It’s that time of the week again.
First the book, then the script.
One book/screenplay:I have to confess that I didn’t get that much reading done this week. I have some books queued up and I started to read “The Big Short” by Michael Lewis this week. I haven’t gotten that far but the plan is to read the book at ten follow that up with the (Oscar winning) Screenplay by Charles Randolph and Adam McKay. A couple of years ago I promised myself to read more non-fiction books and so far this seems like another winner. I’m not reading them to find stories to adapt (in this case that would be more than just useless) but to learn something new. I read “The Signal in the Noise” by Nate Silver a couple of years ago and that one helped me to think about statistics in a completely different way and even though I’m not that great at statistics (and don’t get me started about math) I feel that I have a general understanding of the subject matter. I hope Michael Lewis’ book about the mortgage crisis helps me understand our banking system a bit better.
Two movies: I rewatched “Ex Machina”, I did see it in theaters when it came out, and the movie is still really impressive. I love the performances and it shows that you don’t need flashy special effects to tell a sci-fi story, a great script is more than enough to do that. Another though I had while watching: Alicia Vikander would e a great April.
The second movie wasn’t that impressive, I was in the mood for something stupid and I watched Blade: Trinity. Honestly, it wasn’t as bad as I remembered and I’m tempted to say thats it’s not the best David Goyer movie but definitely not the worst, but damn, they need to do more of those Blade movies.
Seven pages: Still on it.
seven hours: Very productive. I’m still waiting for new material from Orlindo1 so I decided to have a look at my old time-travel tv series and I decided to revive that idea with a german/european setting. More on that at a later time.
And now for our feature presentation. So no worries, this is not going to be another Geek Treatise about D&D, the week I’m going to be way less controversial, lets talk politics. 🙂
Let’s look at this cute pig before we talk politics.
I’m a very opinionated person and I’m very interested in politics but I’d never go into politics. Just to e clear, I’m not hating on politicians, I’m sure that most of them try to do what they think is right and even when their worldview is different from mine, as long as they are honest and believe in what they are saying (and more importantly doing) I have no problem with them, my problem is with the people who vote for those idiots and their issues.
So yes, this is going to be a rant but let me start with a little disclaimer: If you can read this2, I’m probably not talking about you. If you have a basic understanding of how the world works3, I’m probably not talking about you. If you believe that 911 was an inside jo and the government can’t be trusted, I’m definitely talking about you.
Stop being stupid. Switzerland had an interesting vote last weekend, I don’t want to go too much into the details but one of issues they had to vote on, had something to do with throwing foreigners out of the country after they committed (petty) crime. I just oversimplified because it’s not really about the vote it’s about what happened afterwards and it shows that democracy’s biggest problem is its voters.
So, some newspapers wrote about how people voted and of the statistics (I bet you had no idea that that would develop in today’s main topic) was along the lines of: “high education, more likely to vote no”, “high salary, more likely to vote no”. The vote was quite clear: 41,1% yes, 58,9% no. So its no surprise that most of the bars in the statistic were above or around 50%. Sure people who attended university voted yes roughly 60% of the time, and among people with no formal education, 40% said no4. I’m not entirely sure about the numbers so don’t be and if they are not exactly true but I’m trying to make a point here. I looked for the original article but I can’t find it but that’s not that important. The comments are important.
I spent about ten minutes reading through the comments and what I read made me almost activate the Doomsday Machine. Some people were just idiots and threw racial slurs around and warned people who voted yes that they would regret their decision. Those people aren’t worth a rant but the next bunch are. Some people (on the yes and no side) argued that they either fit or don’t fit the profile of the people who votes no (or yes). I read many statements that said that “Even though he attended university, he voted no. So this analysis must be bull excrement.” To people like this let me say the following thing:
Having a university degree doesn’t say your smart or stupid but not being able to understand percentages does make you look really stupid!
So yeah, that’s all I wanted to say. Maybe a bit anticlimactic but it said to be said and they had deactivated the comments. Let’s end this post with politics as well. John Oliver made a new video you should watch. Enjoy!
