Duh. My point is as a consumer is I care about the end product. I don't care about the process and I don't care if the artist did it for money or just because they liked writing. The point was narrowly attacking GGT's statement that we value artists who just "do" it.Originally Posted by Illusions
Well, maybe that explains why we value artistic innovators that just DO their thing, and find fame or fortune by accident.
It's certainly possible, and I've been thinking about that in counter-point to what I've been writing, but hadn't brought it up because it would send the discussion off on a tangent. I got the impression that generally it wasn't that money killed creativity so much as it bred second and third-order effects which did so. I suspect that those can be mitigated if involved or interested parties are willing to make an effort, whereas I see little way to mitigate the loss of a (large) subset of artists and creators from not being able to make a living, except for actually enabling them to make a living.
Last night as I lay in bed, looking up at the stars, I thought, “Where the hell is my ceiling?"
Man, pretty much every single person I know uses adblockersI hope they can keep us safe from malicious ads
Interesting, I've only met one person who has used ad blockers (at least that I'm aware of). I don't think most people I know care enough to even look into it.
But I think the great potential of this technology is that people could have a choice -- buy an e-book for a fee or get it for free with ads. Assuming an ad exchange for the ebook market can be developed and scaled properly, I think that's a pretty compelling business model that gives people options for how to access content.
What's ECCM?
I do think people fall into the iPad and Kindle trap way too easily. I made the same mistake of sorts with iTunes. I knew I was getting into a situation where a big chunk of my music was locked into a proprietary system, and I stand by my choice because it was the best legal system at the time. But now I'm living with the consequences, as the first waves of people with iPad books and Kindles will.
Electronic Counter-Countermeasures. I think that's Nessie's way of saying, "Is the Pope Catholic?"
Ipads can be used for books from both Nook and Kindle.
I noticed on itunes that I can pay them more money to remove the DRM from my daughter's music, I assume that would then mean I could easily convert it to something else (but of course, she wants another ipod).
As for ads, I always thought that ad-block plus was why so many people choose to use Firefox. When the IE7 pro add-on for IE worked and blocked ads I much preferred it to Firefox - I might see if it has become more functional since the last time I tried since they seem to have had an update.
We're stuck in a bloody snowglobe.
Man, pretty much every single person I know uses adblockers
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
okay so what happens when we apply these arguments to something like education?
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
I'm on my second Google eBook in just a few weeks. Been very happy with it. Works on iPad, Android, Web browser and Nook. I recommend checking that out, they have some free books you can try too:
http://books.google.com/ebooks
http://books.google.com/support/bin/...answer=1065611
Yeah, I'll definitely look at their free books.
We're stuck in a bloody snowglobe.
Yes, I'm aware of these kinds of arms races. Though I think they are pretty low level in the advertising world compared to the gaming world.
That's just because you're a homo
In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
Tear: Many types of art wouldn't exist unless people purchased it. TV and movies with special effects for example need people to purchase it to pay for the cost of the creation of it. Unless you have a really elitist (wouldn't surprise me) of what "art" is then you must agree money plays a critical role in many types of art mediums.
Aside from your little troll, you're missing the point. That vast majority of art has been made by people who barely squeaked by, and never got seriously compensated. Most worked other jobs to support their profitless job. They do art to express themselves. Some would find patrons to keep themselves fed, but overwhelmingly the wealthy artist is a phenomenon of the second half of the 20th century. Try not to view the vast span of history through the eyes of a young, undereducated, extremist zealot trying to repaint history to support an agenda, m'kay?
As for elitist, do you mean having standards? Must be, because you seem to consider Friends to be the apotheosis of art. Of course, we're all familiar with your conflation of financial success (i.e. the lowest common denominator) with quality. Granted, what is good art is spectacularly subjective. But there are generally accepted criteria, like technical expertise, new perspectives, and paradigm shifting.
Wtf dude, stop dissing FriendsAnd the second half of the 20th century has spawned ridiculous amounts of fantastic art, esp. with the help of more wealth and better technology
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
It's like saying that testicles drive scientific progress because for most of history most science was done by testicles
On the subject of the opening post, how about crippling public safety and snowplowed streets for the commercial interests known as unions?
And three sources apparently saying it was more than a coincidence.DECEMBER 30, 2010, 4:26 P.M. ET
Storm hit NYC on eve of sanitation worker shake-up
Associated Press
NEW YORK — The snowstorm that paralyzed New York this week struck just before 100 of the supervisors coordinating the city's plowing fleet were to be demoted to lower-paying jobs in a budget-cutting move.
The timing of the demotions, scheduled for Jan. 1, ignited speculation that disgruntled sanitation department foremen had purposely sabotaged snow removal.
"I don't think it took place, but we are going to do an investigation to make sure that it didn't," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Thursday.
Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty said he was also concerned, but had seen no sign of a job action, just dedicated workers. The heads of the unions that represent sanitation supervisors and rank and file workers said the rumors were false and insulting.
The demotions would cost the supervisors about $5,000 in base pay and, combined with the elimination of another 100 similar positions through attrition, are supposed to save the city $20 million a year.
The Sanitation Officers Association, which represents about 1,000 supervisors, has been fighting the demotions in court.
Joseph Mannion, the union's president, said the supervisory shake-up hurt snow removal.
Many positions for foremen have already been eliminated, he said, which meant fewer people available to coordinate the fleet.
Part of the city's reorganizing plan had also been to use some of the savings in management costs to hire 100 new uniformed sanitation workers, meaning fewer people would be overseeing plows and more workers would be driving them.
Bloomberg dismissed the concerns Thursday.
"The budget had nothing to do with this," he said. "We thought we had an adequate number of people, an adequate number of training and the right equipment."
Mannion and Harry Nespoli, president of the Teamster's local that represents sanitation workers including plow drivers, also denied a city councilman's claims that sanitation workers' bosses encouraged a slowdown.
Dan Halloran, a Republican council member from Queens, said no one was explicitly ordered to leave streets unplowed, but three sanitation workers told him that certain supervisors made it clear that workers who slacked off wouldn't be punished.
"They were told, 'If you miss streets, you're not going to be written up,'" said Halloran. "'You're not going to get checked up on. Take your time.'"
Nespoli said his drivers wouldn't follow an instruction to sandbag a job.
"If they are doing it over a radio, anybody, then it is recorded," he said. "My members are out there working, and they are plowing."
—Copyright 2010 Associated Press
http://online.wsj.com/article/AP4e39...8736f4632.html
Sanitation Department's slow snow cleanup was a budget protest
By SALLY GOLDENBERG, LARRY CELONA and JOSH MARGOLIN
Last Updated: 12:37 PM, December 30, 2010
Posted: 2:34 AM, December 30, 2010
These garbage men really stink.
Selfish Sanitation Department bosses from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts -- a disastrous move that turned streets into a minefield for emergency-services vehicles, The Post has learned.
Miles of roads stretching from as north as Whitestone, Queens, to the south shore of Staten Island still remained treacherously unplowed last night because of the shameless job action, several sources and a city lawmaker said, which was over a raft of demotions, attrition and budget cuts.
"They sent a message to the rest of the city that these particular labor issues are more important," said City Councilman Dan Halloran (R-Queens), who was visited yesterday by a group of guilt-ridden sanitation workers who confessed the shameless plot.
Halloran said he met with three plow workers from the Sanitation Department -- and two Department of Transportation supervisors who were on loan -- at his office after he was flooded with irate calls from constituents.
The snitches "didn't want to be identified because they were afraid of retaliation," Halloran said. "They were told [by supervisors] to take off routes [and] not do the plowing of some of the major arteries in a timely manner. They were told to make the mayor pay for the layoffs, the reductions in rank for the supervisors, shrinking the rolls of the rank-and-file."
New York's Strongest used a variety of tactics to drag out the plowing process -- and pad overtime checks -- which included keeping plows slightly higher than the roadways and skipping over streets along their routes, the sources said.
The snow-removal snitches said they were told to keep their plows off most streets and to wait for orders before attacking the accumulating piles of snow.
They said crews normally would have been more aggressive in com bating a fierce, fast-moving bliz zard like the one that barreled in on Sunday and blew out the next morning.
The workers said the work slowdown was the result of growing hostility between the mayor and the workers responsible for clearing the snow.
In the last two years, the agency's workforce has been slashed by 400 trash haulers and supervisors -- down from 6,300 -- because of the city's budget crisis. And, effective tomorrow, 100 department supervisors are to be demoted and their salaries slashed as an added cost-saving move.
Sources said budget cuts were also at the heart of poor planning for the blizzard last weekend. The city broke from its usual routine and did not call in a full complement on Saturday for snow preparations in order to save on added overtime that would have had to be paid for them to work on Christmas Day.
The result was an absolute collapse of New York's once-vaunted systems of clearing the streets and keeping mass transit moving under the weight of 20 inches of snow.
The Sanitation Department last night denied there was a concerted effort to slow snow removal.
"There are no organized or wildcat actions being taken by the sanitation workers or the supervisors," said spokesman Matthew Lipani.
Joseph Mannion, president of the union that represents agency supervisors, said talk of a slowdown "is hogwash." But he admitted there is "resentment out there" toward Mayor Bloomberg and his administration because of budget cuts.
His counterpart at the rank-and-file's union, Harry Nespoli, has also denied there is a job action, though he admitted his guys are working lucrative 14-hour shifts.
Bloomberg spokesman Stu Loeser said only: "We would hope this is not the case."
But multiple Sanitation Department sources told The Post yesterday that angry plow drivers have only been clearing streets assigned to them even if that means they have to drive through snowed-in roads with their plows raised.
And they are keeping their plow blades unusually high, making it necessary for them to have to run extra passes, adding time and extra pay.
One mechanic said some drivers are purposely smashing plows and salt spreaders to further stall the cleanup effort.
"That is a disgrace. I had to walk three miles because the buses can't move," said salesman Yuri Vesslin, 38, of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg -- quickly becoming the public face of failure this week -- spent a second consecutive day yesterday defending himself to critics of his administration's handling of the storm.
He took reporters to The Bronx to explain that the city is coming back to life and to tout his administration's efforts.
"Can't work much harder," Bloomberg said.
But Hizzoner admitted, "We didn't do as good a job as we want to do or as the city has a right to expect."
Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty promised that every street will have been plowed by 7 this morning, but then he offered this hedge: "Will somebody find a street that I missed? Maybe."
Bloomberg and Doherty also offered a series of excuses for the failed response to the blizzard. They blamed residents for shoveling snow into streets that had already been plowed and for tying up 911 with non-emergency calls.
"This was a failure in the operations and ultimately, as the mayor tells us very often, the buck stops with him," said Councilman Vincent Ignizio (R-SI).
Additional reporting by C.J. Sullivan and Anthony Affrunti
jmargolin@nypost.com
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/s...53QKOJlekSSDJK
Unsurprising that the NY Post writer kept referring to those three anonymous workers as "snitches."
Last night as I lay in bed, looking up at the stars, I thought, “Where the hell is my ceiling?"
But it corroborated Dread's blame-unions-for-everything position.
The wsj saidIn the largest metropolis in the US, with state and federal funding, it's not a matter of too few workers (or if they're Sanitation employees) or not enough machinery. They also hired about 6,000 temporary workers with plows and dump trucks to clear tertiary streets.Part of the city's reorganizing plan had also been to use some of the savings in management costs to hire 100 new uniformed sanitation workers, meaning fewer people would be overseeing plows and more workers would be driving them.
It's an administration and coordination/triage problem. The buck stops with Bloomberg.
(The fiasco at airports in NYC holding international flights 6-12 hours on the tarmac is another issue.)
It's not relevant if the plow drivers are told by their superiors not to plow streets to stick it to Bloomberg. That's known as declaring a jihad on your boss.
Once again, was the city caught rather off guard? Sure. But the fact that we can't even do anything besides pay public employee pensions says something.
Yeah, I've always found the NYPost reporters to be excellent and their editors to be beyond insane. Methinks the editor swapped in that word.
You might be taking your omg it's all a conspiracy from the unionistis and public pensioners to destroy the mayor! a bit too far. Using the term "jihad" demonstrates your willingness to appeal to emotion (and spark anger and finger-pointing).
NYC wasn't caught off guard. Blizzard force winds and heavy blowing snow was forecast at least 24 hours in advance. The mid-atlantic east coast had plenty of warning, and knew it would fall on a holiday weekend. It doesn't get much clearer than that, unless mayors and administrators chose to ignore it......
Yeah, and why a billionaire capitalist like Bloomberg wouldn't know how to manage the city (even with its evil public servants) gets a pass?
He's been doing a great job through multiple blizzards, having been elected three times now. And he acknowledged that his administration made mistakes. But the accusations here cut to the core of why New York State is becoming unworkable.
Questioning his overall competence after almost a decade of very solid city management is sorta irrelevant.
Who declares a snow emergency in NYC, to initiate all the planned procedures, Dread? It's very relevant.
The jihad reference was unneeded and lame, but there are several workers that have come forward claiming their supervisiors were responsible for the slow response. Obviously there isn't going to be a smoking gun here, but the immediate reason was because they were getting back at the mayor for gutting that department earlier.
Its a common practice the government uses. When budget/tax problems come up they cut needed services to the public, so the public ends up caving into higher taxes or an evil budget (instead of government cutting out the worst expenses). In this case its either the supervisiors doing that, or taking the fall for it.
Indeed, I'm not saying there's a massive conspiracy here. But I am saying that this crosses a very big line, though is indicative of the kinds of problems we're going to keep on facing.
Dread, you didn't answer my question. Who declares a snow emergency in NYC? Only the mayor has that power, right?
After "consulting" with everyone from NOAA to his various subordinate agency heads.....Bloomberg declined to initiate emergency snow protocol. Wonder why? Could it be that he didn't want the Broadway shows to postpone performances or refund purchases, or chase away tourists from restaurants or hotels? I read about NYC folks that tried very hard to get to the city for that show or dinner reservation, even paying hundred dollar cab fees, only to find things closed up.
Huh, funny that, since in south eastern PA we had a travel advisory warning us against ANY travel that wasn't considered Emergency in nature. That's when we decided not to drive into Philly the day after Christmas. I have no idea what the tour buses decided to do, when they carry hundreds of people into NYC for holiday shows and shopping. But I do know if hizzonor had officially shut things down for safety's sake, our local and regional buses would never have left in the first place.
In short, Bloomberg ended up crippling (overwhelming) NYC public service in order to protect the city's commercial interests. He was arrogant, and didn't want to lose tourist revenue, even at the cost of public safety. I saw him on Sunday CNN saying, "People are still coming for shows and dining, our city is still open for business...."
You're literally blaming people for guessing wrong on the weather.
You're also not making sense; declaring a snow emergency doesn't hurt tourism or business. Snow emergency != terror emergency. Snow emergencies just cost money in terms of getting equipment ready, massive overtime payments, etc.
Guessing? Like taking a risk?
Faith is Hope (see Loki's sig for details)
If hindsight is 20-20, why is it so often ignored?
It's not a "guess" these days with doppler radar and fancy scientific predictions. It's a choice, a decision.
Where I live, an official declaration of a Snow Emergency means more than 'move your car from the street so they can plow'. It's also a legal type of declaration, so buses and airlines can cancel operations and not be sued. *And people can get full ticket refunds from airlines or buslines* Stores, movie theatres, and restaurants can close and send all employees home safely. People are supposed to hunker down and stay off the streets. It's partly why there are "runs" in stores for toilet paper and bread.
In fact, we can be fined by police if we're found just driving around, doing snow donuts in parking lots during a snow emergency. Why? Because it's considered a public safety violation.
The point of a snow emergency is to get everyone off the road, leaving transportation issues for true and dire emergency needs. Snow plows, ambulances and fire trucks take precedence. Yes, a snow emergency declaration CAN and DOES hurt tourism and business.
Last edited by GGT; 12-31-2010 at 05:17 AM. Reason: *
...and yeah, we had the same dilemma with fricking football. Rendell called us a nation of wussies because the NFL postponed a game in PA snow?
Edit to add my rantI've noticed when climate "emergencies" happen during holidays and schools are closed, people tend to stop thinking of the children or looking to their school superintendents declaring SCHOOL IS CLOSED DUE TO WEATHER. Granted, many school admins err on the side of caution and cancel school when it should simply be delayed a couple of hours.
But when it comes to city admins that can't look to school supers' decisions, they have trouble deciding. They might err on the side of optimism, tourism, municipal revenue. Not stopping to think that bad weather impacts 911, emergency services, police-fire-ambulance calls (mostly traffic related), and consequential municipal costs.
When it comes to cost/benefit ratios, even a big city like New York probably can't handle paying people to remove snow AND pay damage law suits from people injured or dying because the streets weren't cleared for emergency vehicles.
Thousands of people driving or commuting into the city may generate millions of dollars, but can it compensate for the resulting injuries or deaths? News sources called this the billion dollar storm, in lost revenue. But can (or should) that be compared to families crashing on roads, truckers jackknifing, subways frozen with people inside, or any person being paralyzed for life, or dying?
There was one woman, just one, who was full term pregnant and called 911, but emergency help didn't arrive until 9 hours later. The claim was not enough ambulances, snow-bound roads, streets clogged with stranded vehicles, fire trucks and ambulances stuck in snow.
She gave birth in the vestibule of a cold wet building, with police officers trying to help, laying out blankets, using dental floss and kitchen scissors to tie and cut the cord. The baby died.
I mean really....in the largest city of a big civilized country like the US.....20 inches of snow shouldn't paralyze an entire EMS, and babies shouldn't die when a hospital is blocks away.
Last edited by GGT; 12-31-2010 at 04:48 AM.
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