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Originally Posted by DaveB
 I'd guess that a good number of people who don't have computers or internet connections now are probably not huge moviegoers, anyway (the elderly, people without disposable incomes, etc.).
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Originally Posted by dontEATnachos
If you look at a lot of countries that have a history of being poorer than the US piracy is so brazen that it isn't even an issue. In China, Eastern Europe, and lots of other places, piracy is more omnipresent and acceptable and it doesn't take hi-tech for everyone. All it takes is one guy with BitTorrent and a DVD burner. Then they sell the pirated DVDs, books, etc. out of the backs of vans (or in some areas just in regular stores). Technology helps facilitate piracy but advanced technical knowledge is not required for piracy to thrive in poor economic situations.
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Originally Posted by devincf
There's a real disconnect from the white suburban tech savvy people here and the rest of the world. As an example, go to Harlem and see the booming business in DVD piracy because the people in the area are not downloading these movies.
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Originally Posted by EdHocken
He didn't say it wasn't. It was a major part, but not everyone was like that.
Also you forgot that farmers burned and destroyed crops in the idea that it could raise prices because there was no demand for anything. Frankly if you had money during that time you lived pretty damn well. |
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Originally Posted by ElCapitanAmerica
And those pirates probably download those movies from bit torrent in the first place.
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Originally Posted by EdHocken
No, because broadband isn't illegal.
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Originally Posted by EdHocken
Or just simply took a video camera into the theater. Don't tell me that shit still doesn't go on.
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Originally Posted by EdHocken
Another part of it is due to content control especially in places like China and Iran.
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Originally Posted by devincf
These people totally ARE regular moviegoers.
There's a real disconnect from the white suburban tech savvy people here and the rest of the world. As an example, go to Harlem and see the booming business in DVD piracy because the people in the area are not downloading these movies. |
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Originally Posted by Bancroft Agee
Put the numbers in perspective and you'll see how widespread it was. Even people that held on to paying work saw wages drop, work increase and prices soar. Why? Because there's 300 momo's waiting outside to take your job in an instant if you complain. At the worst of it, 1 in 4 Americans were out of work.
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Originally Posted by EdHocken
Prices did not sore during the Depression. They dropped tremendously due to the fact there was no demand for anything.
Yeah, wages and hours did get cut. But once again there was no demand, prices did not increase. And if there was no problem getting access to movies in China. Then what was all that noise about the firewall? |
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Originally Posted by EdHocken
And if there was no problem getting access to movies in China. Then what was all that noise about the firewall?
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Originally Posted by dontEATnachos
Yes, they do censor content and access to certain known internet sites that they disagree with but the government can't stop pirates from getting through the system.
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Originally Posted by Bancroft Agee
I've always been under the impression that the Chinese Gov pays only lip service to entertainment piracy. Is that off base? They're seemed more concerned with keeping the population in line and controlling the flow of propaganda.
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Originally Posted by Francis Wolcott
See, there's another thing there. One way or another, the modern world also includes a great deal of numbness and a sort o basic addiction to just be entertained. I don't think for many people convenience will be the first thing to go and I seriously doubt a lot of them will have any sort of awakening as a result of this.
Not long ago I was in Cuba and people of younger generations sort of implicitly no longer give a fuck about communism or whether Cuba will get better or anything. There's still a lot of smart people and hopeful people. But I got a deep sensation that many of them had given up already and so, they have their systems of knowing when stores have something to go there fast and they get their school stuff done with as much ennui as you can imagine, but that's it, and there's all the party and fun you can imagine. And they come from generations, even before Castro, of believing they are actually worthy and proud and striving to do the best they can (one of the reasons that revolution actually succeeded and didn't collapse as many others around the world did). I don't really see a lot of time passing from hypothetical collapse to Western World going into a basic stuck fuck-it mood, since it's already part of the zeitgest of our times. I can see systems of knowing what to do, and co-ops and whatever happening for food and whatnot... I also see a proliferation of youtube content and of flash games and of any type of time-consuming thing just to get to the next day. It's not like the actual infrastructure for that isn't already in place. That being said, I'm not exactly sure the world will collapse as it's expected/implied in this thread. And if it actually does, you should expect some sort of anarco-capitalism to emerge from it and not really think of it coming back. After the Depression and pretty much any other big historical event, the world never returned to what it was and if this goes to hell, then what we know of the world is over, entirely. I've been reading of Somalia a lot lately. It's interesting that in a way, even though they are still entirely screwed up and up-to-fuckedupness in African standards, the country got quantifiably better after the government's collapse. There are lots of IT companies and some entrepreneurs have done everything from lighting up the streets to opening schools and we are talking of Somalia, of all places. Any type of big crisis will still leave a lot of extremely rich people in the Western World, and there's no doubt a lot of them will step with varying degrees of altrustic to entirely selfish reasons. And considering how the only constant in all present governments is a sense of inefficiency, I doubt they'd survive. It wouldn't even be a revolution or a dissolution, just a transition to de facto irrelevancy. And if we are talking of a full hypothetical Depression scenario, it'd have to be a McCain win. I can very well imagine what Katrina like carelessness would do in a Depression. I can imagine drug dealers and clever CEOs being more "loved" in certain regions than all politicians. edit: note that my "it'd have to be a McCain win" was in reference to full hypothetical horrible scenario. I'm not entirely sure the world is collapsing and if it truly is, I'm not entirely sure an Obama administration could simply solve it. |
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Originally Posted by devincf
Also, I feel like people have overinflated concepts of what the Depression was like. It wasn't all Joads and Hoovertowns.
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| Depression 2009: What would it look like? Lines at the ER, a television boom, emptying suburbs. A catastrophic economic downturn would feel nothing like the last one. OVER THE PAST few months, Americans have been hearing the word "depression" with unfamiliar and alarming regularity. The financial crisis tearing through Wall Street is routinely described as the worst since the Great Depression, and the recession into which we are sinking looks deep enough, financial commentators warn, that a few poor policy decisions could put us in a depression of our own. It's a frightening possibility, but also in many ways an abstraction. The country has gone so long without a depression that it's hard to know what it would be like to live through one. Most of us, of course, think we know what a depression looks like. Open a history book and the images will be familiar: mobs at banks and lines at soup kitchens, stockbrokers in suits selling apples on the street, families piled with all their belongings into jalopies. Families scrimp on coffee and flour and sugar, rinsing off tinfoil to reuse it and re-mending their pants and dresses. A desperate government mobilizes legions of the unemployed to build bridges and airports, to blaze trails in national forests, to put on traveling plays and paint social-realist murals. Today, however, whatever a depression would look like, that's not it. We are separated from the 1930s by decades of profound economic, technological, and political change, and a modern landscape of scarcity would reflect that. What, then, would we see instead? And how would we even know a depression had started? It's not a topic that professional observers of the economy study much. And there's no single answer, because there's no one way a depression might unfold. But it's nonetheless an important question to consider - there's no way to make informed decisions about the present without understanding, in some detail, the worst-case scenario about the future. By looking at what we know about how society and commerce would slow down, and how people respond, it's possible to envision what we might face. Unlike the 1930s, when food and clothing were far more expensive, today we spend much of our money on healthcare, child care, and education, and we'd see uncomfortable changes in those parts of our lives. The lines wouldn't be outside soup kitchens but at emergency rooms, and rather than itinerant farmers we could see waves of laid-off office workers leaving homes to foreclosure and heading for areas of the country where there's more work - or just a relative with a free room over the garage. Already hollowed-out manufacturing cities could be all but deserted, and suburban neighborhoods left checkerboarded, with abandoned houses next to overcrowded ones. And above all, a depression circa 2009 might be a less visible and more isolating experience. With the diminishing price of televisions and the proliferation of channels, it's getting easier and easier to kill time alone, and free time is one thing a 21st-century depression would create in abundance. Instead of dusty farm families, the icon of a modern-day depression might be something as subtle as the flickering glow of millions of televisions glimpsed through living room windows, as the nation's unemployed sit at home filling their days with the cheapest form of distraction available. |
| US consumer confidence plunged to a historic low in December amid the rapidly deepening recession and the outlook for the next six months is "quite dismal," the Conference Board said Tuesday. The private research firm, which has been measuring consumer confidence since 1967, said the index tumbled to 38.0 in December from 44.7 in November due to the deteriorating economic conditions in the fourth quarter. Consumers' outlook for the first half of 2009 remains "quite dismal," and they see "only a modest recovery" in the second half of the year, said Lynn Franco, research director at the Conference Board. "The further erosion of the consumer confidence index reflects the rapid and steep deterioration of economic conditions that occurred in the fourth quarter of 2008," she said. The record 38.0 figure was lower than the prior low record of 38.8 in October, and was weaker than the 45.5 reading which had been forecast by analysts. |
