Interesting Links for 24-12-2022

[andrewducker]

1. Britain's winter of discontent is the inevitable result of austerity

(tags:austerity UK NHS infrastructure Doom )

2. In the long term, if we want to keep the global temperature down, then our electricity generation has to be entirely generated from renewables

(tags:renewables globalwarming )

3. Stardust is inspired by The Voyage of The Dawn Treader

(tags:narnia neilgaiman )

4. Fans Can Now Sue Movie Studios For Deceptive Trailers

(tags:trailers law fraud viaMyBrotherHugh )

5. Both versions of "Riddles in the Dark" (the Gollum chapter of The Hobbit, changed when Lord of The Rings came out)

(tags:lotr TheHobbit Tolkien )

6. Finally, a believable explanation of why Elon Musk bought Twitter!

(tags:ElonMusk Twitter comic funny )

7. Elon Musk orders removal of Twitter suicide prevention feature

(tags:Twitter suicide OhForFucksSake ElonMusk )

8. Brexit means no British manufacturer able to build ministerial cars

(tags:UK cars manufacturing Europe Doom )

9. The 10 best films of 2022

(tags:movies reviews )

Comments

[calimac]

5) I haven't seen the texts presented in parallel like this before, which is nice to have. Unfortunately it's not entirely accurate. As far as I checked, which is only a few pages in, it has the first edition correct but doesn't notice all of the changes made in the revision. For instance, Gollum's backstory in regard to playing riddles was changed to fit what Gandalf tells Frodo about his origin in LR. First edition reads, "before the goblins came, and he was cut off from his friends far under under the mountains." (Yes, it says "under" twice.) Revised edition says, "before he lost all his friends and was driven away, alone, and crept down, down, into the dark under the mountains."

What's more, there were further revisions in the 1960s which affected mostly the first couple chapters of the book but also this chapter. These were mostly small wording changes, affecting the background of the story but not changing the plot. One interesting change here, again not accounted for in this chart, affected "Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum." Tolkien added "a small slimy creature" to the end of the sentence, probably because early illustrators of the book had depicted Gollum as gigantic.

You want a full accounting of all of this? Get a book called The Annotated Hobbit by Douglas A. Anderson.

[dewline]

1. This is applicable to multiple nations where the IDU Austerity Programme was imposed. Including the US, Canada, Australia, and where else?

2. That work of switching to and scaling up renewables is, of course, already underway. How much faster can we safely move on the switch-over?

4. And this is going to be good for us how?

7. Only took a day to reverse that attempted evil, thanks be. So...what's next? He's got some other stupid/evil/both-at-once thing(s) in the works, the way he keeps complaining about the "woke mind virus"...

8. *facepalm*

[andrewducker]

The USA cut far far less under Obama than we did under Cameron/Clegg. And came out of things better too, from my understanding.

[calimac]

4) I have mixed feelings about this one. On the one hand, it's pretty well established that not everything in the trailer has to be in the movie, though I can think of a few cases where it would have been much to the movie's improvement if it had been.

On the other hand, if you rent and watch a movie because your favorite actress is in the trailer, and it turns out that she's not in the movie itself at all, you're entirely entitled to feel pretty pissed off.

On the third hand, what have you lost? The price of the rental and the time you spent watching the movie. This suit should have been remanded to small claims court, if not dismissed on the grounds of de minimis non curat lex.

[hairyears]

...de minimis non curat lex.

No.

Or rather: yes, if it's just this one consumer, renting this one copy of the movie, just this once.

And it isn't. It's advertising and millions of potential consumers get to see the misleading advert.

Tens of thousands of people rent or purchase the DVD on the basis of a profitable falsehood.

And if the studio and the distributors get away with it, just this once, then they'll do it again, as often as they can make a dishonest buck out of it.

You and I will never be able to trust the advertising and the 'All Star Cast!' with a Big Name on the posters and the cover of the DVD.

It's not a trifling matter when it's false advertising.

And yes, we will all hear eloquent and persuasive legal arguments that it is, together with belittling and dismissive media coverage that will nudge our views towards de minimis non curat lex when this argument is worse than merely wrong.

[calimac]

Then it should have been a class action suit. Without that, it is indeed just this one consumer, renting this one copy of the movie, just this once.

[hairyears]

Point 3...

I'm going to attempt a balanced view of this, because we are talking about one of the most serious matters that there is, on social media and public safety.

So I'll lead in to this with Twitter's explanation, and we'll take it that Twitter is acting in good faith when they say this:

Twitter head of trust and safety Ella Irwin told Reuters in an email that "we have been fixing and revamping our prompts. They were just temporarily removed while we do that."

But this runs into well-known and well-established best practices in the industry:

"normally you would be working on it in parallel, not removing it"

I hope that nothing untoward happens, and that this does not lead to tragedy.

But this is Twitter and hate cults 'pile-on' to people in distress and in crisis and explicitly urge the targets to kill themselves.

Ms Irwin would do well to seek advice, for herself, as she advises a social media platform that has cut back on moderation, and welcomed back political extremists and hate groups who will do this and...

The courts will hear that Twitter's expressions of regret and concern and sympathy in the matter are confounded by an unnecessary action that shows a disturbingly laissez-faire attitude to suicide prevention.

[kerk_hiraeth]

All trailers are deceptive by their very nature; at least in my experience.

This could be... well no actually. I don't care; people who believe trailers deserve to be conned.

That's akin to believing any advertising is telling you the truth.

kerk

[andrewducker]

Nobody deserves to be conned. And anyone who takes advantage of the vulnerable and naive deserves to feel the full force of the law.