Interesting Reads

[KingRoyal]

ITT post articles that are interesting reads that don't quite fit somewhere else

Penn Jillette Wants to Talk It All Out

The big thing people are surprised in this interview is that he's completely written off libertarianism, for which he was a vocal advocate for most of his career.

Many times when I identified as Libertarian, people said to me, “It’s just rich white guys that don’t want to be told what to do,” and I had a zillion answers to that — and now that seems 100 percent accurate.

Though, really, it conforms to a lot of other interviews he's done and a lot of the media and acts he's put on over the years. He's always been fairly skeptical, and routinely would hold and express views on topics like vaccines that ran 180 to what I would see a lot of liberatians say.

But really even this interview demonstrates how critical a thinker he is and how he's willing to change his mind and analyze. His views on Israel-Palestine are considerably level headed, much more than what I encounter from a lot of people on the issue

[Friday]

I don’t know why, but I’m just going to tell you how stupid I am. I’m good friends with Karen Russell, Bill Russell’s daughter, who’s a Harvard lawyer. Her father was a superstar in basketball, and she is my age-ish, she’s in her 60s. She talks about touring with her father as a basketball star and not being able to eat in restaurants and not being able to stay in hotels. She’s telling me this — she’s saying this to a man who’s 68 years old and has lived in the United States and supposedly knows how to read — and my jaw drops.

I'm glad he told this to us, because oh man do I see this shit all the time. For some reason, people just do not get it that this shit is real.

Cops are another good example.

[Mongrel]

It's interesting to see it as a rich white guy coming to terms with privilege, but there's enough sporadic mentions of things that without spelling it out indicate he hasn't always been fully privileged and maybe that's helped him keep his mind open.

Whereas if he'd been rich from birth, it's far more likely that he'd be be writing OpEds in the NYT or something, rather than giving a very meaningful and thoughtful interview to Cracked.

It's also nice to see Cracked doing high-quality journalism again. As bizarre as that switch was, it certainly wasn't unwelcome.

[Thad]

It also gives some insight into his defense of capitalism -- it's not really capital he's defending (at least in this interview) as such; he's using "capitalism", like a lot of folks do, as a general term for buying and selling things.

His story about his father paying fair values for coins is maybe a little obvious but it's instructive. Aside from it just being the ethical thing to do, it's good business. If someone's willing to take $200 for a coin collection that's worth $1000, you could rip him off and make $800, but you're putting your reputation on the line. You make a habit of doing that and sooner or later people are going to find out and that will be the end of your business. That ain't worth $800.

Rational self-interest is a thing, but it requires, you know, rationality. It requires perspective and long-term thinking, which don't come easily to shareholder-driven companies.

[Mongrel]

His story about his father paying fair values for coins is maybe a little obvious but it's instructive. Aside from it just being the ethical thing to do, it's good business. If someone's willing to take $200 for a coin collection that's worth $1000, you could rip him off and make $800, but you're putting your reputation on the line. You make a habit of doing that and sooner or later people are going to find out and that will be the end of your business. That ain't worth $800.

And as also noted in the article, it's not just avoiding a bad reputation, it's accruing a positive one that absolutely brought in more business.

[KingRoyal]

How Godzilla Minus One Pulled Off Its Oscar-Nominated VFX for Less Than $15 Million

Interview with Takashi Yamazaki on how they pulled off an Oscar nomination on a fraction of a budget than bigger Hollywood films. While VFX exploitation is also a problem in Japan, he emphasizes that the costs can be kept down by not crunching creatives and by letting a director make and commit to shot choices, rather than lengthy and complicated VFX rounds.

[Thad]

The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion

So okay more problems with the Hugos. In this case, last year's Worldcon was in China, and a bunch of award-eligible stuff got disqualified. It's not clear at this point if there was direct pressure from the Chinese government or if a bunch of American and Canadian convention runners just preemptively disqualified stuff they thought the Chinese government would want them to disqualify, but either way it's a shitshow and, much like the Vox Day tampering a few years back, they're going to have to address this if they want the Hugos to stay credible.

There have been a number of stories about this in the mainstream press, as well as posts by people like John Scalzi, but the report by Chris M. Barkley and Jason Sanford is the primary source for what went down; it's a bit of a longer read but if you read one article about this story it should be that one.

[Büge]

It seemed like, based on what I've read, that the awards council were self-censoring. Like, they'd trawled nominees' social media for anything that they thought the Chinse government would condemn.

[Thad]

I would at least assume that the Chinese censors would know the difference between Tibet and Nepal.

That doesn't necessarily mean that they never gave the organizers a talking-to, but there's also no evidence as yet that they did.

[Grath]

Allegedly, the chairman of the House Select Committee for Strategic Competition Between the US and Communist Party of China is doing an investigation into the Hugos fuckery. So that's some bonus fun.