The economic troubles in Europe are leading to public unrest, as EU governments try to pare back their bloated public sectors, in some cases trimming wages and benefits, in others by delaying access to them. In France, plans to save the national pension system by raising the retirement age from 60 (!) to just 62 has lead to a massive strike of over one million people:
French strikers disrupted trains and planes, hospitals and mail delivery Tuesday amid massive street protests over plans to raise the retirement age. Across the English Channel, London subway workers unhappy with staff cuts walked off the job.
The protests look like the prelude to a season of strikes in Europe, from Spain to the Czech Republic, as heavily indebted governments cut costs and chip away at some cherished but costly benefits that underpin the European good life — a scaling-back process that has gained urgency with Greece’s euro110 billion ($140 billion) bailout.
In France, where people poured into the streets in 220 cities, setting off flares and beating drums, a banner in the southern port city of Marseille called for Europe-wide solidarity: “Let’s Refuse Austerity Plans!” The Interior Ministry said more than 1.1 million people demonstrated throughout France, while the CFDT union put the number at 2.5 million.
(…)
French protesters are angry about the government’s plan to do away with the near-sacred promise of retirement at 60, forcing people to work until 62 because they are living longer. The goal is to bring the money-draining pension system back into the black by 2018.
As debate on the subject opened in parliament, Labor Minister Eric Woerth said the plan was one “of courage and reason” and that it is the “duty of the state” to save the pension system. He has said the government won’t back down, no matter how big the protests.
Prime Minister Francois Fillon reminded the French that it could be worse: In nearly all European countries, the current debate is over raising the retirement age to 67 or 68, he said. Germany has decided to bump the retirement age from 65 to 67, for example, and the U.S. Social Security system is gradually raising the retirement age to 67.
That sense of perspective was missing from many of the French protests, where some slogans bordered on the hysterical. One sign in Paris showed a raised middle finger with the message: “Greetings from people who will die on the job.”
Nothing like Gallic hysterics, eh?
Of course, we shouldn’t be surprised at this: statist societies like France and much of the EU use ever-expanding government-provided benefits as bribes to buy social peace, making dependents out their citizens and, in effect, infantilizing them. It’s no wonder, then, that the public then throws a tantrum when the state is forced to cut back.
But before anyone indulges in some schadenfreude at French expense, bear in mind that President Obama and his progressive allies want to take us down this same statist, dependent, and infantilized social-democratic road. (And, to a lesser extent, big-government Republicans have been willing to accommodate them.) We’re already seeing that with the growth of public sector unions in the US and their outlandish benefits*.
While Europe seems to be in for a season of unrest, the problem isn’t yet so bad in the US and, importantly, many people agree that it is a problem in the first place. Hopefully we can make the necessary reforms before we have our own mass tantrums.
*(For the record, I’m a member of a quasi-public union, and apparently it’s one of the dumber ones; we’ve never received the over-the-top wages and benefits the other unions do. I tell ya, it ain’t fair…)
(Crossposted at Public Secrets)
Interactivity is a key element when it comes to successfully spreading web content, which is why the ARG or transmedia experience — which works across platforms to create a narrative that the user has to discover on his or her own — has become a much more visible part of the landscape. Enter a recently launched ARG created specifically for the web series community, one that celebrates it.
Created by producer Jenni Powell and No Mimes Media, Webishades launched earlier this month via an article posted on Tubefilter. That article included a link to the Webishades website, which had secrets to be unlocked with phone calls, emails and ads on websites for series including The Guild, Squatters, Compulsions and The Temp Life. “It was a lot insidery, but that was part of the fun of it,” Powell said via phone.
To be honest, I completed the Webishades challenge in about ten minutes, because I cheated. And while I cheated — with some help from the ARG forum Unfiction, where previous players have documented the complete path to victory — that low level of commitment is deliberate.
Webishades is part of No Mimes’ recent string of 10 Minute ARG projects, which are created to be self-sustaining in perpetuity. “People don’t do stuff when we want them to, necessarily,” No Mimes managing director Benham Karbassi said via phone. “So we want to give them the opportunity to do it when they want to.”
So far, by Karbassi’s estimations, “a few thousand” people have checked out the Webishades website, with “a few hundred” following up on the phone call. But every component of the Webishades experience is automated, and as long as the participating web series don’t remove the clues from their websites, the game will be playable for the foreseeable future.
Not that there’s a lot there, to be frank — Webishades doesn’t have much in the way of story, instead operating as a promotional engine for the shows involved, and the reward is relatively Spartan. “It’s not as narrative as other ARG games,” Powell said. “It’s very different because it’s advertisement-based: ‘Here’s this fun fake product, let’s talk about it.’ That’s more of the game. We could have blown this out more, but it was just a fun way for us to work together.”
One of the complications is that Felicia Day, who in the project’s original iteration played a much larger role, was cast in a multi-episode arc on the SyFy Channel series Eureka this summer, meaning that her involvement had to be scaled back dramatically. “As you go, you have to be really flexible — that’s why ARGs are so fun to design,” Powell said. “You have to be on your toes the entire time.”
No money exchanged hands in this project, with everyone instead donating their time to put the elements together (with the exception of performance fees for actors in the Webishades commercial). That’s because Webishades isn’t intended to be a moneymaker; in fact, a Crackle representative, during a call with Powell and the No Mimes team, directly challenged No Mimes as to why they were doing this project — because it was just going to cost them money.
Karbassi’s reply at the time was that it would be great advertising for them, and also give them access to the web series community. Which seems to have paid off, at least in regard to the latter point: The number of series which participated in the project does represent an impressive range of the talent currently making web narrative. And while the numbers are low on players who have fully engaged with the project, those Webishades ads do remain on all the respective sites. The game is still on.
Related GigaOm Pro Content (subscription required): Shattering the Fourth Wall To Find Web Audiences
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The economic troubles in Europe are leading to public unrest, as EU governments try to pare back their bloated public sectors, in some cases trimming wages and benefits, in others by delaying access to them. In France, plans to save the national pension system by raising the retirement age from 60 (!) to just 62 has lead to a massive strike of over one million people:
French strikers disrupted trains and planes, hospitals and mail delivery Tuesday amid massive street protests over plans to raise the retirement age. Across the English Channel, London subway workers unhappy with staff cuts walked off the job.
The protests look like the prelude to a season of strikes in Europe, from Spain to the Czech Republic, as heavily indebted governments cut costs and chip away at some cherished but costly benefits that underpin the European good life — a scaling-back process that has gained urgency with Greece’s euro110 billion ($140 billion) bailout.
In France, where people poured into the streets in 220 cities, setting off flares and beating drums, a banner in the southern port city of Marseille called for Europe-wide solidarity: “Let’s Refuse Austerity Plans!” The Interior Ministry said more than 1.1 million people demonstrated throughout France, while the CFDT union put the number at 2.5 million.
(…)
French protesters are angry about the government’s plan to do away with the near-sacred promise of retirement at 60, forcing people to work until 62 because they are living longer. The goal is to bring the money-draining pension system back into the black by 2018.
As debate on the subject opened in parliament, Labor Minister Eric Woerth said the plan was one “of courage and reason” and that it is the “duty of the state” to save the pension system. He has said the government won’t back down, no matter how big the protests.
Prime Minister Francois Fillon reminded the French that it could be worse: In nearly all European countries, the current debate is over raising the retirement age to 67 or 68, he said. Germany has decided to bump the retirement age from 65 to 67, for example, and the U.S. Social Security system is gradually raising the retirement age to 67.
That sense of perspective was missing from many of the French protests, where some slogans bordered on the hysterical. One sign in Paris showed a raised middle finger with the message: “Greetings from people who will die on the job.”
Nothing like Gallic hysterics, eh?
Of course, we shouldn’t be surprised at this: statist societies like France and much of the EU use ever-expanding government-provided benefits as bribes to buy social peace, making dependents out their citizens and, in effect, infantilizing them. It’s no wonder, then, that the public then throws a tantrum when the state is forced to cut back.
But before anyone indulges in some schadenfreude at French expense, bear in mind that President Obama and his progressive allies want to take us down this same statist, dependent, and infantilized social-democratic road. (And, to a lesser extent, big-government Republicans have been willing to accommodate them.) We’re already seeing that with the growth of public sector unions in the US and their outlandish benefits*.
While Europe seems to be in for a season of unrest, the problem isn’t yet so bad in the US and, importantly, many people agree that it is a problem in the first place. Hopefully we can make the necessary reforms before we have our own mass tantrums.
*(For the record, I’m a member of a quasi-public union, and apparently it’s one of the dumber ones; we’ve never received the over-the-top wages and benefits the other unions do. I tell ya, it ain’t fair…)
(Crossposted at Public Secrets)
Interactivity is a key element when it comes to successfully spreading web content, which is why the ARG or transmedia experience — which works across platforms to create a narrative that the user has to discover on his or her own — has become a much more visible part of the landscape. Enter a recently launched ARG created specifically for the web series community, one that celebrates it.
Created by producer Jenni Powell and No Mimes Media, Webishades launched earlier this month via an article posted on Tubefilter. That article included a link to the Webishades website, which had secrets to be unlocked with phone calls, emails and ads on websites for series including The Guild, Squatters, Compulsions and The Temp Life. “It was a lot insidery, but that was part of the fun of it,” Powell said via phone.
To be honest, I completed the Webishades challenge in about ten minutes, because I cheated. And while I cheated — with some help from the ARG forum Unfiction, where previous players have documented the complete path to victory — that low level of commitment is deliberate.
Webishades is part of No Mimes’ recent string of 10 Minute ARG projects, which are created to be self-sustaining in perpetuity. “People don’t do stuff when we want them to, necessarily,” No Mimes managing director Benham Karbassi said via phone. “So we want to give them the opportunity to do it when they want to.”
So far, by Karbassi’s estimations, “a few thousand” people have checked out the Webishades website, with “a few hundred” following up on the phone call. But every component of the Webishades experience is automated, and as long as the participating web series don’t remove the clues from their websites, the game will be playable for the foreseeable future.
Not that there’s a lot there, to be frank — Webishades doesn’t have much in the way of story, instead operating as a promotional engine for the shows involved, and the reward is relatively Spartan. “It’s not as narrative as other ARG games,” Powell said. “It’s very different because it’s advertisement-based: ‘Here’s this fun fake product, let’s talk about it.’ That’s more of the game. We could have blown this out more, but it was just a fun way for us to work together.”
One of the complications is that Felicia Day, who in the project’s original iteration played a much larger role, was cast in a multi-episode arc on the SyFy Channel series Eureka this summer, meaning that her involvement had to be scaled back dramatically. “As you go, you have to be really flexible — that’s why ARGs are so fun to design,” Powell said. “You have to be on your toes the entire time.”
No money exchanged hands in this project, with everyone instead donating their time to put the elements together (with the exception of performance fees for actors in the Webishades commercial). That’s because Webishades isn’t intended to be a moneymaker; in fact, a Crackle representative, during a call with Powell and the No Mimes team, directly challenged No Mimes as to why they were doing this project — because it was just going to cost them money.
Karbassi’s reply at the time was that it would be great advertising for them, and also give them access to the web series community. Which seems to have paid off, at least in regard to the latter point: The number of series which participated in the project does represent an impressive range of the talent currently making web narrative. And while the numbers are low on players who have fully engaged with the project, those Webishades ads do remain on all the respective sites. The game is still on.
Related GigaOm Pro Content (subscription required): Shattering the Fourth Wall To Find Web Audiences
ScribbleLive plans to reinvent the <b>news</b> article | VentureBeat
Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on media, advertising, and social networks. Before joining VentureBeat in ...
Craig Newmark: NPR Will Be A Dominant <b>News</b> Force In Ten Years
Craigslist founder Craig Newmark said he thinks NPR will be a "dominant force" in media by 2020, thanks to the organization's membership model. Speaking recently with Atlantic writer James Fallows at a journalism event in Washington, ...
Probably Bad <b>News</b>: Toy FAIL - Epic Fail Funny Videos and Funny <b>...</b>
epic fail photos - Probably Bad News: Toy FAIL. ... Fail, Owned and Pwn moments in pictures and videos. Share fails, pwns, and owns with the world on FAIL Blog. Lolcats � Loldogs � Celebs � Look-Alikes � News ...
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