Charities

Here's a question to any economists out there. What the heck are you doing wasting your time reading this crap !?! Seriously though, the question is as follows:

Let us say that, tomorrow, all of a sudden, the thousand richest people in the world agree with all those Wall Street Occupants that they have far too much money. They decide that they will keep a relatively small part of it themselves (say $50 million each), and give the rest to charity. Let us also say that the average wealth of these 1000 people is $1.05 billion - implying that they will give a clean billion to charity... each. That's one trillion dollars.

What is the effect of one trillion dollars suddenly flooding the economy !?! Surely the impact on things such as inflation and devaluation of the dollar must be immense. It could perhaps cause more trouble than good. Even if this trillion dollar tidal wave does not materialise, smaller large acts of charity must be doing something similar on their own scales. Has anyone ever looked at the negative economic and fiscal impact of large scale charity !?! Furthermore, considering that taxes are, in a loose sense, charitable funds, would high taxes also have these side-effects !?!

I realise that the trillion dollars I mentioned above weren't exactly locked away in vaults. Also, a lot of that wealth of the hyper rich isn't really cash in the attic, it's largely an index of the value of their stock and whatnot. Nevertheless, I expect that the question stands in principle. 

YouTube And Copyright

Production houses have been making YouTube come down hard on a lot of copyright violations lately. They have been making YouTube take down the video entirely, or if the copyrighted material is just the audio bit of the clip, YouTube mutes it.

Now, I'm sure the ethical angles on the subject of piracy and copyright violations have been thrashed out in detail elsewhere. In this case though, surely the smart thing for the companies to do would be to tell YouTube to leave the clip up, but to degrade the quality of the audio and the video. Not so much that it would make the clip unwatchable, but enough to make the bad quality noticeable. People who then like the clip's content could pay for the full HD product - either just for the clip on the spot (say $0.15) in which case both YouTube and the production house get money, or by buying the DVD from which the clip was taken.

The thing is, we live in a world where there is absolutely no shortage of entertainment options. It isn't like the TV of bygone decades where you had a more or less captive viewership. If your show is hard to get, many of your potential customers will just go somewhere else. In the context of such a situation, the low quality video on YouTube just acts as free advertisement. People who like it a lot will probably buy the full HD version. People who don't like it much wouldn't have bought it anyway, so you aren't really losing any money by showing them the clip for free. And the stated free advertisement might get you quite a few new customers.  But if you just don't put up the clip, chances are that people just won't know what you have to sell. And with so many options to choose from, they aren't going to go through the hassle and cost of finding out what you have to show when your competitors are showing free content. Moreover, those who look for your stuff will likely find someone's pirated videos of your content which have managed to evade YouTube's sweeps.

Perhaps right now, while TV is still going quite strong as a stand alone service, you may get away with sticking to the heavy handed model. After all, TV does this 'free advertising' bit for many people - and those who didn't watch the show on TV can stuff it. But the day when TV merges with the internet is not very far off. The amount of proper content on YouTube that is independently made (i.e. genuinely directed and produced stuff, and not just some shaky video off of someone's handycam of their dog farting) is increasing as is the amount of content with expired or deliberately unenforced copyright. YouTube IS TV for a lot of people. And they're members of a rapidly growing club.

Once Upon A Time

After a chat with my parents that bizarrely involved Ghadafi, Walt Disney and the snobbishness of literary critics, I ended up spending a good 45 minutes YouTubing clips of Disney cartoons. Of course there can be no denying that the main reason behind doing so was nostalgia - at least initially. But rather quickly, I genuinely got caught up in the madness of the clips. I was surprised, after watching many of my childhood favourites again, to find out just how batshit insane they were. Take 'Alice in Wonderland', for instance. I had recently watched 'Alice', Burton's take on Caroll's story. And it was slickly done, as you would expect from that guy. But for all that Burton is an undisputed genius of the weird and wacky, the film comes across as what it is - a polished attempt by an accomplished but sane filmmaker to tell you a trippy story.

Disney's take, on the other hand, genuinely has the feel of dreamlike insanity. It doesn't feel like the artists and scriptwriters were trying to tell you anything bizarre - it seems that, while they were writing the story, they were themselves in an altered state where their grip on reality was loosened. Put it this way, if Burton's film was an accomplished actor trying to portray an eccentric man, Disney's film WAS the eccentric himself. Of course, a great deal of the madness happens to take inspiration from the original story in Lewis Caroll's book. But while Burton tries to merely re-interpret that surreal quirkiness for today's generation, Disney uses it as a launching pad for bold journeys into the heart of good natured insanity.

And it isn't just 'Alice'. There are so many other films that have that streak of insane brilliance running through them that you have to wonder whether Disney forced his artists to drop acid regularly. I mean, just look at this:

I used to be terrified of this one as a child. I remember leaving the room while this bit was on and returning for the concluding hymn. And damn it, I was right to be freaked out. Good heavens, that's really not the sort of thing you show children.

'The Sword in the Stone' does its bit to haunt kiddy dreams. The battle between Madam Mim and Merlin isn't in the same category as 'Bald Mountain', but it's still quite scary in a surreal way. Have a peek:

OK, fine, that was a pretty bad example, that's just fun. But don't tell me they weren't on something pretty whiffy when they made it.

And anyway, while that wouldn't scare a child, the 'escape into the woods' scene from Snow White would:

Even when they were trying to be playful, many scenes would come out as just weird and surreal. This was from my first Disney film - "Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day":

I was going to go on and make some kind of serious point regarding Disney. But at this stage, I'm not sure whether I'm arguing for or against Disney, or for that matter whether this post even needs a point. I'm just busy enjoying someone else's acid trip. Shut up and watch.