Results for “star trek”
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Assorted links

1. There is no great stagnation: the horizontal shower.

2. What if Star Trek had social networks?

3. The culture that is Iceland.

4. New economics blog from Phillips Exeter Academy.

5. TGS for musical instruments?

6. Profile of Scott Stern’s work on the economics of science.

7. Kristof has quite a reasonable review of Murray; by the way if you think dysfunctional social mores all boil down to economics, how are those Albertan tribes with the oil revenues doing?  Ex football players in bankruptcy?  etc.  Here is more Krugman on Murray, now totally on the mark.  Matt nails it too.

Assorted links

1. Can you digitally organize your friends (acquaintances, enemies, etc.)?  (By the way, I haven’t yet figured out how to respond to Google+ queries, thanks if you sent me one though.)

2. Can the neuroeconomics revolution revolutionize psychiatry? (gated, in any case I am skeptical)

3. The new Tim Groseclose book on media bias is now out.

4. Professorial hobbies.

5. The demographic depression in household formation, or why housing may not recover anytime soon.

6. Star Trek vs. Anti-Star Trek.

Capitalism: Hollywood’s Miscast Villain

In the WSJ online I cover Hollywood and capitalism including Star Wars, Star Trek, Avatar, The Wire and much else.  Here are two bits:

Although Hollywood does sometimes produce leftist films like "Reds," it has no deep love for socialism…

But Hollywood does share Marx's concept of alienation, the idea that under capitalism workers are separated from the product of their work and made to feel like cogs in a machine rather than independent creators. The lowly screenwriter is a perfect illustration of what Marx had in mind–a screenwriter can pour heart and soul into a screenplay only to see it rewritten, optioned, revised, reworked, rewritten again and hacked, hacked and hacked by a succession of directors, producers and, worst of all, studio executives. A screenwriter can have a nominally successfully career in Hollywood without ever seeing one of his works brought to the screen. Thus, the antipathy of filmmakers to capitalism is less ideological than it is experiential. Screenwriters and directors find themselves in a daily battle between art and commerce, and they come to see their battle against "the suits" as emblematic of a larger war between creative labor and capital.

On The Wire:

…although it uses character, "The Wire" is ultimately about how character is dominated by larger economic forces: drug dealers come and go, but the drug market is forever. "Capitalism is the ultimate god in The Wire. Capitalism is Zeus," says David Simon, the show's creator.

Over its five seasons, "The Wire" shows how money and markets connect and intertwine white and black, rich and poor, criminal and police in a grand web that none of them truly comprehends–a product of human action but not of human design. It's the invisible hand that's calling the shots, as Mr. Simon subtly reminds us in the conclusion to the third season, when Detective McNulty wondrously pulls a book from the shelf of murdered drug dealer Stringer Bell, and the camera focuses in on the title: "The Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith.

Smith's metaphor of the invisible hand, like Mr. Simon's invocation of Zeus, tells us that to understand the world we need to look beyond the actions of individuals to see the larger forces at work. But Zeus is an arbitrary and capricious god whose lightning bolts fall out of the sky without reason or direction. Smith's "invisible hand," however, is that of a kinder god, a god that cares not one whit for individuals but nevertheless guides self-interest toward the social good, progress, and economic growth. So Mr. Simon understands that the Baltimore dockworkers lost their jobs because of the relentless change that capitalism brings and not through any fault of their own. But Adam Smith sees what Mr. Simon does not, namely that it was capitalism that brought the Baltimore stevedores their high wages in the first place and it is the relentless change of capitalism that slowly raises wages throughout the world.

More here.

Avatar

It was entertaining but I was expecting to be awed by at least one scene, as happened in Terminator, T2 and Titanic, and I was not.  The plot is identical to that of Battle for Terra, right down to the "tree of life."  Many scenes I felt like I had seen before.  Here is the helicopter gunship scene from Apocalypse Now, here is the men in robot suits battle scene from Alien (and one of the Matrix movies), here are the sky islands from Castle in the Sky, here we have the Dances with Wolves scene(s).  I am all for homage but this was pastiche.

The aliens were gorgeous, leggy, blue fashion models.  Nice, but Star Trek did the green alien girl thing forty years ago.  Personally, I like my aliens to be a little bit more well, alien.  All the way to another planet just to find that the girls are blue and the horses have eight legs instead of four?  Sad.

I insisted on seeing it in 3D but the effect was not revolutionary and there is still some eye strain.  In the end I would have preferred 2D.

I was entertained but I was not enthralled.

The Political Psychology of Stimulus

David Hirschleifer writes:

Regardless of who's right on the economics, clearly the ‘stimulus'
language captures the pro side perfectly, and the con side not at all.
Indeed, the term immunizes the mind to opposing evidence. After a cup
of stimulus from Starbucks, if I'm still drowsy, by definition I need
another jolt.

….Opponents have lots of metaphors they could choose from. Instead of
the image of rousing activity, there could be the economic ‘suppression
plan,' ‘deadweight package,' or ‘growth-retardant system.' For
alliteration, there's ‘prosperity Propofol.' To honor the frugality of
government, how about ‘resource-flush scheme,' ‘wealth dump,' or
‘porkapalooza'? As for mechanical metaphors, there's ‘recovery off
switch,' ‘opportunity crusher,' and ‘investment choke button.' For the
computer savvy, how about ‘stagnation drag and-drop-down device,' or
‘system freezer'.

In recognition of our gleaming new
infrastructure, there's the ‘road-to-Hell-paving project'. And to
celebrate the new Star Trek film, how about economic ‘stasis-field
mechanism', ‘enterprise eliminator,' 'job vaporizer,' or just plain
‘black hole'?

So, here's a political psychology question. Why did opponents gullibly
swallow the stimulus terminology, and thereby defeat? Any ideas?

Questions that are rarely asked

Richard Green writes to me:

If the likes of Hitchcock and others could turn works that were mediocre in literature into great films, I wonder what mediocre films could have been great literature.

The point is not to come up with a list (though some of you will) but rather to ponder what we can learn about literature as a medium.  He continues:

…literature adapted from films is almost (and this is a hedge because my experience says invariably) hack work, rushed and held in the lowest regard...Is it because literature is the elder medium, and has a higher status which would prevent condescension to recognising a prior from another medium? Is it because creation is more personal to a individual writer than the inevitable collaboration of film, and so they are loath to allow others’ work in?

Movies need (at least) a plot and a script and that can be taken from a book, with results of varying quality of course.  But I do not have an equal understanding of which factor of production is scarce to writing a good novel.  Do professional writers benefit more from showing originality in creating a world and also creating a language?  There is plenty of fan fiction based on Star Trek and the like but few professional writers take this same tack.

A simple default hypothesis is that movies are more powerful and more real than books.  So a movie based on a book won’t necessarily be overwhelmed by its source but a book based on a movie will be.  Of course there are many books adapted from oral tales so maybe it is the addition of the pictures that is so overwhelming.  I know only a few books adapted from paintings, most notably Gert Hofmann’s excellent Der Blindensturz.

Epistemology

A few points:

1. "Transcendental" arguments fail in epistemology, as in most other realms.  "Well, if you couldn’t know things, really know them, you couldn’t even be here to doubt that we can know things…" etc.  Please.  Don’t bring this up.  It is not logically impossible to imagine a non-knowing computing device spewing out all sorts of true claims.

2. I love Thomas Reid, but I run away when I meet others who like him, much less love him.  He is too often used to dismiss the doubts that others have about your ridiculous, completely unsound philosophical positions.

3. The relevant real world question is why we ignore obvious truths, rather than how we come to know the tough things we do.

4. The quest for "justified true belief," a’ la Nozick, is a chimera.  Gavagai, I say, and no, Quine does not require behaviorist roots, even though Quine was a behaviorist.  As a general rule, expect either underdetermination or overdetermination in your theoretical endeavors.  For that same reason, don’t think that epistemology can be reduced to neuroscience.

5. Ask an agnostic to give you betting odds on the existence of God.  Most of them hate this question, but I do not see how they can eschew it.  Hard-core atheists will be torn between "zero" and "one in a trillion," but when you ask them where the "one" comes from, they get flustered.

6. Bryan Caplan still mocks me for saying "one in twenty."

7. When they shoot phasers ("set to kill") in the original Star Trek, how does the phaser "know" to wipe out the person and his clothes, but not the ground nor the boulder he is leaning upon.

8. You are wrong so, so, so often.  That is, or rather should be, the central lesson of epistemology.  It is a lesson which hardly anybody ever learns.  And you don’t need the fancy philosophical machinery to get there.  That is why the rest of epistemology is so often so fruitless.

The Two Things

Glen Whitman, Cal State Northridge economist, presents an elegant idea: The Two Things.

A few years ago, I was chatting with a stranger in a bar. When I told him I was an economist, he said, “Ah. So . . . what are the Two Things about economics?”

“Huh?” I cleverly replied.

“You know, the Two Things. For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay, here are the Two Things about economics. One: Incentives matter. Two: There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

It would be hard to do better than that! And Glen has gathered an terrific group of Two Things statements from readers. A sample:

The Two Things about Marketing:
1. Find out who is buying your product.
2. Find more buyers like them.
-Racehorse

The Two Things about Software Engineering:
1. Pick two, and only two: stable, feature-complete, on-time.
2. One great coder is better than two good coders, except when not.
-Matt

The Two Things about Teaching History:
1. A good story is all they’ll remember, not the half hour of analysis on either side of it.
2. They think it’s about answers, but it’s really about questions.
-Jonathan Dresner

The Two Things about Art Criticism:
1. If it isn’t novel, critics aren’t interested.
2. If it is novel, no one else is interested.
-TheLetterM

The Two Things about Writing:
1. Include what’s necessary.
2. Leave everything else out.
-Nicholas Kronos

The Two Things about World Conquest:
1. Divide and Conquer.
2. Never invade Russia in the winter.
-Tim Lee

The Two Things about Star Trek:
1. Don’t beam down in a red shirt.
2. You can always talk evil computers into destroying themselves.
-Tim Lee

My modest attempt to match these is

The Two Things about Life:
1. Be brave, work hard, save: live for the long run.
2. In the long run, we’re all dead.

Saturday assorted links

1. “In sports, South Korean women generally outnumber men in the stands.” (NYT)

2. Why don’t people talk about fat-tailed sheep more?

3. China-Africa donkey trade wars? (NYT)  Donkey nationalism!

4. “Roosevelt fixed his VP mistake.

5. New Oliver Kim Substack, he is an economist from Berkeley, first piece is on public housing.

6. Small towns building statues to fictional characters.

Sunday assorted links

1. “About 100 surrogate babies are waiting for parents to pick them up in the country, about half of them at BioTexCom’s facilities, the Ukrainian Parliament’s human rights commissioner, Lyudmila Denisova, told The Associated Press. The numbers could rise to the thousands, she said, if coronavirus travel restrictions are extended.”  Link here.

2. Drive-in van Gogh exhibit.

3. Avi Schiffman update.

4. NASA releases principles for moon governance.

5. Analysis of the Delhi lockdown.  And a lockdown counterfactual for Sweden, not a huge difference given what already was baked in.

6. “…the path that individual job-losers follow back to stable employment often includes several brief interim jobs, sometimes separated by time out of the labor force.”  A new Hall and Kudlyak paper on job market recovery, in my view shows the importance of matching.

7. Weather and transmission rates.

8. “Major League Baseball told players their prorated salaries would contribute to an average loss of $640,000 for each game over an 82-game season in empty ballparks…

The Tyler Cowen Guide to 10.5 hr layover in Los Angeles

That is a reader request, here goes:

I sometimes describe L.A. as the world’s best city to live in, but one of the worst to visit.  Nonetheless you have some pretty good options.  With half a day, make sure you have a rental car with the appropriate soundtrack(s).  If you start from LAX, pick one road to drive east on, another to head back east to west — how about Sunset and Pico?  Wilshire?  Stop and walk as you can, convenient parking is often available.  Use Jonathan Gold to pick the right eating places, perhaps Thai and Mexican?  Veer off a wee bit and visit the La Brea Tar Pits, or for a longer trek Watts Towers.  Time the sunset for Griffith Park.  Deemphasize “Downtown” but consider the new Broad Museum for contemporary art.  Work in a beach walk at Santa Monica or Venice, preferably the former.  See a movie.  See another movie.  Avoid Beverly Hills.  The truly ambitious can drive all the way down Western Ave. and stop for Belizean food along the way to that chapel at the very bottom of the road.

Basta!