Interesting Links for 26-02-2023

[andrewducker]

1. A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most

(tags:Apple speakers technology sound )

2. Supermarkets all out of turnips after shoppers told to eat them amid veg shortage (another lovely week here on normal Island)

(tags:UK food Doom )

3. The NYT is apparently fine fabricating sources

(tags:nytimes fraud OhForFucksSake jkrowling transgender bigotry )

4. Britain's failure to act on Russian dirty money will see us forever labelled hypocrites

(tags:Russia money OhForFucksSake uk )

5. There is basically no research on how often to sterilise baby bottles, and advice varies *dramatically*

(tags:babies food cleaning )

6. Hilariously appalling questions that tech employees have asked at public sessions

(tags:technology work questions OhForFucksSake )

7. Food shortages in the UK - what's missing from shelves and why?

(tags:trade food uk Doom )

8. James Bond books rewrite will remove 'offensive' references

(tags:books JamesBond offensive writing publishing )

Comments

[simont]

#8: just reading the title I had a response already springing to mind, along the lines of "I bet they've removed casual use of racist or sexist language but not addressed the underlying issue of Bond's entire job being to perpetuate what's left of British imperialism".

In fact, it sounds as if they haven't even done a complete job of the former!

(That said, in a lot of Bond films at least – I'm not familiar with the books – Bond is going after non-state bad actors of various kinds that all the nations involved agree are awful, and not propping up British foreign policy at all except insofar as it's in favour of not having shit randomly blown up by criminals. SPECTRE, rogue CEOs, rogue ex-MI6 agents, rogue Russian officers, freelance spies trying to swindle both sides at once, random lone terrorists, that kind of thing. It's rare that he comes into direct confrontation with the Soviet bloc, although given his position, one assumes that it must happen in many of his other missions that didn't get filmed. So if you were trying to transplant Bond into a less awful context, perhaps you could deal with a lot of the imperialism problem by simply having him work for an explicitly neutral international organisation of some kind, along the lines of – strange as it is to say it – U.N.C.L.E.)

[hilarita]

Though there is that hilarious 80s Bond where he's supporting the Taliban because they're against the Soviets, which looks rather different now

[simont]

I'm unreasonably fond of The Living Daylights. Partly because it has some particularly good set pieces (the homicidal milkman attacking the safe house, "he got the boot", the climactic fight involving the whistle-activated key finder) but yes, also because that heel/face turn is amusing these days :-)

[armiphlage]

And it would be good if they addressed the whole bit where Bond is licensed to commit extrajudicial murder, rather than investigate.

[simont]

I must admit I was never sure where that licence actually applied, and what it covered.

Outside the UK, how does MI6 grant a licence for anything, when it's someone else's jurisdiction? Surely the most they can do is intervene if he gets arrested, and claim he was covered by diplomatic privilege, which is surely tantamount to an act of war if you try it just after your guy has just blatantly murdered someone on foreign soil.

And inside the UK, OK, I suppose the UK authorities could make it legal to randomly gun people down there if they really wanted, but he hardly ever seems to be on missions there anyway. And if he actually used that privilege I bet he'd have to justify it to some kind of MI6 oversight committee.

Probably it's a purely symbolic privilege that's mostly there for him to threaten people with, just in case he points a gun at them and they say "You wouldn't dare".

[danieldwilliam]

I don't think he ever had legal permission to kill people. More that he had operational permission from the British security services to murder people if it was convenient. He's a state assassin, not an executioner.

[simont]

Right, that makes sense – if a non-00 agent guns someone down on foreign soil then when they get home they're reprimanded, demoted, and/or never sent out again on any remotely sensitive mission. If a 00 agent does the same thing, MI6 will be all 'fair enough, I expect you had a good reason, here's your next assignment'.

[danieldwilliam]

If they get home.

No 7.

[channelpenguin]

Hmm. Not really seeing shortages here in Germany. Higher prices, sure (though easing a bit now). But no shortages*. Just saying...

*Except that for 6 months or more, I just CAN'T find normal sardines with skin and bones in (I like those best). The skinned and boned versions are available. Odd.

Re: No 7.

[calimac]

Around here, the pandemic caused the disappearance of eggs in cartons of 6. You can get 12, you can get 18, but no longer 6.

Re: No 7.

[channelpenguin]

Oddly, over here, eggs usually come in 6 and 10. The odd place has 12 or 30. Organic shops sometimes have 4s.

Re: No 7.

[calimac]

Wow, that is different. I've never seen 10. I'd buy that if I could get it: unless I'm making quiche, 12 is often 2-3 more than I can use before they start to go bad.

Re: No 7.

[channelpenguin]

Eggs take like a month to go bad, though? I keep mine for ages, but could easily eat 4 any day of the week if I to... I can honestly say I've never had one go bad, but I turn them most days.

Re: No 7.

[calimac]

Yes, but I don't use eggs very often. That's why I was buying 6.

Actually, that's no longer true. I've taken to making fried rice regularly (insert logistical reasons here) and I put two scrambled in that. That uses them up faster.

Ivan offer for you...

[hairyears]

Nice to see Margaret Hodge doing something worthy with her post-ministerial career...

She's chosen not to mention the Russian donations to Conservative Constituency Associations: I guess she's chosen to be apolitical.

Re: Ivan offer for you...

[andrewducker]

Excellent point!

[danieldwilliam]

#8 I wonder why we are trying to make these books less awful.

And what the parameters of awfulness we're trying to address.

As one of your other readers notes; at a fairly deep level the Bond books about the solving of problems by the application of extra-judicial violence and the primacy of the British state. They are also some pretty hefty wish fulfilment given the author's actual career failings.

Or thinking on Blyton and the parody of her by the Comic Strip as a borderline Hitler Youth group.

You can imagine one of the Famous Five saying something like "I don't like [offensive term for group], they are always {stereotypical action]." You can replace what with "I don't like[less offensive term for that group], they are always {stereotypical action]" and you've toned down the language but left the social attitudes intact. They likely still carry the same engrained social attitudes of racism, classism and sexism. Perhaps more subtly hidden.

And I think this is a question about what the archetype in some of these stories is, and why. What's the guts of it that we're trying to preserve.

The archetype hero of most Dahl children stories, as far as I can tell, is someone who is a little cleverer, kinder and saner than most children dealing bravely with the insanity of authoritarian adults. Is the archetype hero of the Bond stories a racist, sexist, violent imperialist who is correct in their racism, sexism and violent imperialism (which is the vibe I get from the books) or is someone more noble who risks death for his community and through extra-ordinary talent and will triumphs whilst making us laugh with his gallows humour? What's important about Sherlock Holmes as a character? His detecting? His drug misuse? The sexism he exhibits?

I can't help thinking we are being encouraged to accept the changes to these "well-beloved" stories because they represent significant brand value to the rights holders compared to the newer, more genuinely acceptable to 21st Century audiences.

[andrewducker]

I strongly suspect that the only reason that the books are still in print is because of the success of the movies. And the only reason the movies are still seeing success is that they have changed significantly on at least two occasions. I'm sure there would be some kind of appreciation of the older ones in any case, but I don't think "James Bond" would be part of popular culture if there wasn't regular reinvention.

I do wonder how much the early Bond novels actually sell. Are many people really going back and re-reading them?

(I read a few of them as a teen, after I found them in a second-hand bookshop. I certainly wouldn't have paid for them new though.)

Part of me thinks that this is a bit of a marketing ploy.

[danieldwilliam]

Do you mean specifically that the only reason you think the Bond books are still in print is the success of the movies? (I'd agree).

Some years ago I saw a whole display table of new editions in a bookshop.

The tone of the films changes often. There's an opportunity for a refresh or a nudge each time the main actor changes. Some bigger than others. That's allowed them to remain current and in the popular culture currency. I think I would argue that the current iteration of Bond is further away from the character as originally written than say the iteration of Holmes in Elementary. I'm gently mulling over if that's true and, if true, what that means.

https://wordsrated.com/james-bond-book-statistics/

This implies that current sales of Bond books are. If Fleming sold 30 million books whilst alive and 60 million books in the two years after his death - to 1967, then between 1968 and today about 10 million Bond books have sold - which is about 2 million a year on average.


https://lithub.com/these-are-the-bestselling-books-of-2022/

That would put *all* Bond books on a par with the top selling books of 2022. (I have never heard of Colleen Hoover but apparently she's huge.)

[andrewducker]

2 million a year on average - I wonder how front-loaded that is. 60 million in 2 years - chances are that the next 5 years would see at least 50 million, the following 10 years another 40 million, etc. Seems very unlikely that they're still selling anywhere near in the millions nowadays.

I was thinking about Holmes in Elementary earlier today - when you were talking about wish fulfilment. Because it became obvious to me, watching the series two years ago, that the main advantage he had was that he could ignore the law while investigating. So many cases solved because Holmes and Watson arrived slightly before the police, broke in, and had a rifle through things without having to worry about due process. A lot of the appeal of Bond is a similar "We know that we're the goodies, so it's fine for us to ignore the rules to beat them." effect.

[danieldwilliam]

No, hang on a minute, I've screwed up the numbers.

It's about 100 million total sales. 30 million whilst alive, 60 million in the years immediately after death. So 10 million -ish Flemming books between 1968 and today, or about 200k per year.

Probably front loaded as you suggest.

Not sure what that tells us about non-Flemming Bond books, but a not crazy assumption might be that for every Flemming book sold a non-Flemming Bond book sold, so another 200k a year.

[andrewducker]

I did think the numbers were a bit weird earlier when I was looking at the sales for Devil May Care when they were delighted that it sold 44,000 copies in the first few days. Because with Amazon pre-orders, and something with the advertising of the Bond centenary, I would expect a large chunk of its sales to be day 1. But I could well be very wrong!

[danieldwilliam]

On Holmes. There's a lot of that sort of thing. The pattern seems to be 1) brilliant deductive leap not available to normal people, 2) targeted gathering of evidence to either prove the deduction or do an A/B test, or to present sufficient judicial evidence or to flush out the criminal 3) some jeopardy or a twist when the deduction needs to be revisited.

Which I think is a big contrast to actual modern police detective investigations which are very procedural with a big data hose of evidence and a large data management function. Also helped by the fact that most murders are committed by a very narrow range of suspects.

As an aside on wish fulfilment, if our society really wanted to solve more crimes we don't need to reduce our evidential burden or relax due process. We just need to do DNA testing at every crime scene and then process it.

[andrewducker]

Oooh, that's interesting. I wonder how large we'd need to scale our DNA testing to manage all the cases that it would help.

[danieldwilliam]

You'd want to do a forensic sweep of every burglary scene. Looks like about 200,000 burglaries a year. That alone doesn't identify the actual burglar but it does give you a solid evidence pack for when you catch them, links them to lots of other crimes and a data set that perhaps helps you catch them by building up a pattern of behaviour that you can use to make predictions or find correlations. For example, we find the DNA for person X, Y and Z at a burglary. The police pick up person Z and identify them, then ask them who X and Y are.

After a couple of years you'd have most burglars arrested and in some sort of criminal justice custody.

That's also going to massively increase the DNA database so you'd sweep up more sex offenders.

You could add in DNA samples from drug busts or other crimes. And a bit of that is we caught you doing X but we perhaps can't prove it, but now that we have your DNA we can link you to a couple of other crimes.

You probably need DNA testing to be in the low hundreds of pounds before you can roll this out en masse.

But if you recall the huge number of forensic kits that were (perhaps are) not being processed in the USA. Those seem to have found a lot of linked serious offenders.

[andrewducker]

DNA tests are definitely in that range now. Have been for a while. I got myself tested on 23andme ages ago - and they'll do a pretty good scan for about £150.

I popped to https://www.gov.uk/get-a-dna-test/if-youre-getting-a-test-to-use-in-court and then chose their top provider - who will do you a paternity test for £99: https://www.alphabiolabs.co.uk/legal-testing-services/

And yeah, that makes total sense.

[danieldwilliam]

You've got some evidence gathering and processing costs on top of the DNA test - say enouugh to double the cost of the tests. 5 tests per burlary, including excluding the victims, I think we're looking at £300m to do DNA testing on all burglaries per year. Which is for example 1/10th of the Mets total budget.

[andrewducker]

That seems doable if it actually cuts crime significantly.

Is anyone in the world doing it yet?

[danieldwilliam]

I don't think anyone is doing it routinely but there have been studies in the US which indicate it is effective - perhaps too effective

https://www.police1.com/police-products/crime-scene-investigation/articles/solving-property-crimes-with-dna-v5QzUcLwthfBbJtQ/

https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/207203.pdf

https://www.crime-scene-investigator.net/DNAsolvespropertycrimes.pdf

[bens_dad]

7. IIRC from the books, the licence to kill did not include UK support if he got caught by the local authorities.

In the Daniel Craig Casino Royale* he had at least one assassination mission before he got the licence to kill - only those who had experienced the psychological
effects of making a hit could be licenced ...

* I don't remember whether the book said the same thing - I haven't read it for well over forty years and I was still in primary school.

-------

I am pretty sure that there will have been small tweaks to the wording many times before, both for different territories and reprints. In fact I am sure the publishing histories list revised reprints.