For centuries

France has practiced and perfected institutional otakuism

(The original post was either deleted or the person blocked me.

But for posterity, the claim being responded to here is that American minimum wage workers are actually dramatically poorer than Bob Cratchit from A Christmas Carol.)

You might start with learning about the basics of household economics for the majority of humans who have ever lived, which is to say pre-modern peasant farmers: acoup.blog/2025/07/11/c...

And *historians* - be better than this!

I understand you may specialize in ideas, or politics, or something else but PLEASE equip yourself with a basic grasp of how material conditions change over time.

I had to learn Pindar and Aristotle and Hobbes and Rousseau, you can learn how prices work.

This sort of absurd, ultra-bleak reading of the remarkable prosperity of modern societies is not only embarrassingly wrong - and I saw a historian retweet this sincerely (!!) - but also helps fuel not materialist, left-wing politics, but rather reactionary right-wing politics ('RETVRN-ism').

So what you have *actually* discovered is that an American family working at minimum wage is *meaningfully better off* in terms of access to real resources than someone on the lower runs of Victorian Britain's educated *urban middle class.*

Quite the opposite of the intended implication!

Moreover, we need to understand that when the Cratchit's are described as 'poor' this is relative to their social station (urban middle class) not the population at large. Bob Cratchit is an educated clerk, his eldest daughter an apprentice at a trade.

They are not working/lower class.

I went over the 'grain wage' conversions, which are more relevant here: bsky.app/profile/bret...

In calories, a modern minimum wage worker has something like 17 times Cratchit's buying power.

The original article this article is leeching off of and voiding of context for ragebait points.

It's a nothing statement, Aardman isn't switching to ai. The kind of "ai" here is the same automation stuff we've had for years, but renamed ai to attract investors.

www.radiotimes.com/movies/walla...

I think that reading well and deeply makes you a more interesting person, gives you a language to speak with, and allows you to see things that might otherwise be missed. Deep interest in anything can do this, but some traditions are richer and wider than others.

I remember the Olden Days when T0ky0P0p had the Sailor Moon license and they put out a whole pile of "novelizations", which were NOT APPROVED BY KODANSHA OR TAKEUCHI. This was why the Sailor Moon manga were out of print for over 10 years until Kodansha started their own US localization dept.

This is giving me unwanted flashbacks to Harry Turtledove's series of novels which were "WW2 in a high fantasy setting" complete with Stalingrad, the Manhattan Project and all the various crimes against humanity very much intact, but also dragons and wizards.