If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch Silicon Valley(gatesnotes.com) |
If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch Silicon Valley(gatesnotes.com) |
https://nplusonemag.com/issue-25/on-the-fringe/uncanny-valle...
All the comments here make it sound like a depressing place to be
We decided to go grab a beer and play pool while we waited for this new thing to execute based on this new language sun was having us convert everything to, XML...
While at the pool place these girls in lingerie were walking about selling raffle tickets.
We asked what they were for.
"We are putting ourselves through school and we are selling raffle tickets for the lingerie we are wearing, for $5 a ticket."
"I see, where are you ladies going to school"
"Oh, we go to silicone valley college..."
----
I wish this was a scene in Silicon Valley... it was ridiculously funny.
I compare the show to Entourage: Amusing to those outside Hollywood, but completely ridiculous to anyone who actually works in the industry.
The past few years, the quality degraded significantly IMO. It mostly turned into "The Office but with developers and geeks!!" - which doesn't make it a bad show, but not as witty and thought provoking. I wonder if it's past the point where it needs to reach a wider audience, just like any other show.
sorry bill but one could argue in a round about way that andrej karpathy did do just that ;P
the hot dog identifying app is one of my favourite examples of how spot on the show is
here(o) is a question i asked to one of the show's technical consultants whether the choice of 'not hotdog' was a reference to one of karpathy's early demos(i||ii)
timanglade> Ha seems like a fun coincidence.
(o) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14639161 the yt link is now a dead link.. use either of the below
(i) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6aEYuemt0M&t=465 ; Title: Deep Learning for Computer Vision (Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI) ; Desc: The talks at the Deep Learning School on September 24/25, 2016 were amazing. I clipped out individual talks from the full live streams and provided links to each below in case that's useful for people who want to watch specific talks several times (like I do).
(ii) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyovmAtoUx0&t=5787 ; timestamped from the full stream; Title: Bay Area Deep Learning School Day 1 at CEMEX auditorium, Stanford ; Desc: Day 1 of Bay Area Deep Learning School featuring speakers Hugo Larochelle, Andrej Karpathy, Richard Socher, Sherry Moore, Ruslan Salakhutdinov and Andrew Ng. ;
_Yes, Minister_, which satirizes the British government, supposedly had close access to several people in government, though it was probably careful rather than casual.
The clips on Youtube are all distorted, don't bother with them, but find S01E04 "Big Brother".
One of the funniest things I’ve seen, while also being sad, because it’s so true.
The Internship
The Circle
It's possible to get a somewhat accurate view from watching these, but you have to know which parts to completely ignore. I kind of wish there were "this is accurate" edits of those shows and movies.
Ballmer himself probably doesn't like the caricature (he's a bit of an internet darling, isn't he? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I14b-C67EXY), but would someone who worked with Ballmer find it accurate? Likely.
Not to mention, Gates wrote the article about Silicon Valley linked in this thread.
I just bought Season 1. It took 10 seconds and cost 10 bucks, and now I can watch them at my leisure. Exactly what I was looking for. :-)
"The Internet" device. All the tech illiterate coworkers. Jen's imposter syndrome. Moss's on-the-spectrum reactions. Online dating when it was still nerdy. Novelty websites. Viral cultural events.
But it wasn't exclusively geek humor. There were broader episodes involving Jen's and Roy's romantic lives too.
I have bought Netflix subscription - but I am dissapointed now - the library of historic films available for me (in Poland) is very small and the current productions are kind of mechanistic. And no SV in Netflix.
(Would presumably be just as true the other way around, but that's not the title of the piece.)
It was a constant the leader fucking up and the gang coming through at the end - over and over and over.
Pure genius.
> During one visit to Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, about six writers sat in a conference room with Astro Teller, the head of GoogleX, who wore a midi ring and kept his long hair in a ponytail. “Most of our research meetings are fun, but this one was uncomfortable,” Kemper told me....
> “He claimed he hadn’t seen the show, and then he referred many times to specific things that had happened on the show,” Kemper said. “His message was, ‘We don’t do stupid things here. We do things that actually are going to change the world, whether you choose to make fun of that or not.’ ” (Teller could not be reached for comment.)
> Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades. He wobbled to the door in silence. “Then there was this awkward moment of him fumbling with his I.D. badge, trying to get the door to open,” Kemper said. “It felt like it lasted an hour. We were all trying not to laugh. Even while it was happening, I knew we were all thinking the same thing: Can we use this?” In the end, the joke was deemed “too hacky to use on the show.”
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-v...
Tyler expounded on his reaction in a rare Library of Congress interview made public back in 2012. "That movie bummed me out," he said, "because I thought, 'How dare they? That's all real, and they're mocking it.'"
To be fair, Silicon Valley (the show) never interested me... kinda found it to be boring. But it _is_ hilarious when you run into these art imitates life imitates art things.
silicon valley is really insufferable. i don't understand that place at all and don't ever wish to be there. and i am often reminded of adam curtis' documentary all watched over by machines of everlasting grace. i wish he would do another one along these lines.
Do the show producers feel something similar to some in their own industry or their surreality is just reality for them? Are they brave enough to mock powerful people they may wish to work with later?
Would be fun to watch one on Hollywood and they should have very intimate details to bare.
The only time I've been able to stand Hollywood critiques in recent memory is BoJack.
Try Californication or Entourage
Are you SURE
Silicon Valley is the show most startup founders will refuse to watch. My startup was featured on TechCrunch Disrupt, we were on stage talking about how we will change the world with our product. Then things didn't particularly go as planed.
I discovered the show and started watching it shortly after. It was painful to see that they portrayed our exact journey as it happened. Only the show poked fun of the mistakes we were making. I watched it not only as a comedy, but also as a documentary that would predict our fate. It was eye-opening!
My favorite part (and most humiliating) was when we pitched our startup to a non-silicon valley investor and she simply replied: "OK, cut the crap. Which website are you scraping?"
All my co-founders were offended by the show. I must admit, its painful to watch someone else make fun of the things you put your heart to. But from time to time, someone has to make fun of you or you start to take yourself too seriously.
If you are trying to make it in silicon valley, please watch the show. At best, it will help you make your startup more grounded.
"During the review process once the footage [of Techcrunch Disrupt] was woven in, another editor criticized the crowd shots for not featuring any women and blamed Berg for the oversight.
'...Those were real shots of the real place, and we didn't frame women out.The world we're depicting is f---ed up.' said Berg"
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/hbos-si...
Sorry for the amp link, the main page was broken.
There's been debate about whether "Silicon Valley" the show should have more diversity than Silicon Valley the place, but Berg argues that a show made for entertainment not meant to be a "social-action wing" or be a force of change - the show is just satirizing the reality that the tech industry itself needs to take care of.
At least in my Silicon Valley career, the "cast" around me has been vastly less so.
Not at all surprising considering it’s Hollywood, but amusing nonetheless.
https://www.businessinsider.com/hbos-silicon-valley-had-dive...
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-v...
My favorite part:
>>>
During one visit to Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, about six writers sat in a conference room with Astro Teller, the head of GoogleX, who wore a midi ring and kept his long hair in a ponytail. “Most of our research meetings are fun, but this one was uncomfortable,” Kemper told me. GoogleX is the company’s “moonshot factory,” devoted to projects, such as self-driving cars, that are difficult to build but might have monumental impact. Hooli, a multibillion-dollar company on “Silicon Valley,” bears a singular resemblance to Google. (The Google founder Larry Page, in Fortune: “We’d like to have a bigger impact on the world by doing more things.” Hooli’s C.E.O., in season two: “I don’t want to live in a world where someone makes the world a better place better than we do.”) The previous season, Hooli had launched HooliXYZ, its own “moonshot factory,” whose experiments were slapstick absurdities: monkeys who use bionic arms to masturbate; powerful cannons for launching potatoes across a room. “He claimed he hadn’t seen the show, and then he referred many times to specific things that had happened on the show,” Kemper said. “His message was, ‘We don’t do stupid things here. We do things that actually are going to change the world, whether you choose to make fun of that or not.’ ” (Teller could not be reached for comment.)
Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades. He wobbled to the door in silence. “Then there was this awkward moment of him fumbling with his I.D. badge, trying to get the door to open,” Kemper said. “It felt like it lasted an hour. We were all trying not to laugh. Even while it was happening, I knew we were all thinking the same thing: Can we use this?” In the end, the joke was deemed “too hacky to use on the show.”
Erlich passing Dinesh off as Latino to get a deal on a graffiti logo design:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSzmVFF58Mo
Dinesh recounting to a puzzled Gilfolye about how he was a "cool" kid back in Pakistan, and why:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKz0M6SmQ8c
The latter one, in particular, implies that the writers had a deeper than average understanding of the different youth cultures of the US and South Asian cultures at a particular time in history.
I challenge any of us to come up with something better or an alternative!
That’s not the amount of transfered data that makes a P2P Internet practical or not, but rather its reliability, something a compression algorithm can’t do anything about.
My problem with that technology is that, if the main character actually wanted to do good, he'd donate that algorithm to Apache and the show would be over in ten minutes. Or, if he wanted to make loads of money, he could license it for millions. Instead he wound up launching an ICO. The show should have been over in half an episode, but they turned the hero into a moronic sociopath to drag it out for five seasons.
Still watch it, and love it though. And super impressed that a Hollywood production finally understood Northern California. That never happens (see: The Social Network, Hackers, every Steve Jobs movie, etc.)
The guy later pulls Richard aside saying that he wasn't "openly Christian". The whole episode was hilarious.
Basically all the Hooli scenes are about that. Also just about the entire careers of Big Head, Jack Barker, and Denpok the "spiritual advisor".
I'm still thinking about this comment about Fieldbook shutting down [1], and the "What Happened at Fieldbook" [2] article:
> In contrast, our closest competitor, Airtable, seems to be getting more traction.
Was really sad to read that.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18461395
[2] https://medium.com/the-fieldbook-blog/what-happened-at-field...
I'm not familiar with Fieldbook, but I do wonder if they weren't as savvy as Airtable when it came to sales & finance strategy.
Products alone rarely make a business. It's a perfectly viable strategy to keep forging ahead at a loss while you slowly gain market share. You obviously need to show revenue growth (sales savvy) to keep the funding coming through (finance savvy).
I'm definitely guilty of getting all caught up in product and neglecting the business side of things.
Outside of dumb luck, I don't see a plot arc that favors Richard's team at all.
Especially when one of the overarching themes is that over the seasons the "underdog" throws friends under the bus, hacks competitors, rents a botnet, lies, commit fraud, and all kinds of other abuses.
What's the difference between Richard dumping a gf because she uses spaces and Gavin screwing over Jack because Jack wanted to get dropped off first from the private plane? The only difference I see is that Richard's narcissism doesn't come with the weight of a $100 billion company behind it.
Richard's bad behavior comes off as less jarring because almost all of the time he has considerably less power than Gavin. Richard doesn't have a wall of lawyers who he can casually probe about assassinating a foe. Gavin does.
Edit: clarification
Growing up in Texas, I never appreciated how on-point the show was, until I left the state and realized that the subtle culture cues of Texas didn't exist elsewhere, which means that King of the Hill nailed it. I mean, every detail is perfect.
The voice for Hank was based on some redneck guy who kept calling MTV and complaining about Bevis and Butthead.
Hank Hill is ripped straight from Tom Anderson, a character from Beavis and Butthead. AFAIK Tom Anderson appeared on the show very early and the timeline you're suggesting doesn't make sense.
Pointing out that TBBT's parody is poor is like saying Will & Grace did not portray a representative picture of gay urbanites.
I know lots of gay urbanites who feel well-represented by Will & Grace. I know lots of people in the "trad nerd" set, but none of them see The Big Bang Theory and say "yep, that's me".
I'm not sure he has a great personality, and went offtrack during the Linux/IBM/SCO fiasco, but man is he funny.
His row with TechCrunch's MG Siegler provided some decent entertainment too.
Judge surrounded himself with a lot of different perspectives on all of this.
I like to think he photoshopped it in his spare time lol.
Finished Lab Rats last week, and contrary to Disrupted which was a very enjoyable modern age tragicomedy-autobiography, it hit home very bad and left me with a sense of despair. IMHO it should be an obligatory reading for everyone in tech these days.
> I have friends in Silicon Valley who refuse to watch the show because they think it’s just making fun of them.
But yeah, it's good to take a look at satire of yourself once in a while. Often they can tell you stuff that you may have overlooked, and generally they're not too hurtful when doing so.
It feels, well, not fun anymore a lot of the time. Development by copy-and-paste and gluing other peoples code together to arrive at a half-baked solution instead of exploring the code to try to understand it as a system so the solution you arrive at is the most effective that time and skill permit.
Being more infatuated with nerd culture than building something great. (I see this a LOT!) Chasing dollars instead of knowledge. And, don’t get me wrong; it’s ok to want to make money. Even a lot of it. But that should be the icing on the cake of solving real problems.
I feel like we used to do this stuff because it was what we loved to do. But now it feels like too many people do it because they want to look cool and/or they want a lot of money. The romance is dying.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rqfkuc5mawg&list=PLTM-Dbun10...
My own startup has been mostly outside of America, but we get enough brushes with Silicon Valley culture -- or, worse, wannabe Silicon Valley culture -- to make the show really resonate.
Even closer to home, for me personally, is the Australian comedy "Utopia" (or "Dreamland", depending on the market). It's about a municipal urban development corporation, which is basically my startup's customer group. One episode features a sendup of what my own startup does (online collaborative infrastructure planning and stakeholder engagement) -- or, more to the point, what some of our would-be customers want it to do. You can tell that the writers know what they're talking about. Damn near killed me to watch it. Highly, highly recommended!
Hah! Anecdotally, I've had the opposite experience watching the show and running a startup in the valley. Most of my co-founder friends have seen it and see it as a sort of catharsis.
"We aren't the only ones, this happens to everyone, so much so, there's a show about it"
And then there's the inspirational, "Let's have the team coalesce around a deadline and jam out something that's never been done before", episodes. Also very real.
I'm a huge fan of the show, but one thing I would like to point out is that I don't think everything of the show is negative. sometimes it makes me wish I was developing (data science here). my favorite moments of the show is when they overcome some huge challenge (spoiler like with 2 days of the condor)
So, so true. I tried to start watching it when I was running my startup but it literally felt like I was watching the same place and people I was spending 9-14 hours/day at the startup accelerator I was in.
The first season resonated the most with my experiences, but I know others who recognize their own experiences in different parts of it.
Running home - "Hand Covers Bruise" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXdFJggkjzM Starting work - "In Motion" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y2mDjPR7oU
Not only did I have that exact same conversation with my coworker the day previously about the exact brand of yogurt, on post-analysis we're pretty sure our company has stocked the exact same spoons they used in the show.
For a while I couldn't decide if it was life imitating art, or a tongue-in-cheek nod to the stereotype we were seen as. But it wasn't the latter, the founder/president wasn't that self-aware.
I can't imagine who thought that the community of some of the world's biggest nerds wanted to listen to Flo-Rida !?
OK, now I have to watch it.
This is what Iannucci says about making more of The Thick of It -- it's impossible to do because current politicians are self satarising in ways that are unbelievable if you put them on screen, even if those things actually happened in real life.
- Office Space, check!
- Idiocracy, check!
- Silicon Valley, check!
For Silicon Valley it helps he's actually worked for a startup, a hardware one at that.
Oh how I loathed that show, especially at height of its popularity. I got so tired of smiling and nodding (or rolling my eyes, depending on who it was) as non-technical people at work and even my mother-in-law made it clear they thought of me when they watched that show (simply because I was the "smart engineer", so obviously a huge nerd with no social ability). None of these people were my age though, they were all signficantly older and Silicon Valley would have likely been much too sophisticated for them.
> I got so tired of smiling and nodding (or rolling my eyes, depending on who it was)...
> ... Silicon Valley would have likely been much too sophisticated for them.
Not to get personal, and I'm sure you're more empathetic in real life, but your frustrations might seem like geeky egotism to your coworkers.
Silicon Valley is a very different show, but definitely on solid ground. And it's unique in that it seems quite popular amongst people its blatantly making fun of.
SV laughs WITH nerds, satirising the excesses of a culture that is presented as filthy rich and dominant beyond belief. It also deals with the actual wet dreams of the culture in a fairly realistic way.
Think about the material that a dim bully could get from BBT (tons), versus what he could get from SV (very little). That’s all the difference.
Have you watched SV?
Season 1 ends with TechCrunch Disrupt, where founders nervously stammer on stage about how their "mobile-first, local-first social media network" will "make the world a better place".
BBT is outsiders laughing at the image of a nerd archetype many have in their head. It can be entertaining; it can tell you a lot about their relationship with that archetype. But as with all caricature, the distorted image can be a little ouchy.
SV satirizes insider territory with surprising resolution. It can be entertaining; it can tell people a lot about the culture. Where it's ouchy, it's ouchy because the truth can be painful as well as funny.
(I live next door to Pasadena and am acquainted with many Caltechers.)
http://popculturedetective.agency/2017/complicit-geek-mascul... http://popculturedetective.agency/2017/the-adorkable-misogyn...
Dinesh is one of the few nerdy Indian stereotypes that I do not mind. All the others seem like caricatures and generalizations of South Asians. Dinesh on the other hand, could be sitting right across my table, coding....
If The Big Short is considered a great "documentary" for the 2008 crisis, then SV does even better for the Valley.
Indeed. In the context of the show, and American culture, it was Dinesh's perspective that stood out as seeming odd or unique.
But I wonder if the post-1950s American/Hollywood understanding of "cool" - the glorification of rebel/outcaste that Gilfoyle's personality represents - is itself really the anomaly on the global scale.
I'd imagine many/most parts of the world don't develop a romantic cultural trope around the underdog, or the person who doesn't fit in with the mainstream. But I'd be interested to learn otherwise.
Other than those two things so far, I really love the show.
really underrated show.
While in reality e.g. IQ score baselines keep getting adjusted to account for the fact that kids keep getting better and better scores as time goes on[0].
The world is not getting dumber and if it is there is no evidence for it and plenty against it.
Big Bang Theory: Purposelessly inaccurate in ways that upset you.
Silicon Valley: Purposefully accurate in ways that upset you.
*with the occasional rule breaking exception
Also, Sneakers and The Net.
The more you rewatch it, the more you realize it knew exactly how over the top it was being, and is doing so with a wink and grin.
And there are far too many truely geeky Easter eggs in there to say it's oblivious. Technicolor rainbow, indeed.
how about "the pirates of silicon valley"? I feel it's _by far_ the best movie made involving his figure, likely because it came out earlier.
"AAAAaaaaaah! here is this completely benign part of the software development cycle that we are dramatizing because the sky is falling and our company won't survive!!!!!"
Every episode
Airtable probably does a better job of attracting customers with their extensive collection of premade content though.
But I cannot get over the ‘candy’ look in airtable.
This startup is laughing at themselves and the valley. It's so absurd that a VC actually funded this it makes me wonder if they aren't laughing too.
[1]: http://history-computer.com/Internet/Conquering/BitTorrent.h...
[2]: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3182207/data-storage/c...
[3]: https://blogs.cisco.com/sp/the-history-and-future-of-interne...
My strong dislike from BBT comes mainly from people associating me with a show that I find wholly unfunny. Not because it makes fun of geekdom and I don't like that, but simply because I don't find it funny at all. I saw a lot of parallels in the type of comedy on BBT and that on "2 and a half men" and could never understand their high ratings.
https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-technical-advisor-for-silic...
https://medium.com/@timanglade/how-hbos-silicon-valley-built...
Yahoo Tech workers 31% white https://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/152561899994/yahoos-2016-diver...
Ebay Tech workers 29% white https://static.ebayinc.com/assets/Uploads/Documents/eBay2017...
My experience is that white male Americans are roughly 25% of the Silicon Valley workforce, but if you bundle in white immigrants and women you might reach 40-50%.
As I remember the TV show, the main characters are 80% white, and the Indian guy is the whitest one I've seen.
Small sample, I know, and I'm not offended. Just a little bored...
What do you mean by that? Can you explain?
What Bevis does/thinks/likes versus what Hank does/thinks/likes versus what Richard does/thinks/likes could not be farther from each other. Just because they're all white doesn't mean they're all interchangeable.
That said, Silicon Valley probably belongs on both sides of the Venn diagram. Lots of people enjoying the show without realising they are the joke.
Of course I'm not trying to say all ML researchers are dweebs, but if that description applies to 10% of attendees, you've got a line.
Say what you will about the world's biggest nerds, but irony, whether purposeful or inexplicably accidental, is not lost on them.
Ninja Edit: New conference name :)
That was fast.
I was all for a name change from a juvenile pun, but "NeurIPS" is hilariously bad. It confirms, that everyone but the press, continues calling it NIPS.
> line to see Flo-Rida went around the block
I mean, if it was a free (already paid for) concert, then I would go for it too.
BTW the whole renaming of NIPS to NeurIPS could be an episode of SV, where a board of directors are all offended by names of body parts!
Maybe he means culturally
The latter just feels cheap.
BBT definitely laughs at nerds. But I don't think reassures the mainstream about its superiority. The characters on BBT are depicted as god-tier geniuses that are successful at doing important work. The nerds are the protagonists.
SV on the other really sticks it to developers and VC. I don't get a sense the SV writers respect was the valley does at all.
SV is just about 20 times funnier though.
I've never seen an episode where they were depicted in actually doing work, just in talking about their social group and the character interaction. They could have all been sitting in a coffee shop or bar for all of the links to their job it had. Whereas SV does have content about their life outside of work, a lot of the comedy comes from their "jobs".
I also really don't think the BBT people are depicted as genius'. One episode I do remember is when one of them was struggling with a physics problem with electron behaviour. He finally solved the problem that had been plaguing him (a 'super smart' physics researcher, because he started thinking of the electrons as waves, and not as particles. Which any 16(17)-year-old physics student would have realized in about a minute.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/13/magazine/mike-judge-the-b...
“I should’ve made it 10 years later and set in the present.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minstrel_show
>The minstrel show, or minstrelsy, was an American form of entertainment developed in the early 19th century. Each show consisted of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music performances that mocked people specifically of African descent. The shows were performed by white people in make-up or blackface for the purpose of playing the role of black people.
[0] which is problematic as a blanket characterization of TBBT, though it may apply to some players; it seems pretty clearly not to apply to Dr. Bialik, for instance.
[1] historically, from some quarters it was roundly attacked on the opposite basis, for excessively sympathetic portrayal of blacks, especially during slavery, and especially for it's frequent positive (from the viewpoint of those objecting) portrayal of runaway slaves.
I find that characterization to be as stupid and insensitive as referring to highly paid tech workers in the Bay Area as slaves.
And the butthurt is misplaced. The nerds of the show are definitely a source of the comedy but they are protagonists you are supposed to root for. They have foibles but generally, you are supposed to respect their intelligence and commitment to science, etc.
It's a far cry from steve urkle.
It's much much much closer to a George Lopez show making fun of Mexicans than to Minstrel shows.
In King of the Hill, our white Alpha, Hank Hill, the only guy with any common sense, tries to stay sane and keep it from all falling apart in a world that has gone Haywire.
In Idiocracy, our White Alpha, Joe Bauer, the only guy with any sense, tries to stay sane and keep it from falling apart in a world that has gone haywire.
In Extract, Joel, our down to earth White Alpha, tries to stay sane and hold it together in a world that has gone haywire.
And in Silicon Valley, well- you get the idea. I love Mike Judge films, he is an astute observer and hilarious. but his ouvre is not broad. He's got a formula, and it works, and that's fine.
Ah, that's not my memory of King of the Hill. In it Hank is the biggest idiot and it's only those around him that have any common sense.
I probably only watched the first season but I remember one episode in particular where some Laotians moved into the neighborhood and Hank couldn't except that they weren't Chinese or Japanese. His father who fought in South East Asia knew immediately that they were Laotians but Hank refused to acknowledge any kind thing other than Chinese or Japanese. Hank's wife went on to bake a "Apple Brown Betty" (I think that's what it's called) and got upset when the Laotian neighbor made it better.
People keep saying that, but what it really that funny and original? I'll take e.g. MASH any day.
"Whoever is first to do something isn't likely to be the best at it, simply because everyone that comes after is building on their predecessors' work. Named after the sitcom Seinfeld, which many people won't watch any more because everything about it has been copied." https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunn...
No, it's a bad show because it's badly written, cliche, and lowest common denominator humor, just with nerds as subjects instead of some regular families as per usual.
I still find funny very manny pioneering shows -- heck, even back to Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Laurel and Hardy, and all kinds of 80s and even 70s sitcoms.
That movie is full of memes that haven't been relevant since the mid-00s (and specifically, the humor in the movie has a distinct Bush-era vibe which straight-up feels foreign in 2018... it feels like a period piece even though it's set in the future), and I lost whatever enjoyment of it that I had left when actual Neo-Nazis began using the movie to promote their pseudoscience about race and intelligence.
Are you sure? Who is the POTUS now?
I'd say you can't make this stuff up, but Mike Judge made this stuff up before it was real life!
The Bush era—or rather the core of the era, from about 2002 to 2007 (i.e. after the dust from 9/11 settled and before the housing crisis), was a boom time, and much of the future situation feels like it comes from "what if this boom lasts forever?" (i.e. society becomes wealthy enough to automate everything, so people just sit around and watch Ow My Balls and drink Brawndo every day instead of having to work). Something made nowadays would probably start with a premise that comes from "Millenials can't afford anything".
Mainstream culture during the Bush era was also before the sudden explosion in nerd culture. Superheroes hadn't eaten the entertainment industry yet, nostalgia wasn't yet a driving force in pop culture, and it was still uncool to admit that you enjoy RPGs or reading comic books or doing whatever else nerds do. A parody of modern cultural memes would resemble Ready Player One more than Idiocracy, and Ready Player One wasn't even intended as parody. Instead, Idiocracy spends a lot of time lampooning shock reality TV (e.g. Ow My Balls), which was a huge thing in the mid-00s with shows like Jackass and Fear Factor but isn't big anymore. And the general culture is different. Like, you had people saying things like "you talk faggy", which sadly was common in real life during the mid-00s, and as such it was a ripe target for parody, but would be completely taboo now. Even in bro-culture you wouldn't see that in 2018 (I mean, there's still a lot of homophobia around, but you don't see those slurs dropped casually anymore), and so a parody of modern bro-culture probably wouldn't even mention it. TBH, a parody of modern bro-culture would probably involve MRAs and redpillers and pseudo-intellectuals who worship Jordan Peterson.
Like, the _idea_ of a movie about the future being full of stupid people would still be relevant in 2018 (and you can thank Trump for that), but it wouldn't be Idiocracy because Idiocracy was more about parodying mid-00s pop culture than anything else. I'd imagine a late-10s Idiocracy would involve some combination of nerd culture turned mainstream eating the world, '90s nostalgia (with "only '90s kids remember" somehow being reiterated over and over 500 years in the future), avocado toast, and nobody being able to afford a house.
(Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/603/)
But...they are (or, rather, they can reasonably be expected to produce genetic changes which reinforce themselves.) Because cultural changes effect mate selection, and also otherwise improve the relative fitness of those naturally inclined to thrive in the cultural environment.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/13/magazine/mike-judge-the-b...
I think the movie is a reflection of the time it was created, but it's a little less tied to that moment than you think. If you think of it as a subversion of the generic Jetsons vision of automation leading to mass complacency then it could be a more universal film than you portray it as. (Probably pre-Jetsons but '50s postwar sci-fi probably exemplifies that vision the best. Or maybe it extends further back, and the Idiocrats are just tackier versions of the Eloi from Wells.)
I think the big realization we have now is that automation is far less utopian than we expected, it comes with complications and externalities and inequality, with a lot of what we have now is just abstracting away work so that someone less well-off and farther away is doing it. Funnily enough one minor "plothole" I always had with Idiocracy is that if everyone is stupid, how were the machines still semi-functional? How did their society produce the cameramen at the monster truck death rally? Obviously, the whole movie is a satire or lampoon, but it made me think how society could culturally regress while still remaining technologically semi-functional, buoyed by artifacts of the ancient past like the Eloi or some descendent race from a fantasy setting.
I think if you were to make an Idiocracy today it would have to be focused on how social media and the 24/7 online culture have disrupted the way we relate to one another. Instead of 1001 channels of trashy reality TV it would be conspiracy theories and fringe ideas and charlatans appealing to both emotion and pseudo-logic. (Interspersed with unboxing videos and ASMR and live-streaming, sure.) It feels like anti-intellectualism today is fueled more by anger and zeal (this applies to all political stripes). The current boom feels a lot less even and people are far more desperate and stressed out. Our attention spans are even more frayed. Whereas the original Idiocracy was more about complacency birthed from prosperity, as you pointed out. (Though that rather ignores specific Bush administration policies that could be criticized as anti-intellectual, whether culture wars at home or military aggression abroad. But maybe their absence from that film makes it, as I mentioned earlier, more generic.)
It was a fairly modest aggregate growth period with unusually poor distributional effects, where the bottom 3 quintiles so real income drops and the fourth was flat.
Which is actually a lot like the subsequent expansions.
> what if this boom lasts forever?" (i.e. society becomes wealthy enough to automate everything, so people just sit around and watch Ow My Balls and drink Brawndo every day instead of having to work).
Er, the trend of automation and distraction hasn't really changed (indeed, it's gained even more cultural currency), though the shock genre has moved from reality TV to online video venues, often relayed by social media; not any less of a thing, just a slightly different medium. Though I guess a VR headset worn on the smart toilet would be more 2018 dystopian futurism than the big screen.
> Like, you had people saying things like "you talk faggy", which sadly was common in real life during the mid-00s, and as such it was a ripe target for parody, but would be completely taboo now.
No, using slurs implying homosexuality and lack of manliness as anti-intellectual insults isn't less of thing now than it was then. If anything, both anti-intellectualism, it's time to homophobia, and it's tendency to conflate those two opposed things has increased.
> but you don't see those slurs dropped casually anymore
I've seen them about as much in the last two years (including on mass media outlets) as I did in the whole of the 1990s, in the specific confluence of homophobic insults with anti-intellectualism. Less of “gay” as a generic equivalent of “bad”, sure, but that wasn't the context of “you talk faggy”.
The Kids In The Hall is a seminal example of sketch comedy, but as a broadcast show, the audio from the live audience had to be engineered into the sound channel of the program, since live performances have to mic the audience, to capture their laughs as part of the recording, and mix it properly, so that its volume pairs well with the broadcast performance, just like a sporting event.
The show really does hold up, years after the original recordings, still proving funny and awesome. But it turns out that the sounds of the audience change the whole dynamic of the humor. This is demonstrable if you stand it next to their movie, Brain Candy, which is also funny and watchable, but a different experience, without the noise of an audience.
You could argue that the performers have had their performances altered by the demands of improvisation and the give-and-take interaction that occurs with a live audience, but in retrospect, as a viewer watching the same show twenty years later, I don't really care about whether the audience effects are manufactured or not.
The truth is, the quality of the show has the sounds of the audience built into it as an integral quality, that boosts the entertainment value of the show.
The Kids In The Hall seem to have realized that the live improvisation really was a strong aspect of what made their show good, which is why they opted to engage in touring as a live show, instead of continuing as a broadcast series. I think if anyone were so inclined, though, the right kind of genius could be applied purely as post-production. It's just that the authenticity is preferred for obvious reasons, and ultimately, it's probably actually cheaper to just be talented.
If you film a comedy in front of a live audience, the actors have to adjust their delivery to speak around the laughter. If you take the laughter out of the final cut the pauses were the actors were waiting for the laughter to die down make it weird and awkward.
If a scene only needs one or two takes to get right, they can just go with the laughter from the live audience. If it takes several takes, they will still be getting laughter from the live audience, and so changing the timing of the delivery, but it won't be as intense as it should be for the quality of the joke, and if that live laughter was used it could change the perception of the joke for the broadcast audience. (Our perception of a joke is influenced by how we think others perceive it).
Hence, if you use a late take you need to replace the late take live laughter with either earlier take live laughter or laughter from a laugh library.
https://the-big-bang-theory.com/tickets/
https://medium.com/@jennychen_26501/my-big-bang-theory-live-...
https://www.quora.com/Did-Seinfeld-use-a-laugh-track-a-live-...
More correct: every live action sitcom used a laugh track and/or live studio audience.
Really. It's probably on the Top 3 stupid gimmicks by showbiz bigwigs together with the Loudness Wars and anti-piracy messages on original DVDs
They said that the mom is the eagle-eye over the brand and pushing it to ensure max profit for them.
While i wanted to respect that, and i respect the hustle, it just shows that you can go too far with brand exploitation.
The daughter had the brand advanced through high profile sexual scandals (sex tape, personal relations etc)
The fucking dad had a transitional sex change to keep the limelight ( Nobody cares if he "wanted to be a woman his whole life" - thats his business. Not mine and not worthy of attempting to grab attention dollars.
IMO, the kardashian enterprise ilustrates only one thing:
The dicotomy of the education gap in this nation. Never mind a wealth gap. Education gap is why the US is doomed.
Or just awareness of how brands are operating now in general. I don't know if it's as dramatic as education.
It used to be the brand name/logo/trademark itself held all the value (e.g. Apple, Nike, etc.), except now we're seeing the value shift to how the brands correlate with consumer's identities (e.g. privacy, kaepernick, etc.). Kardashians, political parties, and corporations are especially cognizant of this social shift and are adapting faster than people are aware of it happening.
I personally blame social networks, which have made consumers hyper-aware of how decisions affect their carefully-constructed image of themselves online - but it's probably more complicated than just that.
What has changed today is hyperconnection. That changes the rules of game.
I mean, the show is painfully obvious in being scripted. It's like the Truman Show sans Truman.
The scene was two women fighting over something. Between takes, the director and players were riffing and helping each other to develop their nasty insults and "bitchy" comments.
take trump for example. nytimes detailed about $600+ million in wealth transfer to him from his dad. while we don't have tax returns or financial statements to confirm this, he's probably worth about a billion dollars now. that rate of return is (roughly) less than 2% yearly. he would have been way better off putting that money in an index fund--he'd be worth about $3 billion if he had.
To keep up with the index is probably really hard.
and sorry, i misremembered the numbers. he got over $400 million (at least) from dad, and that would be worth about $2 billion if simply invested in an index fund (according to the article).
Don't forget to factor in Trumps' heavy spending over those years which greatly reduces his rate of return. You could just as easily say that he is keeping his value level with respect to inflation and spending the rest.
And at least in the UK people and families that want preserve wealth actually run their own funds. There are a number of listed self managed Investment trusts (with low TER) based on preserving family wealth.
RIT Capital Partners is one example 12.6% pa for 30 years its base was Rothschild family money and there are others Much older.
There’s nothing racial or political about this.
It’s certainly ethically dubious. And I’m not certain it actually has any effect.
Eugenics is always political.
> It’s certainly ethically dubious. And I’m not certain it actually has any effect.
Then why are you defending it? I'm confused.
With grade inflation and babysitting modern age students, what are the realistic requirements to attain a university degree in a low-difficulty major at a mediocre school? 80 IQ? 85?
The literacy argument is trivially refuted in a similar manner. Reading by itself is not indicative of higher cognitive function above an elementary school child.
Also, proportions are what matter here. I doubt the proportion of people with high fluid/crystallized intelligence is higher now, than it was, say in 1850. The only difference is that now a higher proportion of the general population have degrees.
There's a lot of stuff filmed outside the studio though I'm certain they don't have a live audience for. The IT Crowd does use a laughter track a lot of the time.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2015-09-03/should... is a good critique of these kinds of calculations in general - they usually assume perfect market timing
the trump wealth transfer started over 60 years ago. over the long run, market timing doesn't matter that much.
(EDIT: and that opinion piece was not coherent; the author mixed up trump's businesses with his net worth, and convoluted other finance concepts to render his desired "opinion". it was awful.)
Besides, there's no claim that he was given anywhere close to $400M over 60 years ago, nor can anyone be realistically expected to invest their inheritance starting at the age of 12.
I realize we're talking about humanity as a whole, but I don't see the appeal of the 70's.
I see it mainly as an implementation problem, not necessarily objectively bad by itself.
A bit like communism :)
Sure, and if Elon Musk invented flying hamburgers we could solve world hunger, which is just about as plausible as successfully using genetic selection to solve a non-genetic problem. The premise is false; anything that proceeds from a false premise is useless.
I guess that’s basically why I often feel driven to make comments like the one I started with.