TheFooder
1yr ago
They overestimated Disney+, something I was pretty sure of at the time. It flattens out Disney's product line putting classic Cinderella on par with Brandy's Cinderella or Little Mermaid with Little Mermaid 2-4. There's no distinction between television, direct to DVD and big budget film projects. They screwed the pooch on planning and execution and IIRC, this is mostly under Bob Iger's leadership.
TheFooder
1yr ago
Marvel plans it's films/movies five years out. These were effectively finished pieces before Covid happened.
Worth noting this same general timeline is abused to make it seem that Bob Chapek is responsible for the Disney flops that were well underway when Iger was still in his first run as CEO.
TheFooder
1yr ago
Another question, possibly illuminating, is why is the US so closely aligned with Jordan? We prop them up even more, if I'm not mistaken. My guess would be that we have to separate our view of our strategic relationship with Israel today from our strategic relationship in the 60's and 70's when we were more reliant on the oil it's access and defense and that is the relationship that defines where we are today. Likely, once all the Boomers are out of government and it's run by Millenials and Zoomers, we'll care about a different set of global priorities. I almost choked to death on my coffee trying to imagine that world, but it's inevitable.
TheFooder
1yr ago
2.1 million is a lot of refugees. How does that measure up to previous crises, like Syria, etc? Is it effectively the same but all at once or a much bigger number?
TheFooder
1yr ago
The "it's got a Christian character, therefor it's Christian propaganda," aspect of this story bugs me too. Would we do the same if it was a Jewish person? I'm not sure. If a protagonist said, "My Jewish faith compels me to stop child sex-trafficking," would someone say this was a Jewish movie? I doubt it, but maybe...?
TheFooder
1yr ago
Agree + emphasizing the last line: "...prove to be dangerous down the line." This has always been my contention with Wokeness going back to, at least, the emergence of Jordan Peterson. The left seems to be creating it's opposition through its actions and it's extremely dangerous if you're a person who actually cares about progressive and liberal values. The reaction will be reactionary and that's bad.
TheFooder
1yr ago
I think your experience is broadly what's happening: extreme-lefties will hunker down with the Q-Anon take; Righties will support it's trad values and centrists will look at it, say what's the fuss and become further ostracized from lefty news and culture outlets. This may be going too far, but I'd categorize this as the Left creating its own problems by unecessarily pushing people away.
TheFooder
1yr ago
Your analysis matches what I've been seeing. I've also been following the Wiki Talk pages on this film which is pretty wild. The argument is that QAnon is a thing, so it's important to note in the Wiki page that this film is...somehow...associated with Q-Anon. To me, it all looks like opinion laundering. Something like, "We've convinced ourselves that Q-Anon is an important conspiracy (because Trump believes some or all of it?) that everyone should be aware of (and against), so now we can point at any tenuous connection to Q-Anon as an obvious problem." The argument is circular.
Here's one line from the wiki page that really stuck out to me:
Caviezel has endorsed the spurious belief that child traffickers drain children's blood to obtain adrenochrome,[53] a chemical with supposed anti-aging properties.[60] Caviezel suggested he had seen evidence of children being subjected to the practice.[62] Caviezel reiterated his belief in the adrenochrome conspiracy theory during the press tour for Sound of Freedom.[63]
First, the word 'spurious' is obvious editorializing (against Wiki's view-from-nowhere) which is unsupported by the linked article, but what's really 'spurious' is the claim that 'adrenochrome' is an obvious conspiracy theory. The take goes like this, "adrenochrome doesn't do what people claim, therefor any reference to this is a conspiracy theory." That should raise some flags because, whether or not Adrenochrome is real, effective, or something Caviezel believes in, has no bearing on whether or not people are killing children for their blood, something Ballard claims having seen numerous times in videos he had to watch for the DHS. AFAICT, there's no dispute (or even discussion) about the claim of blood sacrifice just whether or not Adrenochrome is real or a conspiracy theory. This is a prime example of the kind of reporting/editorializing that sets people on edge.
I've been watching this story develop on various media-critique YouTube channels and it's just bonkers how rapidly this became culture war. If you're a publication on the left, why not simply leave it alone, say nothing? That's the part that's weird to me. From a strategic point, how does this not tip middle-of-the-road Americans toward the conservative viewpoint and further reduce the credibility of these journals? The RS piece is especially egregious, IMO.
Also, the denigration of the film is weirdly anti-Latino. As you correctly pointed out the production is almost entirely Latino and the film has a lot of Spanish with subtitles. It's about to be released in Mexico, at which point, I think we're going to see it get a huge bump. If one considers this a Mexican cinema production (cast, crew, writing and directing are largely Mexican) this is the highest performing Mexican film of all time. It's admittedly a bit of stretch and why I didn't add it to the Mexican Cinema wiki page. I'll let other people have that fight.
TheFooder
1yr ago
This has been my position for a while, but I sometimes find it hard to support, like, I can't always rebuff arguments about supreme court, executive orders, etc. They do sorta matter, but it isn't apparent until some time has passed. For instance it took a decade for the effects of Clintonian repeal of Glass-Steagall, the creation of DHS, or Obama's NDAA2012 to become apparent. What seems to be the case, to me, is that the combined effect of the past 40 years of presidential politics is an increase in elitism and consolidation of power and wealth. There's a problem with the brain, not with a particular hemisphere.
TheFooder
1yr ago
lol, I didn't even know there were 75 people here. You really hit a nerve.
TheFooder
1yr ago
Watching Midnight's Edge, Nerdrotic and Doomcock bag on Disney is what I do when I'm not reading this forum. Nice to see I'm not the only one.
TheFooder
1yr ago
Unless you’re talking about two completely different demographics. Gen-Z doesn’t watch Mr Beast.
TheFooder
1yr ago
The problem seems to be the term Gen-Z in this case. They are not the demographic for Mr Beast. The kids who watch him are closer to 12-13 yo, a new, as yet unnamed demographic. I say this as apparent of children in both age groups and my personal experiences with their viewing tastes.
TheFooder
1yr ago
Creators with younger audiences is pretty common. Dare I say baseline? PewDiePie entertained people a decade younger and so it goes.
TheFooder
1yr ago
I used to be a big tabletop gamer, going to GenCon, writing games, etc. The wokeness factor has been so stupidly bad for so long I simply dropped out about a decade ago. None of this is surprising. Also, how the heck are you going to make a fantasy game set during savage medeival times without dark and challenging elements? So dumb. What I don't really understand is the wrath. Hasn't everyone who cares already bounced over to Pathfinder?
TheFooder
1yr ago
I really like this framing, but the more I thought about it the less sure I became that it's likely. I'm hugely ignorant in the complexities of both societies, but it seems like Ukraine will have many advantages that Pakistan never had, or had working against it. Things like general level of tech and industry, access to wealth, landmass and sea access, education levels, etc. I'm really not sure about the religious thing. It seems a lot more 'hot' between Muslims and Hindus than it does between Eastern and Western Christians.
I would also predict that the most likely end to this war is a settlement where a big chunk of Ukriane ends up in Russia...likely, the 'more' culturally Russian bits they already have. This will act as a bit of a pressure valve for the two main factions presented in your argument.
I'm skeptical but interested.
I"m very interested in this. I have a sense that the extent to which WP's "Reliable sources" document is used throughout media and government is deep and unprecedented. I noted that Matt Taibbi saw 'reliable sources' cited numerous times in his Twitter investigation and because we know that many of the major tech platforms interface with WP directly (Ex. Google, Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa--a service I believe they pay for) it seems like there are dots that need to be investigated for connection. The specific document at Wikipedia is a nightmare of liberal bias (I'd consider myself a liberal, fwiw) and directly impacting the truthiness of any article related to modern personalities and events.
I think it's very likely this same document is acting as a source for everyone...why? Because people wouldn't do the same work twice if they didn't have to, particularly if it promoted the agenda they already wanted to purport. Anyway, I think there's a huge story about Wikipedia just waiting to be broken. I'd really like to know how WP doubled it's annual income since 2016, but don't have a pro statista account. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1311370/wikimedia-foundation-annual-funding/
TheFooder
1yr ago
So, I also have worked in HFT Finance and am currently director of Operations for a (fully CFTC regulated) BTC futures/options exchange. I completely sympathize with losing scads of money in seconds ( my biggest hit was $70k because I misread a settlement value) and I was working the day Knight Capital imploded (I had met the VP a week earlier at a CME training session!).
Anyway, I guess my point is that there's some serious differences between running a trading firm and running an exchange and as stated below, the security of your customers' accounts is paramount, possibly more important that the actual functioning of the exchange. This is why US exchanges are required to use 3rd party clearing houses and a variety of other services to ensure the proper handling of margin, reserves, fees, open interest and settlements. We have industry wide annual disaster recovery tests, risk control evaluations and hundreds of other hoops to jump through.
I think this was a huge hit to the credibility of all things Crypto but if there's a silver lining, it's that companies like mine, who take the extra few years to not only align with CFTC regulations, but help to inform how they can be improved, will ultimately be preferred over foreign companies that lack these controls--if BTC can maintain it's value. I don't want to seem like a CFTC fanboy, but regardless of the extent to which you think they make good decisions ,their mere existence creates some sense of normalcy and safety and provides a history of precedent that is mostly transparent. (I'm not sure I'd say the same about the SEC, fwiw).
Of course the big question is what is all this stuff and what's it worth and is the value of Bitcoin actually reduced because of US government controls. I'm not sure and always wonder about what the future of this stuff will be but I feel confident in saying some sort of digital blockchain currency will perpetuate into the future.
As for SBF, it seems like there's a lot reasons to be upset with the dude and his team. They really screwed up (or maybe they pulled a fast one, I dunno). To me, this whole episode seems to be more reflective of the un-serious direction our civilization has taken where we consistently fall for the hype and never seem to do the boring research. We hand billions of dollars to kids because we feel they've been vetted by some university or other pedigree. I've spent a life surrounded by grad students and high IQ scientists, doctors and lawyers and can say emphatically: smart people are some of the dumbest people I know.
I feel lie your political position and mine are about the same and every time an election comes up, I'm simply floored by the amount of people who actually believe and are energized by their chosen party. It really baffles me that anyone can believe any of it. I often feel like my lack of faith is my biggest failing.
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