Yet Another Sale Abroad. Not a criticism of the YASA team. It’s hard to scale a company in the UK and foreign investment is a good thing in general. But still frustrating that the UK was unable to offer the kind of investment that Mercedes could to keep a company British.
Stephen Maturin switches from opium to coca leaves about halfway through the Master and Commander series (around 1800). Ensuring a steady supply of the leaves becomes a recurring theme as is his sharing of their wonders with the various scientific personalities he comes across.
There was at least one study during the pandemic that showed efficacy of these things. The problem for studies is knowing exactly how much they're used. I've used the Boots version in the UK for a long time on the basis that there's half decent evidence that it's effective and the only real side effect is on my wallet. It would be great to see a challenge study of these things but I'm going to keep using them regardless.
It's amusing that they actually use the word guild. If the medieval guilds had their way London would still only have one bridge. The irony here is that creatives have an advantage that workers in every other industry lack. Humans value and will continue to value artisinally produced goods. Creatives will always have that in a way that 18th Century weavers and spinners did not. That appreciation also leads to the creative industries being subsidised essentially everywhere in a way that is likely to increase over time rather than decreasing.
Will the rise of AI reduce opportunities for creatives? Almost certainly, but unlike essentially all other industries, it won't be wiped out by the rise of automation because humans won't stop liking things that are created by humans. As in music, there will be a shift to performance where customers / clients are engaged in the creative process. In many ways, it will be a return to something like the golden age of portraiture as people pay for engagement.
There are huge opportunities for creatives in the age of AI to create new art forms, created in new ways for new kinds of consumer. Creatives can choose to engage with that or to throw sabots. As London's liverymen show, guilds cannot stop the tide, the opportunity is to become something new that floats on the rising waters.
This. Entertainment is not a zero-sum game, people are quite happy to enjoy two great works rather than one. The margins of profit might be lowered, but so too will be the costs of production in AI.
> That appreciation also leads to the creative industries being subsidised essentially everywhere in a way that is likely to increase over time rather than decreasing.
Not only had it been decreasing for some time now, people are excited about making good-enough music in AI generators. I'm even surprised by your use of "subsidised" rather then "paid for".
We had a chance for the sponsors during the best times of Patreon. Now it's just going to get worse.
if it weren't from guilds all towers and bridges would have collapsed and Maritime trade world never have happened.
then, many centuries later, and land owner elite capture, the guilds become in England just an extension of the peerage system and then it becomes what that phrase above describes. btw most medical labour organizations today work like that protectionism scheme and nobody complain much.
It might well be neoliberal dogma but the rose that got walked through London last week by the Watermen is a reminder that it is also true.
People should complain much more about doctors’ guilds. There are limits on how many doctors can be trained in the US and the U.K. largely as a result of lobbying by doctors’ guilds. They’re called professional associations these days but let’s not pretend they confine themselves to enforcing professional standards.
There’s a line in one of the Aubury Maturin books, Clarissa Oaks when pumping the ship bilges, a sailor remarks, “she flows as clear and sweet as Hobson’s conduit”.
Fresh water was consumed in prodigious quantities in the Royal Navy, not least for watering down grog but also for extracting the salt from salted meats.
Other way around -- grog wasn't so much diluted with water as the grog was applied TO the fresh water as an antiseptic.
Fresh water on ships had typically been sealed inside a barrel for months or even years before it was consumed, growing all manner of unhealthy pathogens. Pre-germ theory people read this as "it smells and tastes bad," which is a pretty good first-order approximation of germ theory.
When you cut that contaminated water with alcohol, that greatly reduces illnesses from drinking it, especially in those whose GI systems are already somewhat adapted to tolerate the pathogens. Strong spices in grog such as cloves also helped mask the taste of drinking years-old barrel water.
It's the real disease of the EU. There's no problem of failed policy that shouldn't be addressed by deepening the policy and making it harder to back track. The only possible response to problems of complexity is to make the complexity more intractable.
The real shocker for me is that the authors completely ignore the difference between grid integration and market integration. They seem to hold a maximalist line where the market can and should drive planification of the power grid, and where "managerial-governance" can emerge from that abstraction.
