Posts by BenWilson
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As for being risk averse because of limited funds, Hollywood studios spend the equivalent of the GDP of a small country every year making movies but are extraordinarily risk averse - they are only interested in something that will pull in millions of 13-yr-old boys worldwide on opening weekend.
The kind of risk aversion that leads to slow death. But they don't have to be that way, and they haven't always been that way. Nor does having limited funds force risk aversion. It's just a very understandable stance.
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Body parts made into functional objects seems like a different subject though than body parts/bodies displayed as body parts/bodies.
Isn't a display a functional object?
I agree that bizarre and macabre are not bad. We still need morticians, pathologists, etc. And watching horror is still fun. But there's all sorts of taboos around death and dead parts that are very hard to shake, and I don't really think it's even necessary to try to shake them.
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I'm not sure why it's so *incredibly gross* to me.
Death customs are amongst the most arbitrary, and most strongly felt of all morals. I expect it's because they are exercised mostly at times of extreme emotion. We want answers, and guidance, and take heart in strong customs that give us that, despite having very little rational basis other than lightning rods for grief.
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Just on the mummies thing - maybe I'm a bit cold but I really have no problem with mummies on display. They're just another object. Maybe I'd feel differently if they weren't bodies that are so old, but I don't know - dead bodies are fascinating but in the way of a "thing" not a person.
Sort of. But there's definite ickiness surrounding the uses of dead human remains. Who would ever keep the relics produced in Nazi death camps? I'm sure an ashtray made from a human skull is a perfectly functional ashtray, and certainly just a thing in some senses, but it's still a bizarre and macabre thing to possess or even see, IMHO.
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What Jackson is saying (I think) is that educated and experienced people with hunches work better than open transparent accountable scorable funding systems for the creative art of the film industry. That's something I can believe.
Not just the film industry. I'm actually yet to find the business which functions well using that kind of management. I'd say fund-management, but the events of the last 4 years suggest that they're the worst managed of all.
Problem is - rather like the "machine model of mind" - there aren't any particularly popular alternatives. The "purity" of the "management via accounting" model appeals to our scientific minds because it can easily be comprehended. Which gives the illusion that we can broadly comprehend how management as a business works, that good management can be engineered. It suggests that anyone can understand anyone else's business, at least in broad sweep, just by getting the right kind of reporting structure in place. It's very hard to accept the idea that every business might function under very different rules, indeed every human might. Getting the best out of people is a very tricky task indeed, a very piecemeal one, a product of years of experience, and is often not transferable between businesses, or even between different teams in the same business.
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But it's more likely a result of performance indicators and a kind of business mentality that is common to anything that the accountants in treasury fund.
Yes, if I took my accountant's advice on how to run my business, I wouldn't have a business. I'd have investments. Which would probably have halved in value over the last 3 years.
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Didn't the Germans see our film industry as a 'miracle' during the Harley years?
Most of the Germans I've spoken to recently have remembered NZ for LOTR, and thought it was fantastic, mein Schatz. But yes, they also like other genre.
I'm not sure whether those two things (failure of imagination and fear of failure) are a result of being government bureaucrats with government restrictions or whether that a general kiwi trait, part of our culture.
I don't think it's a general "kiwi" trait. It's the natural risk aversion you get when you haven't really got that much money to play with. Making good money from a movie requires enormous capital outlay. If you've got billions to play with, you can take punts on many risky shots, because you've got the unimaginative steady sellers too (which are also high budget in many cases). When you've only got millions it's not so easy. Like I said, tough brief. Hell if MGM can get itself into financial strife....
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It's a pretty hard brief. Even private studios that run solely for profit can't reliably pick winners. Nor can a country of this size reliably hold onto whatever winners it creates.
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ChrisW, I'm not surprised that little remains of so many child deaths. The pain of them is so strong that people often shun the memories in self defense.
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I wonder if there's anything more soul-destroying than working for a company which has 'cheerful whimsy' as a condition of employment.
Indeed. I worked briefly for McDonalds as a teen. My favorite job was compacting the garbage, because there was no-one telling you to smile and be happy about it all the time. I really enjoyed the curious juxtaposition of descending from the sterile faux happy of the front counter into the stinky dark pit below to operate a huge machine that turned the colossal piles of waste into smelly cubes. Standing over it with a stick in hand pushing any errant garbage that tried to pop out always reminded me of numerous medieval depictions of heaven and hell, when I thought about my singing co-workers above, about to burst into dance at the behest of management. The freezer was down there too, and other storage. I'd often ponder how the business of McDonalds was using humans to convert what was in the freezer and boxes here into what was in the stinky bags over there, and what was most likely flushing down the pipes over there.
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