Articles
The Godzilla Beeper
John Scalzi on the hows and whys of Godzilla’s multi-movie character arc.
How do we go from the undeniable terror of Godzilla in these 1954 and 2023 incarnations, to the cuddly on-call deus-ex-monster of the 1978 cartoon series? The latter does not seem compatible with the former. The answer lies in the fact that of what lies between the 1954 original and the 1978 animated series, and something I like to call, for lack of a better word (or at least, a word that exists but I can’t think of), “protagonization.”
Between the original movie and the cartoon are fourteen other Godzilla movies, from 1955’s Godzilla Raids Again to 1975’s The Terror of Mechagodzilla, and during that time a curious thing happens to Godzilla: he stops being an unknowable terror and becomes, more or less, the guardian of Japan. It doesn’t happen immediately; the first few sequels have Godzilla still wreaking havoc at will. But by 1964’s Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, Godzilla has tempered his indiscriminate havoc enough to team up with two other monsters to defeat Ghidorah, and by Godzilla vs. Megalon (1973), Godzilla is shaking hands with a human robot he’s teamed up with, and no longer terrorizing Japan, preferring instead a quiet existence on Monster Island, which is essentially a retirement home for kaiju.
Big win for Dunedin’s ‘dicks guy’
The hospital’s abortion service was one of six locations that will become the country’s first designated safe areas from August 25 this year.
That law covers up to 150m around an abortion service. It prohibits certain behaviours that “could be considered distressing to a person accessing or providing abortion services,” according to the Ministry of Health.
An extremely rare instance of something actually getting better in our world.
Biden’s Unheralded War on Poverty
Biden’s Unheralded War on Poverty
The Great American Quit Rate (full name: Great American Quit-Your-Stinkin’-Job-for-a-Better-One Rate) has finally subsided. While it lasted, though, it enabled the nation’s low-wage workers to make the first substantial economic gains they’ve made in 40 years. And that the GAQR existed at all was due almost entirely to President Biden’s war on poverty—a war that has gone largely unnoticed by both the public and the media.
Biden has implemented a significant wage hike for the American working classes whilst their inflation runs much lower than the UK’s. Meanwhile, Jeremy Hunt and the Bank of England are still asking our working class to take wage cuts to try to instigate a recession, in order to fight the inflation caused by excessive corporate profits.
Whether we want it or not, the UK upper classes are fighting a class war.
Pain, No Gain
William Davies · Pain, No Gain: Inflation Fixation · LRB 13 July 2023
Weber’s argument, supported since with empirical analysis, was that profits were responsible for rising prices, not wages. In politically sensitive areas such as energy, her view has become the new common sense. The IMF has accepted that rising profits have made a larger contribution to inflation in the Eurozone over the past two years than wages, and that ‘companies may have to accept a smaller profit share’ if inflation is to fall.
Today, despite the media’s focus on rail strikes and the RMT, the most radicalised workers in Britain are doctors. What technology or overseas supplier is expected to replace them? London, once the oversized heart of this ‘aspiration nation’, is slowly emptying out of young people and children, as the most basic expectations – of home, family and money for a holiday – become all but impossible to meet. The gap between housing costs and wages has rendered the British economic model socially unsustainable, not just on the cultural or geographical margins, long brutalised by conservative politicians, but at its very core.
Modern Britain makes Cyber Punk’s corporate dystopia seem almost twee
But this is not the worst of it. National Highways Ltd, a company owned by the government, is using a new strategy: passing on the costs of obtaining its injunctions to the people named in them. Once a company has obtained a costs order from the court, it can force the people it names to pay the fees charged by its lawyers. Yes, even if you have adhered to the terms of the injunction, you are charged simply for being named. If you cannot pay, bailiffs might come to your home and confiscate your property.
In the UK, private companies can take out an injunction against anyone they want, and charge that person for the cost of them doing so.
A Spicy New Take on Bean Dip
From context collapse to content collapse
In a 2010 interview with the journalist David Kirkpatrick, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg put it bluntly: “You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” Zuckerberg praised context collapse as a force for moral cleanliness: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” Facebook forces us to be pure.
Linked to from the previous article is this gem.
Medieval sociopolitics? In my blog? It’s more likely than you think.
/u/spez is right about feudalism and that’s why reddit as we know it is doomed
Since Elon Musk bought Twitter, people have been making a lot of comparisons between internet institutions – particularly various social media things – and premodern political forms and figures.
These comparisons typically rely on the level of understanding of antiquity or of medieval life you’d expect to get from DKfindout! Castles. I am not a historian, but I know, like, just about enough to be embarrassed for the speakers.
So in this post, I want to talk a bit about how the relevant historical phenomena worked, a bit about why feudalism tends to be a pretty bad comparison to internet stuff, and a bit about why Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is – still! – maybe more correct than he knows when he compares moderators to landed gentry… in a way that suggests the end coming for Reddit as-we-know-it
Amazing article, well worth the reading time. The linked references are also fascinating as well.
Who’s the Cutest Little Dolphin? Is It You?
Sometimes, they catch (dolphin) mothers and calves together, and the animals exchange signature whistles throughout the process. By analysing 19 such moments, recorded over 34 years, Sayigh’s student Nicole El Haddad showed that mothers raised and widened the pitch of their signature whistles when calling to their calves, just as humans do when talking to their babies.
Inflation Is Being Driven By Corporate Price Gouging
The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) and Common Wealth think tanks have shown that profits were up 34 percent at the end of 2021 compared to pre-pandemic levels and that nearly all of this increase in profits was due to just twenty-five companies.
using the latest available figures for the largest 350 companies on the London Stock Exchange, recently showed that profit margins for the first half of 2022 were nearly double — 89 percent higher than the same period in 2019 before the pandemic.
The chief economist of UBS Global Wealth Management, Paul Donovan, stated that “Much of the current inflation is driven by profit expansion,” adding, “Typically, one would expect about 15 percent of inflation to come from margin expansion, but the number today is probably about 50 percent.”
The very rich are getting much richer extremely quickly. And entirely at our expense.
The tenth anniversary of Iain Banks’ passing.
Ten years on: Iain M. Banks (1954-2013)
“When in Rome; burn it.” The State of the Art (1991).
Ten years ago. Shit.
You Can’t Understand Modern China Without Looking at the History of Land Reform
I always end my courses on modern China with two final messages for my students: go to China, and when you go, be sure to visit the countryside.
That second message is much needed. Today we know China as a nation of sprawling megacities. My adopted hometown of New Orleans wouldn’t even crack the list of the top 150 Chinese cities by population. But there still exists ample beauty in a vast, diverse countryside, especially in remote villages that have managed to find a way avoid the sledgehammer of modernity.
What languages dominate the internet?
Rest of World turned to W3Techs, a web-scanning firm based in Austria, to count all of the publicly accessible web addresses on the internet to get hard numbers on the discrepancy. Our data shows that a little more than half the sites on the web use English as their primary language. That’s a lot more than one might expect, given that native English speakers only make up just under 5% of the global population. Meanwhile, Chinese and Hindi are the second and third most-spoken languages in the world, but the same scan found they account for just 1.4% and 0.07% of domains, respectively.
Sci-fi writer Ted Chiang: ‘The machines we have now are not conscious’ | Financial Times
“There was an exchange on Twitter a while back where someone said, ‘What is artificial intelligence?’ And someone else said, ‘A poor choice of words in 1954’,” he says. “And, you know, they’re right. I think that if we had chosen a different phrase for it, back in the ’50s, we might have avoided a lot of the confusion that we’re having now.”
So if he had to invent a term, what would it be? His answer is instant: applied statistics.
“It’s genuinely amazing that . . . these sorts of things can be extracted from a statistical analysis of a large body of text,” he says. But, in his view, that doesn’t make the tools intelligent. Applied statistics is a far more precise descriptor, “but no one wants to use that term, because it’s not as sexy”.
The AI pivot
Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI
“Current AI feels like something out of a Philip K Dick story because it answers a question very few people were asking: What if a computer was stupid?”
Fun and thorough article linking the AI and crypto hucksters. It’s deeply depressing to see people falling for the AI-booster’s bullshit, just months after the collapse of the crypto-bullshit industry.
Shall we learn from our mistakes? No! We’ll just be fooled time and time again.