Yes, it’s a problem that something like that is insulting to publish.
I'm not sure. Times change, and things that were acceptable become not so - and vice versa.
It's not just acceptability. Jokes written even just five or ten years ago often fail to land on modern audiences. That taste in humor changes is neither morally positive nor negative. It's easy to look for deeper meaning in the notion that what once was funny now isn't, but often, there isn't a deeper meaning to find. Life is different now; so too must humor change.
When I re-watch comedy like ‘The Young Ones’ or many other funny series from the 80s or 90s, I don’t find it funny any more. It’s not that the jokes weren’t good and that I didn’t find it funny at the time, it’s just that humour changes. In that case, it’s nothing to do with the jokes becoming ‘unacceptable’.
I find Yes Minister funny now, and I'm too young to have watched when it first aired.
I used to find The Thick of It hilarious but now I find it a depressing reminder of how ludicrous modern politics has become
Yes Minister is a reminder that politics has been ludicrous for a long time, but I think its style is much lighter than The Thick of It.
I watched the entirety of Yes (Prime) Minister relatively recently despite being younger than the show and not British; and found it delightfully entertaining and often surprisingly relevant to contemporary political issues.
The institution yes minister makes fun of has barely changed in 400 years, let alone 40, the jokes on the whole thus remain fresh.
I’d be pretty upset if the value of my home was harmed because someone decided to make it common knowledge that the town I lived in was crap.
That is a very British take. Constant worry about the value of something you don't want to sell. Thinking about your home as a financial investment, rather than a...home.
> Thinking about your home as a financial investment, rather than a...home.
Sadly, the way all Western economies have devolved over the last decades, real estate equity is the only form of wealth that at least some part of the 99% has for retirement.
Broad market index funds have performed spectacularly over the last few decades, and far more than 1% have them (or could have had them) for retirement. It has been the standard recommendation since I graduated college in the early 2000s.
Of course, many people prefer to invest in extra big and luxurious houses/cars/vacations/restaurants/alcohol/coffee/etc out and I would even throw in educations with low ROI, rather than broad market index funds.
This is specifically about those who had been earning money in the ~1980 to ~2010 period, for the vast majority, their house should not have been the only equity.
> Of course, many people prefer to invest in extra big and luxurious houses/cars/vacations/restaurants/alcohol/coffee/etc out and I would even throw in educations with low ROI, rather than broad market index funds.
The problem is, index funds have no inherent value, they (just like all stocks and other financial derivatives/instruments) are effectively a paper with one or another form of "IOU" written on it. Economic crashes, wars, tariffs, morons in politics, whatever, there are tons of ways massive amounts of value can be straight up destroyed in a matter of days.
A house however? As long as it's reasonably well built, come what may, you still have a roof over your head. No one's gonna come and kick you out of it. And that's inherent value.
> index funds have no inherent value, they (just like all stocks and other financial derivatives/instruments) are effectively a paper with one or another form of "IOU" written on it
What do you think a real-estate deed is?
> No one's gonna come and kick you out of it
Property tax. Title fraud. Mortgage fraud. Mistaken foreclosure. (Legitimate foreclosure.) Squatters' rights. Eminent domain.
The difference between real estate and financial assets is possession. But every time you're away from your home, you aren't in possession of it. And possession, control and ownership are three overlapping but ultimately separate concepts.
> No one's gonna come and kick you out of it.
Real estate suffers from the whims of the market, governmental policy and especially war. Even if you rule out outliers like imminent domain (used on many many homeowners in the first half of the 20th century in the US) or destruction via war, simple economic changes as we saw in 2008 cause people to lose their homes.
> pretty upset if the value of my home was harmed because someone decided to make it common knowledge that the town I lived in was crap
I could argue this for the journalism disclosing Flint’s lead problems. The root cause isn’t the commentary. It’s the reality. Balancing one’s property value is the fraud conveyed on a prospective buyer.
Presumably, anyone looking to buy your home would visit and quickly ascertain whether or not your town is crap.
Not necessarily. I think the interesting idea the article dances around is changing attitudes and sensibilities. In many ways, I think media of the 90s and even 2000s had a different balance of optimism and cynicism. Critical commentary was an edgy (or in this case humorous) counterpoint. 1999 saw dark edgy and dystopian films like the matrix, fight club that felt like a warning, criticism of a future to be avoided.
Similar subjects today are noticably darker without the buttress of social optimism. Films like The Joker seem less like a cautionary tale and more like a documentary. Is the joker now the protagonist?
Or could it be about “Othering” these destitute places, and realising far more of us are engulfed in humdrum of life collapsing.