[A Pleasurable Headache]
One more edition until 2021 sails into the sunset. As tradition I shall probably go through some of the things I enjoyed and consumed this year, media wise.
In the interim, definitely go and check out Voir on Netflix. It’s a series of short video essays on movies, exec produced by David Fincher. Tony Zhou from the dearly missed Every Frame a Painting YouTube channel is also involved.
The highlight for me was Walter Chaw’s essay/episode on Walter Hill’s 48 Hours, and its relationship to race in America. Chaw has a book out on Walter Hill in Spring of next year. I absolutely cannot wait.
Onto some links? Sure, why not.
Links
COP/out
<https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=10064>
Author Peter Watts on the absolute failure that was COP26. He quickly gets to the crux of the problem.
“Those who feel personally threatened by this crisis want desperately to take all necessary measures. The John Kerrys and Boris Johnsons of the world? They’re rich. They’re first-world. They’re insulated: they’ll probably make out okay even under the worst-case scenario. So why should they care? Oh, they’ll walk the walk if they have to—but when the chips are down they’ll choose politics over science any day.”
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The Code That Controls Your Money
<https://www.wealthsimple.com/en-ca/magazine/cobol-controls-your-money>
Talking of crumbling systems that are on the precipice of collapse…
The vast majority of the world’s banking infrastructure runs on a coding language known as COBOL. COBOL is a dying language. No one is learning it. No one seems to want to as they chase the latest and greatest coding languages, trends and markets.
“Consider: Over 80% of in-person transactions at U.S. financial institutions use COBOL. Fully 95% of the time you swipe your bank card, there’s COBOL running somewhere in the background. The Bank of New York Mellon in 2012 found it had 112,500 individual COBOL programs, constituting almost 350 million lines; that is probably typical for most big financial institutions. When your boss hands you your paycheck, odds are it was calculated using COBOL. If you invest, your stock trades run on it too.”
The best part? There are no simple fixes. It all sounds very familiar, doesn’t it?
> “And they were the lucky ones. The Commonwealth Bank of Australia tried to rewrite a core system in a fresh language; the project cost twice as much as they expected, $1 billion in Australian dollars. Len Santalucia, the longtime mainframe expert, once worked with the financial institution DTCC to investigate the possibility of converting their COBOL to Java.”
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When It Comes to Drug Laws, Britain is a World Loser
<https://novaramedia.com/2021/11/29/when-it-comes-to-drug-laws-britain-is-a-world-loser/>
Europe, particularly Germany and Portugal lead the way. Despite the attitudes of large swathes of the British population, drug legislation in the UK tends to veer towards the ‘salt the earth’ policy still prevalent in the U.S.
“This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Misuse of Drugs Act being passed in Britain, the law that criminalises cannabis amongst other drugs. However, the public can see that the country’s drug policy is not working and is in desperate need of a rehaul. Only 34% of German citizens were supportive of the legalisation of cannabis before the new government agreed to implement it. In the UK, that figure is already considerably higher, with 48% supporting legalisation, and only 24% opposing, according to YouGov. “
Hot on the heels of this article comes the news this week that the Tory government in the UK are due to crack down harder on ‘middle class drug users’, ratcheting up the pointless ‘war on drugs’ rhetoric and practices that have continued to fail since the 80s.
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UK Newspapers Accepted Money to Publish Positive Environmental Stories About Saudi Arabia Around COP26
Staying on home soil, bastions of journalism The Independent and The Evening Standard stand accused of greenwashing on behalf of the current Saudi regime. Most were labelled ‘Partner Content’ when published, but at least twelve on the Standard’s website failed in this most basic of practices. This worsens when the same content is republished elsewhere:
“Stories that were part of the Independent’s commercial deal with Saudi Arabia were also reproduced on the websites of other news organisations, such as Yahoo News, where they did not carry any label to inform the reader that Saudi Arabia had paid for them to be created.”
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I Can’t Enjoy the New ‘Grand Theft Auto’ Because I’m Old Now
<https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7ddej/grand-theft-auto-the-trilogy-review>
Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.
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The “First World” can Fuck Off Playing Victim: Colonial Roots of the Modern Refugee Crises
IGD survey five of the world’s biggest refugee crises by country and shows the colonialist and euro-centric causes at the root of each. This is a good primer and overview for further reading on the subject.
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The Secretive Prisons That Keep Migrants Out of Europe
And whilst we’re on the subject…
This piece in The New Yorker reveals the European Union has established a ‘shadow immigration’ system in Libya. It has invested millions in coast guards in the Mediterranean (mostly Italy), focusing on capturing migrants before they reach European shores and then placing them in detention centres with horrid conditions and little to no oversight. Said centres are often run by militias who care little for the migrants wellbeing or health.
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Ten Million a Year
<https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n23/david-wallace-wells/ten-million-a-year>
David Wallace Wells at LRB talks at length about the inequality of air pollution. As with everything else, the poorest suffer first.
Wells also talks about pollution as the invisible killer, little considered when it comes to policies, finance and solutions.
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I’m off to go and do the Christmas quiz. See you in two!