radiodespieds

[radiodespieds]

The 4-Hour Freewheel

I don’t often write book reviews, but as both a chef and an instructional designer, I have some specific feedback for this one. The 4-Hour Chef, by Tim Ferriss, purpots to do a lot of things : teach you how to cook from novice to master-level, teach you to survive in the wilderness, teach you the science of cooking, teach you how to teach yourself any topic. Unfortunately each of these things try to take up so much space in this book that they prevent the others from working at all. And at every point, Ferriss will earnestly interrupt what he’s explaining to bring you an anecdote about his wild, awesome life.

Cuisine

Let’s start with the core promise of this book : the cooking. Instead of a recipe catalogue, Ferriss has done the smart thing here and organized a training course, starting with the easiest, lowest-equipment dishes. He thus avoids the pitfall of most cookbooks for true beginners, which dump a pile of recipe on you and leave you to sort through. These structures don’t foster progression or learning in the reader : either you’re already skilled and you’ll pick the recipes that inspire you, or you’re a beginner and you’ll forget about the book after 2 or three less-than-perfect attempts. The 4-Hour Chef, in comparison, gives you a plan spread out over several months, where you only commit to the titular 4 hour every week, with a clear sense of progression and an enticing goal. The 4-Hour Chef also makes sure to walk you through the often-forgotten non-food activities in cooking : prep first, cleaning, minimizing multitasking, entertaining people, managing inventory, etc. Topics that are almost always omitted by cookbooks, even though their absence quickly turns cooking into hell.

And if you go into his 2-meals a week plan as a novice, you will indeed graduate in your cooking. The book doesn’t try to cram all of one cuisine’s basics into you and only feature recipe designed by Ferriss to fit in the plan, which is a good thing unless you were planning to staff at a bistrot or a trattoria. Many of his recipes are “hacked” in a way to require only the skills you have already mastered from your progress in the book, so some might not make the best of their ingredients until after the first few weeks, like the unseared lamb in his Osso “Buko”, the first recipe, but they all sound appetizing. Plus, chefs of any skill level benefit from remembering how far you can pare down a dish and have it still taste amazing.

There are some very odd choices here and there : sous-vide is a very interesting technique and it can teach you about the way meat really cooks, but it is really in its place in the basics section (first part out of four) of the learning plan, given how much effort it requires when you don’t have the equipment ? Does a two-kettle, digital scale, hand grinder and thermometer coffee really fit the theme of minimal equipment, progressive skill level ? If you’ve been cooking at a good level already, you’ll also know that cleaning as you go requires more than just a bonus afterword at the end of the first section. There’s also a few outdated cooking tips, but the book is from 2012 and it’s nothing major. The few relatively unknown neat tricks that are sprinkled throughout the recipes will help balance these stumbles out.

Fortunately, you’re free to skip anything that doesn’t make sense, and a difficulty spike sometimes benefit learning. And you will have to skip some, because by the end of the Domestic section (stylized as DOM, everything has to be short-handed here), you’re supposed to master the basics and be able to graduate up an order of magnitude closer to being chef-level cook. With only 14 lessons and 7 bonus activities, will definitely leave you unprepared for these ambitions (but maybe not demotivated ? depends on the person), especially for the two next levels : Hunting/Foraging and Modernist cooking. Both of these would indeed make better chefs of any of us who haven’t dived into it, and they are technically achievable for many households, though the fare on this cooking journey is starting to be extremely steep. It’s becoming clear at that point that Ferriss is optimizing for calendar compression and woah factor, not for money (or man-hours) : even following the most budget-friendly alternatives he proposes, he’s still inviting you to spend thousands of dollars over a few months. And that’s fine, as long as you understood that was the point of the book ; my issue is that even with a 700-pages book, you’re still left very short in any of the 4 sections. Each of them would require their own tome or possibly several in order to realistically bring you close to proficiency, especially with the book’s structure of a learning course rather than a recipe catalogue. (Which again, is a good choice of structure. It would just need to take up more pages in order to work.).

[Sidenote : I’d be tempted to present the last recipe of the book, Carpe à L’Ancienne (or as it’s , as another example of badly-paced teaching, but it’s made pretty clear in the book that it wouldn’t be an easy feat even for serious followers of the book method. Rather, it’s good entertainment to read about a recipe so ridiculously lengthy and pricey, for a result that most people wouldn’t enjoy anyway. It’s one of few recipes that you won’t feel guilty about not making but will still read to the end. However, its presence kind of makes you wish there would be a graduating exam recipe (or dinner party), one that’s actually geared towards the skills that the book professes to teach.]

Studying historical texts

The main problem here aren’t the random difficulty spikes or the imperfect advice, though. What sends me up the wall is the whole damn book wrapped around the cooking.

Part of it is the writing style, systematically peppered with clichéd expressions that an extremely-online positive-thinking man would have thought cool in 2012. Saying these fall flat would be an understatement, making the reader wince in second-hand embarrassment is more like it ; but again, the book is indeed from 2012, this is what to expect when working on historical texts.

The content itself though, could make you go as far as grinding your teeth in annoyance. Even if you start only at the actual recipe section (a good hundred pages in), you will regularly be interrupted right in the middle of an explanation so that Tim Ferriss can take his Very Important Tone and tell you about this awesome person he’s met and became friends with, or about an adventurous anecdote where he seems to think his self-deprecating humor will hide the bragging. Less often it’ll be some random factoid, and quite a few times it’ll be about having sex with women. Which is a weird thing to interrupt a cooking advice column for, especially while implying that the two topics might be essential to each other. Does the meatloaf recipe really require an explanation about how your friend’s wife gives her husband regular blowjobs ?

There’s the diet and supplementation advice, which I don’t take too much offense from : it’s written in the 2010s lifehack diet era, and follows the model of making big promises backed up by early, limited data and hopefully is not taken too seriously by contemporary readers. The science is likely to be very outdated, especially in its most hack-y promises. The “slow-carb” model that Ferriss championed in his other book The 4-Hour Body and uses here as a base for his claims, did not take hold in the world of diets. He does not go into the details in this book, but it seems to be mostly a low glycemic index diet, where small amount of low-GI carbs are allowed. GI-oriented diets seem to work often enough, but they have come under scrutiny for their unreliability and the incomplete picture they give of nutrition. His supplement advice, centered on compounds that were not very studied at the time, is also likely to be very outdated. Then there’s Ferriss obsession with raising testosterone, which, unless you’re a man with a low-testosterone condition, should not be a primary concern, and belongs to the a weird conception of masculinity that’s all muscle and attraction.

Is that how you learn to write ?

The first thing you’ll read when you open the book without skipping is the worst offender of them all : the pedagogy section. Just like the cooking sections, the points he makes here aren’t all particularly bad and even include some things that are often forgotten. The power of establishing stakes when self-teaching for example, or the importance of triaging your learning material up-front and being ruthless about it. The power of triaging your material and priorizing, which can help you take fast strides in the beginning of learning. These ideas would not be equally efficient for any topic, and Ferriss doesn’t provide evidence that they are, but they are useful tools to employ as a learner.

But it all amounts to not much, as it becomes clear the advice is primarily used for party tricks or obsessive, purposeless cramming. You will have a starkly different experience mine here if you have envied Ferriss’ lifestyle : jumping from one activity to the other, meeting celebrated personalities and travelling everywhere. To me, it feels not only extremely elitist but also empty : the goal is the chase, and the rush that comes with the chase. Ferriss gets his hands on cooking and learning in the same distracted way he got his hands on selling supplements and drop-shipping : he’s intensely engaged with it, but would be completely uninterested if there wasn’t the thrills of fake promises like “best in the world” “achieve in less that three months“, “receive unanimous praise”, “become rich”, etc.

That first section is also the worst offender re: Ferriss interrupting his own train of thought with barely-relevant anecdotes. It is infuriating to be hooked by an exciting promise of a founding principle of learning, only for the third paragraph start explaining in detail how he got himself ridiculed at a high-status gala dinner. By the end of the anecdote, it will have brought next to nothing to prove the initial point and Ferriss will never expound on that concept, rather content to switch to another which he will undercut once again with boring retellings. Sometimes an anecdote interrupts another anecdote. Sometimes a section just starts with one such anecdote, which Ferriss seems to believe is an appropriate substitution for in media res writing, and when it’s time to get to the argument you’ll realize the story didn’t cast any light on the issue.

Buying advice

Should you buy this almost-a-decade old book ? Depends. I do believe there’s something for everybody here : complete novice, experienced home cook, food nerd. Even an actual professional might find some inspiration in the nature or the modernist section. But that valuable nugget will not present itself easily, and you’re going to have to sift through a lot of bullshit to get to it. The best use I can imagine is going in with just a little home cooking experience, do most of the recipes in the DOM part in order, do the dinner party, then skip around the WILD and SCI part for anything that catch your fancy, then do most of the PRO part (since there’s still basics being studied in there), then close the book. Once you have the experience, you might be tempted to go back to it and look in the two middle parts for inspiration in some new things. Dutifully ignore everything else (several hundred pages’ worth) unless something strikes a chord within you. That’s it. That’s not much, but it’s slightly more than your average unused recipe book.

Now, is it worth the pricetag ? Given its age, it’s gonna depend on how much it goes for on ebay when you’re looking. I personnally wouldn’t be paying much for it, but you do you.

[radiodespieds]

A review of movies, unspecified movies, but among them The Square (2017)

Movies are a lot simpler than I thought they would get when I was younger. That’s not to mean that they can’t get complex in plot or in artistry, it means that usually the most fulfilling movies will get there by being good at some very simple stuff ; they’ll lay out their tricks right in the open, playing it in front of you. And the point will not be to decipher a mystery or cryptic messaging from the authors (though that can be fun too), but to enjoy the tapestry that these simple elements start to form after a while.

The Square is interesting to me because both its theme and its format is the contemporary art world, an environment that’s known for being highly cryptic to outsiders, and yet it plays out in very simple ways. Let me back up just a bit : when I say that the contemporary art world is the format of the movie, I’m referring to the way it’s been described by another reviewer (maybe in The Guardian ?), in that the movie itself plays out like a visit to a performance arts museum. Scenes are loosely linked by plot but feel disengaged with one another and usually start in media res, and you usually spend a bit of thought figuring out the full context it’s playing in.

That’s not to mean the movie doesn’t have narrative themes running throughout, but it does mean reviewers will come out with different theories, depending on what caught their attention in the kaleidoscope. Personnally, the big message I’m getting from the movie is that the rationale for contemporary art pieces will only make sense to people, like most of our characters, who are entirely detached from mundane ways of living and thinking.

Simple, naive ideas will seem fascinating to them, even presented in simple, naive formats. The title piece, The Square, is a delimitated space where people are supposed to benefit from equal rights, equal status, etc. It’s treated in the movie as it would be in real life : it’s so unremarkable outside the the museum’s world that the public has to be taunted with extreme violence before they pay a little attention to it. And indeed the Square is such a basic idea with so little observational or prescriptive power that you wonder why the museum’s staff decides to get rid of an apparently old statue from its front plaza, mishandling it and decapitating it in the process.

In this way, Christian and his colleagues are more like children than the actual children of this movie : they come up with very unremarkable ideas and spend a lot of time pondering them like they have profound meaning. This is not just shown when a character tries to explain the significance of any piece, in which they’ll produce a mix of extreme platitudes and overly convoluted BS, like when Dominic’s West character is interviewed to explain the relationship between the everyday world and the everyday materials that is found in his art. It’s also obvious when characters try to express social commentary : when Christian tries to record an apology video for one of his unreasonable plans, he very quickly devolves into the equivalent of “we live in a society” argument for his class of people.

From the movie, It’s not clear to me whether the isolation from the ordinary world is a result of this naiveté or if it’s a cause. It seems to me that it is the backdrop to almost all interactions that Christian has with people outside this world, and it’s credible that from this isolation he would develop his elaborate, inane excuses of ideas. Certainly any time he tries to reach out to the “outside” world, be it with positive or negative intentions, he very often experiences some kind of backlash. When he tries to help, like when a woman comes running and screaming for an unseen attacker in the wonderful commute scene, he soon realizes he has been caught in an elaborate pickpocketing sleight of hands. When he tries to buy food for a woman panhandling in a service station, he gets surprised by the outright rude manner in which he gets spoken to.

In the same way, he’s most often unable to recognize that he’s been mishandling people while going about his plans, unless they manifest to him in the loudest manner that they can. Elizabeth Moss’s character comes to confront him after a one-night stand, and they both come out of it more confused than they came in. Christian exercises unduly hierarchical activity over some of his staff without thinking about it, pressuring them to participate in his inane plot to get his things back from the pickpocketers. He launches into said plan, accusing hundreds of people of theft, without checking first if his cuff links were not just displaced in a suit pocket ; when he finds them again, he doesn’t apologize to anybody, mind you.

This theme of being unable to empathize with the outsiders to their world is not subtle, mind you. In several scenes, the movie will show you a homeless person lying down in the street, just next to a solicitor for a charity trying to get the attention of the moving crowd and failing. Or it will be a homeless person with a voiceover explaining The Square, “imagine if we were all equal”. From the get-go, it’s plainly obvious that the art world is unable to treat people as their equals.

There’s a scene at the two-thirds of the movie, an extremely polarizing display of aggression. A performance artist is invited to enact his latest piece, that we’ve seen through videos in the background, at a very high society gala comprised of rich elites. HIs performance consists in playing a wild animal version of himself, sometimes walking on four limbs, and interacting with the people around him as if he were asserting dominance on them, like the wild animal would. At this gala, it slowly devolves into him attacking and coming close to raping a woman while other attendees look down in fear, until all these rich old men snap and get up to pummel the “artist” and the camera cuts.

Reviewers, understandably, flock to this scene to support their point, and I’m not any different. The tone of the scene is a radical change of gear for the viewer, but it’s also a consequence of all the trends showcased up until then. The organizers (the museum staff, it’s unclear exactly which of them is helming the project) are more interested in setting up a high-status spectacle for their sponsors than they are in actually engaging with the art’s theme ; if they did, they might have realized they were the target of it, not the onlookers. They’re also picking performances whose significance is incredibly boring when examined outside of the shocking spectacle they accompany. Imagine there were still wild animal relations among humans !!! The main reason why they are so surprised by the brutality of the bully and by their immediate submission to it might be because their elite position have shielded them from experiencing this kind of oppression in their own life.

The artist himself is also shown to be disconnected from the human realities around him, even though he’s the one pretending to go back to basics. We never get a glimpse of the him outside of his performances, so it’s not fully clear during this scene whether he increases the aggression in his performance intentionally as a way to cross a line that forces the gala audience to react, or if he’s so taken by his act that he starts overplaying it. He probably didn’t intend to be beaten up by the crowd (we never know how he ends up as a result), but the almost-rape fits too much with the act to be dismissed as accidental. His presumed point, that (rich) humans have forgotten what it feels like to under wilderness rules, is again not so interesting that it would be appropriate to enact a rape to illustrate it. Yet the artist does think it’s appropriate, which shows how far he himself is removed from normal lived realities.

On a more visceral level, all the faces in the scene are displayed as unable to empathize with others around them at some point. Be it the artist that doesn’t flinch in front of the hurt he’s causing, the audience that looks down to avoid  helping their peers, or even the audience later that punches around wildly with no restraints anymore. The museum director yet again tries to intervene to  soften the situation (before the almost-rape starts) in a diplomatic manner, and is again shown unable to affect his surroundings positively. When the artist doesn’t stop, he just sits back down and let things devolve further.

This scene, like most of the others, is almost completely isolated from the others : you never see the preparations for the night, and you never see the consequences of it. That is how the movie operates : show you around one setting, then moving to the next without indication whether they link up to something. And in focusing on the here and now, they usually play out very simply, usually by creating confusing or stressful situation for the characters, and thus making the audience laugh or squirm. You could certainly argue that’s all the movie is, a series of almost unrelated awkward short films. The common thread that I see, and that other reviewers might reject, is that inability of the contemporary art scene to empathize with people outside of it and within themselves.

[radiodespieds]

Does the responsibility of climate change lie with the individual or with the companies / governments ?

It’s a widely shared sentiment in people who talk about climate change these days. Private citizens own only a meager slice of worldwide emissions, so why ever put the responsibility of action on them ? Leaders will talk about how you should turn off your lights, turn down the heating and take the car less often, but it’s only a habit to blame the common people for anything wrong, and it’s a way to talk themselves out of taking the actions that fall under their scope. And it’s true that if you only look at private citizen’s consumption actions (buying things, consuming resources etc), the resulting emissions will never compare to those of superfactories or giant container boats.

But does that mean that no responsibility falls over the individual ? This series of post is addressed to people, to you, to convince you of taking action in the front of climate change death. So what am I talking about ?

We can explore the lifestyle changes you can take later, but I want to note that I don’t believe them to be meaningless of ineffective. For one, all of these non-consumer pollution emitted by the companies exist as part of a global supply chain to bring “value“ to consumers, so it seems disingenuous to talk about them like they’re only the company’s problem and not within our capacity to change. Companies exist to bring you stuff. Refuse the stuff that creates too much carbon associated to it and it will affect the whole chain.

You could argue that the agency, the choice of what to consume, does not fully lie with the consumers if at all. People consume what is available to them and might not be able to seek out alternatives for carbon-heavy products. People seek out what is advertised to them, sometimes in a very heavy and targetted manner, and it wouldn’t make sense to blame them fully for their choice. People seek out the products that make economical sense to them and might not be able to afford the alternatives. People seek out products that have the most addicting properties, because companies purposefully design their production in a way that will maximize consumption on the part of the individuals, be it with sugary foods, tv shows cliffhangers or dopamine-inducing like buttons.

And that is all valid and well. But you could take the companies’ point of view and argue just the same that they can only respond to the consumer’s behavior ; those that don’t, die. “Agency“ is never fully in the hands of one actor, and responsibility can’t be shifted easily onto just one side of the equation.

To avoid the very complicated question of free will, this post series will just rely on a simple proposition : any actor could be acting differently. Whether they are best motivated intrinsically or externally is just a question of tactics, in the end we just need to focus on getting the biggest change possible. And since this post series is addressed to you, it will focus on getting you to take action, whether that is to go out and influence the behavior of other actors, or to change your own.

On that note, I’d like to elaborate on something about the relationship in between leaders and the general public. Leaders, be it of governments, companies, other hybrid institutions, react not just to the public’s consumption. They react to lifestyle trends, to change in norms, to changes in their and their organization’s self image. They react to campaigns directed at their organizations, to legal threats, to disruption in their activities, to new policies. All of these, while not being part of your consumption, are things you could be putting into action. Companies only listen to money, sure, but you could be making sure to cut their access to some of that sweet money. Convince other people to spend differently, put them under scrutiny, go directly stop the distribution of their goods : a lot of company-level actions can be informed by individual-level actions, even without spending your money differently.

Ultimately, even if you don’t believe that any responsibility falls on you, it must mean that all the responsibility falls squarely into the shoulders of these leaders. It would mean that these people are directly behind the death of you, your family, your neighborhood and every person you’ve ever met. Would you let that pass ? Would you let them get away with it, let them rest at night ?

Especially since, by that point in time, you would be hard pressed to find a leader that hasn’t been thoroughly briefed on what exactly his organization has been doing to the world. That is not how they look at it, but they have the information at hand : whether their organization is heavy on transport, heavy on manufacturing, heavy on electrical power, etc. Companies mostly think about revenue and rarely truly factor these “costless” externalities, but the information is right there and has been for a while. Any leader who pretends to themselves that they don’t know the extent of their impact is simply lying, at the very least to themselves.

I don’t mean this post to go too far in what you could be doing to steer their action, that would be for later. I just wanted to clear up that whether you have responsibility does not change much to what you can do.

[radiodespieds]

How much more important is the climate change fight compared to other issues ?

Wowee what a rant. Sorry in advance

The lede

Climate change is, by the numbers, by far the biggest threat humanity has been facing. That makes it more threatening than say, World War I, all of the terrorism attacks put together, the Holocaust, Stalin’s Ukraine famine, the Vietnam war, Leopold II’s colonization of Congo, the Cultural Revolution, the Khmers, etc. The only thing that ever came close in terms of credibility and danger is that time when we didn’t know if nuclear weapon testing would ignite the atmosphere, or if the nuclear arms race would lead to planet-wide destruction on a whim.

How we measure and balance the importance of issues

There is long-standing, widespread philosophical debate on how we are supposed to weigh options against each other when it comes to morality. Some simply try to quantify the amount of suffering / pleasure each option would bring. Some imply that not all suffering / pleasure can be freely exchanged, and that you cannot actively sacrifice something irreducible (like a life) to preserve a perceived greater good (even several threatened lives). Some look to the transgressions of a chosen moral code as absolute and not related to numbers at all. I argue that, even though they might disagree on the course of action, all of these interpretations would conclude that climate change is the scariest thing ever. But for a deeper understanding, let’s see how these can apply to past issues, and how people have reacted.

What’s a reasonable reaction to other issues ?

You don’t need to look too far back to find issues that are worth bickering with family over, voting over, protesting over, radically altering one’s lifestyle over. Only in the last year, billions of people have participated in isolation and social distancing in order to curtail the millions more deaths that the Covid-19 could bring over. Hundreds of thousands have shown up around the world to protest against systemic racism and lethal violence against black people. Hundreds thousand more showed up to defend or bring in the right for women to not die in botched illegal abortions. In a lot more understated fashion, billions of people have kept on putting their safety belt when driving, even though these buckle things are a hassle and why should we have to do anything when it’s the other people who are driving dangerously.

These are big issues, because each individual affected by them might be risking their life, and because there are many such individual affected. That’s the crude way in which we evaluate the importance of topics. And while it definitely leaves some issues out of the limelight every year, what it has brought forward is indeed worth acting over. They are worth making little sacrifices every day, they are worth making big sacrifices over the whole year, and they are worth getting into shouting fights with opposing protesters.

The only thing is, some of the issues that are left out of that limelight, if they were put under some deeper scrutiny, would outweigh the ones in the headlines like a whale is outweighed by the weight of all the emerged landmass on earth.

(To be clear, the other issues aren’t less important in themselves)

(It’s like having been stabbed in the arm and start crying out and twisting because of it, only to realize later that a whole cliff is falling on you, your family and your whole neighborhood. The cliff doesn’t make it that you’re less stabbed in the arm, and while it might shift your focus it’s not going to make the knife less painful or less damaging to your arm tissue.)

How much bigger is climate change compared to these issues ?

Climate change is *pretty* big. And by pretty, I mean extremely ugly. Like 7 billion deaths ugly. Climate change’s damage, and the speed at which this damage is arriving, depends a lot on the famed temperature increase that the news and the international treaties love to mention but not actually do anything about. The current target is to stay under 1.5°C of temperature increase, which would already incur dramatic changes and yet is far from being secured. The more likely scenarios, given current trends, is that we would end up at 2 - 2,5°C.

If we do get there, that would be a problem, because many scientists are finding out that the planet might have some positive feedback loops that would kick into gear at that temperature and accelerate the warming further. There’s currently about 15 of these potential feedback loops that are being monitored, but we can take maybe the most famous one to illustrate how that works : imagine that the temperature does increase ; as a result, massive amounts of ice at the poles start to melt, and release all the gasses that were stored in the water’s solid form. Among these gases, methane goes into the air, significantly increases the greenhouse effect of our atmosphere, trapping more heat, and increasing the global temperature yet again. That’s what we mean by “positive” feedback loop : it’s positive only in the sense that the more it goes, the more it accelerate.

Take all these hidden feedback loops kicking into gear together, and they take us from 2°C... to 4 - 4,5°C.

It’s hard to overstate how bad that is, for everybody. And I do mean EVERYBODY. First world privilege, White privilege, male privilege, etc. all of these headstarts are not gonna get you far when the earth can only sustain 1 billion humans.

No, that’s not a typo : if climate change gets its way, there won’t be 1 billion deaths, there will only be 1 billion people left to survive. If you’re keeping count, at 7.8 billion persons alive right now, that’s at least 6.8 billion deaths. And that’s not taking into account the population increase in that period. It’s also just the number of people that the earth’s resources can sustain and doesn’t count all the lives that would be lost to resource wars, global supply chain breakdowns and generally being in the wrong place whenever the crisis reaches you. 1 billion is not so much the number of survivors as it is the number to which the human population will come back to after the hot, searing dust has settled over our mess.

6.8 billion people is a bit hard to wrap one’s head around. Let’s come back to our other issues to see if we can use them as comparison points. What’s the deadliest event in history that you can think of ?

What about the Holocaust ? You could redo the ‘41-45 Holocaust back to back over and over again, Jewish and non-jewish deaths included, and you would need about 459 of them, or about 1 600 years of non-stop extermination, before you start matching the potential threat of climate change.

What about “Communism deaths“, a famous ill-defined talking point from right-wing advocates ? Figures thrown around are usually in the 100 to 150 million range, mostly comprised of USSR and PRC deaths over their combined 100-year history. You would need about 50 communism eras to catch up to what climate change would do to us. That would take you about 5 000 years of cyclical regime-induced famines and mass killings before you catch up to what could happen in just the next 30 years with 4°C. 

What about pandemics, since they’re so trendy ? The deadliest pandemic for which we have estimates for is the 14th century Black Death in Europe and Asia. Back then, it killed around 200 million people in 5 years. Very good score. It still takes about 34 Black deaths back-to-back to catch up to a climate change wipeout. That’s a 170 years of non-stop, barely contained outbreaks of the plague.

But these are not really current issues anymore, they aren’t very useful to decide for us how we should be acting. The PRC is still going on, but most of it’s death toll happened before the 21st century. (A quick look at their recent history will teach you that they definitely haven’t exactly stopped either, but that’s a whole other topic).

Since we were on the topic of pandemics, why not look at the current one ? It makes little sense to try and do the count for a pandemic that’s not even over yet, especially with all the hidden “excess deaths” that will come into full light only afterwards. But for the sake of using it as a visualization tool for the looming climate crisis, let’s see how it might stack up. The current confirmed death toll is soon to reach 2 million deaths, about 1/100th of a Black Death. That number is not yet decelerating, and is in fact still slightly accelerating, so with no knowledge of how soon the various vaccination campaigns will affect it and by how much, it would be foolish to make an attempt at a reasonable projection. My unreasonable bet, though, is that we are at best sitting at the middle of this confirmed death count, add to that a number of unknown proportion of excess deaths and I’m going to make my bad bet at 5 million worldwide deaths when the pandemic is over. That’s still 40 times before you reach the Black Deaths, and consequently 1 400 times before you reach climate change. Imagine the earth has to relive 2020 a thousand four hundred times.

Or rather, imagine what it feels like if we had to live through ten 2020 at the same time. That means ten times more of the people you know die of covid. The hospitals receive ten times more extreme cases. The Now imagine a hundred 2020 simultaneous epidemics. Remember the mortuary refrigerators on TV ? They’re stacked in towers now, and they’re overflowing with corpses. Now multiply that by ten once again. One in ten people in your neighborhood have disappeared. Now imagine we have to live through this hundred-fold 2020 for 14 years straight. That’s what the years after 2040 are gonna feel like.

And that, I think, is where the kicker is. During this pandemic, we are undergoing what I would qualify as one of the biggest self-imposed lifestyle changes in history (please do send me any other competing example if you can think of any). And yet we’re still telling ourselves we can’t do it, or even a 10th of it, when it comes to climate change. Even though climate change is going to be literally a thousand time more devastating, Even though climate change is most likely going to kill each of us at some point, as well as our children if we have any, and as well as every other person under 50 that doesn’t die in the time in between.

Is climate change really out of the limelight though ?

As of 2021, a lot of people are aware of the existence of climate change. It’s been widely discussed about by researchers since the 1970s. There’s been major international treaties on it since the 1990s. In the US, a 2000 presidential candidate ran a good part of his campaign on it. Environmental activists have made it a major part of their battles for 30 years. So why am I saying it’s out of the limelight ?

Because, when you compare the amount of chatter it gets to the amount of people it’s about to kill, the underestimation of the problem is appalling. Treaties keep on missing their already widely insufficient targets. Political campaigns keep on placing climate action as a side-piece to their program. Scientists yell their heart out that we’re heading for the wall, and we all cover our eyes and keep our feet on the gas.

Compare the amount of publicity other issues get to their impact. Out of all the issues that get more coverage today than climate change, how many are likely to literally destroy the human world ?

Again, this doesn’t mean the issues are less important than they are portrayed to be. But how exactly are they going to matter if everybody they affect is going to die in 30 years ? Given that a climate apocalypse would render all efforts of all current and past causes moot, you would think that people would be paying attention. How about if you’re “not into politics at all” ? You would think that people who don’t yet participate in any cause would maybe consider this one, given that it’s about to kill them and all their children.

In any case, climate change is getting slightly more coverage every year, but compared to the actual size of the threat we might as well be looking at it through welding masks.

What’s the reasonable reaction to climate change then ?

It’s hard to capture exactly what would be a good response to this, because it’s hard to compare it to other stakes that individual have to deal with throughout their life. Whatever decision you have to make, side you have to choose, demeanor you have to craft, you’re rarely dealing with the end of your life if you get it wrong. You’re even more rarely (hopefully) dealing with the end of all human life. So comparing the stakes and asking “how much more involvement should climate change get over this” the answer is always going to be “More”. That in itself is kinda scary, but it doesn’t even give you a good idea of how much more, how much more extreme behavior would be appropriate.

So really, what’s not an acceptable level of intensity in the face of climate change ? Try to ask this question in earnest and you’ll realize how extreme things could be going and still be a reasonable answer to climate change.

I’ll say this : think of any intense activist, even if you don’t personally know one. Somebody that devotes a good part of their life to it, going to major protests, talking about it on a regular basis, donating to campaigns, donating to NGOs tackling field issues, voting based on their engagement, shifting their way of life in some places etc. Imagine they would be doing all that for the cause of climate change. Would it be too extreme an answer to what they are battling ? Which, if you remember well, is the death of 7 billion people ?

Obviously not. Counting the deaths makes the question almost moot. It even appears that their response is far below the emotionally-appropriate response. If you and everybody you know is about to have their life cut decades short, it doesn’t feel enough to just be smiling at an annual rally. What’s appropriate regarding your own feelings would go into pretty aggressive and violent territory pretty quickly. Fortunately, that’s not taking into account what would work, and that has to be a part of the reasonable answer as well. But for this long-ass rant, I just want to settle how intense you would be allowed to go if you had to.

I fail to see a clear upper limit. When your life is in immediate danger, pretty much any behavior becomes appropriate, whatever gets you out of danger quickly. Here your life is not in immediate danger, you still have around 30 years to spare, but it is in unequivocal danger. You will die. And it’s not like you were the only one in that life-threatening situation : if a stranger is about to die, any action that you might take to remove them from harm would be welcome and hailed as heroic. If a loved one was about to die, then all actions become obviously acceptable. Here 7 billion strangers and all your loved ones are about to die, so at what should we be stopping ?

This might be starting to scare you the other way rather than helping.  What is this person going to be asking that I do ? Am I gonna be asked to commit crimes ? Should I expect eco-conscious people to be committing amateur terrorism now ? So I want to take that time to remind you of the deep reason why we would be fighting climate change. We’re fighting climate change to prevent lives to be lost and way of lives to be wrecked. If the fight itself is putting lives in danger, what’s the point ? That would be like cutting the tree to escape a falling branch.

My point is, whatever you think you’re doing for climate change now, it’s time to admit it’s not enough. You will have to go all-in. You will have to make the craziest activists up their game just to compete with you. You’re gonna have to be comfortable with doing and saying stuff people will hate you for. You’re gonna have to show up. You’re gonna have to move where your money goes. You’re gonna have to deprive yourself of some stuff. You’re gonna have to try to deprive other people of some stuff. Some of it won’t be easy, it will feel bad, it will be tough to pull off, it will take time and effort. But you’ll do it because if you don’t, everybody you know will die young.

See you soon.

[radiodespieds]

Spider-Man Remastered is the worst possible marketing material for the PS5

This should be obvious to any brand manager, advertising director, or any other job you can get after a communication bachelor. Spider-man Remastered does not help sell the PS5 over its competitors in any way.

Let’s run this through the motions, shall we ?

What is marketing supposed to do for you, a marketing executive ?

Marketing is supposed to help you sell a product. Does that sound obvious ? Then I’m sorry to tell you, you’re not a Sony Public Relation Director. Chances are you’re not being paid as well either.

Marketing is supposed to make people want to buy your goddamn console. There’s a myriad of ways to do that, which I categorize in two sections : Embellish and Distinguish. When you Embellish, you sell all the advantages of your product, put its features and quality forward, the point being that people like things that are good for them. When you Distinguish, you address the most specific description of your target audience and position yourself as a distinct solution for them.

Now if you’re the PS5, or if at least you’re in charge of its launch, you’re gonna want a good combination of Embellish and Distinguish. That’s not very unique, most products who have competition need to touch both of these bases. But if you’re a tens-of-billion dollar market just on your own, it sounds reaaaaally important for you to touch both of these shiny bases. After all, the slightest lost opportunity, any 0.01% margin error is gonna net you millions of dollars in losses.

You’re the PS5. A gaming console. Some appeal of your console over the other guy’s is the games you keep for yourself. The exclusives. At launch, there’s not many of these, plus people have limited attention spans you have to choose the ones to put forward carefully (Sony had 5 big ones). Your selection should be diverse, as to create an atmosphere of richness of abondance, and as to appeal to several markets at once

What should a launch game do ? It should Embellish, proving the power of your console, the raw capacity for the lusted after Graphics. More importantly, it should also Distinguish you, from your direct competitors but also from your own, older generation console. You don’t want people to just stick with what they have, even for a little longer, ok ? They’ve got to drop their dumb multi-processor hundreds of dollar console and come get the new Wall-E-themed one you just made for them. New games should be shiny and beautiful, but they should also

What’s the problem with Spider-Man Remastered, you ask?

Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, or Insomniac’s Marvel’s Spider’s Man Remastered, is a remake of the old-age video game from like, two years ago. By “remake”, we mean to say that it is exactly the same game with raytracing added and some texture updates. Oh, and they changed the face actor of Spider-Man for no good reason, we’ll talk about this one in a bit.

Seriously though, it is exactly the same game. It is not, as the marketing would like you to believe, a better game in any capacity. If you hadn’t played any version of the game before, and had to try them both but without knowing which one is the remastered, you would have a hard time picking your favorite one.

Youtube videos love to show you side-to-side comparison footage, and sure enough the two sides do look different, but the fastest way to decide which one looks better is to pick whichever has the PS5 logo.

There are indeed differences in quality, like the full-surface reflections made possible by raytracing. But the differences in most of the game are so tiny that they are quickly overshadowed by any personal preference. Don’t like higher saturation ? The PS4 version will look better to you. Think higher contrast makes thing look cartoonish rather than realistic ? maybe that PS5 version is not for you.

As an aside : one big, notable through the whole game difference, is the face change. Let’s not dwell on it too much, let’s just say that it is... bad. And hilariously unjustified. The new version of your game is going to be identical on all point, except the main acting device for you character is going to be stiff and unexpressive ? Sure, why not. Why not go full 1984 on your user and pretend this was made to make the way for better acting ??

it quickly became apparent that delivering even more believable-looking characters made finding a better facial match for actor Yuri Lowenthal – who we all love as Peter – a necessity.

Bryan Inthiar from Insomniac

Sure, Bryan.

How does that relate to the PS5 itself though

After all this negativity, I want to quickly go over what Spider-man Remastered does well (or at least okay) for the PS5′s marketing. Insomniac’s Spider-Man on the was one of the beloved exclusive titles on the PS4, widely praised among fans and critics for its attention to detail, smooth gameplay and smooth swinging, and overall fun. Putting the new version at the forefront reminds all customers of the quality of the exclusive roster coming with playstations. If you want these games, then you’re going to want a PS5 going forward. Marketing checkmate.

However, that’s not much. If you already own one of the “exclusive” launch title on your PS4, why would you go for a PS5 right now ?

Maybe you’re excited at the new possibilities the new console is bringing to developers, and all the ways they’re gonna make games better. And... what are these ways again ?

Better graphics ? You look at the Remastered game. It is barely different. There’s visibly no improvement on that side. The Miles Morales game also looks the same apart from new character designs.

Dual sense trigger sensibility thingie ? It’s nowhere in the game’s promo material, in great part because the game was created for the PS4′s controller. That also applies to Miles Morales.

So what makes the PS5 itself exciting ? If you’re a consumer looking at Spider-man promo material, you’d be hard-pressed to tell, and that’s a problem. The Playstation game universe is exciting, but the PS5 feels just like an expensive admission ticket for its future. It doesn’t bring much on its own, it just allows you to continue getting the newer titles. That feels... like scalping ? Not a good result in terms of consumer marketing.

Hopefully, marketing executives are already catching up on the fact that simply increased computing power isn’t a sales advantage anymore. You either have to apply that power to different things (VR / augmented reality), or you have to focus on completely new functionalities, like Nintendo has been doing since the Nintendo DS. Maybe by the next generation of console, we’ll have an explosion of new features and no talk of power and speed.

Or, if the last generations are anything to learn from, we’ll get exactly the same as we’ve ever had. Some type of revamped branding applied on a barely-more powerful machine with barely-distinguishable games.