> Also reveals Tolstoy's own perspective on writing as a moral endeavor which he feels Shakespeare failed at, as if Shakespeare had a morality it was "people should be good, but not too good"
I couldn't agree more, which is why I like Shakespeare so much better than Tolstoy.
We need more writing where people are the best they can be. Imagine the good Shakespeare could have done by making his characters the best role models. People imitate, and Shakespeare has incredible reach.
As I get older, I have little patience for flawed characters, and love it when I see someone act good all the time in fiction.
Edit: Tintin, for example, is one of my favorite fictional characters of all time. He is smart, athletic, capable, dependable, and, most importantly, always acts in good faith.
Another perspective: when I was younger, I liked Hardy Boys and Tom Swift because of their earnest niceness. As I get older, I realize that the world is a complex place and people (characters) are nuanced. Reduction to black/white (good/bad) squeezes the nuance and thus the humanity.
For similar reasons, I don't enjoy reading about the good works of (Western) holy people. (Buddhism and Hindu stories, the small exposure I have, seem to contain nuanced characters.)
I understand reality is nuanced, but I want to be exposed to ideals when I read. I'm not too interested in recreating reality. I want to see what to strive towards. I recall the Hardy Boys with a lot of fondness. They meant a lot to me as a child.
I get that, and it's a challenge for me as a Shakespeare actor and director. I often work with these "flawed" characters, and early in the process there's this question of "do I really want to tell the story about this person?"
I've got only limited patience for people being stupid and/or mean. Can't we tell stories about good and smart people? Those stories exist, but they're depressingly rare.
I have ways of turning Shakespeare's text into a story that I think you will want to hear. Or at least, trying to. It's the hard part of my job as an artist.
> I've got only limited patience for people being stupid and/or mean. Can't we tell stories about good and smart people? Those stories exist, but they're depressingly rare.
I don't think there are good or bad people. Every person contains both within them.
Oh gosh I feel the exact opposite. Of the Tolstoy books I've read I don't think any of his characters are martyrs as one might expect "someone too good is" but you see examples of people thoughtfully trying to helping others and it paying off, while others who thoughtless do it end up, uh, not so great.
I guess I don't consider myself as much an expert on Shakespeare to critique his side though.
The point of Hyperloop is to provide a shiny new technology that municipalities can use as an excuse for not investing in public transportation, ensuring that America switches to electric cars instead trains/buses/trams/bikes/etc as ICE automobiles are phased out over the next 20 years.
As in the US the majority of people don't demand public transport, I don't see why municipalities would need an excuse. Outside of nerd circles the hyperloop is rally not even very well known so I don't even understand how that would make sense.
And 'the point' of Hyperloop certainty never was that, that is just conspiracy nonsense by people who are bitter that most people don't share their opinion. The most you could say is that 'hyperloop has been abused by XY people to avoid investing in public transport' but I have not seen a single piece of evidence for that.
Are you really so cynical that every new technology that you don't like, is instantly put to 'ah this is a conspiracy to prevent adoption of what I like'.
>I actually believe in the benevolence of AWS; I spent nearly a decade there. Do you?
I have no reason to doubt the benevolence of AWS at present, but how much faith do you have in the perpetuity of that benevolence? There is a tremendous power imbalance between Amazon/Google/Microsoft and the companies that depend on them for infrastructure, and the nature of capitalism and the declining rate of profitability means that eventually, the markets will demand for that power imbalance to be exploited economically.
When the Manorial system emerged in Europe, it was a largely benevolent force offering stability, security, and community in the wake of the collapsing Western Roman Empire - within a few generations it morphed into 1000 years of serfdom.
> how much faith do you have in the perpetuity of that benevolence
None! Literally none. This is a huge risk for our country, and we should thinking about what it means for the next 1000 years, not the next 10.
Bezos appears to truly, truly believe in Customer Obsession. The culture definitely softened while I was there though, and I can't imagine how it'll change in 200 years. I can't guarantee his great grandkids won't be dicks. I don't really want to live in the corporatist city state of Seattle By Amazon with its "benevolent" AI overlord and its drone stazi in 2234, ya know?
The functionality may be similar, but the scale is completely different and shouldn’t be ignored. Building a machine that cooks 1 pancake every 5 minutes is a fun project for precocious college students; designing a system capable of cooking 10,000 uniform pancakes per minute is a feat of incredible industrial engineering.
I'm talking about R&D specifically, not infra folks.
But let's say designing for scale is 100 times harder than a taxi app for just one national taxi service. Based on my 23 year career in trenches I seriously doubt that's the case, but let's be generous.
That would net us into ballpark of €60M expense. Non-negligible, but it translates into a hundred developers pulling €100k a year for 6 years, still at least an order of magnitude below Uber.
Very obviously it does not scale anywhere near linear. There has to be a severe case of diminishing returns in technical hiring.
Why should Mike have to remember this? Why should all of your infrastructure depend on Mike not getting a text from his wife while walking to the fridge for a La Croix?
>At the end of the day, people would rather feel nice about themselves than make actual change.
Almost, but not quite. At the end of the day, there are people making extraordinary amounts of money from the status quo, and those people would rather have the general population squabbling over minutiae than demanding systemic change that would actually resolve the problem (and subsequently cause those people to lose an awful lot of money).
This is a very disingenuous comparison. For any given food, there are a large number of both perfect and imperfect substitutes, which is very much not the cases for patented medicines. It is also much easier for individuals to grow their own food than it is to manufacture their own pharmaceuticals. But beyond that, food is one of the most regulated markets in modern society. Farm subsidies, food assistance programs like SNAP, strategic food reserves, and any number of other programs function as "soft" price controls. I don't think that "changing pharmaceutical regulations to match the food industry" means what you think it does.
Drug patents only last about 10 years. So fixing the evergreening system at the patent office solves your concern about perfect and imperfect substitutes.
Take a look some time at the large list of drugs Walmart pharmacy offers for just a few bucks a month. Our model should be to get more drugs in such a state that a Walmart can offer them for such a low price.
