Category Archives: Technology and Society

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Technology and Society

Avatar

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Is one of the stupidest movies ever made:

If Avatar were drawn like a regular cartoon, or had been made on soundstages with sets and the like, would it be interesting? Would it hold our attention? The answer is, unquestionably no. There’s no chance anybody would even have put it into production, no matter that Cameron made the box-office bonanza Titanic. So the question is: Does the technical mastery on display in Avatar outweigh the unbelievably banal and idiotic plot, the excruciating dialogue, the utter lack of any quality resembling a sense of humor? And will all these qualities silence the discomfort coming from that significant segment of the American population that, we know from the box-office receipts for Iraq war movies this decade, doesn’t like it when an American soldier is the bad guy?

Podhoretz’ review is chock full’o’spoilers, but when something is as apparently ridden with PC cliches as this, it’s pretty hard to spoil it. Let’s hope they can apply the film-making technology to a good movie soon.

[Monday morning update]

Kurt Loder over at MTV has similar thoughts:

Cameron is a great action director. There’s a lot to look at here: the luminescent glow of the jungle in which the Na’vi live, the ancient Tree of Souls with which they commune, a spectacular range of mountains hanging high in the sky up above Pandora — and there’s a lot going on. The director and his battalion of digital technicians have cooked up a fantastical bestiary of Pandoran creatures — futuristic hammerhead rhinos; dogfighting battle dragons; and, in one virtuoso sequence, a vicious six-legged thingy that chases Jake through the jungle and off the edge of a cliff (see trailer). The meticulous detail in which these creatures have been rendered, and the complexity with which they’re arrayed in the film’s exotic environments, are undeniable marvels of moviemaking art.

Unfortunately, whenever the action lets up and we’re returned to the piddling story, the picture slumps like a failed soufflé. It’s also heavily laced with political instruction of a most familiar sort. Cameron, who’s now 55, is a self-acknowledged aging hippie, and his boomer worldview is strictly by-the-numbers. Quaritch and Selfridge are evil Americans despoiling the Na’vi’s idyllic planet in exactly the same way that the humans have (we’re told) trashed their own native orb. The invaders are armed with deplorable corporate technology (an odd animosity in a major-studio movie that reportedly cost more than $300 million to make), and they speak the familiar — and here rather anachronistic — language of contemporary American warmongering. (“We will fight terror with terror!” “It’s some kind of shock-and-awe campaign!”)

The Na’vi, on the other hand, with their bows and arrows and long braided hair, are stand-ins for every spiritually astute and ecologically conscientious indigenous population ever ground down under the heel of rampaging Western imperialism. They appear to have no warlike impulses themselves, and they live in complete harmony with their environment. (They even talk to trees.) Why, the movie asks, as if the question were new, can’t we be more like them?

No one argues that it’s not a brilliant technological feat. It’s just a shame that it seems to have a cliched, politically infantile story line.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

The Green Jobs Illusion

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Thoughts from Ron Bailey, from Kyopenhagen.

This is a good example of the difference between creating jobs, and creating wealth:

As we rode the metro to the conference, Ratledge and I had a pleasant conversation about the great successes of Aspen, Colorado, in producing green jobs. With the financial crisis, construction jobs in Aspen disappeared. But thanks to stimulus money and tax breaks earmarked for weatherization, unemployed construction workers are now insulating houses. Tax breaks have similarly encouraged a solar power installation boom. When I asked him if solar was price competitive with conventional power without government guaranteed low interest loans and tax breaks, Ratledge admitted that it wasn’t. But he predicted that the price of Chinese solar panels was falling so fast that it would soon outcompete conventional power. I chided him that it sounded like the federal stimulus was actually creating green jobs in China. Ratledge did note one rapidly growing green sector in the U.S.: energy auditing. Of course, people and businesses wouldn’t need to hire energy auditors if the price of energy remained low or if they didn’t have to comply with new energy efficiency regulations.

The tax code creates a vast industry of auditors and accountants. But they make the nation poorer, not wealthier.

“Green Jobs” are the last refuge of the economic ignoramus.

[Update a few minutes later]

The Long March — from California to Copenhagen.

If one is a teacher, a public nurse, or a state bureaucrat, and stays close to home, life is not too bad. Two tenured teachers at midlife can easily make together $160,000 with summers off — far more than the owner of a brake shop or a farmer of 40 acres of trees — and without worry over burdensome regulations or the daily need to drive down the 99 for a living, or to fly out of LAX for business, or to depend on the local CSU to provide literate, skilled employees. Life is therefore pretty good, at least so far.

But if you are a private company, dealing with high taxes, all sorts of regulations, a crumbling infrastructure (take a 300-mile drive from Gilroy south on 101; spend a day at LAX, or try finding a convenient east-west route out of California in the winter), and poorly educated employees, the experiment in egalitarianism has failed.

Answer? The best job in California is a state one; the worst a private-sector one. Result? 3,500 flee per week with capital, education, and know-how; 2,500 arrive with far less capital and training.

…This California model is important because Obama is adopting it as a blueprint on a national scale. If he wins (and don’t count him out), life really would be more patterned on an equality of result. New payroll, income, state, local, and health care surcharge taxes would hit those over $200K with about a 70% take of one’s income. The public sector employees double in number, unionize, and demand ever more from “them.” Cap-and-trade charges raise monthly utility bills 20%. Things like SUVs, Winnebagos, and private jet travel are taxed out of reach — except for a guardian class that uses public moneys for a rarefied lifestyle of governance and enforcement (sort of like the jets parked on the tarmac at Copenhagen or Barack’s night out on the Big Apple).

We would all want a job at the DMV but would never want to go there for any service — a model for health care to come. In short, the poor get a little better off, the better-off a lot worse, and America becomes a sort of collective lower middle class at about a 1950s lifestyle, praised and congratulated for ending “poverty.”

And ending wealth as well.

Space, Technology and Society

How Technology Will Change Our Lives

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…in the next decade. Prognostications from Ray Kurzweil. This is the part I like:

We won’t just be able to lengthen our lives; we’ll be able to improve our lifestyles. By 2020, we will be testing drugs that will turn off the fat insulin receptor gene that tells our fat cells to hold on to every calorie. Holding on to every calorie was a good idea thousands of years ago when our genes evolved in the first place. Today it underlies an epidemic of obesity. By 2030, we will have made major strides in our ability to remain alive and healthy – and young – for very long periods of time. At that time, we’ll be adding more than a year every year to our remaining life expectancy, so the sands of time will start running in instead of running out.

For those of us interested in space, we’re going to need it, because one thing that doesn’t seem to be improving over time is government space policy.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Hiding The Decline At Google?

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I got this email (I’ll keep the emailer anonymous unless (s)he notifies me otherwise):

It’s very disturbing how Google is behaving with regard to Climategate/Climaquiddick. I put both of those in my custom news page. For a while, it steadfastly refused to update Climaquiddick, and then it began to update Climategate only with stories attacking climate change skeptics. I could find many more stories on Yahoo, most of which were alarmed at the fraud which seems to be occurring.

Then when I logged in today, Google News had deleted those two categories from my custom section. When I reestablished them, they brought up only a few of the old, outdated original stories plus a few newer attack stories.

Web searches on Climaquiddick yielded only 72,600 hits on Google and 84,300 on Bing, but 565,000 on Yahoo. None of them will autocomplete the word “Climaquiddick.” They won’t autocomplete “Climategate” either, but Yahoo alone will suggest “climate gate.”

Does everyone in Silicon Valley think that pretending information doesn’t exist will make it so? If so, how much can we trust the technology they produce?

I think that there are going to be huge reverberations of untrust throughout many areas of authority resulting from this. As was pointed out early on, it’s not just a scientific scandal, it’s a journalistic one.

Business, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

Your Stimulus Dollars At Work

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Some supposedly egregious examples. But I wanted to focus on this one:

$4.7 million for Lockheed Martin to study supersonic corporate jet travel

Now, I don’t know much about this money, or what its actual purpose is. Is it to just study the market? It’s not enough money to do anything serious in terms of advancing the tech, unless perhaps it’s for CFD.

But I don’t think that it’s necessarily intrinsically a bad thing for the federal government to be spending money on, though I think that it’s quite likely that the money will be wasted. More efficient supersonic jets are, after all, a green technology, and they could lead the way to cost-effective supersonic transports, so it could in theory be a good federal investment. The question is: is it appropriate for the government to be making such investments, or should we rely on the industry?

Well, the problem is that most of the industry, at least the big airframers like LM, don’t believe in R&D. At least not as a cost of doing business. They view it as a profit center — that is, they see it as simply another source of revenue, whether provided by the government, or some other customer. But they rarely put their own money into it. Neither does Boeing. Because for decades, they have become conditioned and inured to avoid it, instead going hat in hand to Uncle Sugar for R&D funds, which is happy to hand them out, even on boondoggles. I think that this is one of the reasons that we haven’t seen much aviation innovation — because the people who actually build airplanes aren’t willing to spend their own money on it. Of course, the regulatory and liability environment are also significant factors.

[Afternoon update]

I assume that this is what is being referred to:

The work will focus on “systems-level experimental validation activities” and is part of the NASA aeronautics research mission directorate fundamental aeronautics programme’s supersonics project. Managed by NASA’s Glenn Research Center, the supersonics project is to provide proven capabilities that address the efficiency, environmental and performance challenges of supersonic aircraft. The studies also seek to identify potential requirements for future supersonic aircraft, assess the effectiveness of technology today and identify new research opportunities.

As I said, don’t expect much useful to come from the money. I could do a lot more with it.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Don’t Panic!

54 Comments

Thoughts on global warming, and cooling, from JoSH:

From the perspective of the Holocene as a whole, our current hockeystick is beginning to look pretty dinky. By far the possibility I would worry about, if I were the worrying sort, would be the return to an ice age — since interglacials, over the past half million years or so, have tended to last only 10,000 years or so. And Ice ages are not conducive to agriculture.

What’s the environmental impact of the Great Lakes region being under a mile of ice?