Take this with grain of salt. After seeing how American did 2020 election with so many centurians that would put Japanese to shame and chasing out observers with lots of luggage votes, I am disinclined to read anything about democracy by American media, especially WAPO.
Russia is good friends with China. USA research and universities are saturated with China Chinese. Good luck with keeping secrets. Russia and China alread able to shoot down F35. Have more nukes. Have hypersonic missiles. Ablr to take out American satelites. Supply chains and raw materials absolutely trounce USA with even NATO support. Saudi now doing non petrodollar. USA 400K troops decimated in Afghan. Dedolarisation is happening making USA dominant in 75% world teansaction now drop below 50% (according to official world numbers and below 40% in unofficial like India/Russia/China trades that not registered in the west). USA couldnt even make phones and TVs properly. Every single American wunderwaffen destroyed by Russian. That is entire Nato against 1 Russia (ok maybe supported by NK Iran and China?). USA natural adavantage? Like isolated? That works against her as well. Just go down to Mexico and have a look. Dominate by Chinese firms all the way to Peru and Brazil. I can pick any Chinese citizens that can speak 2 to 3 languages. It is extremely hard to so to pick Americans like that. In fact depend on locations, you get tons of non-English speakers inside USA. USA couldnt even get enough military recruits since many years. Official military troops are so weak, they have to outsource to security contractors. What about drone game changer? American globalhawks just pissed by SU and crashed. DJI able to outproduce entire NATO drones production by several folds. Military you will find it hard anyone to acknowledge USA now is number 1. Industrially, China is several magnitude of USA. Even so mamy F35 components can be traced back to Russia and China. The titanium and aluminium air frame? And how about gold reserve? Have anyone really believe any gold in Fort Knox? Hint, if you have friends working in Fed, might want to check why so many physical gold being shipped out of USA to Shanghai every month. Even Olympics, you see so many Americans on asthma meds and still lost to Chinese.
Allowing Russia to join NATO would nullify WW3. Disbanding NATO and separately signing FTA or allowing EU to do so would also prevent WW3. Heavily dependent on China and not use billions to fund disinformation will also prevent that. CIA taking out Netan will also prevent that instead of pouring more bombs to replenish Netan's troops. All in all, it sure looks like USA wholely wants WW3.
It is getting smaller. Your insistent it is not is weirdly just your specific opinion. I ate fornlike consistently over 30 years. Shrinkage is very observable.
You need to check American gold stockpiles. That is currently holding down gold price. China is actively dwindling American gold by making it mandatory physical delivery to China. We will see how long America can play this. When the gold stockpiles truly emptied gold price will spike. Attrition includes ability to produce. If you run our stockpiles, how you peoduce?
Job market isnt that rosy as government stats show. Just go to any foodbanks and see for yourself the queue. Remember no one audit government numbers. All the numbers are essentially "trust me bros".
My partner has been volunteering at a food pantry here in the US northeast since mid-2020. The numbers have remained fairly constant, aside from regular seasonality.
Your salary comes from that. So too is your Internet. Maybe you are being hypocrite? To be human, we destroy. The only way is to die out and let nature take her course. Agent Smith in Matrix said summed it best that we are virus on this planet that need to be eradicated.
That seems reductive. Are you a slave owner if your shirts were made in sweatshops? You certainly contribute to the problem, but i don't think your a hypocrite if you use modern features of life - nearly all negatively impact. The alternative is living in the woods off grid - and likely illegally, since you can't afford to buy the land without also being a hypocrite in most locations.
I think there's a middle ground where you acknowledge there's a problem, try in some part to mitigate your contribution and build the world you want to be.
We don't have to be all-in on sweatshops and environmental destruction just because we in some part contribute to the problem as well.
True, but it seems more than possible that we could self-regulate to minimize the harms done
More on point, it is absolutely critical that we self-regulate, because if we fail to do so, eventually, nature WILL regulate us into oblivion. Our existence depends on an insanely complex web of life. As with any robust network, many nodes and connections can be damaged and the system will still work. But keep damaging nodes and connections, and eventually, the system cannot recover — it will break down and may die off completely. When that happens, no human technology will save our species.
And the self-regulation is happening. We may very well be on a path where improving technology gets us through to a far less destructive life mode. More education, security, and rights causes birth rates to decline. Sustainable energy production is now cheaper than digging up fossil fuels, transporting them across the globe and lighting them on fire. Lighting is 10X more efficient, etc. etc. etc.. Intentional efforts to save species and ecosystems often see them recover faster than expected.
The only question is whether we have the luck and political will to make this transition happen fast enough to get to a sustainable energy & materials economy before a critical collapse.
Asimov Foundation books near impossible to adapt to TV series or movies. It has no typical hero's arc. Even in Gibbon's Rome book you able to follow say Nero rise and downfall. As a generic idea book, Asimov books were ahead of his time. As a good scifi novel? He was several magnitudes below Cixin - and majority would even place Ursula way way higher than Asimov. Apple Foundation literally blast through Asimov story telling. To me, at least Apple succeeded as YA or within a potshot of Cixin. Asimov literally failed in adult scifi by today's standard. What holding you is nostalgia. Evaluate the story in contemporary terms.
I've read the "Second Foundation trilogy" written by other renowned sci-fi authors, as well as the later Foundation books written by Asimov. They had typical main characters with hero's arcs driving the story. I much preferred the originals.
Especially the first book. It's refreshing to read a story where events occur because of unstoppable historical forces instead of the superhuman actions of a hero.
If I wanted a story about a hero, I could read...well...just about any other book ever written.
A book doesn’t, and Foundation makes excellent use of every inch of the novel as a medium to explore itself, but the commenter above was specifically referring to what made the book difficult to adapt into a television series. And while Malick et all can def do “rumination on a theme” as a feature film, an ongoing tv series requires the audience to invest and keep coming back week after week, episode after episode.
Generally that takes the form of characters who experience things — ideally growing or changing in response, although many genres and formats don’t require that part. It’s unnecessary since part of the medium of television, unlike the novel, is people putting on a show to entertain you which is different from reading, an inherently more-individual experience. Part of what TV is selling is a group of people to hang out with every week. Generally.
Which is not to say always — shows like Twilight Zone and Tales from the Crypt proved the anthology format has a wide audience. But they had the advantage of a brand new paradigm each week, which creates a relationship with the show itself (but even TZ allowed the audience Serling).
Foundation def be done as anthology style episodes with some crossovers/overlap, but again practical realities make it difficult to guarantee narratively-necessary access to actors due to contract and scheduling factors, and you have the issue of both too big for standard structure and “not big enough” for a true anthology at its core. Not saying it couldn’t work it’d just be more difficult, which is not a quality that makes studios likely to invest.
I think your description of television much better fits the mould of 90's network TV (24 weekly episodes per year) than prestige era limited series or narrative arc TV. Foundation could absolutely be done as an anthology show in the vein of American Horror story - where each season covered an era of an unfolding narrative, with characters like Hari Seldon and R.Daniel recurring as audience favourites.
Either way though, there are issues with the adaptation that are quite distinct from eschewing the episodic arc of the original trilogy. It's full of spiritual woo for one, which is entirely antithetical to Azimov's vision. It's also more than fond of sadistic violence. Azimov's whole method as a writer was to have smart characters solve difficult problems intellectually. 'Violence is the last resort of the incompetent' after all.
I hear where you’re coming from, but you will note that AHS, while being an anthology, pulls continuously from the same group of audience favorite actors — which goes back to the “people putting on a show” variant I described above. The audience has a relationship with those actors. Very meta, as befits a Ryan Murphy shindig.
That recurrence that wouldn’t be possible for a Foundation series without suggesting characters themselves are repeating through time, which would seem to lean even harder into woo, which I’m sensing is not your bag.
Agreed - but as I said with Foundations specifically, that you could change the characters each series and keep your anchor characters (i.e.: those that live on literally by being robots, or through projection). It's also pretty amenable to cutting back and forth in time. In other words multiple parallel timelines, which a number of shows have pulled off. There are enormous underserved audiences for clever complex formally innovative TV, and a whole bunch of money going into fluff that (at least in Apple's case, seems like it isn't drawing an audience now - let alone in future rereleases, as the prestige shows of the 90s did).
What's so interesting about Cixin? I could barely finish the books.
On goodreads Foundation (which IMHO is not even among the best Asimov works) is rated noticeably higher than The Three Body Problem, and as a reader I feel it is justified.
If you take into account the novelty factor, it will probably sink to the average rating of mediocrity in a couple of decades.
Having read all of Azimov - but only the Dark Forrest trilogy by Liu Cixin, I actually think they're more comparable than you suggest. Both are hard science fiction 'ideas men'. Fairly uncomfortable with deep characterisation or 'literary' writing. Capturing vast scopes of time and space in space operas that are somehow more charming and interesting than their broad scope and concept heavy setups have any right to be. Azimov is more of a well rounded intellectual - the man literally wrote hundreds of general knowledge and popular science books. And it shows in his depth of reference and context. Cixin seems more rooted (inevitably) in authoritarianism and historicism. These critiques are obviously subjective. I've greatly enjoyed the work of both, but Cixin has a long long way to go before he can demonstrate the longevity let alone influence of an Azimov. They do share one other thing in common though - the adaptations of their work have been enormously disappointing, arguably entirely missing the point of the original series.
Re: A hero's journey, hard disagree. There are numerous heroes in the original foundation series, and the later books have one very well drawn one - Golan Trevize, in addition to a host of memorable characters.
Ths error is on indiviual IT department to allow Crowdstrike DIRECT access to their system without check and balance. Have they just delay update by 1 day, they will not get affected. Clearly the CIO allowed extrrnal company to have the power to flip the off switch. Then again, we now see the wisdom of Xi and Putin. Diversity is good!
This kind of numbers are not auditted. Might as well a journalist fake the numbers while in washing room cubicle (happened before). So just take this reading litely.
