The Workplace Is Even More Sexist In Movies Than In Reality | FiveThirtyEight
12 Mar 2015 Leave a comment
Come see the violence inherent in the system!
28 Feb 2015 Leave a comment
in constitutional political economy, Marxist economics, movies, Public Choice Tags: Monty Python
Court-siding as The Sting reborn?
16 Feb 2015 Leave a comment
in economics of crime, movies, sports economics
Court-siding in the Cricket World Cup yesterday reminded me of the 1973 classic movie The Sting with Paul Newman and Robert Redford. This movie is still worth watching today – a great Robert Redford, Paul Newman movie told with great wit.
Both court-siding and The Sting were both sharp practices by gamblers based on the delay in broadcasting sports results.
In court siding, the six or seven second delay in cricket broadcasts allow spectators with mobile phones to tip off gambling confederates in other parts of the world to place last second bets.
Court siding carries a 10 year prison term in the Australian State of Victoria. It is not illegal elsewhere and some have suggested that gambling syndicates turned to court siding because it’s easier to accomplish than match fixing.
Dozens of people are ejected from cricket games every year for court siding. They are easy to spot. They take no interest in the game, don’t cheer or clap and spend all their time on a mobile phone or laptop.
In The Sting, a bunch of grifters conned a gangster by pretending they could manipulate the distribution of horseracing results by the local telegraph office in the 1920s. The confederate delays the distribution of the racing results for several minutes, so the race is run and the result known before the bets are placed with the unsuspecting betting shop, relying on Telegraph racing results.
Central to the con, which is called the Wire is setting up a betting shop filled with grifters in on the con placing false bets. The only gambler who places a real bet is the mark.
The wire was most popular in the early 20th century, when horse and dog race results were sent to betting parlours via the telegraph. As with court-siding, the con is time and personnel intensive requiring a large gang to be involved.
As with most cons, the Wire is based on manipulating the greed and deep pockets of the mark, including a willingness to act illegally to profit from gambling or other business ventures.
In the case of The Wire, there is corruption involved because a confederate of the telegraph office is supposed to be on the take. The confederate in the Telegraph office delays distribution of the race results, while the tips of his co-conspirators giving them enough time to place a bet.
In the case of court siding, this practice seems to me to be simply entrepreneurial alertness or arbitrage.
Betting in sport is often on spreads such as when a no ball is bowled, who is the first change bowler, who bowled a no ball or got out before a milestone such as 50 or 100 runs.
Court siding cannot be stopped by closing the betting shop 10 seconds early because they are not events that happen to a timetable such as closing the betting before the race starts.
It is up to bookmakers to solve this problem because it is an ordinary business problem. There is no corruption, bribery or any form of conspiracy between the employees of the bookmaker and the gamblers or between the gamblers and the players of the particular sport. The police should not be wasting their time with court siding.
Bookmakers could stop the practice of court-siding dead if they introduced a 10 second delay between lodging a bet online and when the bet is accepted. This 10 second delay is longer than the broadcasting delay that makes court siding possible and profitable.
An important notice from the London Fire Brigade about 50 Shades of Grey
12 Feb 2015 Leave a comment
Vangelis – Memories of Green
03 Feb 2015 Leave a comment
in movies, Music Tags: Blade Runner, Vangelis
35 years ago today, 6 Americans escaped from Iran, as dramatized in Argo
31 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
Blade Runner – Final scene, "Tears in Rain" Soliloquy
31 Jan 2015 1 Comment
in movies, Music Tags: Blade Runner, Vangelis
The Bechdel Test: whether women are in a movie as fully human characters, or as plot devices for the male characters
27 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in discrimination, economics of media and culture, gender, industrial organisation, movies, occupational choice, survivor principle Tags: co-worker discrimination, consumer sovereignty, customer discrimination, employer discrimination, Hollywood economics, sex discrimination, The meaning of competition
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Hollywood is a slave to the box office on the most cutthroat industry there is. Film producers and screenwriters will portray men and women in whatever roles and whatever extent sells tickets.
How women are represented in the movies is determined solely by the preferences of the audiences willing to buy tickets. It’s a buyers market out there. Film producers would do whatever it takes to finance films that sell tickets, as even Five Thirty-Eight realised:
“Movies that are female-driven do not travel,” said Krista Smith, West Coast editor of Vanity Fair, describing the broader sentiment in Hollywood. There are almost no women who have sales value in multiple international territories, maybe with the exception of Sandra Bullock, she said.
Times change, and film producers change with the times. Consumers are both sovereign and change their minds, and in the case of movie audiences, constantly demand novelty and surprises, as even Five Thirty-Eight picked up on:
Hollywood is the business of making money. Since our data demonstrates that films containing meaningful interactions between women do better at the box office than movies that don’t, it may be only a matter of time before the data of dollars and cents overcomes the rumours and prejudices defining the budgeting process of films for, by and about women.
This moral panic over gender wage gaps between millionaire actresses and actresses dare not say that for want of offending the audience that is actually the main driver of any gender gap in movies.
Hollywood activists complaining about the gender wage are to business minded to dare insult the audiences that pay their wages.
Movie 3-D technology review: Peter Jackson’s Battle of the Five Armies versus the rest
22 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in economics of media and culture, entrepreneurship, industrial organisation, movies, politics - New Zealand, technological progress Tags: 3-D movies, creative destruction, innovation
We saw Peter Jackson’s latest Hobbit movie the other day. The other films previewed before the Battle of the Five Armies were also 3-D films.
The first of these was a cartoon where the 3-D technology seemed to be based on using crayons to try and trick you as to what was going on.
The next trailer was the next Star Wars movie in 3-D. Again, it was vastly inferior to the 3-D technology of Sir Peter Jackson and his team.
I noticed the same with all the 3-D films of Sir Peter Jackson: they are much better than the competition.
More than a few times in the 3-D films of his competition, you doubt as to whether the film is in 3-D or not and can’t really tell the difference sometimes as to the 3-D effect over normal films in terms of cinematic experience. Example of this was the last Star Trek movie we saw. The 3-D effect failed in a number of occasions.
Clearly there are trade secrets in 3-D films. The 3-D effect works pretty well in Peter Jackson’s films, except for the occasional close-up transition, and sometimes is quite dazzling.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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