I applaud these guys and the work they're doing. Any bureaucracy, public or private, with access to a guaranteed income stream will grow like a tumor. The entire federal govt needs to be audited and gutted. The time for committees, reports and similar half measures is over.
Even taking your statement at face value, as a non-troll, this makes no sense.
Have you ever optimized a slow program? How do you do that? A popular approach is with a flamegraph. It shows the hot parts of the execution; what is burning CPU cycles. If we profiled federal government, we'd find 4 big areas of spending [1]. Social security, medicare, the military, and debt interest. In our flamegraph, these are big fat sections. If you're profiling a program, would you look at this and say, "oh i'm going to spend my time optimizing this function call which takes up .01% of the execution time?" no, you wouldn't (unless you're an intern).
But that's hard, which is why elon isn't doing it. Nobody wants to cut social security because then a bunch of old people would starve to death. Same with medicare. Defaulting on our national debt would be a bad look. And god forbid we give the military less money. So where does that leave us? Even if you truly believe elon cares about making the government more efficient, the approach doesn't make any sense. In the absolute most charitable reading of it, he's just incompetent and he's doing this for show to get some widely supported easy wins (let's get rid of the penny and save $86M/y!) so people will like him. But the more realistic viewing is that he's gutting programs in order to further his own agendas, which is literally the definition of corruption.
There's a saying "don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" but you don't become the richest man in the world by being incompetent. You become the richest man in the world through malice.
There is still a sensible positive interpretation. It's possible that the distortionary economic and geopolitical effects of this spending both domestically and abroad has just as severe or worse negative externalities as items with larger budgets. Those externalities could range from inflation, displacing local industries and organic fundraising mechanisms, enabling rent-seeking corruption, overproduction of idle elites, instilling self-crit degrowth ideation, and political polarization/backlash abroad (My Japanese relatives now have a very dim view of Rahm Emanuel and Biden due to their USAID type activities and strings-attached diplomacy of paternalistic progressive cultural imperialism).
A reverse Keynesian effect you could call it - where there are second-order deadweight loss effects from "NGO" grift make-work complex, rather than a synergy.
Good luck, whenever an eyepopping number gains traction in the media finding the source of the claim become impossible. See finding the original paper named, "The Big Payout" that was the origin for the claim that college graduates will on average earn 1M more than those who don't go.
Huh? I did a quick search and everything I can find says the relationship among the 3 build team members was very close and positive, that they were all close friends. They went on to do a show together on Netflix. Maybe some of the later episodes give the impression that there were tensions but I don't see anything attesting to that.
I don't know. I watched the show, but wasn't by any means a superfan or something.
In the last season or so of the build team, the dynamics had changed. Keri and Tory, who had gotten along fine before, seemed unable to keep their dislike of each other out of the show. It went from "Okay, that's a pretty funny prank" to "You are actively trying to hurt each other." At least as I recall it.
I don't know, maybe they worked it out. But I do recall a season or so that was genuinely uncomfortable to watch, because of the dynamics between people on the show - and it was a distinct change from previous seasons.
Here’s another hypothesis: none of it was real, but rather manufactured drama in an attempt to drive up ratings. If those seasons were reformulated for mainstream, that would be the simplest explanation about how both things can be true.
The CCP has a propaganda and spying tool in the hands of 170M Americans. Yet the new Administration is more interested in playing politics than taking necessary steps to secure us against our primary adversary.
It's not just Trump though. Neither the Republicans nor Democrats are taking the China threat seriously enough. The CCP must be destroyed.
There are major changes coming to H-1B. If I were dependent on it either as a worker or employer, I would start making contingency plans immediately. The Trump admin and its core constituency are most united on immigration issues, so the political will is there. Any nascent challenge to that will has been utterly crushed in my view as MAGA decisively won the past week's debate on X against the Musk/Vivek libertarian contingent. Beyond the emerging consensus on the Right though is how well anti H-1B messaging plays with the Left. And the existential H-1B threat to the white collar worker means that influential segment of society will be rooting for its downfall, some more loudly and more conspicuously than others.
Overall a perfect storm of political consensus and will. The cherry on top is the ease with which the program can be curtailed or limited. It's not like solving healthcare... All of this points to major immediate action.
Did they? Trump just recently made a couple of statements, siding with Musk on that issue. He has no other choice, as money comes from Elon, not from MAGA.
He also reversed his stance on EVs during his campaign, openly admitting that he had to due to Elon's contributions. So basically, Elon is the president now.
Right, it's so simple to make a good Bond film once you accept that you need to give the people what they want, people here being actual Bond fans (not "society") and what they want being classic male escapist fantasy.
This push to "modernize" Bond is regressive once you realize male desire has not changed and thus there is nothing to modernize. Depictions of a cool spy dude getting beautiful women to fall for him is not "sexist" and not in need of modernization.
More generally the "modernization" angle is all about making the films which appeal to both men and women, which is a losing proposition for Bond which is fundamentally a franchise for men. You are always going to create a more compelling piece of content by tailoring it to a specific group, and the vast gulf in the sorts of content men and women tend to enjoy (generalization of course with many exceptions, but generally true nonetheless) means any bridge spanning that gap will be flimsy and weak.
Mission Impossible scratches most of my Bond itch, and it doesn’t really have a lot of the womanizing stuff. What I want from Bond is for someone to steal a space shuttle.
While I agree on the itch scratching. I also don’t necessarily feel like the type of womanizing I see in bond is a display of toxic masculinity. So, just because MI can be enjoyed without it doesn’t mean it needs to be culled in our modern world. I’m not a super fan but my impression/memory is most of the women that are being womanized are also extremely capable, strong, powerful, even deadly women and they’re usually always flirtatiously consenting in their exchanges. While I don’t need it, it does give me a different understanding of bond as a person/character than I know of the MI guy whose character’s name or personality outside of the mission I can’t even recall from memory.
Bond is a holistic character. He’s whole life is a male fantasy. He’s suave , has an awesome job, cars, adventure, fights, etc. MI is just doubling down on the action and adventure part highlighting the physical capabilities of the main character. You don’t really care about his personality (perfect role for Tom Cruise imo)
In any case, I feel like it’s become normal to characterize all masculinity as toxic and statements like yours is kind of like the “people who say only bad guys worry about privacy” to put a HN tech spin on it. You allowing and excusing it in a way and I feel like it’s a slippery slope
You can have sexy women in your movies without being sexist. No one, aside from some crazy weirdoes, is telling men not to be horny. A lot of the bond girls are really boring characters that just exist to get fucked. Pierce Brosnan's character in The Thomas Crowne Affair is not that far off from his Bond persona but his love interest is an actual character and that movie is so much hotter.
Yesterday on NPR they said that during last 2 decades number of movies with sex decreased 40% and mentioned Marvel as a showcase. I guess that is modern escapism - very neutered, no sex and a lot of pointless and senseless, in all senses, [imitation of] violence. And judging by how much money it gets - that is what audiences want.
Yes please? If only TV and movies would show the full range of human sexuality and not just cater exclusively to the vanilla fetish crowd. To quote the immortal words of the Joffrey gif from Game of Thrones, “talk shit get hit” can be comedic, dramatic and, in a well-crafted context, sexy content in a movie. Romance novels and fanfic have been well aware of this for an eternity, and certainly pull no punches when it comes to people slapping.
The issues with Bond are that he’s uniformly portrayed by white men who are only portrayed sleeping and slapping women. Give us a Bond who sleeps and slaps men with the same abandon that he does women, and interest in Bond movies will go through the roof. And:
An intelligence agency that only employs straight male secret agents is an intelligence agency doomed to fail from the start. I have to hope someday that the Broccoli family grows a spine someday and shows us a Bond who is a woman, being just as much of an arrogant slut as Sean Connery’s Bond. They did a great job with that Bond, and certainly that’s a desirable archetype! It’s just gotten boring and overplayed to see that leading Bond role manner only played by the same boring and overplayed white men for decades now.
> An intelligence agency that only employs straight male secret agents is an intelligence agency doomed to fail from the start. I have to hope someday that the Broccoli family grows a spine someday and shows us a Bond who is a woman, being just as much of an arrogant slut as Sean Connery’s Bond. They did a great job with that Bond, and certainly that’s a desirable archetype! It’s just gotten boring and overplayed to see that leading Bond role manner only played by the same boring and overplayed white men for decades now.
There was a scene in The Americans where the husband and wife Soviet agents talked about / reminisced about their training. And that to the Soviets, sexuality was just another tool in the box. If you're seducing for the job, what does it matter? The husband was taught about seducing men, and the wife women, as much as the opposite sex (this is not an attempt to simplify / reduce sexuality, just how it is portrayed in the show).
The load-bearing word “is” here overlooks a rather striking imbalance (pun intended). I’m picturing two supercuts and the one where Bond hits men and is hours long, versus the one where Bond hits women and is ten or fifteen minutes long at best. So, yeah, “is” — but was there some argument you intended to make that your statement supports?
> Mads Mikkelsen says 'Casino Royale' director told him and Daniel Craig to stop improvising during a nude torture scene
It turns out that the actors tried to advance the needle here, and make it into a psych torture and have it be more than just a basic rudimentary beating! But no, “it’s a Bond movie”, sigh, and so what could have been a deeply uncomfortable and memorable scene was neither.
I've lived with a Bond fanatic before, and still have on my shelf a complete collection of every Bond movie. So, did I rewatch fragments of a bunch of Bond movies through a slapcut alone? No, thank you, that's a complete waste of my time. I'm already rather familiar with the source material, and I'm pretty sure I've seen that supercut before. Still, though. Can you imagine how much more entertaining Roger Moore's Bond would have been if he used a martial art centered around slaps, and did so completely in character with no acknowledgement that it's wildly funny to Bond lovers? I would love to see that, no matter what the characteristics of the lead.
Bond slapping people is about power and control fantasies. Bond was created at a time when women were finally wielding power of their own again in modern culture, and showed what was appealing to the men whose desires preceded the rise of women having power independent of men. Decades have passed since that moment in time, but Bond has remained fixed in stone, with only the barest concessions to reality, using women just as he always has - that is, needlessly different from how he uses men, without any cause other than stereotypes inherited from the 1950s.
The power fantasy of Bond is that Bond is a high-functioning sociopath, who has no problem using people for whatever meets their needs and then discarding them utterly. That power fantasy used to be the exclusive privilege of straight white men. That is no longer the case. Seeing all Bonds be straight white guys who only slap women is boring. That power fantasy is played out and dull and on its way out. I don't care if some Bonds are straight white dudebros, but it sure would be a lot more in character if they slapped everyone – and it sure would be a lot more in character if some of them slept with non-women on screen — and it sure would be a lot more in character if some of them weren't white.
Asking an intelligence agency to stop sending people to hit people for information is nonsensical. Only showing people reacting by providing the information is also nonsensical. There are quite enough people out there that would bust out laughing at that attempt, not to mention a few that would outright try to bite his hand off the next time he swung at them. I do respect that the mores of the time were afraid to show Bond actually punching a woman, but with all due respect, that was, rounding up, about a hundred years ago. Intelligence agencies have moved ahead with the times. Yes, I pointedly mean that Bond should be doing just as worse to the women as to the men, when it comes to getting information — whether that's slaps, punches, CBT, or buying them champagne and getting their shirt off.
There's a lot of us waiting in the wings to see the exact Bond power fantasy portrayed in that slapcut, by people that we can imagine ourselves being. Generic white guy #12 is not going to qualify, no matter how cool he is. (And let's face it: Foghorn Leghorn is a much better detective than Bond anyways.) Focusing on slapping is a distraction from the real problem: Bond was created, and has been maintained since, as a sociopathic power fantasy for straight white men alone. Until that broadens to represent that exact fantasy for others, I see little hope for the future of the franchise.
Don't change Bond-the-sociopath. Just remove the artificial restrictions on Bond's skin color and gender, and who he slaps, hits, flirts, and sleeps with.
I don't have a problem with people being flawed even if they seem like the hero in other ways. Happy to see her slap him back too ...
I worry sometimes we're headed for a situation where media and stories are almost whitewashed. There are some fandoms I'm into where fans go through past books and raise issues where "isn't this character being a bully here" and the answer is kind of... but they're also a kid at that point and kids do say mean things ... that's reality.
The problem with all this “modernisation” (what a euphemism) stuff going on in entertainment is that you’re trying to transform and change existing characters and franchises.
It’s just a money grab to capitalise on existing characters with existing fan bases.
Inevitably it’s ruined. Bond fans aren’t watching Bond movies thinking “this is sexist”. LoTR fans aren’t reading a fantasy series with influences from Christianity and a white guys experience in WWI thinking “we need more representation of people of colour and genders”.
The solution to this is also trivial: Forget all the old stuff. Write new characters and stories. Or build fans for modern works.
We’re already seen this done: Avatar (not the blue alien one), Dragon Prince, Wheel of Time.
Roger Moore is my favorite James Bond. And so is my 15-year-old son's. Yes, his behavior is old school and wouldn't be tolerated in modern times. So what, he doesn't appear in a movie set in modern times.
This "modernization" of characters is failing in most franchises because it alienates the old viewers without doing much for new ones. It creates Frankensteins that please nobody, typical "by committee" designs.
Instead of changing Bond, Amazon should be trying to create a new Bond that will capture the current generation's imagination like the old Bond did decades ago.
OP is saying that the old Bonds (Connery, Lazenby, Moore) were suited to male tastes that haven't changed since, thus the attempt to modernize Bond is misguided at best.
What I'm saying is that my (male) tastes have modernized, that the male tastes that made old Bonds popular are tastes I find gross and unrealistic today, and I don't feel like I'm alone.
I think the specifics are less important than the general tastes in this case, men still want to be highly trusted international "spies" gallivanting across the world fighting evil with women lusting after them every stop of the way, it's just that the details as to what that looks like have changed.
I think the Craig movies are the high point so far of the series for a variety of reasons. They still have the swaggering machismo of Bond, but with more varied and interesting consequences. Bond still gets laid, but it's not treated as a mid-mission diversion (or post-mission reward) to which Bond is entitled. Craig proved there's lots of modernizing that can be done without touching the core conceit of being a 00 agent.
I agree! Whatever else they are from a critique standpoint, I absolutely love how they’ve modernized the Bond-the-slutty-sociopath role into something that’s actually plausibly what I would expect to find in today’s reality. They did beautiful work with that aspect of modernization and the Craig movies are most memorable of all of them to me now (though I will always hold a fondness in my heart for LASER BEAMS IN SPACE).
They did not do so well with modernizing any of Bond’s skin color, gender, or bedroom scene co-stars; nor did they portray him assaulting women for information like he would men.
I seem to remember on one of the special features on the DVDs that they needed to change to a lighter more comic style with Moore because of the reaction to the Vietnam War.
Dude hate to hit you up with it but whole Bond is about being unrealistic just like Santa Claus.
Being masculine in unrealistic way is part of the fun. Just the same as cars with machine guns in the hood or wrist watch with laser cutting through things.
It is like nagging that in Star Wars explosions in space have sound and are not like actual explosions that would happen in space…
There's degrees of "unrealistic" though, and it's tied to how relatable the Bond is. The old Bonds were a mixture of action hero spy guy and Playboy-style gentleman. Over time, the Playboy lifestyle has aged poorly and finally been peeled away from Bond.
Now, you can argue that formula for Bond was unique, and what differentiates him from Bourne or Reacher, and worth keeping for that reason. But against that, you have the fact that I and a lot of other viewers find the Playboy lifestyle to be a really silly and distasteful fantasy that seems uniquely laughable now, and far harder to suspend disbelief for than generic action hero stunts.
Being killer machine is not distasteful? Like killing people with a pencil is cool yeah right…
Being able to pick up hot women is totally not cool?
My theory is fantasy about killing people is OK because it doesn’t happen - no one is really facing situations where they would have to be in „for life or death” fight.
Being around opposite sex or having actual sex happens and it is tough on people who feel less attractive or feeling inadequate - and feeling inadequate happens awfully often and people don’t want hot movie star to remind the about their shortcomings.
While I think this misses the above poster's point (Bond has always been a masculine-in-a-heterosexual-way fantasy, and going against that would alienate a majority of his core audience) it would be interesting to have a Jack Harkness type of Bond.
The post doesn’t definitively answer whether Bond is bisexual but argues for the importance of acknowledging the possibility. It highlights how the franchise’s ambiguity opens the door for diverse interpretations, inviting viewers to see Bond through their own lenses and experiences.
