In order to illustrate the wage- distribution various acting roles and stagehands can expect for their role in producing a Hollywood blockbuster, Vanity Fair crafted this nifty credits-crawl. Having one’s name immortalized and associated with a grand project—involving more individuals seemingly than the top-level government of a moderately sized nation—is probably reward enough on its own but it would be a little disheartening to know that one’s contribution was less valuable that the play-or-pay contract of a feline extra.
Wednesday 8 June 2016
trรผmmerfrau
The secretive Bilderberg Group will be meeting at an undisclosed location in Dresden, as Quartz reports, this week, and although proceedings are not subject to public-scrutiny in any sense, apparently one item of their agenda will be the so-called precariat.
Coined by economist Guy Standing, the term refers to the working-class suspended in a precarious situation—not rightly any longer called the proletariat since they were afforded more protections and securities—unsure whether they can enjoy continued employment or face redundancy, replaced by immigrants or robots. Siding with the author’s take on this anxiety-causing arrangement in the labour-force, I agree that the lizard-people who rule the world will be rather aghast with what their underlings are facing and what kind of toll this takes on society.
shangri-la or public-burden
Although with very different issues at stake, a series of referenda (plebiscites) put to the people have been returned, I think, with a degree of timidity—like Switzerland’s recent rejection of a basic income for all, the cession of Scotland or of Catalonia, and I wonder what this bodes, bold or dull, for up-coming votes, like for the US electorate or the potential UK withdrawal from the EU.
Of course, sometimes a departure is a foolhardy thing that fortune does not necessarily favour and there’s little leverage for polemics and convincing in defeat—but, as hackneyed and exhausting as being told votes are historic and come with a mandate can be (I doubt that anything so momentous would be left in the hands of the public) maybe our conservative posture is indicative of what meaning we attribute to democracy and how much personal liability we are willing to accept. What do you think?
Tuesday 7 June 2016
hochwohlgeboren
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, foreign policy
patrimoni dell'umanitร
For the first time since 2000, Italy is not nominating any new sites or intangibles during UNESCO’s World Heritage annual call for submissions, begging off by saying the nation with the most treasures ought to take off a year and perhaps give the rest of the world a chance—though I am sure that they would not welcome being edged out by China or Spain (ranked seconds by different counts).
catagories: ๐ฎ๐น, ๐, antiques, architecture, lifestyle
terminal, process, decision
catagories: ๐บ️, foreign policy
Monday 6 June 2016
hinn best land sem solinn skinner uppa
In 1868, swelling with pride over expansionist’s ambitions and the recent procurement of Alaska from an imperial Russia fraught with the sorry prospects of a fire-sale and the acquisition of a few Caribbean properties from the equally distressed Danes, the spree did not end there and not only tried to annex Greenland (an offer repeated during the Cold War) but also Iceland, as Neatorama reminds. The case for annexation was based mostly on the decades’ old accounts of travelogues, which was probably the source for the idea that the two were ironically named to dissuade prospectors, and though the soon to be independent island would have surely been a jewel in imperial America’s crown, the Icelanders weren’t having it. Fortunately, after such outlays on dubious returns, the US Congress was not buying this proposal either and the purchase was not pursued further.
catagories: ๐ฌ๐ฑ, ๐ฎ๐ธ, ๐บ๐ธ, foreign policy
tabula rasa
I am hoping that no one ever tries to aggressively out the artist’s identity and he remains like the Edgar Allen Poe birthday toaster and not like my spying the individual responsible for covering advertising columns around town with biblical verses at work, thinking the job was executed so quickly that it must not be the product of human hands, and being rather disappointed.