Pacific Hollywood Cinerama Dome Gone Or Coming Back?

[Leo Enticknap]

I understand the advantages of concentrating more people onto a smaller more vertical footprint of living space.

After what happened in Miami this morning, the attractiveness of vertical living space just took a bit of a hit..

Personally, I'm a bit done with "white washing" history. At the time Disney employed James Levine, nothing public was known about any sexual misconduct charges regarding Levine.

The reason why nothing public was known (though it was reportedly an open secret within both the Met Opera and Boston Symphony orchestras' workforces) is that his victims were intimidated against coming forward by the likely damage to their careers, or even worse. The same thing happened with Jimmy Savile, who regularly threatened lawsuits against his victims if they went public. So it's not uncommon for the full extent of predatory pedophiles' crimes to enter the public domain only after their death. Michael Jackson is another example.

The fact that many of Levine's victims are still alive creates, IMHO, an ethical problem with his recorded work (and especially Fantasia 2000, which is about his only output that is known to a wider audience beyond classical music fans) circulating freely. I would also feel queasy about it being "canceled," but neither should there be any active promotion of it.

[Marcel Birgelen]

There is a difference between actively promoting something and trying to erase it from history. What Disney is doing with Song of the South is clearly the latter. I do often think about the moral implications of it all, but does this now mean that I can't enjoy a movie with Kevin Spacey in it? Am I not allowed to enjoy listening to a Michael Jackson record?

I try to see the achievements of those men as a separate thing of how they lived their life. That's also the only way I can still look at any movie featuring Tom Cruise, knowing he's otherwise promoting his Xenu-fearing space-cult to the masses.

Many talented people seem to be otherwise deeply flawed human individuals. Maybe because they can't handle the power that comes with their fame and money, I don't know. But I'm certain there is a lot out there we still know nothing about.

After what happened in Miami this morning, the attractiveness of vertical living space just took a bit of a hit..

There is an entire spectrum between a single-family home in the suburbs and some shoddy constructed box in the sky.

It might not be hard to look up, but wasn't the first IMAX "DMR" a blow-up of one of the Star Wars prequels? I did see The Matrix: Reloaded at a Cinemark IMAX theater in Colorado Springs. That definitely did get the DMR treatment.

The first release in DMR apparently was Appollo 13. The second one was Star Wars: Episode II. Both movies had about 30 minutes cut, to fit on older IMAX platters.

I remember DMR being marketed as the pixie dust that allowed IMAX to scan 35mm to such a resolution, that they could access the "hidden information" between the film grain... Well, Episode II was shot in a native resolution of 1440x1080 with anamorphic lenses, which was later "upsqueezed" to 1920x1080. I'm still wondering how they found the magic missing information between those pixels.

The sad thing is some places in Texas, such as Austin, are starting to get over-priced. But Texas has an advantage of being a huge state with lots of land. If a new arrival to Austin can't afford housing within Austin itself he'll probably be able to find something pretty inexpensive in a town not far away.

It's not like those people that move don't see they're slowly creating a new problem elsewhere. But the solution lies in their home states. With real-estate prices and cost-of-living exploding to such extend that only multi-millionaires can afford to live there, you're slowly bleeding your population dry of any elementary workforce...

New Urbanists want everyone to abandon the suburbs, move to the urban center and increase population density. I understand the advantages of concentrating more people onto a smaller more vertical footprint of living space. But the New Urbanist types have never been able to solve the problem of affordability.

I don't think you need to build much more vertical living space, but you just should organize suburban living spaces better. The total lack of commercial development in many of those suburban areas is a great example. If the closest shop is 3 miles away, you're bound to take the car to get there. Meanwhile, envision a small town with a still functioning urban center. People can do a lot more while walking or biking to the services they need and still live in a calm neighborhood. There should be more mixed-developments, where people without children can still live in smaller homes. This would require zoning regulations to become more flexible.

Beyond that, there are many studies that indicate that building anything beyond 10 stories high isn't cost-effective at all. Maybe things change if you're in the center of a metropolis, but not in your average town or city.

Longer term the soaring costs of parenthood are really going to bite the United States square in the ass. This nation is now in the early stages of what could be a long term and possibly irreversible baby bust. For more than 40 years all of this country's net population gains came via immigration and the higher birth rates of those immigrants. And now that scheme has stopped working. Today even immigrants are having far fewer kids. In 20 years this nation's leaders may be pleading out loud, begging for more immigrants to move to the US. We already have skilled worker shortages in medicine, engineering, computer science and other fields that depend on imported labor to fill. Other nations, like those in Europe with really low birth rates, may start competing harder for that labor. In 20 years the United States military may be struggling badly at recruiting enough young adults to maintain an adequate force strength.

The increasing cost of parenthood is a problem in many industrialized countries, but from what I've heard from friends in the U.S. that stuff like daycare is exceptionally expensive. Over here, daycare still isn't cheap, but there is quite a lot of government funding to keep costs in the realm of the acceptable. If both parents want to have an active career, daycare is a necessity, not so much a luxury.

The whole thing about immigration is a very political one. Parties on both side of the spectrum tend to be very dishonest about the entire subject, often leading to polarized discussions that don't seem to match with reality. But since it's so politically loaded, I guess it's best suited for another forum.

[Bobby Henderson]

It's not like those people that move don't see they're slowly creating a new problem elsewhere. But the solution lies in their home states. With real-estate prices and cost-of-living exploding to such extend that only multi-millionaires can afford to live there, you're slowly bleeding your population dry of any elementary workforce...

That is certainly the major imbalance taking place in coastal metros like New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Of young people reaching adulthood in those regions, more and more of them are being forced out of their home regions, even to entirely different parts of the nation, just to be able to move out of their parents' houses and be on their own. The problem has existed for some time and appears to be getting worse. Those high priced regions have relied on an influx of immigrants to counter the imbalance. Even that ploy is wearing thin now.

California is in a particularly rough spot because, even though it is a big state, there are only so many places there where it is practical to live. Water supply is an enormously difficult and worsening problem. Some of the state's most highly populated areas are in what would otherwise be a barren desert. The Lake Mead reservoir is having to supply water to Southern California, the Las Vegas metro and parts of Arizona. Lake Mead also gets tapped for agriculture in the state's central valley. Now the reservoir is at record low levels.

Water is easier to come by in much of Texas. When needed, there are more available areas to build new reservoirs. It's easier for small towns to grow into cities and for existing cities to get a lot bigger. While the cost of living in Austin is starting to get out of hand there are many other areas in Texas where affordability still exists.

The increasing cost of parenthood is a problem in many industrialized countries, but from what I've heard from friends in the U.S. that stuff like daycare is exceptionally expensive. Over here, daycare still isn't cheap, but there is quite a lot of government funding to keep costs in the realm of the acceptable. If both parents want to have an active career, daycare is a necessity, not so much a luxury.

The cost of day care is ridiculously expensive. Even here in Lawton, a place considered "fly-over country," the cost of putting one child in day care is equal to renting an apartment. It's one of multiple issues that forces many married women to choose between either having a career or being a mother, but not both. Any job they take has to at least cover the day care cost with money to spare. Single mothers are stuck in a far more difficult position. They have to work and then struggle to find arrangements, usually with other relatives, to get someone to watch their kids. For many young women avoiding pregnancy in the first place is of paramount importance. Parenthood is a gateway to poverty for many Americans. Hence our nation's looming baby bust.

Out of my own selfish concern, I'm pretty worried about this problem. Around 20 years from now I'll be eligible to retire. By that time the US will be very top-heavy with elderly people and have a shrinking working age population. Our tax base will be shrinking. Programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will be unsustainable. Our nation won't be able to afford its military, much less even staff it properly with manpower. America is going to be in big fucking trouble.

[Leo Enticknap]

Agreed totally on childcare. It's one of the reasons why my wife and I only had one, both directly and indirectly. The direct reason is our age when he was born; the indirect one is that we had to wait that long to be as sure as we could be that we could raise him in a financially secure way, which included full time childcare to begin with, and then part time once he is in to K-12. So here is one family unit, at any rate, that is not reproducing itself at the level needed to sustain the current population. I read somewhere recently that China is now trying to turn this oil tanker around by not only ending the one child policy, but actively trying to encourage its population to have more. But the broader economic climate discourages that so much, that the change of policy at the top isn't having much effect.

And childcare, of course, is something you can't automate. One side effect of the pandemic is that every business that can replace low skilled, minimum wage (or not much above it) labor has been doing so aggressively over the last year. A coffee bar/snack place near me recently reduced its wait staff workforce by around three quarters, by putting iPads on each table, through which you place and pay for your order. Sophisticated combine harvester type things that can pick fruit off trees are making an appearance in the Central Belt. Amazon is putting more robots and fewer humans into its warehouses. Self-driving big rigs are already in advanced testing stages, and it looks likely that they'll be certified for freeway use (with human drivers getting in and taking over for the first and last miles between the on-ramp and the warehouse) within 2-4 years. Airbus is now testing a variant of the A350 that can be operated by a single pilot. But childcare, and for those that need it, elderly care, cannot be done by machines, and the cost of having humans do it has outstripped inflation for many years now.

As for California's water problem, it can only be a matter of time before large scale desalination comes onto the agenda. One plant is already being built near Carlsbad. It's hugely energy intensive, but that is the sort of application for which solar panels and birdie blenders actually work OK (because all that matters is the total volume of water you treat, not the precise time at which you treat it: unlike electricity, it is possible to store a large volume of water until it's needed), and California has plenty of sunshine and wind.

[Bobby Henderson]

I personally never had any kids of my own. My younger brother has one grown daughter, now serving in the US Army. My niece has one daughter and no plans on having more kids. The high cost of parenthood is steering a lot of this behavior. Young people can be stupid at times. When it comes to the cost of raising kids, young people are proving they're not that stupid. The teen pregnancy rate in the US is now less than 1/3 what it was in 1990.

The growing trend of automation will be another downward force on America's birth rate. Most parents want their children to grow up to have the best opportunities. That paradigm includes going to college in order to be able to get a good paying, white collar job. They don't dream of their kids growing up to weld, lay floor tile or work in a factory. The inflation rate of college tuition costs is putting that white collar future for many would-be parents' kids way out of reach. The specter of automation eliminating millions of lower level jobs is making the gulf between the haves and have nots even worse in terms of what to expect for a child's future.

I'm still of the opinion America's looming baby bust is not on the radar scopes of any policy makers. They can't see past their own 2-year or 4-year election cycles much less show interest in an issue whose consequences may take another 10-20 years to have effect. Even today there is a lot of economic imbalance that is pitting cities versus towns and different regions against each other. Small towns and rural areas are caught in a negative feedback loop, shedding more young people to big cities. Not enough kids are being born to replace those who left. That's leaving those towns and rural areas with a population that is getting older, a working age labor force and tax base that is shrinking and not enough opportunity to convince any young people leaving high school or college to stay. When a small town can't afford to have its own police or fire departments, keep the streets paved or keep a school staffed and populated with students that town will slowly dry up and die. Even elderly people get forced out of such towns; they're in more need of access to health care, adult day care services, etc. Those services are usually found in bigger towns and cities.

Here in Oklahoma our state legislature recently finished state-level redistricting. Rural areas, particularly those in the Southeast part of Oklahoma, got hit hard. Whole counties have been merged into other representative districts -all due to population loss. Meanwhile the Oklahoma City and Tulsa metros have gained new districts.

China is already keenly aware how its one child policy failed badly. They boosted the limit to 2 kids and are now even removing that limit. The country is falling into the same dilemma of lopsided demographic imbalance of elderly vs working age generations that has been adversely affecting Japan. In addition to encouraging couples to have more kids they're getting aggressive with diplomacy. Africa is the only continent on the planet that still has high birth rates. In another couple or so decades the majority of the world's youth will live in Africa. The continent has the potential to become either an economic powerhouse or a nightmare scenario of tyrant controlled military power. China is trying to lay down ground work to establish an economic and diplomatic beach head there. The rest of the developed world isn't doing so much.