Film photography just became prohibitively costly for me around ~2018. When a roll of 120 was costing £20/25 in the UK. A lot of the good labs over here (Peak Imaging for example) went bust too.
I poke fun at film shooters today who heap praise on e.g. Kodak Gold or the cheap Fuji equivalents because it's all they can really afford/get their hands on. I wouldn't have even considered shooting it 10 years ago
I shoot cheap color film (and have for almost 20 years) because I like the conspicuous grain pattern. Likewise I shoot quite a bit of 5222 which I develop in rodinal.
Yeah bought some Ultramax 400 last week. Two rolls….$25. Yikes. Might switch to bulk rolling soonish. Portra 400 is about 16-18/roll at the moment. It’s crazy.
Think of it as if ChatGPT (or other models) didn't just have the embedded unstructured knowledge in their weights from learning, but also an extra DB on the side with specific structured knowledge that it can lookup on the fly.
I'm working on a more general purpose programming language called "Pear", rather than the DSL I wrote before called "runny" (a Make/Just equivalent).
I want it to have a more concise syntax (no keywords, fewer characters) but feel familiar to most programmers. All definitions use square brackets in combination with some other set of characters.
- the artifact is likely to be seen by significantly more people and serves a much greater purpose to expose/educate those people (from other cultures) to/about the culture from which it came
That argument wears thin very quickly, especially when the people of the culture from which the artifact originates are not able to view it (because it now lives in London instead of their home country), and thereby learn about their own history. See for example the Benin Bronzes; imagine that the original US Constitution document were housed in a museum in Nigeria.
The Benin Bronzes if returned will go to the descendants of the original owners - the kings of a kingdom built on slavery.
I certainly know many people in countries from which these things were taken who think they are safer somewhere stable - I have heard exactly the comment that returning things will probably mean then end up stolen by politicians from Sri Lankans with regard to the things the Netherlands returned to Sri Lanka.
Also, consider what would have happened if the things from what is now Iraq had been there at the mercy of the likes of ISIS.
In many cases the people know occupying a territory have a different culture and history to the ancient people who made something. They may even have been the conquerors who destroyed the culture that made artifacts.
Didn't the movement to stop slavery come from the UK? After that happened the African region refused to stop because it made them rich so England had to invade and created the Ivory Coast? England has a lot of credibility.
The idea of reparations has come up. Should the US be paying or the African countries who profited and kept it going for another 100 years.
The British were engaged in the slave trade, then worked to outlaw slavery but replaced it with indentured servitude that was basically like slavery with a trivial income. That and exploitative colonial government meant you don't need slavery to loot everything.
Reparations are a different topic and wouldn't necessarily solve the problems of slavery/colonization.
That doesn't dispel that the kingdom has been built on slave trade. It's more about what happened from there.
And of course there's a lot to say about it, even taking the absolute most charitable view, that's 90 years of mild effort after 3 centuries of slave trade. Considering what the UK keeps doing at that time and for the century after, I also wouldn't take the a naively charitable read of it in the first place.
It doesn't need to be unique, you can't just look at a dispute between the UK and another country and dismiss that other country on the base of an history of slavery.
PS: my question would be how many other countries you think were ahead of the UK in terms of trade slave when it was all the rage for European countries ?
I’m not being facetious here, but isn’t the USA (and other nations) basically that? So much of the wealth was accrued through the “low” labor costs of early industry.
> end up stolen by politicians from Sri Lankans with regard to the things the Netherlands returned to Sri Lanka.
I'm not sure if I understand what you're saying, but do you mean that Sri Lanka politicians stole the golden cannon or something else returned from Netherlands? Do you have a citation for that?
No, i am saying that a lot of Sri Lankans believe things are safer in the Netherlands because they risk being stolen if returned (also that they are less likely to be well looked after).
Honestly, of all the empires that could have stolen I'm glad it was the British.
Cruel, destabilizing, more atrocities than any other empire, but somehow the royal class had a culture of conservation for (some) wildlife and historical artefacts.
Hey listen, I come from a country colonized by the British, and it was brutal. It's created generational poverty because they stole the most fertile land and have kept it until today, while sharing with a few corrupt Africans. But have you met the Belgians? Heard of King Leopold II? Now those guys know cruelty and atrocities.
This is an interesting example of survivor's bias. We know about the atrocities the British Empire committed because many of their victims survived. You should read about the Soviets, the Assyrians, or heck even just read the Bible. History has a lot of atrocities in it. As an empire goes the British were pretty run-of-the-mill, maybe a bit light on the genocide.
Also, in a lot of cases people living there have no relation to people of culture that the artefact has originated from. And usually the way that happened was not much better than what British did with their colonisation of these countries later on.
That seems more like a judgement call that should be made by the legitimate owners of the artifacts (I liked in the other comment, that there was a focus on the problem of figuring out who the legitimate owners were, and the practicalities of getting them the artifacts).
I must have contributed to it somehow, since conversations require two parties. But I have no idea how we got from the thoughtful comment that focused on the interesting part of the problem, to here, and so quickly.
