derive a model for the coarse structure of the universe from the Standard Model, considering the Standard Model can't describe gravity. Maybe this is part of the problem..

In that case, they're selling a subscription instead of selling movies, no? (I haven't used it, I don't know the details of how it works.)

It's about conveying atmosphere and mood, not conveying plot-points as rapidly as possible.

Same reason a book might spend two pages describing a lazy dog laying on a porch swatting flies with his tail, instead of cutting straight to who said/did what.

I think it's exactly the sort of thing an institution might do and it would probably pass without much remark, because people don't actually expect better from office flunkies in PR or HR who are personally detached from the whole situation.

This Valentine's Day my (very corporate) landlord paid somebody to hang a little bag containing confetti, a small twix candy bar and a mechanical pencil on my door. What am I, in third grade? Totally tone deaf, but what can I really expect from a soulless corporation?

If it came on a Hallmark "special event" card from the grocery store instead, would Hallmark catch flak? Or would this transfer of blame only occur if computers were involved?

Well that is what dogs do.

I must need more coffee, my first thought was that the bug must have been enormous for anybody on the plane to feel it being run over.

It's not a simple matter of the organization making the most rational decision for the interests of the organization. Individuals throughout the organization have an incentive to suppress past products to make newer products, and by extension themselves and their own careers, look better in comparison. Organizations can behave irrationally when the constituent members of the organization have incentives that puts them at odds with the rational interests of the organization itself.

They can't compete with what they once were, so they bury the past. I suspect many industries are like this. If classic movies were played alongside new Hollywood releases, the new movies would probably be choked out. Accordingly, Disney will even restrict the availability of their old movies on DVD. They can't stand competing with their former great selves.

I won't speak to the situation in India, but in America it is certainly possible for somebody from a 'lower caste' to be in a position of authority over somebody from a 'higher caste'. If for no other reason than because Americans with no understanding of the caste system might find the 'lower caste' person to be more competent and capable than the 'higher caste' person and promote accordingly.

Let the office real estate industry crash and burn, so that developers lobby for the zoning to build more housing instead of more offices. The worst thing we can do right now is bail out commercial real estate investors who bet on the construction of cities with 10x more cubicles than apartments.

Markets as optimization tools only work if people are made to suffer their losses when they occur; bailouts subvert the process and pervert the outcomes.

On one hand, you have a lot of people online making arguments about rural living being ecologically harmful, an economic drain on the country, because (among other reasons) it requires cars to work. Then you have these other people suggesting ways to revise cities that reduce the need for cars. So some rural people connect these two dots, perhaps not always unfairly, and interpret the walkable city activism as people advocating for the eradication of their preferred rural/car lifestyle. And predictably, they don't like that very much, and don't have kind words for such advocates.

> Makes me wonder how many great men of the past were actually their wives alter egos.

Interesting thought. I know JK Rowling is "JK" because her publisher wanted to obscure her gender. This sort of thing is probably common.

Leave Beef Wellingtons out of this!

They were probably invented by the French anyway, and renamed for the obvious reason.

Those polices are flagrantly ignored.

> My experience has been that even beyond caste, huge tech companies get these weird race/ethnicity based fiefdoms embedded within them.

I've had the same experience. It's very weird when you realize you've been hired into such an ethnic enclave in which you aren't that ethnicity, and then learning that your boss's boss is looking for a way to trade you to another team without ever meeting you, mere days after you joined. Thankfully that trade went through and I ended up on a less racist team..

I don't say this to defend the practice, but shunning is not modern. Shunning was advocated by Paul the Apostle (or whoever wrote those letters to the Corinthians) about two thousand years ago. Banishment and social exclusion has also been observed in many social animals besides humans.