Hacker Cinema
The Good Wife
2009 · TV series · 43 min episodes · 7 seasons
Created by Michelle King, Robert King
Alicia Florrick boldly assumes full responsibility for her family and re-enters the workforce after her husband's very public sex and political corruption scandal lands him in jail.
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35 comments on Hacker News
Not a bad thing necessarily, but some part of the plot, and usually with things going awry or emphasizing the scammy nature of blockchain.
Examples: Shameless season 11, The Simpsons S31E13, Superstore season 5, the good wife S3E13, greys anatomy S14E8, big bang theory S11E9, Billions season 5, some later seasons of Mr Robot, etc
Your historical examples are absolutely fantastic!
A more fictionalized dramatization might be season 4 episode 9 of _The Good Wife_ trying to get a DOMA test case (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Wife_season_4) which focuses on the need to lose at the initial trial because SCOTUS is part of the appellate court system. (And, of course, you probably need to lose at state-level appeals as well.)
Well most modern TV series use these in their plots like Bitcoin and SuperPACs in The Good Wife springs to mind. So same for books?
I thought this was just a 'The Good Wife' episode. Didn't think people were this villainous in real life
Coincidentally came across a comment by Neil Gaiman today, related to this topic on Reddit: I don't write much about gay sex, as people who have read my book would know. But oddly, I don't read tweet like this and feel to convert. Instead I read it and vaguely wish I'd actually written more about gay sex. (Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/me_irlgbt/comments/x79303/me_irlgbt/ ).
Isn't it an interesting perspective from a writer? Inspiration and creativity comes from such moments, and tomorrow if this writer creates a gay character for some story, you can feel the author will do a good job of characterisation and making such character feel real. When the writing is good, an actor feels connected to it and the director and show-maker too are inspired to do justice it. Right now it doesn't often feel like that. sometimes when I see some of the awful effort of some of these LGBT / person of colour (PoC) / powerful women scenes, out of boredom I often find myself imagining how such a scene was shot - someone at the production unit suddenly remembers, "Ok, who is playing the token LGBT / PoC / Women? Let's get on with it. What's the scene about - Is it about them facing humiliation 'cos of their identity, showing them being accepted, a sex scene with them, or them finding their own voice or power?" ... (And later in the editing room some director instructing some intern) "OK, trim these hour long footage of the LGBT / PoC / woman character into 1 to 5 minutes snippets and insert it somewhere in episode 1, 5, 7 and wrap it up!" ...
As for every story requiring an LGBT character because they "exist everywhere", can't many other vulnerable / minority group too lay a claim on that? For example, I am sure there are more muslims in the USA than there are LGBTs - should every American TV show now start including muslim, Hindus, Jews, Sikhs, Indian-American, Chinese-Americans characters etc., etc? Obviously, you realistically can't. (And note that all these groups too face bigotry and hatred just because of who they are).
As a non-american, I prefer the previous format of American television where good story didn't have such contrived caricaturisation and only relevant characters that added to the stories. Will and Grace or Modern Family come to mind when I think of how LGBT characters were relevant, well integrated and portrayed well in the story. Recently I finished watching Atlanta and really love the show, especially due to the insights on black culture (in the US) it offered. Shows like "The Good Wife" and "The Good Fight" show women empowerment so naturally and elegantly that you don't even notice it while enjoying the drama. I feel such dramas do more justice to an LGBT / PoC / woman character than some token characters inserted forcefully.
There was an episode of The Good Wife where a dispute was settled using Christian arbitration. Not sure how realistic it was, but it was kind of interesting.
https://ew.com/recap/the-good-wife-season-6-episode-3/
To go a bit on a tangent: I love TV shows where it really is shot where it is set, and the location is a big part of the show.
Examples: Magnum P.I. (Hawaii); Miami Vice (Miami); The Equalizer (NYC). Where re(make)(boot)s exist, I'm talking about the originals.
On the other hand, it can be a little annoying when, e.g. in The Good Wife, NYC is standing in for Chicago.
On a third hand, I love how Murder, She Wrote represents many different places with the same backlot sets, throwing in bits of stock or second unit establishing shots.
In one of the episodes of The Good Wife (a legal-politico drama), the defense lawyer's investigator gets her hands on the "original" video and finds something relevant on it, and comments on how the police / prosecution often give re-encoded videos to the defense so that they miss some important detail in it. As someone who isn't American, I remember wondering how that could be legal and thought it was poor research by the otherwise fantastic team of writers of that show. Surprised by this news today!
Watch this episode of The Good Wife (season 05, episode 13): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3540606/ ...
New Year’s Resolutions 2020
Family
2019: Dinner with family 4/7 nights a week (success, mostly)
2020: Continue status quo
2019: 10 vacations and/or road-trips and/or weekend get-aways (success)
2020: Increase to 14
2019: Park/Recreation together 20 of 40 non-winter weekends (success)
2020: Continue status quo
2019: No non-emergency office work on weekends (complete failure)
2020: Aim for more realistic 8 or less weekends in office spent on non-emergency work
Health
2019: BMI 30 → 25 (complete failure)
2020: BMI 30 → 25
2020: 25% reduction in triglycerides
2019: Gym 3x week (success)
2020: Gym 3x week -- but with HR reaching cardio zone at least 30 cumulative min each visit
2019: Bike/Walk to Work at least 20% non rainy/snowy days (success)
2020: Bike/Walk to Work at least 40% non rainy/snowy days (success)
2020: Added Goal: Cumulative Bike+Walk+Peloton mileage of 1000mi for the year
2019: Track all meals with data (failure, tracked ~20%)
2020: Track all meals with data
2019: Sleep no later than 3am every day except 5/yr (failure)
2020: Sleep no later than 2am every day except 5/yr, use weight training to force exhaustion
Personal Growth
2019: 12 books for the year (wild success)
2020: 24 books for the year (audio or dead-tree), double-time with exercise hours
2020: Added Goal: 24 long-form articles (audio or dead-tree), double-time with exercise hours
2019: Write 5 blog posts (failure)
2020: Write 12 blog posts
2020: Create Podcast Series with at least 5 episodes
2003-2019: Read Atlas Shrugged (failure)
2020: Read Atlas Shrugged
Training
2019 Three certifications in tech I want (failure -- did only 1 -- on NVIDIA RAPIDS)
2020 Certifications: Fast.ai; Azure Cloud (any 2 certs); Google Cloud (any 2 certs)
2020 One CGE at grad school with credit
2020 One CGE at grad school just auditing
Career and Networking
2019: 3 talks/presentations at conferences (success)
2020: Continue status quo + 1 major main-line talk
2020: 3x/month talks/meetups
2020: 2/year meetups speaker/presenter
2020: Meet 2/month new interesting people
2020: Dinner with former work colleague 1/month
2020: Phone catch-up with former work colleague 2/month
Job
2019: Mentor 3 interns (success)
2020: Mentor 3 interns
2020: Three brand new demos for marketing Achieve 95% test coverage on my code
Family Office
2019: 5 deals (failure)
2020: 52 in-person meets with angel-stage teams
2020: 10 deals (albeit smaller dollar amount) or high-conviction PME, if that is better
Side Hustle
Convert 3 of my graduate school projects into working projects (not business successes, just working projects to ensure I have the tech process locked down.) Outsourcing and managing is OK, delivery is the key here.
Tinkering
2019: Play with Jetson Nano (failure)
2020: One mini-demo with RPI
2020: One mini-demo with Jetson Nano (colab w/ friends OK)
2020: One mini-demo with Google Coral (colab w/ friends OK)
2020: One mini-demo with Azure Kinect DK (colab w/ friends OK)
Arts
2020: Discover 5 new amazing artists i’ll listen to forever
2020: Finally finish watching series I love (The Americans, The Good Wife)
Self Organization
2019: No loose articles (everything in Evernote/Pocket) (FAILURE)
2020: No loose articles (everything in Evernote/Pocket)
2020: No one-off reading -- everything through RSS reader or tracked
Just echoing the above—watch The Good Wife! I think it's my favorite TV show, and I'm really picky. Don't be put off by the title—this is absolutely not "the real housewives" or the like.
One addendum, however: I would greatly encourage skipping the last two seasons of The Good Wife (6 and 7), which constitute a massive and sudden drop in quality. There are a few good episodes, but not enough. You'll hear tidbits about what happened when you watch The Good Fight, and it's better that way.
We do know that US Security agencies already interface and work with American tech companies to "safeguard" their commercial secrets and infrastructure. There may already be some well established protocols and processes in place.
Another (mildly) interesting tidbit to feed our theory - The Good Wife TV episode (season 7 episode 14) introduces an agency called "TAPS" or "Technology Allied Protection Service". In the episode, it’s supposed to be a multi-agency task force that works with Silicon Valley’s biggest companies to clamp down on technology theft.
>> The endless stream of crime dramas that make it clear the police never do wrong and if you make it to a trial you are certainly guilty.
I've been watching "The Good Wife" seasons 1 and 2 recently. The show deals with people in private law firms, government prosecuting agencies, law enforcement, and random folks caught up in the legal process. The seasons are set in Chicago during the post-2008-crash time frame, so there's a lot of financial pressure all around.
The show depicts well the financial and political game, the skewed incentives, and deal-making, the disregard for truth, racial and economic biases, how law enforcement often actually "does wrong". I'm sure the show's not very realistic, but it's fun, it paints almost no one in good light, and exposes the double-dealing and back-stabbing up and down the stack.
I'm a bit surprised by that comment. I actually find Prime to have pretty good content and typically better movies than Netflix (who's movie library has been shrinking pretty drastically over the years).
If you haven't already watched it, I'd highly recommend Season 1 and 2 of "The Expanse" on Prime. There are a lot of pretty great shows on there as long as you don't rely on DC/Marvel shows for all your entertainment. Other shows that are reasonably acclaimed are:
- The Man in the High Castle
- Avatar: The Last Airbender
- The Nightmanager
- Mr. Robot
- Boardwalk Empire
- Downton Abbey
- Sneaky Pete
- Orphan Black
- Dr. Who
- Veep
- The Good Wife
- Transparent
- Hannibal
- Deadwood
- Curb your Enthusiasm
- The Wire
- Six Feet Under
- The Sopranos
Watch the TV show "The Good Wife" for a detailed treatment of this technique.
Binge watch "The Good Wife", there's a multi-season NSA arc.
// Don't make life decisions based on the portrayal.
I don't think binge-watching, as many people here are defining it (watching a whole season in a weekend) is useful to Netflix.
What is useful to Netflix is watching a whole show over the course of several weeks, a few episodes at a time.
The primary way my wife and I consume shows is to watch a few episodes a day, every day, until we've watched from the first to the last available episode. We are currently watching through The Good Wife on Netflix which, at 134 episodes, will take us about 2 months.
For me that's a good deal, because it would cost about £35 for a DVD boxset (yes, I could shop around, but only if my time is worthless), while Netflix only costs me £18 for 2 months. For Netflix that's a good deal, because they've got 2 months of subscription from me for 1 show.
Once we've finished with The Good Wife, we'll find another show to watch.
We watch about the equivalent of a movie each night, but we aren't going to watch enough movies in a month to make it feel worth keeping the subscription. Movies require a larger investment, because the characters and world are new and different with each one. With a TV show the characters are recurring, so you don't have to invest as much, which makes them easier to watch a lot of in a row.
The Good Wife is one of the few shows I've seen that does tech right.
That episode in particular was an excellent example of balancing technical accuracy and artistic licence (e.g. the creator's alias is "Mr. Bitcoin" instead of Satoshi Nakamoto).
A lot of shows that do their research seem to feel a need to show it off by having nerds spouting word salad, which while completely accurate, is not something anyone would actually say.
Fun fact : there was a "The Good Wife" episode years ago in which this is issue was basically discussed in court. There the judge ruled bitcoin as a currency after about thirty seconds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCJpJgyxKEg
> There's lots of 'randomness' from the historical nature of our roads that I suspect it would be hard for a self driving car to deal with. Mostly I suspect they'd end up being overcautious where real drivers need to be a bit more aggressive to actually progress.
Funnily enough, this was recently brought up in the TV series The Good Wife where the self driving car manufacturer had to add in a certain amount of 'law abiding fuzziness' into the algo to match real people and to actually advance at an intersection.
This was the plot of a recent episode of The Good Wife.
It was also the subject of The Good Wife season 6 finale, if you like your current events with a side of fiction.
This reminded me of the oft-repeated quote from Alicia Florrick in last week's episode of The Good Wife.
"All options are open to me, and I plan to decide in the next 48 hours."
> I'm in Illinois which is an all-party-consent state
It looks like this was overturned in 2014.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois_wiretapping_law#Court_proceedings
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/03/20/illinois-supreme-court-strikes-down-broad-ban-on-audiorecording-conversations/
n.b. I learned about this in a recent episode of "The Good Wife". I am Canadian.
The Good Wife takes lots of stories from real life. I'm thinking specifically of the episode when a show (like Glee) lifted a cover of a song (like Baby Got Back) from an artist (like Jonathan Coulton) who didn't technically own the copyright to the lyrics or melody.
>While I was seeing my episode of The Good Wife falter at what appeared to be 1.9 Mbps, I was able to measure connection speeds of 28 Mbps to my house using a Speedtest.net test from Ookla. This is exactly the dichotomy that the M-Lab data is showing, and my example is not an isolated one; Comcast users have been complaining for months.
How do we know that it is not just the provider being sapped for bandwidth? I notice that speed tests I run in the mid-day and evening come back pretty much the same, but Netflix takes noticeably longer to buffer in the evening. I always assumed this was because their servers were much busier then.
His issue here is he clearly does not have big [enough] money lawyers representing him - it's not like he is on the college hacker team receiving a helping hand for his legal troubles from his alma mater.
The US seems to have some of the craziest over-reaction sentences and has been happily exporting the insanity to legal systems around the world for quite a while. They put the gas pedal to the floor both domestically and internationally post 9/11 as, you know, some of these people are helping terrorists and stuff. Why else would a SWAT team need to go so heavy-handed on a trivial arrest like this.
As an aside, I now know more of the background from the Good Wife episode; I've been suprised how often tech stories are woven in and in surprisingly balanced detail.
Sure you can.
Most people in the UK are totally fine with some levels of censorship.
Ask them if they want a ban on people producing or distributing images of child sexual abuse and most people would say that they do want a ban.
Extend that to images of people having sex with animals and many people are happy with a ban, and some people saying that they agree it should be restricted to those over the ages of 18, and not accidentally available to anyone.
But when you ask someone in the UK if a TV show should receive a huge ($500,000) fine for an accidental < 1 second showing of a partially clothed nipple most people are going to laugh and say "no". (Unlike US FCC which imposed such a fine for Janet Jackson nipple slip. That fine was overturned 7 years later, but only because FCC had used new powers before taking action). Or if you ask whether it's okay for terrestrial broadcast TV shows to include nudity or swearing after 9pm most people are going to say it's okay. (Unlike US, where shows have to censor their language. See for example The Good Wife which parodied this situation with a street noise during a courtroom hearing. The noise was used to mask bad language.)
Also, might as well mention that next week's episode will feature "a group of software coders in a contract dispute". The Good Wife is actually pretty tech heavy for a mainstream show.
When I lived in Chicago back in 1998 I distinctly remember feeling that the common use of credit cards (and mobile phones) was much more primitive compared to Spain. 10 years later, I needed to use cash way more often the 3 years I lived in Vancouver than the 3 years since I came back to Madrid. Heck, I haven't visited an ATM in at least 3 months.
That said, you are probably right that the technical education and trust needed to embrace bitcoins is much less common in Spain. I first heard of bitcoins in, of all places, an episode of "The Good Wife" couple years ago, and have only found a handful of people who know about them. I imagine this will be changing rapidly in the following months, just like it's doing everywhere else.
From outside the US:
The fuss caused by the wardrobe malfunction during a sports event was baffling.
Some TV programs (not aimed at children, an example is "The Good Wife") have to avoid all swears. That's okay, but sometimes characters need to swear. In one episode they jokingly used traffic noise from a window to mask the swears.
I don't understand the torture porn of shows like 24 and the refusal to allow swearing.
Facebook made a decision to not allow any nipples. That's okay, their servers their rules. But they extended that to disallow any images of women breast-feeding children. That is baffling. Especially when FB also has some hate pages.
> I'd be curious about the underlying reasons.
I'd guess diverse population, with a vocal group who cares about it and a clear issue to campaign against. It's harder to say "More swearing on TV!".
I'm not really sure if or how this should rewrite your conclusions, but cbs does stream full episodes of the good wife
http://www.cbs.com/shows/the_good_wife/video/
"That's the power of intent and Facebook doesn't have that."
Sure they do...
Status Update from malandrew's mom: "OMG I can't wait to watch the new episode of The Good Wife tonight!"
Facebook ads: "Click here to watch The latest Episode of the Good Wife"
Facebook could has something better than Google intent in that they should be able to predict what you intend to search for before you go looking for it.
Intent is huge. I've never been one to click on Google Ads except in real rare instances. Only once I observed my mom using Google did I realize the full value of intent and google ads while searching.
She wanted to watch an episode of The Good Wife that she had missed so she searched in the Safari omnibar for "watch The Good Wife" and the first div under the search bar is an ad to some site that was not CBS that had the Good Wife available to watch via streaming video. To you and I, it's obvious that this "first result" is ad and we would skip over it to the first result. But to my mom, she thinks it's a search result and clicks on it. When she arrives on the site she thinks she's on the CBS site because they naively assumes like many consumers that the site showing the content would be CBS. She doesn't even think twice about the identity. When you are used to TV, you blindly trust that the site/channel showing the content is the correct one.
The only reason I discovered this was because she asked me to pull up The Good Wife to watch on CBS. I, being a savvier internet user, just navigated straight to cbs.com to search there. I got to their Good Wife site and lo and behold, there is no streaming video available on CBS, only teasers and behind the scenes content. I told my mom that "No, CBS doesn't have it on their site" and she was like "Yeah they do. I watch it all the time". I then asked her to show me exactly how she found it on CBS and that was when she showed me that she in fact was clicking on the ad in Google Search between the search box and the search results thinking it was in fact the first result. That's the power of intent and Facebook doesn't have that.
This reminds me of an episode of the (IMHO excellent) "The Good Wife". In one episode, it was pointed out that people are much better at identifying and describing members of their own race, basically the cross-race effect or own race bias [1].
I'm glad there was finally justice in this matter, even if it was far, far too late. To Mr Towler's credit, he doesn't seem to be consumed by the obvious injustice.
The one part missing from the story was any mention of the (other) victim, Brittany, who would now be in her 40s (if still alive). What were the circumstances behind her identifying Mr Towler? What are her thoughts on the matter now?
As must as we can chastise the judge and the prosecutor in this case, there was an eyewitness account and the alleged perpetrator was identified (albeit wrongly). How would you react to an accused child rapist on trial?
I wonder what happened to the real perpetrator. I wouldn't be at all surprised if he is now dead and was probably incarcerated for other attacks.
So this man spent 30 years in jail for a crime he didn't commit. At the other end of the spectrum, Roman Polanski plied a 13 year old with alcohol, raped her, absconded to France prior to sentencing [2], remains free and is treated as a cause celebre somehow hounded even victimized by the authorities.
It's hard not to look at that and see two different justice systems in play.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-race_effect
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Polanski_sexual_abuse_case