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posted by
takyon
on Thursday January 03 2019, @04:34AM
from the oppress-the-world,-make-it-a-better-place dept.
from the oppress-the-world,-make-it-a-better-place dept.
Netflix has pulled an episode of Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj from its Saudi Arabian service after a complaint from the Saudi government as the show covers the Saudi Crown Prince's alleged involvement in the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the kingdom's war with Yemen. The Saudi Government cited its anti-cyber law in its removal request, specifically Article 6, which appears to have nothing to do with the content of the show other than that the Saudis are embarrassed. Given the Streisand effect, it is likely that more people will now see the show than otherwise would have.
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Netflix Pulls Episode of Show After Saudi Arabia Offended
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Talkers are no good doers.
-- William Shakespeare, "Henry VI"
(Score: 5, Interesting) by takyon on Thursday January 03 2019, @04:40AM (7 children)
I either hadn't heard of the show or forgot about it, and now I want to check it out. I bet Netflix expected a Streisand effect, although they primarily don't want to get banned from the Saudi market.
It could lead to Saudis watching the episode [wikipedia.org] on other sites, such as the official YouTube channel: "the episode was still available in the country at the time of the report through the show's official YouTube channel". However, it is an English language show so maybe the effect will be muted or it will be seen primarily by Saudis already critical of Mr. Bonesaw.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday January 03 2019, @09:34AM (2 children)
No wonder Saudi doesn't like him - 42% of his series seems to be triggering them: S01E01 Saudi Arabia, S01E04 Oil, S01E07 Content Moderation and Free Speech. I'll give it a go...
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday January 04 2019, @10:05AM (1 child)
Does anyone have a link to the video in question? Just to make sure I don't accidentally watch it and offend our good allies and dear friends, the Saudis.
(Score: 3, Funny) by driverless on Friday January 04 2019, @10:13AM
Replying to my own question, this is the Youtube video you should avoid watching [youtube.com]. Just don't watch that Hasan Minhaj video if you want to remember Saudi Arabia as the freedom-loving democracy it currently is.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 03 2019, @03:38PM (3 children)
They have to be doing this on purpose - no program manager in their right mind would send this show into Saudi Arabia without expecting blowback, by sending it and immediately complying with the takedown demand, they're going to get tons of free promotion for the show.
It's so obvious that I'm not even tempted to watch - middle eastern royalty behaving badly is so commonplace that it's boring, like reading about drive-by shootings in major metro area slums...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by dry on Friday January 04 2019, @03:27AM (2 children)
Always interesting knowing more about the few friends America still has.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 04 2019, @03:43AM (1 child)
My grandfather did concrete work in Iraq after WWII during the ousting of King Faisal - bunch of spineless kiss-asses living there then, and not much has changed since. If you're not a spineless kiss-ass, you're killed by the royals, so... pucker up, or get out, or die. As for the royals, the fact that they maintain their population as they do should tell you all you need to know.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday January 04 2019, @10:08AM
My grandfather did a lot of concrete work in New York after WWII. He worked under contract for the DeCavalcante family in New Jersey, although technically he was more in the clothing business, concrete overcoats, concrete shoes, that sort of thing.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by TheGratefulNet on Thursday January 03 2019, @04:59AM (10 children)
that's the key question (no, I didn't rtfa).
pulling it from their market, fine. who cares.
pulling it from ALL markets, yes, we very MUCH care.
because, well, FREEDOM.
seriously. who the fuck are they to remove material that is perfectly legal in all countries but their own?
then again, the more people realize how utterly absurd that country is, the better. the ONLY reason they get away with shit is that: money talks.
very sad statement about humanity.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday January 03 2019, @05:03AM (5 children)
just Saudi
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 03 2019, @05:51AM (4 children)
I trust circumvention is trivial?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday January 03 2019, @06:03AM
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 03 2019, @12:26PM (2 children)
No. Once it is cut off it's gone.
There are proposed therapies to replace it but none are proven to bring back the lost sensation.
Some of them are right bastards about it too. Getting it cut off can cripple your sex life or kill you in the worst case scenario.
Avoid countries where they do this to people. Children have rights too. At 18 a person can decide if they want to cut bits of themselves off.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday January 03 2019, @05:36PM (1 child)
Circumvention != Circumcision
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 04 2019, @12:15AM
(Score: 3, Informative) by Hawkwind on Thursday January 03 2019, @05:52AM
Episode still available, reporting from the USA.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 03 2019, @07:11AM (1 child)
Also TLDR, much. Netflix can't piss off a major shareholder can they?
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday January 03 2019, @04:48PM
Netflix can express its insincere sympathy, wave their hands, and pretend to do something about it. Oh, and pound on the table while expressing that they are shocked, shocked that such an episode sailed under the radar.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 03 2019, @09:42PM
Was reading the first line of the summary too much for you?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday January 03 2019, @05:49AM (20 children)
They "pulled" the show with the bad cyber. Or anti-cyber. When Saudi Arabia asked them very nicely.
And this is going to be great for our Economy. Because we get so much money from Saudi Arabia. Huge barrels of money, hundreds of billions of dollars pooring into the coffers of our Country. They're a very big purchaser from Boeing, from Lockheed-Martin, from so many of our Arms Manufacturers. Because of me. Because I NEGOTIATED the biggest Arms Deal in history.
And, we did the biggest Tax Cut in history. It's been tremendous for our Economy. Big Christmas bonuses for so many of our Workers -- who I always put first. So great that oil prices are falling. And some people think it's just luck that prices are so low, and falling. Believe me, it's not luck (thank you "President Trump" & Mohammed bin Salman). Like a big Tax Cut for America and the World. Add that to our other good Economic news. Inflation down (are you listening Fed)! Enjoy! Thank you to Saudi Arabia, but let’s go lower! Hopefully, Saudi Arabia and OPEC will not be cutting oil production. Oil prices should be much lower based on supply!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday January 03 2019, @11:28AM (5 children)
(cont) Saudi Arabia, if we broke with them, I think your oil prices would go THROUGH THE ROOF. I've kept them down. They've helped me keep them down.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 03 2019, @02:07PM (4 children)
Break the OPEC monopoly and you may find society more willing to replace oil with electricity. It has to happen sooner or later.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 03 2019, @03:45PM (3 children)
I wonder if the "oil crisis" was actually manufactured by the oil industry to drive up prices. All it would take is a factor of 4-10 mis-estimation of reserves, which is probably within the noise bars of most of their prospecting data:
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 03 2019, @04:38PM (2 children)
That's a very stupid comment right there.
1. Reserve sizes are directly related to valuation of these companies
2. Killing one's own valuation while boosting competitor's is not exactly good policy
3. It's illegal
4. #1-#3 is non-profitable
What you should realize is that technology changes. What once were non-accessible oil became accessible. Even things like horizontal drilling allows for access to resources that before would be nonviable. Finally, there are rules (laws) about how these reserves are to be counted.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 03 2019, @06:35PM
What about the new areas they keep discovering. One north of Australia. Another in the disputed area china is trying to claim by occupying.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 04 2019, @07:34AM
If you are not selling the company, why would you give a shit about its 'valuation'. You care about the dividends.
Anyway, driving down the share price would even allow you to buy more shares with the extra profits you get by driving up oil prices.
If you do need to sell, you announce the 'corrected' reserves first. Share price takes a major jump, you sell, and its not even insider trading because you sold after the info was public.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 03 2019, @03:41PM (13 children)
Some day, people will wake up and realize that it's not about money - money is an imaginary construct of homo sapiens and its only effect in the entire universe is modification of homo sapiens' behavior.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday January 03 2019, @03:58PM (9 children)
That's an interesting take. Economists proceed from a different premise, in that money is a medium used to quantify the problem of scarcity.
I've long thought that eliminating scarcity would unwind the whole shebang, but your formulation suggests other solutions.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 03 2019, @08:45PM (7 children)
The scarcity premise is nice, but when you've got 10,000:1 ratios between allocations, it gets pretty twisted up with power.
If you think of a Lamborghini as $250,000 that's pretty abstract... if you think of it as 50 months of skilled Italian labor plus an equivalent amount of raw materials, it puts what's going on in better perspective. What does it mean when a trust fund baby gets a Lambo for his 18th birthday? It means that 4+ man years of skilled labor, plus another 8+ man years of material acquisition and refinement went into making a shiny for his birthday. Of course, with world sourced components, it's much more complex than that, but a similar accounting for all the labor from all the source countries and skillsets is not only possible, but even easy to do today. A more accurate breakdown of the $250,000 list price would include $50K sales commission to the sod who sells it for that (probably representing 15% or so of their annual income - what do you do for a living? Oh, I sell about 6 cars a year. What's that pay? I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you...), $50K to the importers, etc.
In the service economy, money buys people's time. It can also be traded for raw materials, but most of that is wrapped up in the expense of extraction, hopefully restoration of the land after the extraction, and people's time all along the way for all of it. Living in a place like Florida where the bulk of the economy is involved in serving retirees, this perspective becomes painfully clear.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 04 2019, @01:50AM (6 children)
Unless, of course, the abstraction is the better perspective! This is one of the powers of money to abstract 50 months of skilled Italian labor plus materials, sales commission, and import fees) into a form that we can grasp near instantly.
Money also buys land. We can reinterpret your entire post in terms of the land used by those people. The nice thing about abstractions like money is that you don't have to do any of that. That is the power of abstraction.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 04 2019, @03:39AM (5 children)
But can "we" really? You're talking about the same crowd who throw money at a lottery system with a 50% overall return on risk, typically much less than 25% return on risked capital if you don't win the big prize, and a big prize that requires multiple lifetimes of median income invested to have even odds of winning.
Money actually leases land from the government. Land ownership is a tax liability - sure, you can speculate on the buy and sell prices and often make (taxable) capital gain on the exchange over time, but the whole time you own land you are liable for property taxes, which become significant if you own significant quantities of productive or otherwise valuable land.
is that you can easily obfuscate what's really going on. Why are those Nikes at WalMart so cheap? Who cares, $39.97 for Nikes man, can't beat that. First off, yes, yes you can get equally high quality footwear for much less than $40. Second, the reason they are "so cheap" is because the domestic arm of the supply chain has been amputated, all that's left is Nike corporate, the overseas supply chain, and your welfare supported WalMart employees bringing you these shoes. When those same Nikes sell for $117 in the mall, you're supporting the shoe salesman, the shoe store manager and owner, the owner of the mall, and all the local taxes that they all pay. Which is the better system? With the obfuscation of money, clearly the lowest bidder wins. With a more transparent presentation of the whole picture, your children's community will be much more prosperous and healthy if the least expensive alternative isn't the only alternative that ever gets funded.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 04 2019, @02:17PM (4 children)
That "we" wasn't going to grasp it no matter how you present it.
Paid labor or labor that generates a capital gain also generates a tax liability. You're not saying anything relevant.
Abstraction can look a lot like obfuscation to the ignorant. Can't it? The problem with your narrative above is that nobody cared in the first place. The second problem is that your narrative indicates that the people who do care are profoundly ignorant about the whole thing. The "overseas supply chain" is a vast number of people who really need your money for all those "basic stuffs" you said they needed.
I guess you've never heard of comparative advantage [wikipedia.org]. Why pay the locals to do such simple stuff when we can pay people who really need the wealth to survive(getting cheaper goods in the process) and then pay those locals to do higher value stuff that we can't do as easily overseas? My society isn't better when we contrive locals to make expensive, cheap shoes rather than the "overseas" people to make cheap, cheap shoes.
And there's no more transparent presentation out there nor a reason to have such. It's just a bunch of woo.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 04 2019, @05:09PM (3 children)
I'll just sign off with: people who might care are profoundly ignorant about what really goes on, and kept that way intentionally. Transparency would help far more (quantity) of people than it would ever hurt, but the people it would hurt have the power to keep their secrets, and so they do.
Woo yourself.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 05 2019, @01:06AM (2 children)
What transparency? What does this have to do with money?
One of the lessons of the information age is that when you're showered with information, the very first thing you do is ignore it. Here, bombarding us with irrelevant details of our trading is just more stuff to ignore. Information has to be extremely filtered before it is of any use. That's the point of abstraction.
As to the people who have the power to "keep their secrets", whose fault is that? Getting rid of simplifying aspects of our lives, like money, isn't going to make this any better.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday January 05 2019, @04:33AM (1 child)
Money has been a great mechanism of obfuscation - I want fish, there are fish in the market, but what can I tell about these fish? Precious little beyond the price. Where does the market get the fish? Well, that depends on a lot of things, but mostly where they can get them for the lowest price. Does the market tell the customers when they get a great deal on some "fish" that is virtually indistinguishable from the normal fish they carry? Almost never. Should the customers know that these "fish" came from a different fishery, different water quality, different ecosystem? Certainly they should, but our supply chain traditionally obfuscates all that behind the single dimension of price.
Is it, though? Keep your one dimensional price, and certainly don't bore me with the details when I'm making the standard weekly grocery run, but when I'm selecting a new supplier for shrimp, or bread, or whatever... I do take the time to read the available labels, and they're usually sorely lacking on meaningful information - sometimes they're so vague that I get a sense that they're hiding something that I might reject the product for, and if there's a better described alternative I take it. I'd rather have more complete information to base the decisions on, but most of what we get is just marketing BS.
There you go, oversimplifying and hearing what you want, not what was said nor intended. Keep your money, it has its place, just don't attempt to put a price on everything.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 05 2019, @06:53AM
Quite a bit. Visual and smell inspection will tell you the quality and quantity of the fish as well as how fresh it is. If the fish is unskinned you can easily tell what family/genera it belongs to.
Why? This information is near useless to the buyer. And when you consider doing it for every little thing, it rapidly devolves to farce. People would be ignoring all that information outright because they just want to buy fish not get a damn lecture on the world's ecological systems while they starve to death.
I think it's telling that you can't articulate WHY your ideas are supposed to be good ideas. That never comes up. This is typical of the nonsense you repeated say. I'm not a mind reader, but I repeatedly see strong demonstrations of irrationality. For example, the first post you wrote on money made the observation that thinking of a product as the sum of labor was somehow a better perspective. That never was justified. It just got dropped on the internet and has lain inert every since. Then you conflated our argument with lottery players. All I can say is that if you're the sort of person who plays lotteries that return a quarter on the dollar, it goes a long way to explaining your reasoning process.
Then followed this bizarre assertion about the cost of Nike's being somehow relevant to the thread. Don't care. Moving on to the last item of that post:
You already stated several most costly alternatives such as Lamborghinis and $117 pairs of shoes that get plenty of funding. So the premise is wrong by your own admission. Owned goal.
And the idea of ridiculous complexification of routine day-to-day decisions would be utterly devastating if somehow we could force it upon mankind, especially of the lottery playing kind (the kind of person who willingly gets a quarter out for a dollar in will no doubt make great use of your ecology lecture on the fish they buy).
Here's the problem. Your views aren't self-consistent, have no bearing on the overall topic, and you can't even show that there's a benefit, even if unrelated to the present thread or overall subject, to read your posts. It has nothing to do with money, trade, Saudi Arabia, or Netflix. It has nothing to do with some elite keeping us down via "obfuscation". It certainly isn't sane with crazy proposals to dump on people completely unequipped to handle those proposals. It's just sad performance art.
I have no idea why you think money is somehow not working despite copious evidence to the contrary (such as economies that have worked for centuries), but the easy and obvious fix here is for you to perceive things differently. Maybe think a little too. It certainly beats inventing numerous ways to make our lives far more insane than they already are.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 04 2019, @12:18AM
Scarcity isn't so easy to eliminate. Any finite good or service is scarce. Post-scarcity generally just means that the good, though still technically scarce in economic terms, is plentiful enough that they won't bother to charge per unit.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 04 2019, @12:33AM (2 children)
You do realize that money works for what it does? And having an objective effect (the alleged modification of behavior) in the entire universe means it is not imaginary? For example, the food I purchased over the past way too many years isn't going to uneat itself just because money is supposedly imaginary.
The key value of money is as a medium of exchange. And that means in particular that the complexity of trade is reduced from NP hard of barter to O(1) of "do I want to pay that much?". There's always been all this babblegook about how money is the root of all evil and similar nonsense. It's just a tool for expediting trade. That's it. Obviously, enough people have to decide to use it as a medium of exchange in order for it to work. That's not imaginary, that's just typical emergent behavior of consensus and cooperation.
Further, when someday the dollar goes kaput, then some new currency will take its place, and then when that kaputs something else will take its place, and so on. There's no need for a currency to last forever or meet some imaginary standard of reality in order to be incredibly useful to us. Money is here to stay because it's too good an idea to die. It should be an object lesson that these cryptocurrencies thrive despite having at best a marginal existence. The niches they support are large enough to spur the creation of a number of useful currencies. If money was really an imaginary construct then whose imagination made these cryptocurrencies when they weren't needed or had value?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 04 2019, @03:22AM (1 child)
Depends on your definition of "works" but, yes, money has very real and powerful effects on human behavior. Does it "work" to the benefit of the majority of the human population? I believe an objective analysis would say: no. Does it "work" to the benefit of those presently in power and control? If you ask them, they would most assuredly say: yes.
Again, a matter of perspective. From the perspective of the pinnacles of power, the key value of money is maintaining stability, the status quo. From the bottom looking up: money gets you food, shelter, things you need to survive.
https://nakamotoinstitute.org/shelling-out/ [nakamotoinstitute.org]
Or, from another perspective: capitulation and compliance.
In some forms, for some things, money can be quite useful and even an equitable form of exchange. Many things are too important for money: decisions made surrounding potentially terminal illnesses, procreation, feeding starving children, etc. Things that should be maintained by everyone and provided without charge might include:
breathable air
drinkable water
basic foodstuffs
basic medical care
basic clothing and shelter
If people have those things, desperation (aka induced disregard for the rules of polite society, such as voluntary exchange of money for goods and services) is dramatically reduced. Of course, if all those things are provided for free, there's an even bigger problem of population control than we have in the present scheme.
This song [youtube.com] comes to mind...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 04 2019, @02:08PM
By any reasonable definition of "works".
Does said "objective analysis" actually exist? Or are you handwaving again? I'll note as a counterpoint that billions of people successfully use money every day to fulfill their wants - an objective analysis you seem to ignore completely.
What is the point of your perspective, the so-called "pinnacles of power" perspective? And we see that the "bottom looking up" perspective already demonstrates an objective measure of the success of money - "gets you food, shelter, things you need to survive".
Sounds to me like changing your perspective solves the problems of money!
How much of that list are you willing to sacrifice for your feelgoods? As you noted [soylentnews.org], money is an abstraction. One of the really important things it is an abstraction for, is that list above. When you compromise money and arbitrarily shift resources around, you compromise that list above as well. Let's give an example. What is "basic foodstuffs"? Well, some committee will have to decide. Then some agency will allot the basic foodstuffs. And then the games begin. Broccoli farmers will lobby to get more of their produce into the "basic foodstuffs" list for higher profit. Someone will discover that the basic foodstuffs is better as fertilizer than as food, and scam to get many tons of the free fertilizer. The powers-that-be will pinch the pennies so that they have more of their own swag while the public will vote in people who promise more free and better quality food stuffs (a perfect steak on every table every day!). Various additional agencies will be created to incompetently prevent all these abuses.
Then as the wealth of the country is drained to support this ecosystem of theater, there will be less wealth available for the basic foodstuffs and it'll get inevitably pared back to uselessness. Eventually, decades down the road people will starve to death on basic foodstuffs and we'll be back where we are now, except without the ability to feed ourselves.
OTOH, right now anyone can buy anything off that list with money. It works.
Or one could just realize that there was some role that current forms of money weren't filling and that the new cryptocurrencies were. For example, South American currencies that are subject to high levels of inflation.
I'll note from start to finish, your post indicates that the biggest problem with money is your perception of it. The obvious solution thus is to change your perception.