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I’ve been thinking about canceling my cable service. When I look at my consumption habits, I just don’t watch enough live TV to justify paying what I’m paying. If I can do it without paying a huge cancelation fee, I’ll get rid of it and then pay for a significantly faster internet connection – which will still be cheaper then the current bill. Then I’ll be a Netflix, iTunes, and Hulu kind of guy.

Which raises a larger point about communication and media in the 21st Century. I don’t want to blog at length right now, but I wonder if we’re not entering a period when services like cable will go by the wayside. Alternatives are certainly there, but just aren’t well-marketed and established. Furthermore, what is going to become of traditional communication devices like the telephone and more contemporary ones like SMS? I find myself using Twitter much more than text messages, and the allure of VOIP is powerful, even if the technology remains imperfect. Is that the wave of the future, or just a tool for a tech-geek minority? These are questions businesses are going to have to address at some point.

There is something wrong with NBC. This statement should not surprise or offend, as anyone who has watched the network over the last several years on a night that isn’t Thursday is already keenly aware of the network’s myriad problems. Take Heroes, for example. I maintain that Heroes was an entertaining television program for its first season, and a tolerable one for its second. Although the story never approached Lost-like levels of complexity, intrigue, and literary sophistication, it nevertheless presented characters vaguely resembling real people interacting in a world not unlike our own, dealing with the problems that superpowers could and would inevitably bring to them.

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Have you ever liked a film ironically, only to look up a little while later and suddenly find that you have genuinely fallen in love with it? Of course you have. But what separates me from you normal people is that I do it with alarming regularity. I can’t even begin to count the number of terrible films that I honestly love with all of my heart. I can’t explain why or how I have fallen under the spell of these cinematic atrocities, but there’s no denying that they’ve got me for life.

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Moon is a film by Duncan Jones. It stars Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell, an employee of a lunar mining company that harvests helium for energy use on Earth. Sam is alone on the Moon, with no direct human contact and only his robot GERTY to keep him company. At this point, the film could have become one of three things. It could have become some sort of space opera where Sam fights Moon Men over natural resources. It could have become a cerebral, elegant, and poignant science fiction film in the vein of 2001. Or it could have become Mystery Science Theater 3000. And despite my unabashed love of MST3K, I am please to report that Moon is one of the best pure science fiction films I’ve seen in quite a while.

The film is filled with beautiful imagery, an understated and effective score, and a very naturalistic and moving performance by Sam Rockwell. But the biggest reason to recommend Moon is the way that Jones approaches the subject matter. I hate to bash on Star Wars, but the series corrupted America’s concept of science fiction. Sci-fi has became a byword for action-adventure in space, and even when brave directors have tried to break out of that formula, they haven’t met with much success. Even films like The Matrix and its various knockoffs were simply “action-adventure IN THE FUTURE” or “action-adventure WITH COMPUTERS,” rather than classical 2001-style science fiction. With few exceptions, the genre on film was for a long period of time nothing more than simple variations on action-adventure.

But science fiction isn’t defined by explosions in space. Science fiction uses advances in technology to expose truths about the human condition and the way we adapt to brave new worlds. That’s why I’m thrilled to see a film like Moon so well received. It’s a film about a future that we can easily envision. What it does, like all great sci-fi, is explore the consequences of that future. And coupled with other recent projects like Caprica (yes, I know it’s not set in the future, but you get the point), it gives sci-fi fans a little bit of hope about tomorrow’s genre projects.

There’s nothing wrong with big budget blockbusters like Star Wars. Those are really enjoyable films. But every once in a while, a Moon is a welcome relief.

The difference between Keynes and Hayek is that Keynes’s theories were primarily concerned with providing politicians cover for expanding government control of the economy, whereas Hayek’s were concerned with explaining how things work.