Maggie's Farm

There is absolutely no way "Blazing Saddles" could be made today.
Very few producers or directors have the leeway to deal with themes like that. Quentin Tarantino was given tremendous leeway with "Django Unchained" but mainly because the black man winds up killing all the 'bad white folk'. Quentin's writing tends to be over the top black on white reactionary tales anyway.

"Saddles" was the purest form of comedy - highlighting the hypocrisy and idiocy of racism. My favorite line (since I'm Irish) was "We'll take the niggers and the Chinks, but we don't want the Irish."

It's a line I'd still use regularly today if people didn't balk at the language itself as being offensive, regardless of context.

In the end, like most of Tarantino's stuff, the black guy wins. But he wins by guile, intelligence, and without alienating the people he's trying to win over. He isn't appeasing the people who oppose him, but he isn't fighting them aggressively either.

He's just being himself, which seems to be a decent guy doing a reasonable job in a difficult situation. His domination of Mongo (another link I have to the movie as it was a nickname of mine when I was younger since I was once dubbed a "pawn in game of life" when I entered the workplace) is a singular act of bravado and humor. Even Mongo knows he can deal with Sheriff Bart physically, but respects the manner in which he was bested.

Like most good comedies, it deals with difficult subjects effectively and honestly, and tries to be inclusive and equal in the manner by which it deals out its insults, such as they are ("where the white women at?").

But comedy is not viewed as a meaningful tool of discussion today. You're deemed out of the discussion if you use it, because all discussions of this sort must be serious, unless it's the offended party making the joke, and then you must accept it as a joke even if it is very mean spirited. Which is why "Saddles" succeeds where others fail...there's not a single mean-spirited part to it.

It's just good fun. But we can't have fun today. Too many trigger warnings come with fun.

I'm intrigued by the "price-fixing" article. If algorithms are better at overcoming Prisoner's Dilemma, as the article suggests, then that is a good thing. In that event, everybody wins.

The assumption is, in this situation, that the consumer is the one losing because they don't get a 'failure' from one of the competitive entities (in this example, the consumer is the jailer seeking the cooperation of one prisoner). But this is hardly the case.

While the jailer 'wins' if one prisoner defects, consumers do not win if one business defects. That is, they don't win in the long run. There is a temporary gain, as consumers utilize the short term drop in price, but over time the price adjusts and will likely adjust even higher as supply becomes more constrained. The broad swathe of consumers lose, while only an enlightened and/or lucky few 'win'.

Solving for prisoner's dilemma allows prices to remain a bit more stable, and more equal across the larger swathe of consumers.


The essential problem of price-fixing is that it can never be adequately defined.

You can get in trouble for setting your prices "too high" (usually defined as collusion, even if none took place), you can get in trouble for setting your prices "too low" (dumping and undermining competition) and you can get in trouble for letting the market set pricing (in examples like those after a natural disaster - GOUGING).

It's possible that collusion, fixing, dumping and gouging all occur to a small degree from time to time. But they are never long term solutions and as the article points out eventually the market undermines the process.

Even if algorithms can adjust and solve for this faster, there will still be fallout and rejection. Eventually one businessman will realize he can program his algorithm to take advantage of his competitor's more staid bot....and dump prices to move product. If self-learning is the key to these bots, and it is, then it won't be long before they figure it out.