This is false. The Prussians were very dedicated students of the American Civil War, which was the first major war to make extensive use of railways to move troops and supplies. The victory over France in the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War wasn’t just a matter of the superior Krupp canons, but also their vastly superior logistics adapted from the American experience (and of course their own experience from the previous wars against Austria and Denmark). The Prussians even hired a few civil war generals as advisors (though I’m afraid I can’t yet seem to find a cite for this in the books I have on hand- gimme the word, and I’ll keep digging).
In other words, not only was American military expertise acknowledged at that time, but there are clear precedents in history to hiring old American military men.
Rarity is the only real requirement for money. You might be interested in the story of the stone money from the island of Yap. These people traded giant stone rocks as a type of currency, and as the wikiarticle notes, “Though the ownership of a particular stone changes, the stone itself is rarely moved. The names of previous owners are passed down to the new one.” I could still have that big stone in my yard, but as long as everyone else agrees that I gave you that stone in exchange for some pigs, then it now “belongs” to you in a societally binding sense. A big ass stone in my yard isn’t useful at all, and yet you could sell the “ownership” of that stone on to someone else, and on and on.
Yap experienced what is called the transfer to “fiat money”, which is stuff that’s considered money not because of the inherent use of the item itself, but because of societal consensus that this item, whatever it is, is now money. What constitutes the actual shift to fiat money was the story of one stone that was said to have sunk off shore, and the people were still trading it as money because everyone knew how valuable it was. As with the American shift away from the gold standard (which was the adoption of fiat money in the US), the continued use of this stone despite its loss at sea was the introduction of fiat money on Yap. You can no longer exchange a buck for its gold equivalent, and the owner of that particular stone could no longer go to its owner’s house and drag it home if he wanted to do that.
A stone that doesn’t even exist anymore, but is still used as money, is a pretty compelling argument against “usefulness” being a requirement for a currency.
Okay, so Europe didn’t think the US military was great shakes. Since when was Japan part of Europe? Their view of the US was almost certainly vastly different that Europe’s, if for no other reason than it was the US navy that gave them the first glimpse of what a modern military looked like.
Based on the article, ISTM that they are useful as collector pieces. People might want a particular stone because it was carved by a famous craftsman, and not want another because it was carved by nodody they ever heard of. Their economy could just as easily work on exchasnge of rare baseball cards.
Well, after a generation’s time, IIRC the opening of Japan by Commodore Perry’s squadron had happened in the 1850’s, I’d think that Japan would be studying all it could from all sorts of sources, and could be considered likely corrupted by the whole “playing fields of Eton” nonsense. Certainly Great Britain’s Far East empire was at least as much of a concern to Japan as the US possessions in the Pacific. Not to mention Spain.
I grant you that an argument can be made for bringing in a US military man to Japan, from their history and prejudices. Doesn’t change what the global community’s opinion really was, I don’t think - which was all I’d meant to address. I’ve not seen the movie, and don’t really care to see it. I’d merely wanted to support the assertation that the US military didn’t really have a global reputation at that time. (Why else would the world have been so shocked when the US clobbered Spain in the Spainish-American War?)
If you guys have seen Golden Eye (I think), the most impossible scene is when there is this computer hacker guy whose cool gimmick is to type real fast using only one hand, while looking at the screen.
Oh, and there is this silly movie with Charlize Theron, Aeon Flux. At the very end, she is hanging on a rope/curtain thing, pulled by a zeppelin which is about to crash. But for some reason, the zeppelin is going really fast (meaning, the horizontal speed). When it crashes down, in my mind, I expected naturally the girl to slide and roll, since she was hitting the ground at high speed (like when a guy on a motorcycle falls down and slides on a hundred feet). But it looked more like she had fell from the second floor. Anyway, that’s poor moviemaking more than suspension of disbelief, but I had to share this.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BMalion
Hell, I used to bullseye womp-rats from my T-65 back home and they’re not much bigger than 2 meters.
Pedant Star Wars nerd
That’s an Incom [BOLD]T-16[/BOLD] Skyhopper you were shooting womprats from. The Incom T-65 X-Wing is the fancy-pants Rebel Alliance Starfighter using similar controls (hence you’re ability to pilot it right away) that would logically be able to perform a similar feat.
/pedantic Star Wars nerd
I always have trouble with Skinamax flicks like Desert Passion where a bunch of rich guys kidnap women to put them in some secret enclave so they can have vanilla sex with them.
Heeelooo. You’re RICH. Why are you kidnapping women to have sex with them? That could get you put in jail for decades if you get caught. If any of them dies while in captivity, it could get you life or the chair. Why not just offer women money to have sex with you? There’s a whole industry out there, I understand. It’s legal in Nevada, and for all practical purposes, legal in most states. Frex, Charlie Sheen isn’t it jail, and he was caught writing checks to a brothel. He’s starring in a popular sitcom if I recall correctly. No, it wasn’t punishment for his brotheling.
In the TV series Wiseguy there was a scene where one of the good guys has been captured by the evil conspiracy. The head evil guy tells his evil chief assistant to kill the good guy. But unbeknownst to him, the evil chief assistant has started having a change of heart and is thinking about defecting to the good guy side. So it’s a cliff hanger moment as the audience worries what evil chief assistant will do.
What he does is, he walks up to the good guy says “sorry bout this” and fires a round of sub-machine gun fire into his chest. The good guy collapses in a heap and all the evil guys leave the premises. During the commercial break, we in the audience consider the possibility that good guy is really dead because he was a supporting good guy not the lead good guy and maybe he’d been arguing about his contract.
But when we return we see that the lead good guy has arrived on the scene and the supporting good guy is alive after all. How did they do it? Easy, the no longer evil chief assistant loaded his sub machine gun with blanks and only pretended to shoot the good guy.
And that’s where my disbelief fell off the ceiling. I realize that TV censors aren’t going to allow a realistic depictation of the effects of gunfire on a human body but they have to maintain the illusion in the show. The reality is that if the chief assistant had tried this stunt, the head evil guy (who was standing about fifteen feet away from the shooting) would have said, “I can’t help but notice that that guy you just shot at close range with a sub machine gun doesn’t appear to be bleeding. Perhaps you inadvertantly loaded your weapon with blanks. I suggest you rectify that error by reloading it with real bullets and shooting him again until I see some holes in the corpse or I’ll call over my number two assistant and tell him he’s getting promoted as soon as he’s done shooting two people.”
Mission: Impossible: Tom Cruise searches the entire internet for the word “job”…
…and doesn’t find anything.
M:I is an absolute goldmine for this sort of thing, actually. Some of my other favourites were:
[ul]
[li]The data on the disk (that the agents themselves brought to put the data on) which causes ANY computer to start broadcasting its location on inserting the disk[/li][li]The setup at the beginning where the Big Important List of whateveritwas (it’s been a while, ok?) is left in an obvious place for the bad guys to go after so that they can be captured - only the bad guys are a little too efficient, and get away with it. But that’s ok because (BIG IMPORTANT REVELATION!) they didn’t put the true list there, it was a dud. And all these top secret agents go “wow! what a good idea! it never occurred to us that the list might not have been the true one!” Well DUH! OF COURSE if you’re going to put sensitive information in a compromised position DELIBERATELY then you’re going to make sure it’s the wrong information! :smack: [/li][li] The helicopter flying in the tunnel was a good one too.[/li][/ul]
