Ah, yes, advertising – a pet hatred of mine, yet it is one of those things that capitalism seems to need to produce in order to survive. In my mind the concept of advertising (and marketing in general) is to convince somebody that they need something that they don’t want, and to then make them part ways with an extraordinary amount of money to possess it. The other aspect is built in obsolescence, and I have to admit that I cringe every time I hear a sales person mention that the product I just bought will need to be replaced in around two years (though my laptop is currently four years old, as is my desktop computer, and at this stage I see no need to replace either).
Category: Economics
Survival in the Modern Times
I probably would have just left this as a review on IMDB but as it turns out there is a word limit on that site which means that I can’t actually say everything that I want to say about, well, this movie. Actually, I have to admit that as a website IMDB is pretty ordinary – it’s good for finding out about movies, and I do have a habit of writing a review of every movie that I have seen, but that is about it – unlike Goodreads it isn’t a website where you can discuss movies with people or actually write engaging posts on a particular movie. Actually, they did have some discussion boards but have since decided to can them, which is a real shame.
Silk Road by the Sea
Well, since I am finishing off layover in Singapore I felt that it might be appropriate to write a post that is somewhat uniquely Asian in flavour (though at this stage I am unsure if I am actually going to get around to completing it, let alone posting it, before I return to Australia – as it turned out, I didn’t). Anyway, we decided to visit the aquarium on the island of Sentosa, and as some museums are apt to do (though I’m not really sure if you can call it a museum, it is probably more like a zoo for fish, though we don’t call them zoos for fish, we call them aquariums – but I digress) they had a display at the entrance to the aquarium, looking at the various ports of call a ship would visit on its way back from China back in the days of the sailing ships.
Rise of the USSA – America Loses the Cold War
Well, after finishing off my post regarding a counter-factual scenario in which the Soviet Union didn’t collapse my creative juices continued to fire, once again thanks to the Alternate History Hub. Once again it is a scenario that stems out of the Cold War, however, instead of seeing how the Soviet Union could have avoided its collapse, we will instead be posing the question as to how could have the tables have been turned and the United States end up on the losing side.
Chasing the Money – Money Monster
Honestly, I not even all that sure as to why I’m writing a blog post on this movie – it isn’t as if it was any good. Okay, it is one of those movies that is trying to make a point and forcing people to think about the house of cards that the modern financial world has become, however, I personally don’t think that it succeeds – at all. The thing is that Money Monster is what you would call a ‘Hostage Taker’ movie – some guy bursts into a room and takes everybody hostage, and through the movie the hostages and the hostage-taker begin to develop a close relationship.
Classic Stockholm syndrome stuff.
Our War On Nature – Naomi Klein and Climate Change
Naomi Klein certainly doesn’t mince her words, but another thing she does is that she does not publish endless numbers of books saying the same thing over and over again. When she publishes a book she will say everything that she wants to say on the topic once, and once only. In her latest project, she once again takes the hyper-capitalist economic system squarely in her sights (which is a constant theme in her books) and exposes how they are destroying the world.
The Big Short – Capitalism in Crisis
Once again I watched a movie that when I started writing a review on IMDB I realised that there was a lot more that I could say about the film than I could easily fit in one of its posts (and even then those post are more for reviews of the film than actually deeply exploring the ideas that come out of the film, not that I actually don’t do that since it is better for me to jump over to my blog to explore the themes). Anyway, The Big Short is based upon a book of the same name and is about some Wall Street traders who predict the coming collapse of the housing market in the United States and decided to bets against this with the purpose of making a profiting (which is what Wall Street traders do). The movie follows these four people from when fund manager Michael Burry first identifies a problem within the market to when the US government bails out the banks.
Art & Literature with the Sarkologist 