UnderpantsWeevil

I mean, the Bond franchise is only in the state its in because the original producers couldn't crank out more than one movie every seven years. That's embarrassing. And everything since Skyfall has been mid-to-crap, despite them throwing fortunes behind it and having a Chad like Daniel Craig at the helm.

That said, the parent company playing tug-of-war with the creative team over how to deliver the next edition in the franchise is a big reason why we get these annoying delays. But, at the same time, giving ten creative teams $50M to make their own entries in the franchise strikes me as a better move than giving one team $500M.

Thomas: "What are you going to do about it? Fire me?"

Amazon reportedly in favour of “Marvel-style” ideas to expand the franchise, such as spinoff shows and films.

Its not like there are a shortage of spy-thrillers bouncing around. I don't see anything immediately wrong with an MI6 extended universe, particularly if it lets younger and more unorthodox talent have fun with the setting. FFS, "Agents of Shield" and the Netflix TV street-level-hero spin offs were functionally thrillers in their own right. A lot of them were very good.

But there's so much wrong going on under the hood of the industry. More and more talent sacrificed on the alter of AI generated content (the Rings of Power generative dialogue/screenwriting was a horrifying example of how to waste $700M in acting/set design). More focus on special effects and less on cohesive storytelling or direction.

Like, if you got the writers room from Slow Horses to do a spin-off franchise called "009", I would be fully on board. But if its just going to be the franchise eating its own tail with forty different poorly adapted variations on Casino Royale... yeah, I can understand why there would be drama.

not his everyman background or happy family

He's going through a divorce and his kids hated him. But this isn't unusual for the "everyman" who climbs over a hill of his neighbors' corpses to get that brass ring.

Once you've gone from pleb to president, you feel entitled to certain things that only a visit to Little Saint James can provide.

"I slaughtered the living to make a profit and before that I worked in a meat packing plant."

But for most people, sex stuff feels bad in a way that rent-seeking doesn’t. You could make as many points as you want with irrefutable logic, flow charts, and diagrams, and it won’t get through the skittering heartbeat of “BUT IT FEELS BAD”

I wouldn't sell logic, flow-charts, and diagrams short. But its worth considering how much sex-negativity pervades Abrahamic Western culture up front. It isn't that we're devoid of logic when it comes to sex and business, its that we've been sold a bill of goods at a very early age. It feels bad because its been drummed into us as bad.

I don’t really know how to fix this.

It's difficult to balance, because the defensive social posture around sex is itself a social counterbalance to the aggressive instinctual impulse people can feel naturally. Leaving people to go full Lord of the Flies on their sexual urges leads to violence and fear and resentment. What we want is a more nuanced understanding of the sexual drive. But that's harder to achieve than blanket permission or blanket sanction. You want some kind of bureaucratic convention to apply, which gets you to institutions like marriage, but that gets you to the commodification of virginity which is its own can of worms.

If sex work was normalized, in a couple generations many people would probably feel fine about it.

I would argue that sex work is ultimately a negative externality of the rent-system broadly speaking. If you constantly need to generate income for basic essentials - food, shelter, energy, etc - then the people cartelizing those services become your defacto pimps. By contrast, if your basic needs are guaranteed, sex as a profession becomes something you can choose as an entrepreneurial passion rather than a lifeline for your survival.

The fixation on the sex work itself is the problem. What people need is public housing and utilities, guaranteed sustenance, and a pathway to a career of their choosing. That plus decriminalization removes the network of pimps that make sex work truly morally abhorrent.

If we got rid of all the oligarchs, we'd barely have anyone left.

incidents of actual terrorism and not people forgetting something in their bag

You're backing yourself into a corner, because you now seem to acknowledge TSA is doing something, you just think its a thing that only applies to "good" people rather than "bad" people.

And your rubric is contradictory. If the TSA stops you with a gun before you get on the plane, you get to say "My bad, please just let me off with warning" or they've failed at their jobs. But if you let someone with a gun onto a plane and then they hijack the plane, they've failed to stop a terrorist. How does a TSA agent stop a terrorist incident on these terms? Is the argument that the TSA is useless because terrorist attacks aren't being thwarted at the moment the individual passes through the metal detector?

air Marshalls and other increased security in the actual plane like hard locked cockpits

Are additional measures that help screen for less-conventional weapons and strategies. But, again, we seem to be using "stopped a terrorist attack" as only happening after it has begun. TSA isn't on board the planes, so there's no way they can ever do the thing you're giving Air Marshals and locked doors credit for.

That TSA as a first-stage screen reduces the number of incidents air marshals and door locks have to prevent as a last resort doesn't seem to matter.

For example, a sex worker can’t work from home if they’re a renter because leases have provisions banning illegal activity on the premises, she said. A sex worker setting up a working space for other sex workers is also illegal, so they’re not allowed to set up co-working spaces or purchase hotel rooms for one another.

The Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act, or Bill C-36, says that in Canada you cannot buy sex, advertise sex, make money selling sex, procure a person selling sex or talk about selling sex in public. Sex workers get an exemption for making money from and advertising sex.

This also prevents sex workers from working with third parties to help with advertising, find clients or run a business, Clamen added.

So, the sticky legal morass is the issue of the pimp (or, as it is more colloquially referred to, the Employer) who seeks to tax some or all of the sex worker's earnings as a condition of her doing business in the area. On the one hand, criminality affords the pimp more leverage by offering "protection" as a condition of rent-seeking the worker. On the other hand, a lot of what is being described above - acquiring working space, soliciting, contracting out sex workers, and extending credit to sex workers - is exactly what a pimp does, in practice.

What we're really getting boxed in by is the very idea of capitalist rent-seeking through the operation of a business. When you're selling anything else, the rent-seeking is considered a value-generating profit motive of an entrepreneur. But as soon as what you're selling involves sex worker's services, we realize what we're advocating is human trafficking.

The Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform’s website notes how Indigenous women, racialized immigrants and trans people, especially trans women, face disproportionately higher levels of policing regardless of their participation in sex work. “The criminalization of the sale or exchange of sexual services gravely exacerbates their stigmatization and marginalization,” the website adds.

You can trace this down a bit further and discover how many of these officers are themselves involved in the protection racket, extorting sex workers for money or outright assaulting them under cover of law by using the threat of an arrest as leverage.

Border security agents are using facial recognition software to identify sex workers and tie their online profiles or ads to their legal identification, Rothschild said. When these programs are successful at matching people’s faces to their ads, they can get banned from travelling to the United States for 10 years, or will have to pay $10,000 to be allowed to re-enter the country, they added.

The Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and its regulations prohibit anyone without Canadian citizenship or permanent residence from doing sex work and presumes migrant sex workers need rescuing rather than supports that enable them to make their own work decisions, according to the Alliance for Gender Justice in Migration.

This prohibition, combined with strict bylaws like the background checks required in Richmond, means sex workers in the most precarious positions are pushed further into the margins, Rothschild said.

The end result of these rules is to limit workers' freedom to travel, to earn income, and to accumulate property. And the goal of these policies - whether it is admitted to or not - is ultimately to compel these workers into underpaid (or outright unpaid) servitude.

The purpose of the system is its results. And modern laws around sex work are designed to compel people into unpaid labor.

The whole idea that it violates the terms of service of a company to not let them show things on my screen without my consent is insane.

Something something contract of adhesion something something. It is functionally a term of service to watch the whole body of content as a condition of watching any of it.

It’s like if every time you went to the grocery store, the employees held you down and force fed you a free sample, then banned you from the store when you started running away from them.

This effectively used to be how people would sell Time Share rentals. You would "win" a "free vacation" to a destination that hosted the time share. Then, in order to check in you needed to sit through a sales pitch that only ended when you agreed to purchase the unit you'd allegedly been awarded as a prize.

If you tried to leave the sales pitch prematurely, you were ejected from the venue.

The TSA part is equally effective as a metal detector is.

You're confusing the workers for their tools. Like saying I don't need a mechanic to fix my car, just a wrench and a jack.

It would mean several companies lose out on massive contracts for that fancy equipment, which is why it won’t happen.

The government kickbacks to hardware supplies isn't the reason you think TSA are being rude to you. And this stuff doesn't get meaningfully less expensive when businesses buy direct.

Two sides of the same coin. The distinction between the two is primarily whether you consider the information conveyed beneficial or nefarious.

Either way, Americans are already the most propagandized people on earth. You don't need to send people to college to indoctrinate them. You've got consumer-grade mass media doing the job just fine.