Category: issues

San Diego Opera is far from alone …

“Aereo would give so-called cord cutters the means to assemble a more affordable package of online streaming options like Amazon Prime, Apple TV or Netflix, and still spend a Sunday afternoon watching the N.F.L. and ’60 Minutes’ immediately afterward. As antenna-driven viewing has dropped and digital consumption has surged, Aereo is a way to put old wine in a new bottle.”

Basically, it makes them look “stupid.” — “I don’t think our society’s rejection of Glass is necessarily rooted in stated concerns about privacy, exclusivity, class dynamics, disconnection from the world, or many of the other arguments that have been put forth. These are well-established, modern problems that Glass makes only marginally worse. Instead I believe the resistance to Glass is about our fear of assistive technology”

Maybe? “There is no better example of the existence of our Second Gilded Age than Comcast. Government has made it possible for the company to exert economic power unheard of a generation ago. If this deal is to go through, Comcast should be required to pay dearly for the privilege of exerting market domination.”

People “who had any type of contact with the criminal justice system were 31 percent more likely than those who had no contact to not obtain medical care when they needed it. Even people who were merely stopped by police were 33 percent more likely to not seek medical care.”

Looks like the broadcaster might be losing a fair amount of money as soon as the government makes it legal for people to choose not to pay their BBC license fee.

“There is no secret ingredient to artistic success; no magic routine for producing art. Copying Joan Didion’s routine won’t make you write like Joan Didion. Writing on index cards won’t turn you into Vladimir Nabokov. We are all more than the pattern of our days and the materials of our work.”

Judith Mackrell: “[If] artists move towards the blanket boycott [Jonathan] Jones has advocated, life can only get harder for all those artists opposed to Putin and his politics. It can only restrict their dialogue with the wider art scene and push them back towards the old cold war-era isolation.”

“Los Angeles officials are starting to get serious about freeing up $7.5 million or more in city government funds that are earmarked for visual art, performances or other cultural events, but have been wrapped tightly for years in legal red tape.”

Europe’s first vice squad “compiled vast dossiers of information on the city’s elite sex workers and their patrons. But they rarely acted on that information. To this day, it remains a mystery why the Parisian police spent so much time and effort observing an underground economy it apparently had no interest in curtailing. But their files are an historian’s dream.”