jlc

If you can arrange your plans to meet at Schuyler House on the 18th, I will re-arrange to accommodate. I am looking forward to seeing you.

Jan

I am sure they said to themselves, "It doesn't matter what she says, because it is all just throw away words and no one will understand them or care."

Right...(now watch your box office drop)

You'd'a thought that Disney would have learned, after 30 years of watching which SF productions were successful and which were not. SF, like Fantasy, must have meticulous and realistic plot and character development - because that is what grounds us to 'the people and the plan' in a hypothetical world full of the unexpected.

Jan

What a great element that would be in a novel (no one would believe it was real)!

Jan
(Inclined to think of the rich Cadillac guy as being an element in the uber arc - maybe he was not as dumb as he seemed...)

Ah Crap! I have an important, property related, family meeting up in Carmel on the 20th of June, and am leaving on the 17th and returning on the 22nd. (I am camping whilst up there.)

Wait. Ya'know: I really would like to meet you. Maybe I can shift my vacation to leave a day later - very late on the 18th. Then, I could invite you to come by Schuyler House on the 18th (and I could leave at about midnight, so I would arrive at dawn and be able to set up camp).

How does that clever plan sound?

Jan

This is fascinating.

Why don't you write a novel? The main character is 'you' (cleverly disguised under a different name), and does just about what you actually did. This gives you a venue to relate the tales, under different names, but dodge any unpleasant repercussions because it is 'fiction. You would need to add a main plot arc to tie it all together...

Jan

I saw it last night, and it was a movie that 'the parts were greater than the sum of the whole'. That is to say, there were a Lot of individual scenes which were well worth the price of admission. What was lacking was the overall logic.

Do any of you recall Disney's ancient attempt at SciFi: The Black Hole? The one where a character says that her father was lost, "...searching for inhabitable life forms..."? That movie made it incredibly clear that Disney thinks, "This is SF, so it is all just make believe and doesn't have to make sense." This is the problem with Tomorrowland.

The basic premise is that all the optimistic high-IQ people go Galt into a splinter Earth, beginning with Edison and Eiffel and Turing. (You can move back and forth between worlds, so they did not have to actually disappear from our Earth in order to begin the other Earth.) Without the dead weight of regulations and stupidity, the new Earth becomes the flying-car, jetpack, interstellar exploration world of the future we dreamt of as kids.

So far, so good.

But the other main thread is a really good teenage girl in the modern world (capable; not whiny; good actress). By 'our time' something has gone horribly wrong in the other Earth and in our Earth and it is all very bad. But when you try to fit the 'what' went wrong and 'why' it is all bad and 'where' all of the geniuses went on Other Earth...well, I started to hear a tiny voice in the back of my brain saying, "...searching for inhabitable life forms..."

Not only did the plot arc not make sense, but it seemed to me that it emphatically did not matter to Disney that it did not make sense because it was 'just SF' and who would care. (You note that this is the same problem that Star Trek: Into Darkness had.)

So while there were some incredible individual scenes, there was no climax, no triumph, no resolution. The dystopian Warming scenes at the beginning were wonderfully overdone (whomever the prof was with the whites-alll-around-her-hysterical-eyes was great and she should have a permanent character role in the Industry), but they were completely implausible at the end and there was absolutely no refutation of them - though an opportunity existed for this.

Cloony (Frank Walker) was OK in parts, but where it would have meant most he totally fell through. Casey and Athena and the young Frank and some of the other characters sustained their parts. (The couple in the SF pawn shop were great.)

Jan

Thanks. It was an incredible group of people. At the time, the British 'equivalent' of Past Times was very low level - people running around in polyester fairy tale costumes, speaking modern English. We pretty much blew them away when we came over in meticulously sewn period garb (some were made from clothes shown in actual paintings), speaking Elizabethian English and trading gossip about the goings-on of the Court of Elizabeth-I.

We gave some seminars and workshops whilst we were over there (1990 and later). The end result is that now Britain has a fine re-enactment community and does not need to import Americans to show them how to present their own history.

Thanks for looking at the photo. (Some of the women's costumes weighted more than my suite of armor did.) It was fun, but hell.

Jan

Or possibly 'post capitalist'.

We have discussed many times here what the world will look like when everyone is affluent and no one has to work because robots (and replicators) do everything that is needed to keep the entire Earth population living lives of luxury. Probably the answer is that 75% of the population spends most of their time on the holodeck, 10% take over the remaining judgment-based administrative jobs on Earth, 10% enlist in Starfleet Academy, and the remaining 5% are the innovators.

Jan

She picked up a wooden version of a sword, held it in both hands like a baseball bat, an whaled away on the shield I was holding until her face was red and sweat was dripping.

I was shouting words of encouragement, such as "Smack that bastard!" and "Hit him again." (We were having trouble with the manager of one of our venues changing 'our deal' as soon as we actually got there - an being very unpleasant about it as well. Most people treated us well, but to a few folks, we were just 'scummy hirling entertainers' and they expected to treat us like dirt. Since we were all capable people (a lot of professionals - psychologist, lawyer, upper management, etc) we did not react well to this.) The manager of the troop was/is a very high-caliber person and quite organized (and a Randist); changing our deal in a high-handed (rude) fashion was something that she did not take lightly. I have rarely seen her so angry, but it was quite justified.

I was glad to help.

Jan
(Ed to add more text.)

I was, of course, thinking of 'folding green bills' being the message behind the green field, but it could be confused with Greens (EPA) instead of 'bucks'.

Gold on blue works well. Heraldically, the only country that was allowed to have metal-on-metal was Jerusalem. It may sound silly, but when you look at a flag or emblem from far away, gold and silver look the same, whereas gold on 'a color' stands out well. So, any pure color would work, and black would also work.

Jan
(heraldically, silver=white; gold=yellow)

I think that we will eventually have a world government, but that it is a bad idea at this time (irrespective of the form of gov it takes).

Each Greek city-state was a country unto itself, and the independence and inter-city rivalries lasted for millennia. Ultimately, the world got 'larger' and the concerns of any given city-state were overwhelmed by the formation of empires on (and across) their borders and then of countries emerging from the ruins of empires.

When, one day, we are out among the stars with hundreds of colonies, Earth will probably merge into a single governmental unit. But that will be OK then, because there will be lots of other places you can go if you do not agree with Earthgov.

Right now, if we were one government, there would not be anywhere someone could 'go to' and be 'in another place'. So, for now, it is better that we differentiate the nations and let each have its own system. People can sort themselves amongst the choices. The problem that we have in the Gulch, is that there is now no country that actually represents our 'choice'...the USA is still the closest, and the US is not doing particularly well in that respect.

That being said, the flag is actually quite aesthetic.

Jan

That is metal on metal and not heraldically correct. Would you settle for gold on green?

Jan

We all admire your sense of selfless dedication to this worthy cause...

Jan

I do not think so - nowadays it would be on everybody's phone and then on youtube right away. Back then, we were doing well to get stills (and not many of them). There is a website (though the Company is pretty much retired): http://pasttimeswithgoodcompany.com/ptim...

(This is from one of our British tours. (I am sitting down; I wear a red doublet.)

Jan

The wisest course was not to inquire too closely...

Jan, feared the answer

For two summers, 1988 and 1990, I was a member of a Renaissance acting troop touring Britain and performing in stately halls and mansions and in castles. I was one of the live steel (rebated) broadsword fighters, one of the dancers, and I did craft demos of armor.

We performed completely 'in period', which means that if someone commented on the machine stitching of a hem, the reply was, "Yes, my lady's tirewoman has marvelous even stitches, does she not?" (Sometimes it became quite a game to try to stay in period when one of the tourists asked questions.) My part was that of "Jennifer Oakes", a young scallywag who had been found aboard a ship (yes, documentable) and who was trying to be reclaimed as a proper servant.

When we were not 'on stage', I was the fight choreographer, driver of one of the vans, and armorer (needed to be repaired occasionally). I was also part of the 'keep her sane' staff of the director, which in one case involved me holding up a shield and having her hit it with a sword until she was exhausted.

FYI. American tourists are every bit as bad as we are writ up to be. We learned to cringe when a bus full of our countrymen pulled up. (We were all speaking with British accents, so the tourists did not realize that we were not American.)

Jan, has a lot of fun stories

The girlfriend of a friend of mine bought him a blowup...sheep. (Designed for similar purposes.) Apparently this...accoutrement...brought them many nights of merriment.

Jan

Awwww. You're so sweet. (Imagery came across just fine.)

Jan

Poo!

But this is in Phoenix....if they burn the restaurant down It Will Rise Again.

Jan

And few people need buggy whips and scabbards any more...

Jan, one of the few

I want to say that this is an incredibly intriguing thread. Yes, it is like the psychohistory of Asimov's universe to consider society in terms of resonance frequencies, and that is just great. Have you considered a second profession, jbrenner?

There are a couple of problems that I see here: One is 'how high is Up' and the other is 'black swan robotics' (not our very own blackswan, you note).

In the former case we have a variable 'time until dissonance' that is predicated on the affluence and infrastructure of the individual country (how high an Up point we start at). And - as this thread makes clear - the voluntary donation of funds to non-productive members of society figures into how long this affluence lasts.

The second, which may actually be a derivative of the first, is that when we come up against the threshold of general roboticization of our society, the model changes. From that point on we all, even the poorest, can become aristocrats ethically supported by our non-sentient robotic slaves. The question of 'productivity' in such circumstances is one we have visited before, on other threads.

So IF we shrug and IF it does not matter because either (a) our country starts at such an affluent point that socialism + charity is taking decades to erode prosperity, and (b) robots revolutionize economics before prosperity is lost, THEN our ethical stance becomes meaningless because the entire basis for productivity has change.

IF we shrug and prosperity is lost precipitously (war, epidemic, asteroid impact) THEN we can serve as philosophical templates for the reconstruction of a free society.

So, the conclusion that I come to from reading this thread is that we are a 'back-up on durable media' against catastrophe. (This is not where I thought I was going, but it is where I ended up...)

Jan

Being a landlord is not my forte, though I am doing it now - fortunately with two people who are laid back and honest. You seem to be more organized than I am, though, and I thought it might be your cup o'tea. I do observe that people who have productive rental properties have a Very Good Income. And the investment is in a format that Uncle Sam cannot easily take away. I recall my mother telling me that during the Great Depression, the people who had rental properties still had some money. They did not get paid their full rents, but generally they got at least a few dollars per month, which was more than most people had.

Jan

You are cosmically correct in both respects, jbrenner. However, according to our own ethics, what a person does with his money is his business. So 'whatever else we do' that is not a point of attack.

I do not like freeloaders any more than you do, personally. But people who give their own money to these parasites merit no condemnation for me. They should not have to NOT give money to charity in order to respect my world view. To say that they have to refrain from this activity puts us in the same class as those people who try to control how we spend our own income.

Jan

That is moot. There is no pain that someone 'should feel'. If a person who has earned money chooses to give it away, it's their money and their choice. They can give that money to sterling individuals or to total loosers and they can give it for whatever reason they wish.

There is no positive ethical advantage to our ruling on whether someone has the right to do as he wishes with his money. Whether it increases the dissonance or delays the crash does not matter: his bucks, his right.

Jan