I think the real reason is that it’s an entirely different media experience than the current types. Most modern games are either gambling traps (microtransaction hell) or extremely high fidelity products that leave nothing to the imagination. In McLuhan terms they are hot forms of media, but the old ones are cool in that they invite imaginative participation. Hence the popularity also of intentionally retro looking contemporary indie games.
No, it's useful evidence in the same way that contemporaneous fiction is often useful evidence. The first season aired from 1989-1990. The living conditions from the show were plausible. I know because I was alive during that time. My best friend was the son of a vacuum cleaner salesman with a high school education, and they owned a three bedroom house in a nice area, two purebred dogs, and always had new cars. His mom never worked in any capacity. My friend played baseball on a travel team and eventually he went to a private high school.
A 2025 Homer is only plausible if he had some kind of supplemental income (like a military pension or a trust fund), if Marge had a job, if the house was in a depressed region, or he was a higher level supervisor. We can use the Simpsons as limited evidence of contemporary economic conditions in the same way that we could use the depictions of the characters in the Canterbury Tales for the same purpose.
I'm not against the spirit of what you're saying, but are you aware the show itself made a meta episode about how comical it was that Homer could live in a house like that? That was never meant to be a reflection of current living conditions. That show is not the best example of what you're describing.
With that said, that episode is from the 8th season in a time where things were already becoming more unaffordable. The time between the episodes explains why this episode exists.
Homes became more affordable from 1989-1996. So I don't think they were retroactively saying "this isn't affordable anymore."
To be clear, I agree that houses are way less affordable now, which was the point of this thread. I just don't think fictional TV is a good reference point for that. They famously exaggerate the spaces people live in so they can film better angles or block different scenes. See "Friends"
I read this as "anything can be used as evidence if it confirms my preconceived notions". Your anecdotes about a friend or two are just that - anecdotes.
This claim of "a single man could feed a whole family on one factory job" is misleading and untrue. It's usually the 1950s that people claim this was true and they wish we could go back to the 1950s. It's easy to show that that the 1950s were no picnic (https://archive.is/oH1Vx).
It's always some time in the past that the nation was great. They pick 1950s, you pick the 1990s. What you don't understand is that people are usually longing for a time when they weren't alive or when they were children. They want to go back to living the stress free life of a happy childhood, when your parents shielded you from all the vagaries of life.
You cite cartoons, they cite memes. If you ask them how a meme could possibly be used as evidence, they say much the same as you - anecdotes about their grandparents.
Evidence doesn't mean overwhelming proof. My post was confined to 1989-1990. I didn't make the claim in your post. Homer Simpson also doesn't work in a factory; he's a nuclear engineer at a power plant. I dunno what you're trying to get at here. There are at least as many problems with trying to use statistics as evidence as there are with using anecdotes and fictional references.
I would also trust 100 fictional cartoon characters before I would trust anything said in a pirated article written by Noah Smith about anything. If Noah Smith said that grass was green I would assume that it's blue.
Resisting production isn't unethical, but telling your client to commit fraud is illegal, unethical, and waives attorney-client privilege.
Generally that lawyers in tech can be both good and bad, but that both the culture at west coast tech companies and how they handle their attorneys often leads to ethical issues that just do not happen in more buttoned down industries elsewhere. In particular many tech companies are just more protective of employees for no discernable purpose. An investment bank faced with a similar situation as the DC v. Meta case would have blamed and terminated the employees and attorneys involved, and trussed them up for prison if needed to protect the company. An oil company accused of faking environmental studies would throw the guy who doctored them under the bus.
This also serves the public interest (although some may disagree) because it preserves a productive company and provides a powerful incentive for management to grind individual corporate criminals into meatballs to protect itself and shareholders.
Meta's instinct was to defend the employee and the illegal activity rather than sacrificing the lamb to protect the company and the shareholders. They are not the only company that does things like this and it just makes no sense. It is something in the water in Northern California that makes them do this or some strange Pacific wind.
The other stupid thing that Meta did was commissioning these studies in the first place. What is the company doing? How does this benefit shareholder value? Is this a jobs program? If you did not like the answers they might give you, you should never have paid a bunch of academics to do these studies in the first place. The company sells digital fent to the masses. Of course it's bad for kids. You don't need a study to tell you that.
> Meta's instinct was to defend the employee and the illegal activity rather than sacrificing the lamb to protect the company and the shareholders. They are not the only company that does things like this and it just makes no sense. It is something in the water in Northern California that makes them do this or some strange Pacific wind.
It's unchecked greed, that's the thing. It absolutely makes sense if you know you can bring your guy into the office of President - print money and if you break laws and get caught before the President is on your side, use all your resources to prolong the case just enough.
And lo and behold, we saw one Big Tech exec after the other swear fealty to Trump. A mixture of rule by mob (it was literally called the "PayPal mafia") and neo-feudalism.
No, the "unchecked greed" is to keep on doing the illegal thing because you know you'll get rewarded in the end. The "right" thing to do would be to admit you fucked up, fire the persons responsible (including, if need be, up to the top levels) and stay on the right side of the law.
Meta chose the other option - keep breaking the law and use all resources at their disposal to delay any sort of consequences.
There is a conservative case for this in that the 30 year fixed mortgage, combined with all of the foreclosure protections both old and new, amount to a government benefits program. Historically, this type of mortgage was developed to promote family homeownership. The mortgage systems have continually blown up in "crises" in part because it's a product of policy more than it is a market product. This is partly why investors both corporate and small flipper types actually do cause serious distortions: the US housing market is a welfare program first and a market for bundled land and houses second.
No one wants to abolish this welfare program (you would have an easier time abolishing Social Security), but also the government wants to keep the trappings of a market price system. It is easier to have serial crises and to blame some guys for the predictable explosions every time, adjust the laws to create enormous numbers of lawyer billable hours nationwide, and then set the stage for the next crisis and the next round of patsies to be blamed. Fortunately, this time we have AI to write all the think pieces about what it really means.
I mostly agree with your comment except the part where flipper types and corps cause distortion because they have 30-year mortgages at their disposal. A fixed rate, 30-year is distortionary on its own; it's a uniquely American "product" and banks in other countries would look at you crazy for requesting such a thing.
I think it has more to do with the various new meanings that have been attached to the word "agent" and the concept of "agency" by software and some parts of west coast culture. Those concepts do not really have much to do with the law of agency.
Lawyers don't come up with good ideas; their role is to explain why your good ideas are illegal. There's a good argument that AI agents cannot exercise legal agency. At the end of the day, corporations and partnerships are just piles of "natural persons" (you know, the type that mostly has two hands, two feet, a head, etc.).
The fact that corporate persons can have agency relationships does not necessarily mean that hypothetical computer persons can have agency relationships for this reason.
> I think it has more to do with the various new meanings that have been attached to the word "agent" and the concept of "agency" by software and some parts of west coast culture.
Indeed, agency (the capability to act) and autonomy (the freedom to choose those actions) are separate things.
BTW, attorneys' autonomy varies, depending on the circumstances and what you hired them to do. For example, they can be trustees of a trust you establish.
There are so many other ways to make money that don't involve crime. And there are even many crimes that make more money that are far less harmful to society.
There's a more transparent and straightforward pathway to a lifetime appointment as a federal judge (which actually pays OK and has many social perks) than there is to a tenured professorship in most fields. Judges have Solomon-like-life-and-death power, and the lawyers who argue before them (often successful, high-status people in their own right) are professionally obligated to suck up.
By comparison almost all professorships are like becoming the most important hobo on a given street corner.
Yeah, it's mostly either students or academia who admire their hobo kings.
It's kind of like a sport like tennis. If you're in the system, you think that the world number 150 tennis player is amazing, but they barely make enough to afford travel to the matches.
In all fairness though, it's very difficult to become a judge. At least in my country, you have to have been both a defense lawyer and a prosecutor in order to become a judge. It takes many years of experience that is not easily gained.
Many employers pay a premium for predictably elite cadres of students. The schools want to try to pass off mediocre graduates as having some of the elite special sauce even though only a small number of students have what it takes. We know exactly what to do to produce elite cadres by aggressive sorting. But the incentives created by the federal government encourage the institutions to extrude mediocre students like a chicken nugget machine produces processed meat product. Every hot student-nugget is worth a tens of thousands of dollars a year in freshly printed loan money directed towards administrators and rent on dorms and apartments irrespective of quality; so the incentive is to stuff the students with filler.
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