Interesting Links for 28-10-2013

[andrewducker]

• Amazon and the "profitless business model" fallacy
  (tags: business amazon )
• Various artists do Wolverine as Disney Princess
  (tags: xmen wolverine princess marvel disney comics )
• This short story perfectly captures modern computing
  (tags: computers shortstory scifi funny fiction )
• Can Agile development work for government, anyway?
  (tags: software

Comments

[philmophlegm]

I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that "Russell Brand" is Sasha Baron Cohen's latest character, following in the footsteps of Ali G, Borat and Bruno.

Watch that Paxman interview and compare to the sort of interviews Ali G used to have, or Borat. With the small exception that Brand is the interviewee not the interviewer, it's the exact same format. Say some obviously stupid, obviously controversial things and try to get a reaction from the other person.

I should add that after that video, I'm not really despairing of politicians, but I am despairing of the BBC...

[gonzo21]

I think he accurate expressed why 50% of the population don't bother voting anymore though.

[philmophlegm]

Tragically, I do see plenty of evidence that there are people out there who think the way he does. It's probably just as well they don't vote.

[gonzo21]

I dunno, I think I could maybe get onboard with the idea of half the electorate starting to vote for independent and small party candidates. Might shake up the party political system a bit.

[gonzo21]

I fully expect to see Cameron and Osbourne on tv soon holding a shotgun to a kittens head and saying 'Build HS2 or the cute animal gets it.'

[andrewducker]

At this point you have three options:
1) Build HS2. Expensive, but gets you a proper modern train line up a chunk of the UK, with the potential to expand it up to Scotland once the first phase is done (admittedly in ages).
2) Upgrade existing capacity. Less expensive, but still quite expensive. Would give us better existing lines, but you'll still have lots of congestion problems because you can't put fast and slow trains up at the same time (as the fast trains get stuck behind the slow ones).
3) Do nothing. Costs bugger all, but leaves you with a train system that's rapidly running out of capacity.

[hano]

That's basically what it boils down to. If they had any sense they'd produce a plan to extend to Scotland asap the benefits to all would be immense. (Not to mention the political boost it'd give the 'No' Campaign).
And upgrading existing capacity merely kicks the problem down the road for a decade or so. There *needs~ to be more capacity, not just for passengers, but for freight as well.
Oh and Labour's idea to re-open the Great Central Railway is both romantic and utterly daft.

[philmophlegm]

The funniest thing about the Great Central Railway idea is that it would replace an expensive train line going from London to Birmingham with a supposedly cheaper train line THAT DOESN'T ACTUALLY GO TO BIRMINGHAM!

[chess]

Unfortunately the success of Give Directly doesn't really tell us anything about guaranteed income in developed nations, much as I support both

[andrewducker]

There's less.

But, for instance, nobody has popped round recently and offered to wash my windows, do my gardening, etc. If you had a guaranteed income of (say) £6,000 then it would be in your interest to do the occasional odd-job that would bring in extra cash.

[chess]

Conversely, someone ambushed us at the lights in Birmingham the other day and forcibly washed our windscreen then demanded payment, which was embarrassing and irritating. I could do without that kind of impulse-entrepreneurship... but maybe people would do it less if they didn't need the money to eat.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, that's desperation marketing. Sheer sign of poverty.

[cairmen]

The post on why movies are made is a) interesting and b) may prompt me to write a counter-rant on Strange Company.

He's spot on about Hollywood and dead wrong about what you should do if you don't need a studio exec to greenlight your movie. Just as launching a webapp without doing any research to find out if people want it is a soul-sapping, time-wasting process, so (in many cases) is making a movie without any idea of who would want to see it or how you'll tell them about it.

[andrewducker]

Depends if you're doing it for the money, or if you're doing it because what you want is to have a particular film exist.

If it's the latter, then listen to nobody and make the thing you want to exist. If you're less obsessed about a particular vision then obviously making it marketable makes sense.

[cairmen]

Very true.

The one wrinkle here is that it's easy to believe that you don't care about the market's reception of your film. When they release their life-savings-and-two-years' worth of work to a grand total of 5 sales and 400 people on YouTube saying their trailer is boring, many people discover their estimation of how much they care about the market isn't 100% accurate.

There are also other options beyond "doing it for the money" and "doing it because what you want is to have a particular film exist".In fact, most filmmakers who make more than one film fall into category C.

I, for example, certainly am not in film for the money - I've got a lot of highly marketable skills which would make me vastly more reliable cash than filmmaking if I chose to pursue them full-time - but I do enjoy making films that people want to see.

[andrewducker]

Oh yes. I mean, I do my links because I like sharing them - but I definitely write straplines and suchlike because Iwant to attract attention - because I enjoy the conversation.

Finding the balance is tricky, of course.

20th century headlines, rewritten to get more clicks.

[cartesiandaemon]

Although I suspect there were a lot of crap headlines in 1969, too, it's just that "man walks on moon" doesn't need a lot of additional jazzing up :)

Re: 20th century headlines, rewritten to get more clicks.

[andrewducker]

http://members.shaw.ca/rlongpre01/moon.html