On the other hand, the film industry reports that the total US box office take every year has been $40 billion or so and rising for the past ten years
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
So if Americans took that money and they spent 75% of it on feeding people instead, that would be it Nobody in the whole world would be hungry It wouldn't even be an end to all movies, just *cutting back* on movies by 3/4
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
And this is, sure, kind of an obnoxious stat to throw around, because we won't do that and there's obvious reasons why berating some individual person to stop watching movies and give the money to charity is a waste of time and unfair to them
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
I personally like movies I don't think trying to divert money away from the film industry specifically by saying movies are mostly garbage (and the majority of movies that are made do suck) is going to be a winning PR move There's other places to find that $30 billion
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
The problem of course is that lots of people have their special interest (hence the term "special interest groups") and when they argue with each other they all say it's obvious someone else has too much money and you should take it from that guy over there and leave them alone
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
I think there's a lot of billionaires who need taxing, and I think there's a whole military-industrial complex that could use defunding Lots of people agree with me on that
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
The problem being the billionaires have trained attack dogs that fight viciously in their defense and the national security people have half the country convinced that relaxing the Pentagon budget even by a few percentage points will lead to their kids all speaking Mandarin
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
So we are where we are The problem is that I think very visible stuff like NASA, whose "practical benefit" is hard to articulate, becomes a lightning rod during hard times But I continue to maintain whether you love or hate space stuff it is not that big a deal
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I'm absolutely fucking disgusted by NASA because it epitomizes the fascist "cells of the body" view of humanity by justifying all current world suffering as a necessary down payment for some hypothetical glorious future for a handful of hypothetical people we will never be
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Well yeah Artemis, which was a Trump talking point in his campaign and which was approved in his first year, has a bit of that stench to it I think the stuff about Perseverance scoping out a site for a future Mars colony is the dumbest thing about it
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But "manned spaceflight" and the idea of "space colonization" I see as mostly orthogonal to the idea of "space exploration" and "space research"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
Manned space flight seems like mostly a pie in the sky idea or a weird strategic play that assumes people won’t give a shit about space unless it’s a human in a lil space ship doing things and space colonization sounds terrifying
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Replying to @Cybren @Nymphomachy and
If you really push space people on this a lot of them will straight up admit that astronauts are a "marketing stunt" That the admittedly very high investment of the Apollo missions paved the funding for decades of other, less glamorous space work later on
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