So what are these foreign comedy movies that no one has really specified?
Gettin' square, The Nugget, Crackerjack, The Dish, Two hands, Bad eggs, Kenny, Dirty Deeds, Thunderstruck, The Extra, Paperback Hero, Bran Nue Dae, Charlie and Boots, Drive Hard, The Little Death, Wolf Creek, Now Add Honey, Nice Package, The Infinite Man, The Mule, 100 bloody acres, Down Under, Spin out.
All Australian, but fuck it, take the chance to promote some criminally under-appreciated local films when it arises.
So what are these foreign comedy movies that no one has really specified?
Gettin' square, The Nugget, Crackerjack, The Dish, Two hands, Bad eggs, Kenny, Dirty Deeds, Thunderstruck, The Extra, Paperback Hero, Bran Nue Dae, Charlie and Boots, Drive Hard, The Little Death, Wolf Creek, Now Add Honey, Nice Package, The Infinite Man, The Mule, 100 bloody acres, Down Under, Spin out.
All Australian, but fuck it, take the chance to promote some criminally under-appreciated local films when it arises.
Another type of movie Hollywood doesn't make anymore - the opulent dance/musical. We still get opulence like in Grand Budapest Hotel. We still get dance/musical, Pitch Perfect. They just haven't been combined since.... Moulin Rouge?
Why can't there be a Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers of 2016? People still love this shit. Look at Hamilton. It wouldn't hurt to have some in the movie theater to go with the broadway theater. Unlike comedy, this isn't a situation where all the new ones aren't any good. There just aren't any new ones at all.
Another type of movie Hollywood doesn't make anymore - the opulent dance/musical. We still get opulence like in Grand Budapest Hotel. We still get dance/musical, Pitch Perfect. They just haven't been combined since.... Moulin Rouge?
Why can't there be a Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers of 2016? People still love this shit. Look at Hamilton. It wouldn't hurt to have some in the movie theater to go with the broadway theater. Unlike comedy, this isn't a situation where all the new ones aren't any good. There just aren't any new ones at all.
I believe it. I don't use any of those three things and have somehow managed to avoid CTS despite sitting at a computer for the majority of my adult life. True for me, must be true for all!
Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, Team America World Police, Hot Fuzz, Wedding Crashers, 40 year old Virgin, Knocked up, O Brother Where Art Thou, Borat, Superbad, Idiocracy. Apparently the Hangover and Bridemaids are good but who knows didn't see it :-p
Adding onto those...
21 & 22 Jump Street, Grand Budapest Hotel, Spy, Trainwreck, Funny People, Little Miss Sunshine, Shaun the Sheep Movie, Dear White People, Guardians of the Galaxy (Genre, but most intentionally funny on Marvel's part), This is the End, Wolfe of Wall Street (Surprisingly comedic), The World's End, Kick Ass, Midnight in Paris, Pitch Perfect, Sleepwalk with Me, Horrible Bosses, 50/50.
They exist but that's what happens when you ignore movies, nothing seems to be good. :P
People mock Prohibition but they also forget how severe and common alcoholism was in 19th Century America. I mean, have you ever gotten so drunk that you thought annexing Florida or Texas was a good idea?
People mock Prohibition but they also forget how severe and common alcoholism was in 19th Century America. I mean, have you ever gotten so drunk that you thought annexing Florida or Texas was a good idea?
While numbers for the time period are soft due to lack of reporting/societal concern, it is thought that prohibition decreased incidents of spousal and child abuse.
People mock Prohibition but they also forget how severe and common alcoholism was in 19th Century America. I mean, have you ever gotten so drunk that you thought annexing Florida or Texas was a good idea?
While numbers for the time period are soft due to lack of reporting/societal concern, it is thought that prohibition decreased incidents of spousal and child abuse.
And it probably would've done a lot more good had it been properly carried out. Enforcement was spotty, mostly ignored in urban areas. Furthermore, there were laws at the State level that permitted alcohol conditionally. Many doctors were able to prescribe alcohol for basically anything, so getting a legal bottle of whisky in 1920s New York was about as hard as getting a legal joint in California in 2016.
Do you have a source on the abuse claim? I'd love to dig into that a little more.
People mock Prohibition but they also forget how severe and common alcoholism was in 19th Century America. I mean, have you ever gotten so drunk that you thought annexing Florida or Texas was a good idea?
While numbers for the time period are soft due to lack of reporting/societal concern, it is thought that prohibition decreased incidents of spousal and child abuse.
And it probably would've done a lot more good had it been properly carried out. Enforcement was spotty, mostly ignored in urban areas. Furthermore, there were laws at the State level that permitted alcohol conditionally. Many doctors were able to prescribe alcohol for basically anything, so getting a legal bottle of whisky in 1920s New York was about as hard as getting a legal joint in California in 2016.
Do you have a source on the abuse claim? I'd love to dig into that a little more.
Listen, I'm all in favor of banning alcohol, if it was possible. Sadly, it's not. It's not possible to completely ban anything that can be made or acquired so easily. Alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs aren't like plutonium where you can mostly control all of it that exists on Earth. No matter how much you try to enforce such a ban, all you do is enable organized crime and waste money and time with a war on drugs. The side-effects of this war have been shown to be just as, if not more, harmful than the drugs themselves.
There are countries with prohibition that still exist. Some more successfully than others, but it's pretty much all Muslim countries. It works to at least some extent only because there is less demand. The religiously observant people don't want alcohol, and don't want other people drinking it either. Still, you're kidding yourself if you think the less-observant people in that country don't drink when they want to.
The practical solution, instead of trying to take on the sisyphean task of controlling the substance itself, is to simply fight the root of the problem. That is, you should reduce the demand. Since we can't convert everyone to being strict Muslims, we need another plan.
In 1970 we apparently had a US congress that wasn't 100% corrupt and under the control of corporations. They passed a law banning cigarette ads on US TV and radio. Yes, that is a real thing that happened. Even more miraculously, they haven't undone it. To a large extent, this has been effective. Smoking is down. Way down. Vaping is another issue, though.
I think the best and most realistic thing we can do is to ban alcohol advertisements. Sadly, that won't happen, since we don't have the congress of 1970. However, unlike prohibition, it's a policy that would be effective. If people simply didn't want to drink as much, it wouldn't matter if it was legal or not. You would get the benefits of fewer people drinking, and it would cost almost nothing. You also wouldn't have any room for a black market to come in, since it would be legally available, and there wouldn't be many customers.
But I'm actually all about restricting alcohol advertisements, for reasons that Scott has pointed out.
One problem, though - advertising today is different than it was in the 70's. We have distributed social interaction models that essentially function as advertising vehicles. How practical is it to police that?
Just ban commercial (money was exchanged) ads and ads on controlled mediums (television, radio). That goes a long way. The rest is all free speech, and there isn't much you CAN do about it. But basic culture can be affected with a lot of bang for the buck. Imagine a SuperbOwl where the only beer logos are on the taps: nowhere else on TV or in the stadium.
I wasn't advocating for reinstating Prohibition, I was saying it had more complicated results than we acknowledge. In 1919 we didn't really have good ways of treating addiction and the black market was a lot weaker. In 2016, we need to fix our rehabilitation centers. Treatment isn't available to most people, and those who have the luxury of getting it often find that it is underfunded or decaying. I don't think banning advertisements would do much to stop alcoholism. The ban on smoking advertisements correlates with a lot of other actions the Government started to take to tackle substance abuse. Furthermore, as tobacco declined without advertising, marijuana has been steadily rising in popularity without advertising whatsoever.
I can only assume advertising works otherwise why would people drink Budweiser.
The actual truthful honest-to-gods reason is that Budweiser is the flavor profile most beer drinkers actually want. I'm not even kidding.
I've spent a lot of time reconstructing pre-Industrial beers, and you know what I've found? Universally, every single pre-Industrial culture was trying to make some iteration of Budweiser.
Prohibition as in "no more booze sales" is clearly not effective. We have enough examples of that failing in various forms over the years. Alcoholism is certainly a disease, and be it alcohol or food or whatever, an addict will find a destructive outlet.
Although, I've recently been reading literature that points to some cultural roots of addiction. Fascinating stuff.
But we have a growing drinking problem in this country, and we should find a way to curtail it. Hence why I like the idea of advertising restrictions.
Australia has basically negative advertising for cigarettes, and a very openly-hostile attitude to the industry. It's been highly effective.
It's true. We dropped from about 28% of the population being smokers in the 90s, to 18% presently. We also see an odd trend, where younger people(18-34 are most likely to smoke, while older people are some of the least likely. The rate of smokers past 45 doesn't just drop, it plummets.
On the other hand, the rate of smoking among the population has been relatively consistent since about 2012, but we're working on cutting into that even further, with constant excise and price hikes, plain packaging, covered points of sale, and the ever-present negative advertising.
For people who don't know what that graph means, Starfox is pointing out that, since My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic came out in June 2010, Hasbro's stock has actually shown very little growth compared to the Vanguard 500 Index Fund (which basically follows the market as a whole due to it's investment in the S&P500) until only VERY recently.
This is basically indicating that Rym's investment in the stock was not as clever or insightful as he portrays in his tweet. Sick finance burn.
However, unlike with an index fund (most cases), I've been pulling undiluted dividends from my whole investment over that entire period. Hasbro pays a surprisingly high dividend for what acts more like a moderate growth stock.
What it also doesn't show is that I sold a bunch of my Hasbro in early 2011, and bought it back about a year later, on news that they were investing more heavily in that and a few other franchises, which would have delayed returns.
The other half of my portfolio was half Amazon, half Google, much of which I sold along the way at peaks to double down on Hasbro.
But yes, it's true, I tend to invest in stocks that track tightly to the overall market (beta). That is a winning strategy most of the time regardless of other factors.
Comments
A few directed by Stephen Chow
The aforementioned Edgar Wright movies
Triplets of Belleville
At least those are the ones I've seen that immediately come to mind without digging through lists and trying to remember.
All Australian, but fuck it, take the chance to promote some criminally under-appreciated local films when it arises.
I believe it. I don't use any of those three things and have somehow managed to avoid CTS despite sitting at a computer for the majority of my adult life. True for me, must be true for all!
-Assume less, ask more.
-Speak less, listen more.
21 & 22 Jump Street, Grand Budapest Hotel, Spy, Trainwreck, Funny People, Little Miss Sunshine, Shaun the Sheep Movie, Dear White People, Guardians of the Galaxy (Genre, but most intentionally funny on Marvel's part), This is the End, Wolfe of Wall Street (Surprisingly comedic), The World's End, Kick Ass, Midnight in Paris, Pitch Perfect, Sleepwalk with Me, Horrible Bosses, 50/50.
They exist but that's what happens when you ignore movies, nothing seems to be good. :P
That's a shame; I really liked it.
Do you have a source on the abuse claim? I'd love to dig into that a little more.
There are countries with prohibition that still exist. Some more successfully than others, but it's pretty much all Muslim countries. It works to at least some extent only because there is less demand. The religiously observant people don't want alcohol, and don't want other people drinking it either. Still, you're kidding yourself if you think the less-observant people in that country don't drink when they want to.
The practical solution, instead of trying to take on the sisyphean task of controlling the substance itself, is to simply fight the root of the problem. That is, you should reduce the demand. Since we can't convert everyone to being strict Muslims, we need another plan.
In 1970 we apparently had a US congress that wasn't 100% corrupt and under the control of corporations. They passed a law banning cigarette ads on US TV and radio. Yes, that is a real thing that happened. Even more miraculously, they haven't undone it. To a large extent, this has been effective. Smoking is down. Way down. Vaping is another issue, though.
I think the best and most realistic thing we can do is to ban alcohol advertisements. Sadly, that won't happen, since we don't have the congress of 1970. However, unlike prohibition, it's a policy that would be effective. If people simply didn't want to drink as much, it wouldn't matter if it was legal or not. You would get the benefits of fewer people drinking, and it would cost almost nothing. You also wouldn't have any room for a black market to come in, since it would be legally available, and there wouldn't be many customers.
But I'm actually all about restricting alcohol advertisements, for reasons that Scott has pointed out.
One problem, though - advertising today is different than it was in the 70's. We have distributed social interaction models that essentially function as advertising vehicles. How practical is it to police that?
I am pro-alcohol, but anti-alcohol-advertising.
I've spent a lot of time reconstructing pre-Industrial beers, and you know what I've found? Universally, every single pre-Industrial culture was trying to make some iteration of Budweiser.
Prohibition as in "no more booze sales" is clearly not effective. We have enough examples of that failing in various forms over the years. Alcoholism is certainly a disease, and be it alcohol or food or whatever, an addict will find a destructive outlet.
Although, I've recently been reading literature that points to some cultural roots of addiction. Fascinating stuff.
But we have a growing drinking problem in this country, and we should find a way to curtail it. Hence why I like the idea of advertising restrictions.
On the other hand, the rate of smoking among the population has been relatively consistent since about 2012, but we're working on cutting into that even further, with constant excise and price hikes, plain packaging, covered points of sale, and the ever-present negative advertising.
Just sayin'
This is basically indicating that Rym's investment in the stock was not as clever or insightful as he portrays in his tweet. Sick finance burn.
What it also doesn't show is that I sold a bunch of my Hasbro in early 2011, and bought it back about a year later, on news that they were investing more heavily in that and a few other franchises, which would have delayed returns.
The other half of my portfolio was half Amazon, half Google, much of which I sold along the way at peaks to double down on Hasbro.
But yes, it's true, I tend to invest in stocks that track tightly to the overall market (beta). That is a winning strategy most of the time regardless of other factors.