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'Mr. Robot' may be fiction, but its hacking plots are all too real

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Re: 'Mr. Robot' may be fiction, but its hacking plots are all too real

#151
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you believe in rational markets, you should also probably consider that those rational markets are capable of pricing stable inflation into nominal pricing. Consider that money is widely accepted to be neutral in the long-run. In inflationary economies, there is nothing stopping individuals from saving value in the form of assets ; you can store your value in pork bellies or gold or ownership of a company or whate…

Even rational markets do not respond immediately or frictionlessly. And I wouldn't call a market where one sector gets a steady inflow of newly-created money "rational". The disconnect in your analysis is that price inflation hits hardest the areas where the conjured money is injected into the wider economy. Saving in gold works to pay for food, but not to pay for housing. To keep up with the latter, you must invest…

You're presuming that 100% of price level changes are due to changes in the money supply. That's simply not the case (see also: that graph in my original post prior to 1913, 1933, or 1971, pick your favorite of those dates). Changes in the money supply do affect nominal prices, but it's not the only factor. Housing prices would continue to increase even with a perfectly fixed money supply; saving at an inflation rate of 0% would result in diminished purchasing power for housing over time, as aggregate demand increases.

Historical record is not aligned with the fantasy that eliminating fiat currency would cause price stabilization and promote savings. It would eliminate long-run inflation, but at the cost of price stability and medium-run investment.

Re: 'Mr. Robot' may be fiction, but its hacking plots are all too real

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good god man. You asked that question? Movies rip-off books, books rip off real life, tv rips off movies. Format doesn't stop one from appropriating material. Just google Fight Club and Mr. Robot. There are plenty of interviews with the creator of Mr. Robot where he explicitly discusses the Fight Club connection. Straight from the horses mouth. I don't have a problem with referencing other works, but it's got to the…

I read and loved Fight Club, loved the movie, and love Mr Robot. Sam Esmail (Mr Robot creator) even says in interviews that Fight Club is his favorite movie, and certain threads, characters, etc are an homage to that. I mean, he even plays the same song ("Where is my Mind") during part of the "reveal" in Mr Robot. However, as other viewers have mentioned it wasn't really MEANT to be that big of a reveal. In fact, the…

Hola, thx for response! 2nd episode of 2nd season. I'd also read those interviews, and so decided to give the second season a shot based on them. However, the first couple of episodes seemed to double down on the "homage". It sounds like I should give it another couple of episodes, so will do. But, I just can't help but be turned off by the breadth and depth of similarites. But, will give episode 3 and 4 a shot.

Re: 'Mr. Robot' may be fiction, but its hacking plots are all too real

#153

Show had so much potential, all when down the drain in season 2.

Care to elaborate on what you didn't like about S2? I enjoyed most of season 1, but started to get turned off by the philosophy/politics towards the end and kind of stopped paying attention. Now I'm seeing people say S2 is more critical of the characters and explores the ideas in some more interesting ways, which has pretty much convinced me to start watching again. You're the first I've seen who specifically didn't…

Season 1 had a clear goal, to hack E Corp to collapse banks, every chapter was about hacking E Corp, it was a little more simple.

Season 2 is slow, not as exciting, and who knows what the goal is, maybe to survive after the hack, maybe something that will be revelead in the last season episode that only Mr. Robot knows, still, it is more slow paced, and tries to over analise the complicated behavior of the characters. IMHO,Elliot's double personallity should have ended in season 1. Another thing is that despise the collapse of the banks, the series doesn't show an apocalyptic world, everything is just like season 1, like if nobody cares about the collapse.

And

Every character is overcomplicated, Elliot with his double personallity, Angela with her ackwardness, Darlene a control freak, White Rose a time freak, and so on, and every damn character always has a monologue, it gets boring, it tries to hard and there is little substance in the story.

Re: 'Mr. Robot' may be fiction, but its hacking plots are all too real

#154
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even rational markets do not respond immediately or frictionlessly. And I wouldn't call a market where one sector gets a steady inflow of newly-created money "rational". The disconnect in your analysis is that price inflation hits hardest the areas where the conjured money is injected into the wider economy. Saving in gold works to pay for food, but not to pay for housing. To keep up with the latter, you must invest…

You're presuming that 100% of price level changes are due to changes in the money supply. That's simply not the case (see also: that graph in my original post prior to 1913, 1933, or 1971, pick your favorite of those dates). Changes in the money supply do affect nominal prices, but it's not the only factor. Housing prices would continue to increase even with a perfectly fixed money supply; saving at an inflation rate…

First, we shouldn't have price "stability" as defined by the Fed. In a technological economy, the price of everything should be trending downward - price optimization is exactly what a market does! The Fed functions to smooth out the bumps, but they seem unable to do so without being tempted to destroy that natural downward trend. Which is why we're next door to 0% interest and "Helicopter Ben" is making rounds in academia (UBI).

The core of your argument seems to be that there is little economic difference between natural technological deflation and forcing a slow inflation, that the market can adjust to either condition. But if markets were perfectly efficient like this, then forcing inflation would have no effect and in fact bubbles would not occur because they would be immediately corrected

Real markets have inefficiencies and lag time, and altering the macro environment is straight endorsement of specific policy, but cloaked as science. If prices were allowed to go down and people were able to save money (actual savings, not simply leveraged between stocks and debt), then they could choose to work less and we would be able to actually see widespread gains from technology. Instead, the government is running the same tired Keynesian playbook for getting "full employment" while the need for human work is being ever reduced.

> You're presuming that 100% of price level changes are due to changes in the money supply

No, just the majority of them. Even though demand for housing is going up (population), we would expect prices to rise to stable premium over the cost of creating new housing (corresponding to the lag between demand and production). Instead, what we're observing is a continual inflation in "values" that seems to actually be constrained by the cost of interest on the value. This makes intuitive sense based on how people are actually encouraged to view houses (like various acquaintances thinking a $5k earnest money deposit is serious business, while seemingly oblivious that they're actually spending much much more).

Furthermore, shamelessly implicit in the idea of forced inflation is the viewpoint that people should be forced to "invest". This certainly keeps the financial sector in demand, but obviously hurts the average person who has their savings eroded either passively through inflation or actively through transaction fees and time spent managing relatively small investments.

Re: 'Mr. Robot' may be fiction, but its hacking plots are all too real

#155
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I watched the first few episodes and really didn't like it. I wasn't aware that the plot of the show moved past the episodic crap of the first season. Maybe I should pick it up at season 2?

I've been confused by the positive comments it has gotten from people in tech - I found it unwatchably bad and that it actually got worse (not better) as time went on. Everything from the 'machine' itself, to the cringe acting and writing, dumb tech concepts (woman who 'speaks' for the machine) and all their vigilante killings that only happen in New York. I couldn't take it. Watch Halt and Catch Fire - it's a thousa…

Halt and Catch Fire - where ibm mainframes boot into dos, quality stuff

Re: 'Mr. Robot' may be fiction, but its hacking plots are all too real

#156
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I watched the first few episodes and really didn't like it. I wasn't aware that the plot of the show moved past the episodic crap of the first season. Maybe I should pick it up at season 2?

I've been confused by the positive comments it has gotten from people in tech - I found it unwatchably bad and that it actually got worse (not better) as time went on. Everything from the 'machine' itself, to the cringe acting and writing, dumb tech concepts (woman who 'speaks' for the machine) and all their vigilante killings that only happen in New York. I couldn't take it. Watch Halt and Catch Fire - it's a thousa…

Halt and Catch Fire - where ibm mainframes boot into dos, quality stuff

Re: 'Mr. Robot' may be fiction, but its hacking plots are all too real

#157
post #59

If you like Mr. Robot, you should watch Person of Interest. POI is a pre-snowden series about a world "in which the NSA has a system which spies on every american citizen in order to fight terrorism" (sounds familiar?). The show begins with the weak premise of "help us fight crimes we predict will happen", but don't be fooled by its appearance of a run-of-the-mill CBS show. Without spoiling it too much, I do want to…

POI is an amazing show. You can really tell how they started off with a bonkers scifi idea, then between S1 and S2 Snowden happened and the writers were like "Oh fuck this shit's real??". The show much improved from there and pushed the scifi to the max. Like ok we know this is real, but what if it was waaay more powerful? The only downside is that they let some techno babble seep in by S3 and the hacking has become…

I've watched both in their entirety (so far). I definitely agree that POI is more watchable with a non-tech person. POI had a few stinker eps, especially ones involving "baddy of the week" type standalones or the "very special episode" where we explore the hidden pain of main character X.

The upside is the ensemble is very strong and likable, the writers worked hard to preserve continuity and development of the characters, even a few side characters that only show up one or two times per season, and it rewards careful watching.

My issues with Mr. Robot are they have been overusing some of the tricks you saw in Fight Club for example, and the characters are much more Breaking Bad in that you can like them but not admire them. The portrayal of tech is amazing though, and the direction and editing stays mostly in the "clever homage" of Hollywood genre films rather than straight ripoff of them. The cast is also very good.

And let's not forget the other big genre series, Orphan Black, which I highly recommend.

Re: 'Mr. Robot' may be fiction, but its hacking plots are all too real

#158
post #71

If you like Mr. Robot, you should watch Person of Interest. POI is a pre-snowden series about a world "in which the NSA has a system which spies on every american citizen in order to fight terrorism" (sounds familiar?). The show begins with the weak premise of "help us fight crimes we predict will happen", but don't be fooled by its appearance of a run-of-the-mill CBS show. Without spoiling it too much, I do want to…

My wife and I watched POI and as the show progressed the plot ideas got better but the acting and dialogue took a nose dive. At times the show with its dialogue became very CSI, NCSI, aka other CBS cop crime crap. Reese and Ebbg's (Rot 13 name per spoiler avoidance request) one liners became fairly irritating. It also didn't help: gurl ryvzvangrq bar bs gur orggre npgbef naq punenpgref va gur fubj (Pnegre... V'z nyy…

I was unhappy about that too, but I wonder if some of it had to do with the actor wanting to headline a bigger series.

Re: 'Mr. Robot' may be fiction, but its hacking plots are all too real

#159
post #35
post #8

I love this show. Haven't been excited about a show like this since The Wire. Not because it is "real" in the same way that The Wire is, but because it is so fresh and challenging. There are points where things go wildly left-field, but it's not predictable. Even the first season twist, which is fairly predictable depending on what movies you've seen, is preceded and followed by other twists. The second season has ve…

(I tried to be vague to avoid spoilers but now fear my post makes no sense) One of my favorite things about the twists though is that I feel like they actually lay a lot of groundwork and foreshadow them very well. For example, I think the twist before the main "first season twist" that you mention was foreshadowed beautifully at the beginning of the episode. By the end of the pre-opening credits scenes, I knew somet…

I had the first twist in the pilot. As soon as Elliot entered the ... club rooms, I figured it out. I'm very good with patterns, and one thing that annoys me is knowing how TV shows are going to end before they do. I had BSG early on, Sixth Sense ("I'll bet he dies and we see a ghost. No, that's just too obvious."), watched three episodes of the Mentalist and had the culprit in the first five minutes of each episode - even within the first minute of the first episode I saw. I'm almost at the point where I can quote some more ordinary movies while I'm watching them. (That's not as odd as it sounds, it's the patterns that are used to build each scene and the overall film that are the giveaway, but it's more subconscious than deliberate.)

So where is Mr. Robot going?

Damned if I know. That's what I like about it. As you say, some of the scenes were so odd that it was clear something was up - why is he watching the game from the bench? Why were they so angry with Elliot, and why was the friend such an influence on them? I didn't pick that one, although perhaps I should have re-watched season 1 before starting 2. I don't think that was the big twist, though, that came later - Juvgrebfr'f fhecevfr gung Ryyvbg qbrfa'g xabj jung Cunfr 2 vf tvira gung vg'f uvf cebwrpg, naq nyy gur cbgragvny snyybhg sebz gung. Vf Juvgrebfr hfvat Ryyvbg sbe uvf bja raqf? I think the other shoe has yet to drop on that one.

I think that people who write it off as "just Fight Club" are hugely missing the point - the narrator in that is just too reliable after we learn the twist, and after all, Fight Club was just a backlash against the overall commercial exploitation of the world at the time. Mr. Robot is about n qryhfvbany cnenabvq fpuvmbcueravp jvgu n fbpvny nakvrgl qvfbeqre, jub unf n zhygv-ynlrerq cyna. Jr'ir bayl frra gur Svtug Pyho cneg bs vg pbzcyrgrq, jung ryfr vf pbzvat?

Really hanging out for the finale tonight.

Re: 'Mr. Robot' may be fiction, but its hacking plots are all too real

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to elaborate on what you didn't like about S2? I enjoyed most of season 1, but started to get turned off by the philosophy/politics towards the end and kind of stopped paying attention. Now I'm seeing people say S2 is more critical of the characters and explores the ideas in some more interesting ways, which has pretty much convinced me to start watching again. You're the first I've seen who specifically didn't…

Season 1 had a clear goal, to hack E Corp to collapse banks, every chapter was about hacking E Corp, it was a little more simple. Season 2 is slow, not as exciting, and who knows what the goal is, maybe to survive after the hack, maybe something that will be revelead in the last season episode that only Mr. Robot knows, still, it is more slow paced, and tries to over analise the complicated behavior of the characters…

The first chapters of a book seldom give you the resolution at the end, here you are complaining that the first chapters of season 2 don't.

If you have such a short attention span that you need something to shock you into continuing the show, perhaps television like this isn't for you.

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