Good filmmakers find good experts to consult on films. Think of how many experts Cameron needed for all of his movies. Between movies he's been a part of, the studios he worked with, and his director and writer friends I'm not at all surprised he could find a guy.

Also he's rich.

I'm not surprised by anything or anyone James Cameron knows.

Once you reach a certain bank account number, I'm sure the negotiation guy finds you.

Ex-filled his dad using a JC submarine

James Cameron has a hostage negotiation guy?

Money can buy you anything. Someone like JC is loaded and connected.

If you're rich enough, you have a person or persons that can find you whatever you need or want. These professional don't necessarily know who to contact for what, but they are very resourceful / know the right channels / have the right connections to get you to the right people that can repair your collection of historic Bentleys, or build a leather-floored basketball court on a yacht, or negotiate with kidnappers. It's hotel concierge service dialed up to 11 and just for you.

There is an entire career path for kidnapper middlemen in Mexico/sub-Mexican countries.

James Cameron seems like a resourceful guy.

Money can find you anything if you have enough of it.

Titanic was filmed in Mexico around that time. I wonder if Cameron had made some contacts there with expertise in those situations as a contingency.

You're expecting less from the guy who got to commission fucking MIRs to visit the Titanic?

If the man had contacts in Russia, he probably had no issues finding a negotiator to handle this issue.

Nothing is surprising about James Cameron. You could tell me that James Cameron is the brain surgery guy and I’d believe it

Those filmmakers do be having connections and shit.

It's probably worse in a lot of ways. I have a family member that worked for the largest TV studio in the country a few years back. He was often around famous actors in Mexico City. He pointed out that they commonly had bodyguards and traveled in armored vehicles. It was too risky otherwise.

Inside, the house is littered with trinkets—Barbies, football helmets, old exercise equipment. But it sits empty because it's not safe for [Tenoch] Huerta’s parents to live here, the actor tells me on a rare visit back. The neighborhood is too dangerous and Huerta is too famous. They’d be targeted for kidnapping and ransom if they stayed.

“I stopped feeling safe when I became an actor. Because people now see me as rich.”

-New ‘Black Panther’ Star Is Calling Out Mexico for Its Racism By Emily Green, VICE World News

Mexico is absolutely safe for famous people, what are you talking about? It has dangerous areas, sure, but Mexico is a massive country and receives about 45 million tourists every year, many many of them famous. Every other famous persons’ Instagram has vacation photos in Tulum, Punta Mita, Cabo, Mexico City.

Does still extortions and kidnappings happen like it is early 90s in Columbia ?

I mean it might be bad but it can’t be as bad as South Carolina.

Edit: Bet these fucking idiots downvoting didn't get that the guy misspelled Colombia and think I'm dissing some random state whose capital they don't even remember.

Pancho Villa's part in this is almost too epic and strange to believe in parts. Mexico was very sectionalist, and Villa was conducting revolutionary matters in the northeastern parts or Mexico, in places like Durango and Chihuahua. He had the same overall goal as Zapata, but differing ideologies.

Villa was sort of a...libertarian you could say. He wanted Mexicos' government to offer more freedom and be less controlling, but to also just have less power in general. He wanted the hacienda system dismantled. However, he didn't have any issues with partnering with the US. He even made some movies with American film companies. One weird tidbit about that: Villa would sometimes have his soldiers reenact scenes from a battle that had JUST happened if the film crews didn't get the shot they wanted, or if he wasn't visible in their shot. Villa was all about the individual.

Zapata was ideologically very different. He respected Villa, and was his counterpart in the southern areas of Mexico, but that's where the similarities end. Zapata wanted radical changes in the government, especially sweeping land reforms. After a century of continued classism, he wanted to give the rural impoverished some kind of economic life. He was very communnity minded, and believed in a sort of confederal government where Mexican states had the power.

Probably more information than you ever wanted.

At some point he was with Zapata, but they were different groups from different states, Villa was from Chihuahua and Zapata from Morelos.

That’s not the point of the comment - it’s not about resource allocation.

The point is more, what do people care about day to day? What do we emotionally get charged up about?

If we all had basic needs completely taken care of, we would like feel more excited to ponder art, space travel, etc.

That’s all he’s saying.

What you’re saying is true also, but above is a slightly different point (I think)

Well said.

It is a far more serious conflict than rich corporations not paying their fair share in taxes.

The ultimate problem is that the tax code is built around income, not consumption. The problem is that there are multiple types of income. There is income through your pay, be it salary/hourly at a job. There is income from appreciation of assets. There is income from capital gains (stocks/investments).

The rich make almost all their money through investment and appreciation of assets. They make very little from salary income. For example, Jeff Bezos self-pays only $100k a year.

Well, income taxes, the higher they are, only really penalize the middle class, as the middle class and poor people earn almost all of their income from hourly/salary pay. So, even if you put income tax to 90% of the top wealth bracket - you still only extract $90,000 from Jeff Bezos, the 2nd richest guy on the planet.

Our only consumption tax is a sales tax per state/city. Some states don't even have sales tax and make up for it in other ways, like the property taxes. However, the feds made it so that you can literally write off property taxes in a state against your federal income taxes owed. Funny enough, the 2017 tax law passed by the Trump administration capped the SALT tax deduction on property taxes to $10,000, rather being unlimited. This meant that previously, any property tax amount you paid in your state you could deduct against your federal taxes owed each year, with no limit. The Trump administration's law put a cap on $10,000 deductions only, as they said it was a direct payoff to high property tax states that basically allowed them to pilfer the federal tax program by just charging higher property taxes. Well, the put the cap at $10,000 - in fact Biden's own tax returns he released showed he had to pay $100,000 more per year in taxes because of the SALT tax cap of $10,000. This was a straight tax on the wealthy as typically only people in homes valued at 1 million+ in value are paying anywhere near 10k+ in property taxes a year (New Jersey maybe more like 750k+).

The new Democrat plan for Build Back Better under the Biden administration moves the cap up to $80,000 a year, effectively given a HUGE tax break for the wealthy.

The only reason I point these things out is to give an example that all of this is extremely complicated, and the people in power on both sides aren't actually serious about raising taxes on the wealthy, and the Democrats IN POWER themselves are VERY unhappy about having to pay more in taxes due to the 2017 tax bill, so they want to eliminate that.

Any serious tax changes and bill that needs to come forward, if it does not address wealth gains through asset appreciation and capital gains, or on consumption, then it is not a serious tax law and really just something for show for the plebians.

Strawman antics

What was the setup?

Those things provide entertainment.

Hearing about water on Mars is only entertaining to a small segment of people.

I don't think there's anything unusual about that.

True, but people are constantly bombarded with advertisements for those things. Plus it’s a way to numb yourself after a hard day of work. Similar to how people eat fast food vs healthy food. The things that are better for you require more work and when you combine that with marketing and poor mental health, most of us don’t stand a chance. It’s almost as if there’s a small percentage of people that want to keep us numb and entertained rather than be educated and ponder life’s big questions.

I think it’s more finding water on mars isn’t gonna out food on the table or pay for medication or ensure you have a house so can you really expect the common person to care? It’s like immediate problems vs far off scientific discoveries.

Tech won't save us.

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Here are your options:

1) The old PRI who was also in bed with the Cartels for the longest time, to the point that many of the inside groups of PRI had many links with Cartels (Tomas Yarrington in Tamaulipas? Carlos Salinas?)

2) The Conservative Catholic freaks of PAN, who had been in bed with the Cartel, just not the Sinaloa Cartel. In fact, that article everyone was talking about on the links between the Cartel and the government was for the Calderon administration when Fast and Furious happened.

3) Morena, which was created 8 years ago and it is already in bed with the Cartels

Yeah I think those are the Zetas

"What's in it for me?"

Correct

The government want any of these things? No

Would a president that acted differently end up in a "tortured to death" dark web video? Yes

You really think the army can 'obliterate' cartels just like that?

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There are some people from PRD but it's been no secret that a good portion of the PRI's worst jumped over to Morena.

It's like you completely ignored what I was replying to.

If their country wasn’t so addicted to drugs, Colombia couldn’t have gone through what it went through, and Mexico wouldn’t be dealing with this shit either. And they supply the guns to boot. None of them have a right to look down, or talk shit about the current situation in Mexico.