Wills, Trusts, Estates, and Shell Companies

“First you must ask yourself…are you wealthy?”

The Laundromat on Netflix (2019) is quite good, and it’s an interesting way to make something like the Panama Papers more relatable. It seems that some films focus on the technology of the leak first (which I enjoy, of course), rather than how the physical world is impacted by the digital (which, as in The Laundromat, is more approachable and interesting).

Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas are wonderful in the movie, they provide both comedy and information. In the educational technology field, this serving of “chocolate covered broccoli” is difficult – it’s either too much of one or the other. In The Laundromat, the satire is a perfect mix of alarming humor.

After watching The Laundromat we watched The Descendants, which is also a great film, and also deals with trusts, estates, and inheritance, among other things.

Maybe a rewatch of Knives Out or The Grand Budapest Hotel are next on the movie list.

Murderbot and his "Hippie Clients"

I’m enjoying the Apple TV series, “Murderbot."

The mix of “green world” (organic and open), and “closed world” (artificial and enclosed) are quite prevalent, even in the mind of Murderbot himself:1

“I could just leave them to cope on their own, I guess. But it wasn’t that easy. It’s wrong to think of constructs like me as half-bot, half-organic. Like the bot-half should just want to obey orders and do its job. And the organic part should want to protect itself and get the hell out of there. As opposed to the reality. Which was that I was one, whole confused entity.” (S1: E7 at 13:22, Murderbot internal dialogue)

And in the next episode:

“I was trying to calm myself down with some of my favorite episodes. But I couldn’t focus. It was like this new show, “Murderbot: And Its Selfish Ungrateful Hippie Clients,” had just taken over." (S1: E8 at 22:39, Murderbot internal dialogue)

I’d share some screenshots of the show, but sadly, screenshots are disabled on Apple devices. There are some workarounds though, and here’s the trailer:

Note that the trailer is from YouTube. It would be nice if Apple TV shows and movies could be embedded from Apple TV, without all the ads and other nonsense.

  1. The “green world” and “closed world” ideas are from a book by Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). ↩︎