There is some skepticism from the economics writers, and more so in the Grauniad than the BBC or our local rags, but even there they're more vocal about Greece and close to silent on Britain.

I think the IMF deserves much more scrutiny from the press than it's had

Actually the whole thing reminds me of the 80s and Reaganomics, with the whole group think from the political classes and surprisingly little argument from anyone else.

Maybe they realised how pointless it was to point out the inevitable?

It is a long time ago, and I was quite young, but I don't even remember any Cassandras at the time... certainly our local newspapers all drank the kool-aid.

So the "E Corp" logo looks a lot like the Enron logo... I'm sure that was a complete coincidence

But yeah, looks like the writers actually talked to someone who understands the internet for a change.

Call me old school but the material is always so weak in most of these socio-ethnic commentary videos, for lack of a better term. They get an HD camera and some troupe and it all looks slick but rarely does anyone have a talent for writing something better than a college freshman could have produced. It usually ends up being a premise in search of a writer.

This kind of attitude is depressing. It's none of your business what someone does in their spare time when no one else is affected by it. There are functioning alcoholics turning up for work pissed, flying planes, driving buses, teaching children. But no, let's go after the guy who sits in his bedroom playing music with a joint. Let's prevent him from having a life, even if he is self medicating a mental illness. It serves him right - if he's got an illness, he shouldn't be using naturally occurring medicine like our ancestors have for thousands upon thousands of years, no! He should be paying hundreds of pounds to a big pharma company for a pill that they invented a few years ago.

The premise behind drugs testing people is based on many things i disagree with:
1) the spectacular failure of the war of drugs - not only has drug use increased in the timeframe, but it has ruined probably millions of lives, needlessly turning ordinary, hard working people into criminals for no good reason other than "we like this plant, but we don't like this plant, and now neither may you"
2) the origin of the war on drugs - which iirc from a well sourced and produced video on here recently was instigated by a vindictive racist who wanted to go criminalise things that were seen as "black people" pastimes
3) the bias of the war on drugs - where drugs associated with the poor and underprivileged are relentlessly pursued to the detriment of functioning happy families across the world, but drugs associated with rich white folk such as those boardroom jockeys who snort coke in the office bathroom, nah, give them an easy time
4) the american prison business - which demands a steady supply of low cost, low maintenance, low rights workers who have no choice in the matter
5) the spreading of disinformation through formal education/popular media, and lack of actual knowledge or experience of drugs - which has led to a generation of people who now firmly believe that the moment you inhale a particle of THC (or "inject 1 marijuana" to the uninitiated), your brain turns into a fried egg, and you immediately begin stealing, cheating, and peddling dangerous items to children

Some of the brightest and best humans were influenced and inspired by drugs. If i wrote a list of people that i had the greatest respect for and who i considered to have made a positive influence on the world, half of them would almost certainly be drugs users; and i mean scientists, writers and artists. Your philosophy is a detriment to society, but thankfully as the decades pass, there are less and less with that philosophy. I loathe being blunt, but there is nothing worse than someone who feels the need to dictate to others what they should and shouldn't do on the basis of what they personally do or don't approve of.

We might get about 90 years on this planet with a bit of luck - why the hell do the minority spend so much time trying to dictate to the majority what they do with that time? And why do the majority let them? What sort of control fetish is it that inclines people to want to do that?

This guy's life has been fucking ruined by your adopted philosophy towards drugs, and you offer to help him as long as he bends to your will? How magnanimous of you to stoop to gutter level to help a mere drug-addled cretin... I think he'd tell you to stick your job, he's overqualified to work under you.

So do you think the skits are funny?

You commented on one of her skits: "Is she really killing it, or is simply that the dearth of true comedy lately has lowered our standards to this point?"

making me think you think her skits are shit, but then you've since commented on two different videos that shes not funny but then give credit to her writers as if they are the ones responsible for her funny skits. Seems contradictory a bit. Why give credit to her writers if you think its shit comedy?

Tell us whats really going on with you and Amy? PM me if you dont want to talk about it publicly

Amy is not funny. She just has better writers now. Her stand-up routines and old comedy is terri-bad.

Pretty pessimistic and defeatist attitude there.

With displacement from various global warming issues, genocides, wars, and extreemists, we're ALL going to see influx of immigrants to our countries. If we can't figure out how to get along, and prosper together, the species, or at the very least civilization, is doomed.
I don't think anyone thinks it's surprising that a near homogeneous society is having trouble integrating new cultures, but to say it's impossible (and imply it will never work in other situations) is not only not true, it's quite harmful and fosters xenophobia in the extremes.
This writer comes from that homogeneous culture, and apparently believes America has the same thing today, a homogeneous culture...not understanding that the USA is comprised nearly SOLELY (since natives often remain separate and essentially non-citizens on the reservations...another topic for another day) of immigrants from every country and culture in the world, if we could not deal with immigrants from other cultures, we would never have existed.

So the lesson to be learned for Denmark : this CAN and HAS been done, even with a country of more than 300 million armed opinionated inhabitants and a population mix that runs the entire spectrum in nearly every way.

Excellent points. If you look back over the entire SNL catalog there is a lot of great stuff. It's also been on for 40 years or so so yeah there should be. I think SNL is used as a springboard for a lot of comedians and writers. For example, Larry David was a writer.

What do you think of Upright Citizens Brigade or Mr. Show? I looked up a list of sketch comedy shows and it reminded me that the Chapelle show was pretty great. I never thought of Benny Hill as a sketch comedy show (it is), but I loved it as a kid. Probably too slapstick for me now.

I attribute the this to her writers. Having heard her stand-up and seen her in roasts, she is not funny as a comedian.

No, a couple of polls have shown his viewers to be more knowledgeable about current events, not taking into account other possible sources of their information. Another poll showed the exact opposite regarding his coverage of the 2004 elections. The show's writers and Mr. Stewart himself both do not consider the program to be a source of actual news per their own statements.

The show covers news that it's creative talent wishes to satirize, which means if we are going to criticize Fox for skewing the outlook of it's viewers, we must point the same finger at TDS.

There is still plenty of optimistic sci-fi out there (Iain M. Banks Culture novels are probably the best example).

But the problem that most sci-fi writers have is that they're generally reasonably smart people who look at the world, look at what we're doing to it and say "yeah, we're fucked".

I have every confidence that if we worked together science could solve all the problems facing us today.

I have zero confidence that we will actually do that.

Related quote by writer Russell Banks:

"After living in Jamaica and writing The Book of Jamaica, I accepted that I was obliged, for example, to have African American friends. I was obliged to address deliberately the overlapping social and racial contexts of my life. I'm a white man in a white-dominated, racialized society; therefore, if I want to I can live my whole life in a racial fantasy. Most white Americans do just that. Because we can. In a color-defined society we are invited to think that white is not a color. We are invited to fantasize and we act accordingly."

If they have to write an essay about the art to define what I'm looking at, then they are a creative writer, not a visual artist.

I should be able to look at a piece, and get something out of it. Good feelings or bad, it should evoke something that makes me want to be part of it. Edward Munch and Francis Bacon, hell even HR Giger didn't make art that was feel good, but their works are amazing and evoke emotions that stay with you.

Fantastic joke writers but also fantastic comedic timing. She may have a knack for it, or she's a quick learner.

@dannym3141

It just felt like a bait and switch. They feed you in with in fact very plausible concepts of time dilation and black holes as we best know it, then hit you with a deux ex machinima so implausible that it makes my brain hurt.

I mean, we're meant to believe that future humans, in order to effect their continued existence create an eloborate, highly risky and convoluted system like this 'tesseract library' thing, with the completely unfounded apparent knowledge that Mcconaughey's character will both willingly jump into it and somehow know how to use it to communicate with his daughter, who will pick up on highly cryptic and unlikely signals, and know how to interpret them?

And then Mcconaughey's character also gets saved. Obviously. Why not just convey the information in a far more direct way? And by the way, I will say that the argument that there is a paradox (future humans save themselves in the past) that the video makes is not strictly true given Hathaway's team survives and it's plausible that while Earth perishes, their team eventually redevelops human society.

To me the way that the story suddenly becomes ridiculous at the end when the first half is so rooted in real actual science makes it pretty clear what happened. Some producer decided to overule the script writers and insert in an ending that is happy, sees the characters reunited lest they offend the crucial female demographic.