There is some resurgence in quality here and there but then there is Avengers, MCU, Star Wars and idk how you can balance that with any amount of quality indie products
The last Avengers movie was 7.5 years ago. The last Star Wars episode was 7 years ago. (The Mandalorian one is the only standalone one since then.) Avengers are included in the MCU btw. There have only been about 1 to 3 MCU movies per year for the last few years. (2022: 3; 2023: 3; 2024: 1; 2025: 3; 2026: 2). There are tons of other, really good movies to watch. Not just indies either: Did you happen to see Project Hail Mary this year? The Odyssey? I missed Spider-man: Brand New Day (the MCU movie that came out this year so far), but it has 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, so I don't think that drags down the average in terms of quality either.
Please don’t sign up with burner accounts for one snarky reply: take responsibility for your words. You could also respond with something nice that inspires the author and other readers.
Provide food for critical thinking instead of accusing people of not being critical thinkers.
For example, tell us what new media from the US is actually great today. What do the arts offer that is next level and worth watching? Is there a rise in arts in other counties that we are missing? What could Facebook boomers need that leads to more and higher quality arts and movies?
Apparently you need a 10 K+ karma account to say the following (which another account, a new one and not mine btw, posted). Some I'm just reusing the other dude's words:
In contrast, thought-terminating clichés like "facebook boomer" show critical thinking on your part.
I fully agree with that: calling someone a "facebook boomer" is just plain pathetic.
(btw the boomers are my parents' generation: don't go thinking I take it personally. I'm a GenX'er and GenX'er are badass, which is why I don't give a flying fuck saying what I think).
Something something about the pot and calling some kettle black etc.
Media, arts, film, and America: things that are not monolithic and cannot be evaluated with blanket statements.
A side-effect of the democratization of content creation and the explosion of ways to consume content is that there’s more low-quality things to consume. Low-quality content will always be produced in greater abundance than high-quality so there’s more garbage to dig through, but there are still gems out there.
Personally, after years of infrequent movie attendance, this is the first month that I can remember in my adult life that my wife and I saw two movies in the theater and given the opportunity there’s a third we’d still like to see!
Costs aren't just up on the shocks of this year. The daily production of all diesel and jet fuel per capita has been declining month on month since 2008.
The per capita part is very important to explaining the figure, don't ignore it, but if you break oil (and related products like kerogen, bitumen and NGL) into light, medium and heavy we hit peak medium oil in 2008.
According to the commenter, price up while production per capita down makes the product unaffordable or less interesting to a lot of people. It is implied by the commenter that fuel producers should produce more and aim for lower prices.
> So based on that, we believe what is most fair is to put current trends in because you cannot predict at what point consumers and demand is going to be -- you're going to begin to see demand destruction based on the pricing environment.
Many people spend hours browsing Tik Tok rather than watching film or television.
Even long form YouTube videos are highly popular. Many folks spend time watching those rather than movies or tv. I believe Tom Hanks was speaking about this many years ago.
That being said….
I remember growing up and my teachers would always emphasize the importance of reading. I’m sure it would be a great thing for humanity if everyone spent their free time reading books rather than on film or television. In such a scenario would people complain about job loss then? This could be a fruitful idea for a science fiction short story come to think of it.
This is my thinking. TikTok is very entertaining. I can’t do hours, but 30 minutes to an hour is great. Compare it to an unswipable hours long sporting event, 30 minutes looking for the right movie you quit 30 minutes in or have to pause till another day because something comes up, or tv shows with unresolved endings that leave you feeling like you are in a toxic relationship-hating the commitment but afraid of the sense of loss.
Habitual use of shorter and shorter form content trains you to expect gratification faster and faster. There is most certainly a better reward for delaying gratification. A really good movie can leave you on a complete high or completely devastated. I'm pretty certain tiktok cannot. It's cheap quick entertainment but if you get used to that fast shallow enjoyment you can't hold on long enough for the good stuff.
I understand. The same arguments have been with us for a long time. See Conrad Gessner's arguments against the printing press.
Since rolling back to at least the pre-radio days is unlikely, we might focus on educating consumers in a way that empowers them rather taking a top-down approach to control what people are allowed to do because we know what is best for everyone.
Something I realized recently was that when I watch videos in any form (feature film, documentary, dramatic or comedy series, or short) I have this nagging feeling I'm wasting time. I think it's because watching is such a passive activity.
When I read, I don't get that feeling. Even here on HN where it is mostly wasting time.
I think this is why so much media has viewer comments. It's something to engage with and lose awareness of the passing time.
Some of these graphs don't support the hypothesis. The movie one for example shows that employment is just slightly below what it was just after the financial crisis of 2008, and shows record job loss after the covid bump which we all know resulted in massive hiring sprees in a lot of sectors followed by massive layoffs. Is the movie and movie production sector really experiencing an apocalyptic downturn where the line will reach zero, or just returning to its median?
Apparently the amount of movies actually being produced has barely recovered to post 2008 levels.
> record job loss after the covid bump which we all know resulted in massive hiring sprees in a lot of sectors followed by massive layoffs. Is the movie and movie production sector really experiencing an apocalyptic downturn where the line will reach zero, or just returning to its median?
The 2023 Hollywood Strike strike, the COVID lockdowns shutting down theaters, and the aggressive film production (UK, Poland, Ireland, Norway, Italy, Spain, Colombia) and VFX (Ireland, India, Colombia) subsidizes right as American states like California, Georgia, NY, and others began cutting them meant much of the American film and television industry got obliterated earlier this decade.
The reality is revenue is roughly consistent, but production costs one you remove subsidies (like what most of the US and Canada did) become exhorbitant in low margin industries like entertainment.
It's now cheaper to produce an "American" movie or TV show in Ireland, using British actors affecting an American accent (thank Hugh Laurie, Idris Elba, and Dominic West for that), with post and VFX done in India than it is in the US.
This is something that has been reported on in the space for a decade now, but not much can be done.
This article is also another example of why HNers should stick to their own lane, as most lack context or visibility into other industries.
Why should we expect the economy of 2026 (not 2020) be comparable to 2008? Am I missing something? Economy was awful i 2008 and we are currently in boom time markets, so boomy for so long that people have been saying it must be a bubble for years now.
This 100%. All the layoffs started before AI. High interest rates means businesses can't afford to take risks. Our entire economy is based on easy money from cheap debt. The tech layoffs are about being able to pay for AI whether that's paying for data centers or tokens.
I expect AI use to cause an increase in output, not a decrease in employment. At least right now. In TV and Film it would translate to more content that was too expensive to film before. If your business is making movies and then suddenly the market is flooded with fast and cheap movies, then you're going to make more fast and cheap movies too!
That doesn't explain anything in this article. All the time series go back to 1990 when interest rates were significantly higher any way you look at them.
Also, nobody has any time for entertainment. Office workers all working 80 hours a week fearing stack ranking, PIPs, layoffs, needing to scramble to get a new H1B job or risk getting kicked out of the country and having to uproot kids. Service workers are working 120 hours a week across 3 jobs. Single people are working 100+ hours a week studying and interviewing and not getting jobs.
Interesting, I have seen people be stretched thin and more stretched but I haven't seen people working 80-120 hour weeks. Different circles maybe?
I do feel for anyone trying to find a new H1B sponsor. I've lived and worker as a foreigner before, its stressful for sure. It is also a tough spot for a country to be in, if your domestic labor is struggling to find or keep jobs itsnhard to justify continuing protections for foreign labor.
While this may be true for some people, overall this is not backed up by the data.
The average amount of time spent doing "Relaxing and leisure" activities (mostly TV) has increased 6% in the last twenty years. There was a small decrease after the post-COVID peak, but working time has also decreased in this time frame.
Not true. If you look at any “cheap entertainment” dashboard, you’ll see usage has been going up.
My hypothesis is, YT, Reels and TT are eating everyone’s lunch, as people spend more time on those. And for people who don’t watch much, there’s Spotify. Basically attention span degradation across all age groups.
It feels like all media, from tv shows to movies are all following a certain formula, with a goal to drive a certain social perspective about people and society.
That I believe. Just, I think the goal is normative, like "don't get in trouble / upset anyone", rather than moral or artistic. So it's the type of goal that shows up in the vacuum of actual goals. It is the type of goal that committees and corporate structures are gravitationally drawn to. Which is what I kinda mean by the problem being structural: the way capitalism makes art naturally regresses to a boring and unimpressive mean with bland and frustrating goals.
If certain ultra conservative countries don’t like LGBT representation they don’t get to be in your major movie.
At this point I don’t know the difference between Chat GPT writing the next marvel movie or Disney hiring someone. Either way the story needs to be crystal clear. You never watch something that makes you think.
They write now for an audience with no media literacy skills beyond good guy good, bad guy bad, and the HR department box check that you have every creed and color represented in the cast.
As if there was somehow a lack of LGBT representation on TV these days. At least on German TV is seems like every show, quiz show, whatever has these "quota" characters.
I don't mind too much, I just miss overall quality and don't care who tf is "represented" or not.
This isn't the problem I'm talking about at all. I think there's just basic skill issues everywhere. Maybe there are also issues with this, but it's a separate thing.
I just don't pay for it. If there's something I really wanna watch I might buy one month of the service binge it then cancel.
The streaming model has imho mostly killed old style television formats with the new way of hyping up a show in the first couple episodes by tossing money and talent, then leave people to hang with unsatisfying conclusions once you've got that sub money. It's all about convincing people to sign up and stay signed up with promises for new content. The quality of the content doesn't matter as long as there's a lot of it and it's enough to keep people from unsubscribing.
With traditional TV your value was directly determined by how many people were watching so you could sell addspace. And despite there being less choice and harder for independent players to get time, in some ways it was weirdly more democratic because if a show sucked or an episode sucked people would just change the channel or watch something else. With streaming they still do that but it's all in the same price scheme so doesn't hurt their bottom line. They're incentivised to just crank out as much crap as possible to keep subs up. Won't last.
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I stopped watching broadcast/cable TV 20 years ago. I had Netflix until they switched to their own content and started raising rates, so I dropped it. I now rent DVDs from a place about 15 minutes from. I also have Kanopy for free. Here’s the opinion: stop watching. That’s the only way to send a message. Read a book. Rent a dvd. Or play a game. Or draw. Or visit friends and play board games. Or learn to play an instrument. Or find a game store near you and go to game nights. Or bowl. Find something else to do than drool at a screen watching content product that doesn’t give a shit about.
If only there was a service where you paid a fixed price for a bundle and you had a set top box that had all these channels together in one package. Of course you'd have a lot of channels you never looked at but overall it would be more efficient.
Apple was correct in the beginning here - the only way to make a service satisfactory to users is to have streaming aggregators (hosting all content) fed by different producers/studios. The "Spotify model", if you would.
The modern "Netfix model" has seemed to resulted in large number of new TV shows (relative to number of new movies) which always seem to get killed before their plotlines are resolved. And when I have something in mind I want to watch I often don't even know where to find it.
I'd prefer to go get DVDs from Blockbuster at this point - it'd be more convenient!
What is the difference between Apple paying another business to make something and Netflix paying a W-2 employee to make something? Both businesses can choose to end paying for media before the story is finished.
Although, I think Netflix also does not directly employ the people that make media, just like Apple. They just employ the people that curate it and distribute it.
This is the biggest thing with streaming vs cable. Say what you will about the commercials, it solved the intertia issue of figuring out what to watch with curated content. What to watch? MTV of course. Done.
In the US, there are a lot more rich people than there used to be [1] and they're often driving prices up because they can afford to pay. (Most obviously in real estate.)
Not even short form. I found myself watching an hour and a half long YT video of a dude jet skiing from WA state to Alaska and can’t even hype myself up to watch a feature film.
Seems things are starting to reverse and movies are picking back up again in various statistics. People want to see the movie everyone is talking about online and all over social media. Plus they make money directly through ticket sales not from the dubious assumptions behind social media ad conversions.
The only thing I’ve been watching lately are Soviet films on youtube. Mosfilms and Gorky films have their full catalogs on there. Sergei Bondarchuk’s films are deeply moving. Seventeen Moments from Spring is incredible as well- the Soviet answer to James Bond. For some reason it feels deeply refreshing to watch these films instead of what the US has been producing.
That is true to an extent, but Soviet films are not all the same. Great artists like Bondarchuk were able to still tell compelling stories despite the political constraints of his time. Even Seventeen Moments of Spring, which was commissioned to influence the Soviet public to have a more positive view of the KGB, managed to tell a meaningful and very human story. Tarkovsky’s Sci-Fi films are also great and can hardly be said to be state propaganda even if they were considered acceptable enough to be made public. Many Soviet films are heavy handed and wooden propaganda movies (like the ones by Ozerov), but not all.
> Great artists like Bondarchuk were able to still tell compelling stories despite the political constraints of his time
This might well be true, and it fits in with the idea that constraints or limits can lead to more creative outcomes (currently on the HN front page[1]), but everything still had to pass the state censor's approval.
Soviet Union was one of last countries with true art. Art requires seriousness. Western art has turned into entertainment long ago. All movies are made so that you can accompany them with popcorn.
There were topis with sort of a prescribed understanding, mostly related to early history of the Soviets. There were opportunistic authors who produced politically correct slop. These fellas quickly changed course in 90s and now have mostly left for Israel. But there was also massive live stream of true art alongside all that, realistic, serious and even Christian: Russian classical culture is so deeply Christian that you pick it even in an atheistic setting.
It breaks the site guidelines to attack others like this, regardless of how wrong they are are you feel they are. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. If you could please review them and stick to the rules when posting, we'd appreciate it.
> Soviet Union was one of last countries with true art.
There was no art, only pro-government communist propaganda. In Soviet Union there was even popular saying regardless culture, that Stalin took over a Russia of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov, and left it with the Union of Soviet Writers.
Before there was Lenin, after there was Khrushchev, both explicitly considered art that is not pro-government communist propaganda as thing that should not exist.
During the medieval period and the Renaissance you totally could do art that had nothing to do with church and royals. In the Soviet Union you could not.
There is a famous quote of the judge on the Brodsky trial (1964): "Who have appointed you to be a Poet?". Аfter he sad that Soviet Government did no appointed him to be a Poet, he was sent in the gulag for 5 years. That is how "art" worked in the USSR.
The guilds regulated art in cities, and most of it was commissioned by the church or aristocracy. The Soviet Union might have been more severe but, like in the Soviet Union, you would have to do it privately unless you had support of the guilds, aristocracy or church. The comparison still holds.
Before AI showed up the UN released a report on the Attention Economy. It said Supply of content had vastly outstripped Demand. It decoupled because entertainment/media was being used to push other products. The telcos, amazon, google/fb and many others were all subsidizing content to push some other product. Exploding info chasing finite non growing eyeballs and time.
There is infinite demand for content (to the limit that human attention can absorb it).
Most content sucks ass. What may appear to be bountiful content is actually a lot of okay and meh content. Very little of it fits to your actual taste preference. It's a whole lot of mediocre. We as humans do not know what plentiful content looks like. We've never lived in it.
Most movies suck. You doomscroll and are dissatisfied. You refresh your media recommendations and sigh. You are excited to see a new fantasy or sci-fi film that scratches that itch, yet often left disappointed.
We are still in a desert. Anyone who says otherwise is settling for the status quo that our childen will call primitive and beastly.
Jobs are disappearing because cheap/free ad subsidized content attracts more eyeball hours than produced and prestige content. It's the optimal pareto frontier of content and does the most bang for buck, most in aggregate eyeball hours.
When the tools enable more creation at scale by tasteful creators, we'll start to get closer to content abundance. We're not there yet.
I would look to the culture industry in Japan as an alternative to the gatekeeping-industrial complex we call Hollywood.
Hollywood's cost structure makes it impossible to try anything new. I'd contrast that to Japan where creators can write a "web novel", get a contract for a light novel, have a manga made, and then an anime, and maybe even some video games. And these all reinforce each other: last year I discovered an atrociously drawn anime that had got me curious about the source material -- that blew me away and I bought all of the printed materials that have come out so far and expect to buy all the rest.
Not least, Japan still gets new 4-panel comics like Bocci the Rock and The Demon Girl Next Door, something almost unthinkable of in the Land of the Nepo Baby where we haven't had a new one since Dilbert.
I haven't investigated it much, but I imagine that LLMs have made it easier for japanese culture products to release products in English language. Is the that industry taking advantage of nearly free translation?
I've heard stories of rather poor translation work since Sony purchased Crunchyroll (a popular AI streaming site) and started using AI for a lot of English subs.
So while AI has potentially made it easier for some Japanese content to reach English-speaking Western audiences, I’m not so sure that it’s doing justice to the original creations.
Note: I’m not suggesting that AI doesn’t have a place in translation work, but it still needs close supervision from bilingual people.
For one thing I've watched enough anime that I have quite a bit of comprehension of spoken Japanese, there are a lot of things that you hear over and over again that stick in my mind. I will even instinctually translate English translations of anime back into idiomatic anime Japanese.
Another thing is that emotional comprehension of Japanese is really easy for English speakers. The people who make Chinese mobile games realize this and make Japanese the default for westerners as opposed to Chinese or English: Japanese speakers use tone to express emotion and I dare say are more expressive and more comprehensible emotionally to English speakers than English speakers.
My spoken Chinese comprehension is weak but I've been training myself to read it emotionally -- like emotionally Chinese was "inscrutable" [1] to me when I first started watching Chinese language media but I hear people speak Chinese every day at my Uni and I watch their faces out of the corner of my eye and maybe even drift into a synchronization trace and I can feel the rhythm of how their voice speeds up and slows down and the other cues and it seems really expressive to me.
Now I have a lot of respect for professional western voice actors who do "cartoons", I saw one who went to my acting school who did a 5 minute skit where he did about 20 different voices. There you really have madcap expressiveness but unfortunately the genre is limited and you just don't have the range of subjects and a stance which is just a bit more serious but still has a "cartoony" range of expression when things get heated.
[1] tone is semantic in Chinese so it is not used so much to express emotion
I lived in Taiwan for years where I worked in ESL and later translation work between traditional Chinese and English. Chinese (like many languages) can vary pretty widely in terms of intonation/accents. For example, if you listen to someone with a 青島 accent, IMHO it sounds a bit more subdued than a typical 北京 one. Interestingly I've actually had a number of mainlanders instantly identify me as having learned Chinese in Taiwan because of my softer pronunciations.
Wrt to voice actors, the world of today is far different from the VA world of yesteryear. There's a lot more competition and also less demand for somebody who can do a multitude of bombastic voices. It's rare that you need somebody like Dan Castellaneta or Mel Blanc. Partly I think because if you look at the trends, especially in Western cartoons and animation, the characters' voices are often very close to the voice actors' natural voices.
It isn't exactly a desert? It is more like a full buffet, but nothing but cheap, mass-produced sugar literally everywhere. All the 2-star donuts and chocolate cupcakes you can eat, and nothing but that.
I'm looking at gaming these days and there's such an endless selection of excellent games I'd love to play. But there are far more great games than I have time to play. So when I see stuff like using AI to make games faster, I can only think what is the point, The market won't buy or play more games so something else has to give.
Same thing here. I gave up on gaming all together because my library grew too much. As a kid, I didn’t even own a console, I had to borrow gameboy or go to my friend house and even then it was just an handful of cartridges. Even now, I plan to just focus on small sample of programming languages and ecosystems, and learn them inside out. There’s just too much stuff out there.
I feel completely the opposite. Mind, I play games a fair bit, but I generally don't feel that excited about most, and I'd say a lot of them have very repetitive tropes. I'm generally in the market for 30h+ spent on a game, so that filters out a lot of the more trendy stuff.
Online games though you pretty much have to follow the herds to the newest titles. You could stick around but it usually isn't pretty: tough to find full lobbies or full of sweats or both.
Creative content will become more personal and less profitable, art being some sort of commercial enterprise is a relative new phenomenon, we will survive without it. Most artists will have to generate income by performance or physical creation, just like it has been for the whole time before it was commoditized to feed the "attention economy"
What a gross and completly apt terminology for the commoditization of art from the bureaucrats by the way.
It's also very easy to make high quality content. You can record a professional album with 5000$ in gear. Live instruments and all.
You can make your album accessible to every human on earth for free.
So my Instagram is full of very very high quality music, much of it I'll only listen to once.
Music from all over the world.
Its great.
Yet sad. So much music I'll never get to. I have to spend 40 to 50 hours a week generating income. If only I did better on that Meta interview way back.
I'd be retired now, free to indulge in endless entertainment.
Very little. It's that America's tax incentives are not competitive. They fly crews to make game shows from LA to london because its cheaper to shoot a show there. There's strong momentum to change that at the moment, there's a bill that might actually get passed that will make the tax environment competitive again in the states that stack theirs on it.
The outsource comment was interesting. Gaming didn't come up in this article but seems similarly hit. I was recently surprised to see how much game dev work is done outside the US for American companies.
Also thought the graphs around covid were interesting, there wasn't a spike up or anything it's just been consistently down.
The article said we're not in a recession. I thought we were lol
I liked this article. I appreciate that it didn't try to say it is or isn't AI.
To me, the entertainment industry suffers from a lot of the same problems in most other industries that chase "efficiency", in terms of resources used and profit made. Economies and industries and labor are interdependent and more "alive" than balance sheets and bank accounts.
For the film industry, when you start moving things away from LA to "save money", it has knock on effects that happen over long periods of time. Multiple Quarterly Earnings Reports long, if you will. Local businesses that depend on the film industry close due to less work, so then there is less expertise available. Less expertise means it can command high prices. Suddenly it's too expensive to film in LA altogether. So the rest of the jobs leave too.
This pattern seems super common, not just in the film industry.
It is a narrative that interweaves with AI, too. AI is supposedly an efficiency boom. In the macroeconomy, who is the "efficiency" we are chasing for, who benefits? Who is getting the money that was "saved"? Regular people do not have more more money or time. The "efficiency" is for people who are already very rich, to get richer. Is that worth the price we're paying? I know my answer. The article gets close to it by mentioning the consolidation in Hollywood, but I do not see how we fix this without enforcing our antitrust laws. It is embarrassing what we let rich people do in the name of stock price go up.
Why? AI is taking jobs. getty images just filed bankruptcy, stackoverflow went from heavy use to almost no use. AI is taking jobs, tipping toeing around it isn't the best thing. It needs to be said, and then what next needs to be figured out because first we talk about 200k jobs, then we will next talk about 2 million and then 20million
They haven't really, it just seems like it, and for that you can blame better distribution.
When I was growing up movies were watched in cinemas. It was a big event and we saw maybe 5 a year.
Over time more start appearing on TV, but those tended to be a bit older, but also cherry picked the good ones. (I don't live in the US).
PayTV didn't appear until mid 80s. They had more movies, but again tended to cherry pick. VHS meant we recorded the ones we wanted to see.
All these things together meant we tended to watch "good" movies.
Hollywood of course were making lots and lots of movies we never saw, or had and way to see. The bad stuff simply didn't have a channel to the world.
The arrival of Video Stores changed that. Suddenly the mediocre (and worse) had an outlet. And trust me, there was plenty of rubbish in there. But there was still a cost to distribute.
Today, distribution cost is zero. If Netflix commission a movie it'll get onto Netflix. Regardless of the result. Some really good stuff, most mediocre, lots of real rubbish.
Repeat for Amazon, Disney, Hulu, et al.
Overall movies haven't gotten worse. Objectively production values are higher. But your access to mediocre and bad movies has increased.
Judging past output though introduces survivor bias, which in turn makes comparison to today misleading.
No way. It is not sampling bias. Big budget movies have gotten worse script wise compared to the 90s and 00s.
The scene workers have gotten better though. And there are a lot of good movies being made still, but not by the mainstream industry that used to really deliver.
Well, my kids like old movies, they just didn't had a chance to watch them. We are rewatching old stuff like Alien, Terminator, etc. and they are surprised how good those movies are. Last night we watched movie "Kiss Me, Stupid" 1964, kids loved it.
I believe this first sentence to be true, but I'm skeptical about the last sentence.
For a while in the oughts I taught a film history class, though, and even 2 decades ago the kiddos thought anything in black and white, much less with no sound or with subtitles, was literally unwatchable. I'm okay with the idea that the students' tastes in media are legitimate, though I have my own tastes and think they are differently-informed.
And further, I dunno if "silly jokes and narrative in favor of spectacle" are new. Think Keystone Cops and Busby Berkley.
I like Battleship Potemptkin and Citizen Kane as much as the next person, but that's not all of what was popular.
Paring the thousands of films from the 80s down to a list of 10 does a lot of work to make that looks like it was better, when in fact I was in middle school and I could literally go see a movie for 75c. I remember some really bad ones, and I am certain I've forgotten a lot of bad ones.
I also have problems making a list of good films from the last decade, but I think that's because I got burnt out and stopped watching long-form video mediums when I left my PhD program. I am not sure I have seen 10 long form narrative works in the last 5 years.
> I like Battleship Potemptkin and Citizen Kane as much as the next person, but that's not all of what was popular.
Funnily enough, those happen to be two movies I didn't enjoy beyond their historic relevance.
I'm not saying that spectacle and one-liners are bad - movies like that are included in my list for 1984. It is when you substitute good writing with funny lines and have spectacle instead of a compelling narrative that I see a problem.
It's crazy how California and the LA area local governments killed their "golden goose" by driving out the film industry. I guess progressives can't stop themselves from doing that, but it's always sad to see.
I’m not a fan of many progressive causes, but this is absolutely more an issue with globalization and easy ability to move jobs overseas to cheaper areas.
They didn't kill the golden goose. Other places implemented tax benefits to encourage film making. That is why so much filming is done in Canada, New Zealand, and various Central European nations. If anything, the golden goose flew away. As a counterpoint: What do you think California and LA area local gov'ts should have done differently?
Not keep adding to the taxes, expenses, and red tape? Work to address the outrageous cost of living in CA that indirectly drives expenses for labor? It's a million and one policies that all contribute to how running a labor heavy business in CA is increasingly challenging (bearing in mind that those factors matter less to a software shop or Apple).
As I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, CA's labor-pool's own hostility to the film industry (via strikes) also played a big role. They gave the studios the finger, then are surprised that the studios took their ball and went elsewhere.
For those unaware, TV and film unions in Los Angeles are incredibly powerful. As a result, people who work in TV and film jobs are paid far above median wages in Los Angeles. Also, I doubt that overseas staff working on TV and film sets are paid the same level as Los Angeles. If anything, LA studios are repeating the same story that we saw in the 1990s and 2000s with US manufacturing: Move it somewhere else where wages are very low, e.g., China or Mexico.
Also, I see this anti-union sentiment a lot on HackerNews: Whenever unions strike, there is near universal rejection as a strategy. The anti-union sentiment on HN is tiring, especially from the US and UK. Those big strikes in Los Angeles resulted in large pay increases and/or expansion of territory (better payouts for streaming, etc.) for those union members. In short, it worked.
"It worked" for those in the union, for a bit, but the article itself shows 30% declines since 2022. If you're still working under the new, even-more-lavish contracts, I'm sure you're happy. If you're in that 30% now working as a barista or DoorDash driver, did the union work for you?
It's akin to the auto worker's unions, but without the same degree of government backstopping for the industry. The auto workers unions are an anchor around the necks of the auto industry, while government bailout dollars are a lifejacket - it's clear California (and more broadly the US) doesn't see the same need to subsidize the unions in TV and film.
These are far more plausible explanations. AI can no doubt bring certain efficiencies, but for the most part consumers seem to be squarely rejecting primarily AI-generated creative output.
How much vfx is being done by AI video editing software/ massive gpu clusters over previous locally employed vfx studio artists? Maybe I’m thinking about this wrong but isn’t the compute/AI vfx models now reducing the amount of humans needed to edit things like Marvel character’s special effects scenes, etc?
Or not. Significant shifts in the nature of emplyoment are undoubtably disruptive, but there's no particular reason to believe this one will result in mass unemployment any more than previous shifts have done so.
Especially if we're talking about jobs in creative industries that require customers with the means to support and consume their output.
Besides, an overabundance of surplus labor, if properly managed, is as likely to lead to a better world than a worse one. There's no ironclad rule that everyone, or even the majority, need to work to live or live to work to be happy. And many creatives, in particular, would be happy and productive working on personal and noncommercial projects if funding were no longer an issue.
That's why the tall bank buildings that dot ~every small town (and plenty of big ones) in the US are full of bankers tending to paper ledgers, and with a secretary in front of every office. We still get milk delivered every day, as well as a block of river ice from last winter every 2 or 3 days (or more often if it's been particularly hot). We dig our ditches by hand, with hand-made shovels and pickaxes. The material for the clothes on our backs was woven on manual looms, from cotton that was harvested by hand, and carded by hand, and spun into thread by hand. We wear them in homes made with iron nails that were cut by hand, from ores that were mined by hand and smelted the only way we know how: With charcoal, in clay furnaces that were made with hands and that are stoked by hand.
Technology progresses. You're playing to an end-state of AI that assumes labor disappears entirely because you have yet to see what the new labor system looks like.
Are you conveniently forgetting about all the tech shifts from the past that did replace labor permanently? The printing press, steam machine, electricity, electronic computers,... even something banal like an elevator used to need a skilled laborer to operate it and now no longer does.
A surplus of labor, by definition, reduces the value of labor. Most people are labor, so this means their earning potential is reduced, which means their social mobility, ability to take care of themselves, is reduced.
When you consider that this conversation assumes we are talking about the US and not the rest of the world? It is sobering.
The AI bet hinges entirely on the new types of work that arise from it.
> AI is taking jobs, tipping toeing around it isn't the best thing. It needs to be said, and then what next needs to be figured out
If we think about it, AI can be seen as dumping cheap products below cost and disrupting the domestic market.
I mean the real cost of production is unknown due to skirting of copyright laws in many cases and even if we discount that, it is well known that AI is being pushed far below the actual costs for providers. There are disruptive technologies, yes but this is not the same if the real cost is hidden or deferred and it doesn't compare with horses/cars or whatever analogy that comes up often.
In the physical world, this is called dumping isn't it? Just because tech is involved it doesn't change the fact. Countries already have anti dumping laws.
"real cost of production is unknown due to skirting of copyright laws"
Copyright laws themselves are not completely "real", not in the sense that digging coal out of the ground is. They were once tailored for Disney to maximize its profit; now that Disney is no longer the juggernaut it once was, they may be re-tailored to maximize the profits of the new juggernauts.
I think the person you're replying to is trying to draw a parallel to the common "china cheats" narrative that centers copyright and "stealing" designs.
That's what AI companies are doing to cut costs dramatically, but since it's domestic, there's a sudden apathy towards the original claims.
Which(if any of this ever fucking mattered at all) would undermine the years long campaign of china-hate that at it's core, was large Capital holders being upset their outsourcing plan backfired once China was no longer a captive third-world backwater.
So here in the "west" we created our own machine to speed up the Chinese "Shanzai" and pretend like it's suddenly innovation instead of theft.
This whole situation is why one should never, ever trust the rich man's opinion on foreigners, as it's always always always just to line their pockets.
Nicely sliced. Weekly wages for full time workers have been rising for decades while fewer workers work full time. I don't think this data backs your assertion.
The number of full time workers as a percent of the total employees has gone from roughly 84% (rounding up) in 1979 to roughly 82% (rounding down) today. There was a spike in people working part time in the wake of the GFC, but we've returned to trend.
Also, I chose weekly wages because annual wages are complicated by time off, which was the other item in question.
This is research from a labor advocacy group, with the explicit aim of the organization to advocate for this sort of thing. This doesn't mean the research is is automatically invalid, but it is bias worth mentioning.
Looking at an article from the CATO institute, over the last 30 years wages have climbed 169 percent, while food prices 111 percent.
But an even better measure is PCE, or personal consumption index. Rather than CPI, or any other "household basics" measure, which subjectively categorize goods and then tracks those, PCE measures the total dollar amount spent by the entire U.S. consumer sector on goods and services. This is what is used by the FRED database referenced in the reply above.
I feel like people complain about “food” but it’s a stand-in and that the cumulative increase in rent, transportation and food probably rose faster than wages. So Cato reply “but food hasn’t grown as fast as wages” is a myopic retort (admittedly one they acknowledge) that tries to fight the narrow factual argument ignoring the broader one where the emotional narrative probably remains true.
a friend showed me their budget recently, and about 45 hours of their wages go to rent each month (for a single room in a house with roommates). That seems very high to me, and their rent is considered "low" in their area (a small suburb)
Assuming they work full time, that is pretty average. The old "30%" rule is that you should spend no more than 30% of your pre-tax wages on rent. Your friend is spending just over a quarter post-taxes.
Something about this still seems to be imbalanced.. and 45/160 is 28%, just below this threshold you've referenced. My intuition says something is wrong here.
Either I missed or was added in an edit the bit about having roommates. That's definitely absurd. I was paying that amount for an entire house in a nice suburb maybe 8 or 9 years ago. Even with only one roommate paying the same amount, they are together paying way more than my mortgage for a house in the country with 5 acres of land and waterfront along one entire side.
I imagine they're in a high cost of living area, where tons of other people want to live. If that's the case, it probably shouldn't be any surprise that in a supply restricted market, the prices are also very high.
yeah, I honestly just feel bad for him. I have it easier, but he's going to school, working, holding down a leadership position in an engineering club. He's living his best life, so I can't feel too bad, but he deserves a break from the cost of living.
*edit: they're not in a _high_ cost living area, but it's not cheap either.
The government heavily interferes in the housing industry. Hence, the higher costs. It's the same for everything the government interferes with - such as education and health care.
For examples:
1. there are 57,000 unoccupied apartments in NYC because city regulations on rents make them unprofitable to rent out.
2. the glacial pace of issuing building permits for burned out homes in LA.
3. the sudden influx of many millions of immigrants pushes up the demand for housing, resulting in higher prices
I genuinely cannot understand how anyone with basic knowledge of economics could believe that government intervention is responsible for all unoccupied apartments in a market.
I genuinely can not understand how anyone with basic knowledge of economics could believe that government intervention is not responsible for the majority of rent price increases
The market, left to its own, will keep building because someone will see the prices people are willing to pay and think “I want in on that” but then the government comes in and blocks them from building. No building = supply lower than demand which always equals higher costs
Further, It would only have taken you one 5 second search to see the ways government regulations can cause unoccupied apartments
> 1. there are 57,000 unoccupied apartments in NYC because city regulations on rents make them unprofitable to rent out.
The correct quote should be:
> According to state data, approximately 57,421 rent-stabilized apartments were vacant across New York City
The key term here is "rent-stabilized". And the reasons why they are vacant is much more complex "because city regulations on rents make them unprofitable to rent out". That is simply one category of rent-stabilized apartments that are vacant.
> And the reasons why they are vacant is much more complex "because city regulations on rents make them unprofitable to rent out".
Is it actually more complex than that? If the regulation that makes it unprofitable to rent them out is rent control, that's still an accurate statement of why they're not being rented out.
I don't think it's much more complicated than that. If you own a "rent-stabilized" apartment there's going to be a very low limit to the amount of money you're willing to spend to keep it habitable. If it needs a lot of money to make it legal to rent out, you're just going to leave it vacant. You don't really have a choice.
It's not very complicated; it's just that the solutions are deeply unpopular. Making housing affordable by definition means driving down prices. But existing homeowners don't like to see their home prices go down! And about 2/3 of the US public lives in a house owned by a resident.
I'm semi-convinced that the reason why we see so many bad ideas in housing is because the good ideas negatively affect too much of the voting public. Or, they perceive the ideas as negatively affecting them.
You're mistaken about the reasons why solutions are unpopular. Have you actually talked to the most active NIMBYs who oppose new housing development? Most of them are barely aware of affordability and home prices. They have lived in the same neighborhood for decades and intend so stay there until they die so prices don't impact them at all. Instead they are concerned about quality of life issues: traffic, parking, noise, petty crime.
My point isn't about the most active NIMBYs; it's about the central mass of the voting public. Yes, the NIMBYs have disproportionate influence, but politicians still have to keep their voters happy.
Perhaps my view is too California-brained, but homeowners here like high prices because it gives more flexibility to downsell, they can get large home equity loans, and Prop 13 ensures they won't be paying full property tax (at least if they've been living there for a while). Even for those planning on living there until they die, their children would still like to inherit a valuable place.
At any rate, I didn't intend to limit the reasons to just price. The solution is to build more housing, but building housing is unpopular, and it isn't hard to see why. So we end up with bad policy like rent control instead.
> But existing homeowners don't like to see their home prices go down!
As a homeowner I don't want to see my home price go down relative to all other homes as that leaves me in a precious position if I need to move, but if all homes fall in price together then that actually makes the prospect of moving less risky as, if I have to move into a house that is a step-up from the one I have, the cost to do so is lower. That would be an improvement over the status quo. High housing prices are a problem even for those with significant equity in a home.
But who doesn't want to see their wage go down is those who build houses. This is the bottleneck. The vast majority of people cannot afford a new house, which means they're stuck in their used houses, which means there is no inventory opening up for those with no houses.
> it's just that the solutions are deeply unpopular.
Is it? The solution in motion is to use AI to push software developers out of software development so that they have to become construction workers, thereby increasing the supply of construction workers, pushing construction wages down. It doesn't seem that unpopular (at least not outside of HN, but even on HN many welcome it with open arms). Maybe it will become unpopular once the motions are complete? That's a tad bit late, though.
“Making housing affordable by definition means driving down prices.”
This is not true.
Not that it matters as I don’t think this is what motivates NIMBY’s but for anyone reading that believes so, this is incorrect.
The old single family home next to the new apartment building gains land value. And this shows up county after county [1]. Building more housing is a valuation win-win, the pie just grows.
Density supports local businesses though. An apartment building was built a block from my home about a decade ago. I was promised congestion, parking issues, and petty crime - but what I got was a brewery, a cafe, and a restaurant that survived COVID. Feels like a win for me.
Probably not even objectively. My neighborhood has less than half the population of had 30 years ago because it's all retired people in single family homes where 30 years ago it was all families. They've even closed down the school because of it.
> The old single family home next to the new apartment building gains land value.
And this is why large property owners fund YIMBY organizations. I have no idea how they've managed to convince people of normal intelligence that relaxing restrictions on zoning lowers property values, and that's why the selfish senior citizens who stubbornly continute to live in the homes they've lived in for decades are against it. It doesn't make any mathematical sense at all. They just are willing to believe anything that promises to give them what they want, which is other people's homes who don't want to sell and who don't want to live next to 900 people on a tiny lot with no parking.
The most insulting part is when they pretend that this is racism, while YIMBYs have been gentrifying black people from the neighborhoods they've been in for centuries, into the woods. The reason they're so frustrated about senior citizens in San Francisco or wherever is because they can defend themselves, while black people can't. Black people are being annihilated from urban neighborhoods; you're seeing them replaced by rent-stressed immigrants who don't have families or connections in the country to retreat to.
> Building more housing is a valuation win-win, the pie just grows.
No, it's a win for people who sell. It's not a win for people who want to keep their homes, and their communities. It's a win for alienation and cultural destruction, pushed by people who either have no roots, or who keep their roots safely protected a thousand miles away.
Gentrification doesn't cause displacement, a lack of housing options does. That part that tenant activists have not accepted is: The "gentrifiers" are coming whether you build housing or not, the question is are we going to build enough housing to keep the existing community in place or not.
Community is still community in a condo.
>>"pushed by people who either have no roots, or who keep their roots safely protected a thousand miles away"
Imperceptibly different from the argument JD Vance makes against immigrants. Maybe rethink that tack.
IDK if things are fundamentally different in Czechia, but I talked to a lot of Czech NIMBYs and they almost never mention home prices. What they usually obsess about is change in a neighborhood that they are used to and want to keep intact. The resentment against new people and new buildings is just palpable, even if the newcomers would be solid middle class.
Noise and dust from construction are often mentioned as well. Construction means heavy trucks entering places where they usually don't intrude.
Saying, "2/3 of the US public lives in a house owned by a resident" sounds like a phrase talking around the problem that young people can't afford to move out of the family home.
A true fact but with a story behind it.
I admit it's awkward phrasing. I try to be accurate.
About half of US adults own their home. It goes up to ~2/3 if you include adult children, grandparents, etc. that live in the house but don't own it.
I wasn't trying to dance around this fact; my point is that a large fraction of the voting public has their interests aligned with keeping home prices high (presuming that these non-owning residents share interests with the people that do own the home).
Go to Manhattan and tell me that housing isn't built because of NIMBYism. It's: RTO (very important!), cost of land (land isn't increasing in volume), end of tax subsidies (programs that gave developers tax breaks), zoning (hey let's demolish all the jazz clubs in Greenwich Village and replace it with affordable housing - is that what you consider the correct line?), jobs (the economics of people moving to a place) and many many many more factors.
About once a week someone with a singular conception of the world of housing comes and you need to open their minds up a bit.
You want to lower housing costs? Maybe increase public transportation, give workers rights to work from home, and invest in expanding the suburbs by making them more dense. But don't do that until AFTER you've established the infrastructure piece. Not everyone wants to live in LA or Austin and spend hours in cars.
If you don't do these things then people all want to live in the same place, which is far more impactful than this "NIMBYism" thing, not everything is your local HOA or little town's regulations.
The is flagrant gish gallop. Most of this is very well handled by most other countries. Example:
“hey let's demolish all the jazz clubs in Greenwich Village and replace it with affordable housing”
Or just rebuild them in the commercial space under the new taller condos, so more than just the nepo trust fund babies or lottery rent control people can live in them. These are all non-issues once you get over people’s aesthetic preferences.
This is not just a California issue, the space between downtown and midtown is severely under-built when compared to the economic output of those spaces.
What are you talking about? Where do you see Paris being demolished?
How would Greenwich Village look if you turned it all into towers of rental apartments?
France uses expansion of the suburbs to make housing more available, and that includes trams, buses and yes, Metro expansion. You don't need to demolish the fucking bistros and parks to replace them with towers.
In NYC it could be done with NJ Transit being replaced, and better transportation. Then the border areas would become more dense because the investment returns would support it. People would want to move there to work in Manhattan.
Please don't turn world class cities into your LA or Houston Hellscapes of cars and highways. I'd rather pay a million dollars for a tiny one bedroom apartment in a real city than half the price in those soulless, cultureless places where you spend all day behind the wheel of a vehicle.
“What are you talking about? Where do you see Paris being demolished?”
Back in the 1800’s when the more dense haussmanian architecture was put in. I’m sure their equivalent of pretty jazz clubs then were mowed down too. But over a 100 years the more housing made space for more people and better culturally richer city.
New York is a newer city, it’s time to densify is now.
I’m literally trying to densify, so that’s the anti-highway move. Tear down all of FDR and put in more NJ transit for all I care, I Love the Path.
We can do both, put more transit it and densify the low density sections of Manhattan. So more people have more choices.
Blocking this on aesthetic and legacy preferences is morally wrong.
>Back in the 1800’s when the more dense haussmanian architecture was put in. I’m sure their equivalent of pretty jazz clubs then were mowed down too. But over a 100 years the more housing made space for more people and better culturally richer city.
Absolutely wrong. Haussmann's restructuring of the city was intended to REDUCE overcrowding and darkness due to the narrow alleyways, not to mention illness from the overcrowding. He lowered density, built parks, and then Paris expanded a lot when they absorbed the suburbs in the 1860's. Today Paris is extremely high density, and they're again expanding into the suburbs - look up Grand Paris projects. But the 6 story buildings aren't being demolished to make 30 story buildings like you seem to be suggesting is the thing to t
do.
As much as I rail against a soulless place like Houston (with no housing restrictions like in NYC or Cali), I also don't want to turn our cities into Shanghai or New Delhi.
And by the way, what makes you think building more makes housing cheaper? It's not like making widgets in a factory. Gentrification makes things more, not less expensive - have you seen the history of Williamsburg, Brooklyn? Rezoning it turned it into a lux neighborhood with an Apple store, and attracted people from around the world.
You’re just laying out engineering problems with very good solutions. Densification doesn’t mean overcrowding or a lack of parks, it just requires creativity. The neighborhood will look very different though.
There’s no point fighting against known norms in economics now. Induced demand in housing is hogwash: there are a certain number of people who dream of moving to east village and that number doesn’t magically grow if you build more housing. After decades of underbuilding, yes the demand is high, but it’s not infinite. Build out the suburbs too, build good transit, split the difference and the housing prices stabilize.
I don’t really understand what the issue is in Houston and why it feels so culturally bereft. Part of the issue is sprawl, sure, but it feels like there’s just less going on than other sprawling cities like LA and Atlanta.
I was there a few years ago in the summer, and figured I’d go see live music at night, and there just was literally not any to see besides at the megavenues. And surprisingly few bookstores for a city that size. I think it’s possible there are more independent bookstores in New Orleans than in Houston, a much larger and wealthier city.
That’s another bad metric without more nuance. if I used to pay 30% and now pay 50% but the remaining 50% buys 2x what it used to then overall I’m still doing better
I’m not saying that’s the case. I’m only saying the metric “housing cost as percent of wages” isn’t enough to judge if people are doing worse or better
To take just one example: a 65inch tv costs just $700 compared to $4k just a few years ago
> The share of income people spend on housing has been very stable over 40 years
That's a misleading metric for two reasons. First, "people" includes all the people who bought a house decades ago before the prices went up, and correspondingly paid the old prices instead of the current prices. And second, it assumes that if housing becomes more expensive what people all do is pay more for housing rather than being unable to afford it and then having to take a longer commute to access housing they can afford, live with their parents, become homeless, etc., which negatively impact the amount or type of housing they get instead of the amount they pay for it.
Meanwhile between 1984 and today median income increased by ~290% while median new home prices increased by ~425%:
And that's with the gap having reduced a bit in the last couple of years, since home prices have declined slightly since the peak in 2022 while median income continued its usual trend.
This is a good point. Also, anytime there is a discussion about inflation, there should be a timeline included.
Both inflation and wages have not gone up uniformly since they started being tracked. We all know the Trump/Biden covid inflation was bad, but by the end of Biden's term wages had mostly caught back up. The second Trump administration's policies reversed that trend.
Housing in particular cratered in some areas during the GFC, but then went wild especially around the covid.
Those are fair points. But I think it’s also misleading to look at prices in a fixed location over time, which ignores that places can become relatively more desirable and move upmarket. Yeah, your parents bought a house in Mountain View for cheap. But they were moving to escape high housing prices in the New York or Chicago suburbs where they grew up.
> Meanwhile between 1984 and today median income increased by ~290% while median new home prices increased by ~425%
The average FHA mortgage rate in 1984 was 13.2%. Today’s it’s 6.8%. The more expensive house with a cheaper mortgage costs $482 per month less and $173,000 less over the lifetime of the loan.
> But I think it’s also misleading to look at prices in a fixed location over time, which ignores that places can become relatively more desirable and move upmarket.
That's fine if there is then some other place with equivalent housing prices
> The average FHA mortgage rate in 1984 was 13.2%. Today’s it’s 6.8%. The more expensive house with a cheaper mortgage costs $482 per month less and $173,000 less over the lifetime of the loan.
Mostly because 1984 (the oldest date the graph had for median income) was a period with historically high interest rates:
That stability claim is an average for all American households, gathering together high-income households and long-tenure homeowners along with poor renters. But in a K-shaped economy where the wealthy do well and the rest do worse, averaging the two forks of the K hides the hardship of those on the lower fork.
> The net effect of this longer history is that renters today spend much more of their incomes on rent than they did in previous generations. The median renter household in 1960 spent less than a fifth of their income on rent. By 2022, housing costs consumed 31 percent of the median renter’s income. And in inflation-adjusted terms, the median rent is up 75 percent over these six decades while the median renter income has risen by just under 15 percent.
That's not dispositive, though, since it may be that people spend more on rent because they can, i.e. other things have become relatively less expensive.
A lot of people spend more on housing because standards have greatly increased. The average square footage of living space per person has doubled since the 1970s and tripled since the 1950s. A modest home in 2020s was a luxury house in the 50s.
Even when I was a kid in the 1980s I didn't know a single household that had multiple bathrooms or air conditioning.
Part of the reason why standards have increased is because incomes have increased.
Hey thanks for posting this perspective w/ the link. Fun rabbit hole to go down stuck in a hotel tonight. I wonder if you think something explanatory is missing in _all_ of these different indices, in the "where there's smoke, there's fire" sense of economic anxiety on display today
> But you can still get a house twice as big as what your parents had at your age in a new subdivision in Tennessee.
Tennessee suburbs are eyewateringly expensive. Your parents made a living wage at a job that doesn't exist in the US anymore, and definitely isn't located in Tennessee anymore. The mean homebuyer is older than your parents.
You can get a cheap house in the middle of nowhere where all the industry was destroyed for imports, services destroyed for outsourcing and the retail was destroyed for the internet and big box chains, if you are a wealthy person who works remotely or at one of the local health insurance conglomerates.
If you are not a wealthy person who works remotely, you can't live there anymore; it is not cheap for you. In fact, all of your family (who has lived here, near each other, for generations) has to figure out where in the country they will have the best chance to feed themselves (or whether they should leave the country) and move there. Now, they're trying to get by without the support of each other, making them more alienated, isolated and dependent on corporations and the state.
There are natural limits to this sort of evil. People won't starve to death quietly.
I’m not necessarily disputing your point, but it’s very odd to downplay one source for potential bias, and then follow up with a study from the CATO Institute. Like, the CATO institute is openly a libertarian think tank founded by one of the Koch brothers.
I also think it’s unfair to look at just food prices. Housing and healthcare have bloomed massively.
Of course you’re right. Food isn’t the whole picture, and no think tank is perfect.
We should evaluate research by the research itself, rather than by the author’s subjectivity credibility alone. The is the point I was trying to make by providing alternative research and adding a little bit of nuance to the reply, but perhaps I should’ve been more forthright in addressing my own bias as well.
> We should evaluate research by the research itself
Why is this the argument when someone challenges your source, but when it comes to someone else's source your argument is:
> This is research from a labor advocacy group, with the explicit aim of the organization to advocate for this sort of thing. This doesn't mean the research is is automatically invalid, but it is bias worth mentioning.
1. PCE tracks spending by and on behalf of households, including employer-paid health insurance and government-funded medical programs like Medicare. Arguably this does not reflect out-of-pocket costs or the immediate cash-flow reality experienced by a regular household.
2. Shelter accounts for roughly 34% of the CPI, whereas it makes up only about 16% to 17% of the PCE which underplays the pressures of housing people face. Housing arguably is one of the most basic necessity and people will spend on it. For majority of the people in the country housing as a % of income is the biggest expense, so weighing it at 16% sounds almost ridiculous.
3. PCE also famously isn’t based on household surveys like CPI which means it doesn’t accurately represent the actual inflation either.
4. PCE also doesn’t accurately represent lifestyle downgrades even though it tracks them. PCE will capture if you swap chicken for beef (like people are doing right now) but the conclusion you’ll come to is that people have the same amount of spending power as before.
I first saw the claim everything is hunky dory because workers are working fewer hours from a economist probably ten years ago. The idea is workers are choosing to work fewer hours and instead enjoy more leisure.
So to point out how inanely out of touch economists are.
The problem with that is the worker economic base unit is a family not one person. Now compare 1960-70s where one person in the household works 40 hours a week. Compare with a modern family where both parents are working a combined 70-80 hours a week.
So yeah workers are working slightly less hours and families as a unit substantially more.
People lack money, but a Netflix (or some other streaming) subscription is a very cheap way to buy a lot of entertainment, and just about everyone has at least one.
This is tricky. Household basics have not remained constant in the sense of being the same product. Out of household basics, like healthcare, also show similar transformations.
But these transformations are not complete, and thus comparing "what people are getting for their money" now vs. then is challenging, complex and subject to a lot of debate and disagreement.
Upvote for bringing data, since I did not. That said, that quote was in reference to AI, so referred to the past 3-4 years. And of course, our money today is not worth as much as it was 20+ years ago. Also many important goods and services increased in price at a higher rate than inflation or wage increases. It might be interesting to look at such industries for a history of consolidation or PE-involvement.
For what it's worth, I thought the rest of your comment was a very accurate description of how labor and capital are reallocated within an industry. The question is simply whether it's a bad thing that Hollywood studios have decamped for Atlanta and Toronto. For the people working in LA that don't want to move, I'm sure the answer is yes. But on net, I think it's probably meant more and better work for more people in general.
I really appreciate your perspective. Mine is definitely malleable on these topics; they're complicated and I'm not an economist.
re: regular people and their money, I will say, something about the bigger picture just feels off. I look at the graphs you linked to, and do not see it reflected in the people around me. I don't mean to be dismissive of the data, more that I feel like I am missing something, or it is, if that makes sense?
Since the 1980s, the wealthy have done fantastic while the rest have not done nearly as well. The argument from CATO and others is that poor people should be content with a shrinking share of an increasing pie so long as their absolute purchasing power isn’t decreasing, but that argument feels wrong in part because it’s human nature to measure status relative to others rather than in absolute terms.
Furthermore, wealth applies more pressure against certain costs like housing[1] than against others like food or durable goods. Cheap toasters only go so far in making people feel like they aren’t falling behind.
This seems to be a common argument essentially “If a rich guy get $1000 and as a result I get $10, then I shouldn’t complain because I got $10” but this glosses over the fact that money is a proxy for power. The rich guy got more power over resources from this deal. Over the years this leads to more power inequality which is bad because now the rich guy can start doing other things to me and I have no recourse.
I agree, but I don't think many wealthy people are open to that perspective. Many seem to credit themselves with having created an environment where everyone's lot is improving in absolute terms, and don't see anything wrong with accumulating outsized relative power for themselves.
The reluctance to give up resources also an understandable aspect of human nature, but power concentration in the hands of the few is always problematic. I'm very much a capitalist but the last few decades have persuaded me that wealth taxes are a necessary and moral correction to capitalism's unfortunate spiraling acceleration of inequality.
It’s a difficult conversation to have because critiquing the wealth accumulation tends to get you shouted down as a communist. I’m a believer in capitalism as well but our current system has produced people that are so wealthy they are effectively above the law. Some limit on wealth accumulation really needs to happen.
To escape the "communist" critique, I think it's worthwhile to grapple with opposing all concentration of power, whether private or public, governmental or corporate.
For instance: marketplace competition requires some regulation, but recognizing that regulation is a necessary evil with many opportunities for abuse (e.g. regulatory capture) helps inoculate against socialism's worst excesses.
At least in Atlanta it seems like a lot of production bounced to even cheaper locales as tax subsidies became a bit less generous. We're at like half our 2022 peak dollar wise.
> the average number of hours worked per worker have fallen
Hooray for just-in-time scheduling where workers have to be available full time but can’t work full time. It’s an innovation that has been great for capital and terrible for labor.
shakes fist at sky "if only we didn't have to pay those pesky benefits then we wouldn't be forced to make the roles abusive contractor/part-time roles...Wild people even try to take this stance.
I'm baffled. Do you not see the normative vs descriptive claim here?
The reality is that requiring benefits imposes a cost, and employers manage that cost by limiting who qualifies. So yes, descriptively this unintentionally hurt many workers - and disproportionately impacted disadvantaged people who didn't make the full-time cliff.
Ignoring this is actually shaking your fist at the sky.
I don't find either of these charts dispositive by themselves. The cost of healthcare, education, housing, transportation, and insurance have easily outpaced any growth in wages. Another facet of this debate is that cheaper goods aren't necessarily of equal or better quality.
People are earning about 12% more and working about 5% less since 1980, but everything costs roughly 3x what it did in 1980 relative to wages, and that's where most people are pinched.
Real wages are inflation adjusted. So if everything costs 336% of what it did in 1980, and the real ages are 112% of what they were, then that means nominal wages are 376% of what they were.
Yes, it definitely can. That's sort of why I kept putting it in scarequotes. I am not skeptic of AI, fwiw. Mostly just our current crop of corpo/gov leadership and their views on what healthy economy looks like.
To use your example of the movie industry, everyone gets the benefits of the effiency gains.
There's twice as many scripted shows today and twice as many movies released despite the average person spending half the time they did 30 years ago watching TV and movies. For less than the price of a 1990s cable tv subscription we can access almost any movie, instantly streamed to our HDR TVs at home, on demand. The digital VFX we expect of a low tier direct to streaming show are better than the some of the best 90s movies (practical effects excluded).
There are hundreds of thousands of people across the world using the 4k camera in their pocket they bought for a few hundred dollars to make hyper specific media and distributing it free on YouTube. They are editing it in cheap or free video editors on their computer or built in to their phone.
It's easy to shit on modern media. With democratization comes slop. There's garbage now just like there was before. But we are absolutely benefitting off the efficency gains of the last few decades.
Modern technology makes distribution free, so then you need to compete on brand and quality.
Outsourcing seems extremely short-sighted in this environment. You're devaluing your brand, and giving expertise and training to another place that can make their own products.
I also wonder how much can be attributed to weakened intellectual property protection. Comments in this thread say they don't pay for anything because they can watch it all for free.
Hollywood got devalued because people prefer spending time on Youtube/TikTok/Instagram/Reddit/Discord/Video Games/Hacker News/etc.
There was nothing the business leaders could have done to prevent the effect of basically an unlimited supply of video entertainment being added to the market.
Even though the businesses are not comparable since journalism is a far less capital intensive business than video media production, I don't see how your example of 1 business thriving while almost all others failed is incongruent with the theme of the linked article which is loss of many jobs in the media production business.
Most businesses in (professional) journalism failed and many jobs were lost.
Most business in (professional) video media production failed and many jobs were (or will continue to be) lost.
The legacy media industry had a huge amount of fat and inefficiency, lots of people sitting around pretending to work. Joe Rogan produces a top podcast that pulls a larger audience than the vast majority of TV shows, and does everything with about 5 employees. Regardless of what you think of him personally or the podcast content, that is amazing efficiency. And he started it before LLMs were even a thing.
While I suspect you're not wrong about either inefficiency in large, well-funded media organziations or the efficiency of Rogan's operation, comparing his podcast to anything but a substantially similar TV show is hardly a fair comparison. Even a relatively low-budget scripted TV series is going to require a cast, writers, props, sets, costumes, hair and makeup, lighting, camera work, craft services, transportation, significantly more editing and postproduction, the list goes on, plus directors and producers and administrative personnel to manage all of this.
And that's exactly the point. It is unfair. TV shows and podcasts are both competing for the same audience, and yet the podcast can do it an order of magnitude cheaper.
> TV shows and podcasts are both competing for the same audience.
If by "audience" you mean "people," sure, but I don't think that's particularly meaninful. I don't think I'm alone in thinking that podcasts and TV shows aren't even kind of comparable or able to replace one another.
Not really, the time I set aside for shows, podcast, movies and games is all different. I am not going to give up watching slow horses to watch a podcast,
Sure, but for people without abundant time to spend alone then watching a show this evening kind of precludes also ingesting a podcast before tomorrow. It's not like the labour movements around the world have negotiated significantly more free time for the big mass of working humans since Netflix said that sleep is their biggest competitor back in 2017.
Yeah but podcast is low quality time; shows,movies are high quality, games are high quality high focus, music and podcast are lower on the rung. Its something you can have playing in the background and not pay attention.
Like the time I have for high quality stuff and low stuff are different and therefore different audiences. For Low quality stuff podcasts are fighting against tiktok
> I liked this article. I appreciate that it didn't try to say it is or isn't AI.
...because nothing in it supported the thesis?
Print and audio/video have been showing clear declines since the 90s, thanks to the death of print, CDs and cable. Maybe AI is part of this, maybe not, but if it is, we're talking about a slight change in slope. These industries were walking dead before CNNs were a thing.
The one industry where you'd expect to see the clearest impact (coding) is basically flat.
FWIW, there was a very good recent NY Times opinion piece titled "I Teach at a Business School. It's Time to Shut Them Down." by a professor at the University of Cambridge business school who argues that these schools have solely promulgated this idea of "efficiency" as their primary output to the detriment of society at large. Worth a read if you're interested in the topic.
Consider "The Red Queen" by Ridley book. It's premise is that evolution constantly improves a species, but since other species also are improving, the species runs and runs but stays in the same place.
It's the same thing in business. One has to relentlessly decrease the cost of doing business, because your competitors are doing it as well. You run and run and stay in the same place.
I haven't read the cited article, but the professor would need to show that industry profit margins are increasing to make his point. I haven't seen any evidence that margins increased in general.
You raise a good point, but I would like to add more nuance. Traditional TV is largely displaced by YouTube (small content creators) and streaming (Netflix, etc.) Traditional film has moved nearly entirely to streaming, but there is more of it now than ever before. TikTok is something truly generational to me. Just like Instagram largely killed the blog because it allowed normies to watch the amazing lives of the top 5%. TikTok allows young people (mostly women) to gossip faster than ever before.
Rhythm and Hues (Oscar award winner for “Life of Pi”) was killed because it was cheaper to move that work offshore.
Sure, we can blame AI for a lot of crimes, but let’s start with the people who offshore everything first. Then when those offshore people get fired because of AI, you don’t feel so bad because it’s not like you’re firing anyone or killing any companies in the same country, right?
At the end of the day, what is the functional difference between offshoring and AI? People in this country still get fired and can’t find work, because the work is no longer done in this country. And then later, much of this work is no longer done by humans in any country.
> when you start moving things away from LA to "save money"
Economic hubs work when there is more efficiency to be found in industrially-codependent resources being located close to each other, than there is in cheaper labor costs outside the hub. Hollywood's heyday was when there was enormous value to putting actors, agents, producers, cameras, sets, editors, VFX, writers all within close driving distance of each other, so that you could organize new movies and shows at the drop of a hat. In a day and age when teenagers are able to use cellphone cameras and pocketmoney to produce stories that are compelling enough to command attention and advertising dollars, the value of that geographic proximity has declined tremendously.
AI didn't build the coffin, but it's been putting nails in it.
I think people incorrectly ignore the strikes. The workers had very little leverage and gave a huge opening for Netflix who had the capital to move production anywhere.
Also, at the time (and still somewhat today), Netflix was the only one to really think globally about a content strategy.
Eh, I think international production was already a thing for quite a while. I remember so many shows shot in Vancouver, for instance, even pre Netflix. But like every industry, remote work has gotten easier and the forcing-function of COVID showed that you can have some writers in Toronto, a crew in the Czech Republic, and post-production in India - you didn't need them all in LA on union contracts and payscales.
Yep. My father was in the biz, and I heard the stories at the dinner table. This has been a long evolution, and the old ecology no longer exists. AI has just given the pre-existing trend another (vary large) extra kick.
I can’t speak to everyone, but grok bot is helping me gain so much efficiency in managing all of the things that I have going on in my life that I feel much more present now.
Before I’d always feel distracted by things weighing on me that I needed to get done. Now a huge load of those things are asked of grok bot quickly, then I close the laptop and go spend time where I should be.
It feels like it’s lifting a huge burden from my daily life.
In general I fully agree except with your conclusion. In the short-run efficiency immediately benefits the established players, but in the long-run it benefits, more or less literally, everybody except them. Because as you bring the price down on things you enable more efficient competition. Competition increases, margins decrease, baseline minimal standard of quality for success increases.
Software is a very clear example on this front. Valheim [1] is a game that was made mostly by one guy, at first at least. Not that long ago, this would have been a multi million dollar game produced by a wide array of people. It's just that tools, markets, and more have made it possible for even single developers to have an absurd degree of efficiency. And LLMs are probably going to bump this up exponentially.
This is why a metaphor I'm currently drawn to is one of people living in a very agrarian society just prior to the Industrial Revolution. What would they have envisioned being created? Super farms of course. And those super farms were indeed created, but the overall impact was such that those super farms became a practically inconsequential part of the overall economy. The future we're moving into isn't going to be the same but more efficient for those on top. That efficiency is going to revolutionize the economy in ways that are probably impossible to see from a distant, much how somebody living in an agrarian society couldn't have even begun to imagine the 'real' impact of the Industrial Revolution.
Not only is Valheim remarkable for the fact that’s it’s largely a one man show, it’s also a labour of love that couldn’t come out of the AAA gaming world, which is creatively bankrupt. They’re busy trashing beloved gaming series left and right and shuttering once beloved studios.
We’re now entering a new era where projects like Halo Reclaimer[1] are more creative and more popular than some of the slop put out by the AAA world with massive marketing budgets. There’s no slop, no micro transactions, just Halo Forge turbocharged by virtually anyone who loves Halo and has a Claude subscription.
Reclaimer looks great. It's like ReSkate for Halo, looks a bit newer and less polished but still great. I think I saw a video about this mod from a gaming creator on Youtube. I just don't get why it's closed source, if the anti cheat code is sensitive they can just keep that one part private and release the rest.
The main difference I see is they used Claude to write patch notes. ReSkate is pretty strict about only using AI for code, all assets and official comms are human made. I guess it's because a lot of their players are real life skaters and that community hates anything that looks fake.
> In the short-run efficiency immediately benefits the established players, but in the long-run it benefits, more or less literally, everybody except them.
The problem is, in a world running on next-quarter financials and bonuses, long-run disadvantages don't matter as long as the persons in charge of decisions can fuck off with golden parachutes before the house of cards crashes down.
> Competition increases, margins decrease, baseline minimal standard of quality for success increases.
Or everyone tacitly agrees on a new low standard of product, maybe adds in regulatory capture to prevent competition from rising, and even if you want, you won't be able to find an alternative. Enshittification galore.
I'm amazed nobody has challenged OP on his narrative for why the film industry left LA since it's completely wrong.
It has nothing to do with 'evil corporations chasing efficiency.' And you rightly point out, efficiency/productivity is literally the only thing that raises living standards.
The truth is, rising living standards have increased leisure time globally, and increased leisure time leads to increased demand for entertainment fit to your culture.
China now has 2X as many movie theaters as the US does. India produces 2,500 films per year today vs. 500 in Hollywood. Ditto for Europe (2500 films produced last year). South Korea went from nothing to a global entertainment player in 5 years. Their industries are still smaller than Hollywood but growing at faster rates.
Just like what happened to Detroit in the 1970s when Auto manufacturers started having to compete with other countries who built domestic car industries, the same exact thing happened to Los Angeles.
In both 1970s Detroit and 2010s LA, companies had focused on monetizing old cash cows (the superhero film was the chevy land yacht) while the market evolved under their feet, and unions had inflated wages/costs to the point of being wildly uncompetitive, so the industry supply chain went global. LA also refused to build homes, so talent couldn't afford to stay even at $1000/day union rates just for holding a light (that's an actual union rate for a gaffer in LA).
We're still just at the beginning of this in entertainment.
Technology has enabled the production and distribution of high end video content to drop dramatically, while at the same time demand for entertainment shifted from being heavily western to being much more diverse.
Overseas has so much film infrastructure now that Hollywood flies out the entire cast and essential crew (DP, etc.) to work on American productions overseas. They hire cheaper local crews (who are non-union), rent cheaper facilities, and even collect foreign tax subsidies.
It's far cheaper to produce everything in the UK, Eastern Europe, or Asia than it is to film in LA. Or even heavily tax-subsidized states like Georgia.
America can't compete on film production cost anymore. So it's halfway through the process of leaving, except for shots that need to film in iconic cities like New York for certain key scenes. But even then, you might see only part of the production happen in the US.
This started during the pandemic content streaming wars. There was a huge demand for content, American studios were shut down, and Amazon and Netflix dabbled with trying to shoot overseas. They found out the foreign infrastructure was just fine and that they just needed to teach the local crews a few things to be able to lift and shift the entire production pipeline. And it was so much cheaper that the choice to move everything was obvious.
Yea the pandemic is overfit as a reason for most things.
Hollywood didn't lose its relevance overnight. It's been a slow moving multi-decade process as the film -> digital -> portable transition made production cheaper, the internet made talent cultivation easier, studios and audiences expanded internationally, unions kept ratcheting up rates, LA refused to build homes while population ballooned and the government kept interest rates at 0 to re-inflate the housing market, unions kept raising rates to keep up with COL in LA, etc. etc.
Netflix is a global company marketing content for global audiences (the majority of their revenue is non-US) on a level that was unheard of during the heyday of Hollywood. There's a few billion people now who have TVs and enough leisure time to stream film/tv content. This is just within the last 15 years.
Most of the markets growing the fastest aren't going to relate to blonde movie stars prancing around LA in the same way US or western European audiences (the bulk of film revenue in the early 2000s) used to.
> Most of the markets growing the fastest aren't going to relate to blonde movie stars doing car chases around LA in the same way US or western European audiences (the bulk of film revenue in the early 2000s) used to.
Disagree. Good content is good content. International audiences show up for good American films, and Americans (increasingly) show up for good international films.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you probably didn't see Dhurandhar or Ne Zha 2 last year (the highest grossing films in India and China respectively)?
Funny you mention superhero films, because that's also what killed the American comic book industry.
If you go to a bookstore and ask someone not particularly familiar with the industry to go find a comic book; you are very likely to have them hand a manga or manhwa tankobon[0] back to you. Trade paperbacks[1] are sold in bookstores, but the western comics section will be a small fraction of the manga & manhwa section.
The root cause of this is that in the 80s, comic book companies - say it with me, folks! - underwent massive amounts of consolidation to chase efficiencies at the expense of their ability to innovate and their ability to withstand systemic shocks. The particularized version of this is that the comic book companies ceded their cultural ubiquity to milk comics fans dry.
The efficiency being chased was "direct sales" - i.e. selling comic books to dedicated comic book stores, rather than in mass-market areas like grocery stores. A key thing to note is that the mass-market sellers retain the right to return unsold inventory and get a refund[3], but comic book stores bought on "all sales final" terms. What this ultimately meant was that comic book publishers didn't have to worry about the quality of the books anymore.
There was a long-standing cultural stigma in the US that comic books are for children. This was itself downstream of a push to censor comics that was partially successful and resulted in the Comics Code stunting the growth of the medium[4] in the US. Eventually, thanks to - among other things, Marvel wanting to publish an anti-drug PSA in a Spiderman book - the Comics Code Authority lost their power and we were able to publish comic books for adults in the US again.
Anyway, Alan Moore wrote a really gritty Batman book and kicked off a rush to capitalize on a growing adult comics wave. This, along with a bunch of people realizing that old #1s of comics published during Baby Boomers' childhoods[5] were super rare kicked off a huge speculator wave. The comics publishers - who at this point were just DC and Marvel - saw the dollar signs and started flooding the market with slop to meet the demands of speculators who were buying #1s just because they were a #1.
This continued until it could not. In an act of supreme hubris, Marvel decided to buy a comics distributor in pursuit of extreme vertical integration and wound up completely destroying their ability to correctly print a book. Then they went bankrupt, got bought out by a corporate raider, and sold their movie rights to anyone who had a buck. DC wound up in the hands of WB (lol), Marvel became a Disney property.
Yes, the 2010s comic book movie wave was directly caused by the 1990s comic book industry's death. And, for that matter, the exact same extreme consolidation that killed comics is coming for Hollywood. Disney bought Fox, Larry Ellison bought Paramount and WB and merged them into Skydance. The entirety of America's cultural industries are looking more and more like DC and Marvel fighting over the ashes of a culturally dead country.
[0] Japanese for trade paperback[1][2].
[1] English for tankobon[0].
[2] Okay, this term actually has two meanings:
1. A paperback that is not printed to mass-market standard. Publishers don't really do mass-market paperbacks anymore, even manga that is printed to mass-market sizes isn't priced like the mass-market books they are in Japan.
2. Anthologies of previously-published comic books - floppies in the western case, massive pulp-fiction magazine bricks in the Japanese case. Sometimes they're not even in paperback!
[3] Which, funnily enough doesn't even usually require returning the whole book, just the covers.
[4] The shit the Comics Code did to US comics makes the censorship changes in the 4Kids dubbed version of One Piece look liberating in comparison.
Sadly, I believe this is a case of survivorship bias.
Rollercoaster Tycoon was also developed by one person. Developers could also be absurdly efficient in the past, see valve and half-life 1 as an example.
It means little to give examples of cases where developers punched above their weight and arguing it was because of reason X they could achieve it in the first place.
How many people failed, was it because of missing tools?
Like before, people will attribute some of their performance to tools, that in reality didn't matter at all.
This is not "software," this is video games. Video game nonsense is such a drop in the bucket, and it matters orders of magnitude less than video game addicts think it does. I could maybe understand it being mentioned in comparison to the film industry - they're both artistic creations that require a bunch of work by large teams. But that's also what's exceptional about them - 1) they mostly fail, and 2) they require expensive marketing and distribution.
When one guy (this guy certainly isn't the first or the best) makes a thing that manages to catch fire a bit, the big players can simply buy it. They can even force a sale, or otherwise refuse to let it be widely distributed or marketed. That's the stick, the carrot is that if it's genuinely resonant with people, they can just throw you life-changing money (i.e. pocket change for them) and generate billions for themselves.
Music barely democratized when production got in reach of the masses; as film production got cheaper, quality indy films became fewer and harder to find, and never in a theater; and as video games become cheaper to produce, Steam can make or break any of them at will, and do the same as any other monopolistic distributor - if they don't, it is by choice. If it is by choice, the person who made that choice will eventually be replaced with somebody who mocks that choice, because they will pay the most.
"Efficiency" doesn't benefit individuals at all without antitrust; it is extracted like any other value. One thing that changed about the music industry is that when it was a thousand companies, you could just bring talent and they would put you where you would earn them money - now that all media is owned by a few companies you are literally expected to bring a hit album to a record company before you get signed, and getting signed then gets you access to the media, wide distribution, and venues. They don't really even pay you, you pay them. Since they control distribution, they don't even really need talent - they can just imitate it. The reason they're giving you a deal is in order to tax your success.
The impact of the Industrial Revolution was that people were forced off of their farms, which were merged into super farms, exactly as they expected. They went from working for themselves for six hours a day, and living in relative comfort, to working for 14 hours a day and living in crime and disease ridden tenements. Their lifespans decreased by a decade. The air, land and food was poisoned. They likely died before they saw any improvements in this, and those improvements eventually came from anarchist and communist unions, and their own education about how they were being used. Then those unions and organizations were crushed, and their names were cursed; even somehow the word referring to the members of the "People's Party" became an epithet to throw at people who thought government had a responsibility to the people. Term limits were introduced so they wouldn't have a president like FDR again, although FDR's reforms ironically served to weaken the unions that saved them, so they could be destroyed completely subsequently in the name of war.
Even today, people say "you can't yell fire in a crowded theater" and don't know that it is something a judge said about a left-winger passing out antiwar pamphlets. They just repeat it, because they heard it. That's what happens when someone controls distribution.
I believe in efficiency. Efficiency under capitalism without effective devices to maintain competitive markets is simply more value for the parasites to extract.
Everybody found it easy to imagine the impact of the Industrial Revolution. That's why they broke frames.
"that those super farms became a practically inconsequential part of the overall economy. " - not really.
The super farms are as important as ever.
Because farms are hyper competitive, it means that the surplus and efficiency gains are not kept by the farmers.
And it's not just 'super farms' - its' transportation that enabled 'regular labour farms' in low cost areas.
So the benefits go to distributors, packaged food makers, grocers and consumers.
In this case, mostly to consumers.
You can see the charts for the kinds of work people used to do vs, now aka we used to all live on farms, now we do all sorts of things.
This is why we're seeing an pushback on globalization, economic optimization doesn't always balance out with strategic considerations aka food supply security etc. and those are hard to put on the books because they feel like a 'non-market force'.
A 'subsidy' feels like welfare, it's really and adjust of the balance of power.
> Competition increases, margins decrease, baseline minimal standard of quality for success increases.
Except cinema tickets prices got raised, if we were still talking about Hollywood and its entertainment industry.
> Valheim [1] is a game that was made mostly by one guy, at first at least. Not that long ago, this would have been a multi million dollar game produced by a wide array of people.
Quoting outliers and exceptions is not supporting your argument. Concurrently, a lot of people figured they are super shrewd and will make AI-generated games and guess what, barely anyone buys them. There are social and taste factors in art. It's not a chart with a line climbing up. A lot of normal folk, myself included, see AI-generated entertainment as low-effort and a plot to get their money while the other guy is snoring and is having 2x RTX 5090's make him money in his sleep.
People don't like that. They don't have to be proficient in IT to see what's going on and to dislike it.
> The future we're moving into isn't going to be the same but more efficient for those on top.
Yes. That is what your parent comments are saying -- that they are not seeing the common folk get too many benefits (if any) when the dust settles, which it still has not. They/we are saying: it's going to get objectively and measurably better only for the richest class.
> That efficiency is going to revolutionize the economy in ways that are probably impossible to see from a distant, much how somebody living in an agrarian society couldn't have even begun to imagine the 'real' impact of the Industrial Revolution.
The only thing at this point that is likely being revolutionized is our cooking skills because we should learn to cook rats and roaches -- because those on top care not about you and me. No, scratch that. They care. But they want us gone.
Almost nobody wants human workers per se, they just don't have a choice. The LLM era shows this acutely and clearly; many businesses rushed to fire people BEFORE they had proof LLMs will get their work done at all. The social and economic aspects of "nobody wants human workers" have been there forever but it was accepted as a necessary evil.
Now, many capital holders have an excuse _and_ a tool to want less -- or zero -- human workers. We are currently living in this boiling pot and your vaguely optimistic comment does not line with the reality I am observing.
Maybe, historically speaking / era-wise, i.e. 50-ish years from now, everything will be alright, a new equilibrium will have been reached and the humanity will be objectively happier generally and per-capita.
That will not comfort a talented VFX artist, a programmer, a sysadmin, a lawyer, and many others, when they have to get their half-paid house confiscated and go live in shanty towns and form a gypsy-like society so they can survive at all.
"Historically..." arguments are boring. What happens _now_? How is society and economy and the rich class handling the turbulent changes in the last 2 years? How will they handle them in the next 5 years?
The primary issue is that the digital economy is attention supply locked now that services expansion has hit a wall. And so the only way to extract infinite growth money going forward, which dealing with commoditisation and erosion of talent and technology moats in any form, is to lay off people.
AI making things cheaper and faster makes it worse, not better because it drives competition up and strengthens the bridge trolls at the attention gate aka platforms while taking power from both viewers and creators.
outsourcing is part of the thing, but efficiency is also a bigger factor.
I joined the VFX industry in 2007(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Compass_(film)), where a film like the golden compass required a large number of people to just make the fur look realistic (there were groomers who's job was to literally style hair.)
The huge increase in CPU power, and latterly GPU power meant that a few number of people could do a lot more. (software RnD was also crucial to this)
to hammer that home, the BBC version https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Dark_Materials_(TV_series) had way more furry animals, much more extensive digital sets, and with a combined run time of > 480 minutes vs 110. It was also done much cheaper.
TLDR its not just AI thats doing this. although it will be more and more now. as world models really kick into gear.
> It is a narrative that interweaves with AI, too. AI is supposedly an efficiency boom. In the macroeconomy, who is the "efficiency" we are chasing for, who benefits?
> Who is getting the money that was "saved"? Regular people do not have more more money or time. The "efficiency" is for people who are already very rich, to get richer.
Pension funds and investment vehicles chase profit growth. The vast majority of people have a stake in that.
No: he seems to think that profit shall not be more important that human life
I kind of agree with him: probably, a civilization deemed to be called "advanced" would have everything in place to sustain the basic needs of its members: that would be the baseline of everything
I remember a few years there was a comment or a linked piece on HN in which someone (a programmer) said (I paraphrase):
I am quitting my job because I've just realized that everything, without exception, that I've done as a programmer has been done with the goal of making already rich people even richer.
>I am quitting my job because I've just realized that everything, without exception, that I've done as a programmer has been done with the goal of making already rich people even richer.
Do you have an idea as to what your new job will be, and if so, and will you be doing to ensure that you won't be making rich people even richer in this new position?
That was a quote. I am not quitting my job, and that quote did not describe my life as a programmer (though I did help one famously rich person get that way).
Regular people absolutely get things that they couldn't get before... that's not exactly money and time per se but it's still something that has some value. The Internet Was the Same way. Mass production of electronics the same way. What regular people could afford to have simply was completely different than what existed in the past. Being able to ask any question to get an instant answer for example is quite powerful. Now admittedly if it's something that you don't value then it's frustrating that you didn't seem to have any choice in the matter but this is where the value is now coming
How does one consider, depression, inflation, interest rates and investments, purchasing power, and other impactful economic downturns for such analysis? During this window a consequential war in Europe, another one in Iran leading to an energy crisis, has happened as well which could accelerate the existing trends in one way or the other. I think any serious comparison should control for these factors.
Maybe. As a contrast, look at the book industry. We have access to 500+ years of books digitally, and yet most people prefer to read books written in the last 50 years.
The point stands, the over supply is a huge factor. There’s so much content available that serves as a competitive/substitute for traditional film and tv that it changes the entire consumer behavior and economy around the industry, which translates to jobs.
I don’t think people will ever really want to only watch old stuff, or lack desire for new stuff. But, in terms of thinking about the volume of media available I think the non-expiring idea is valid. YouTube alone has 500 hours of video uploaded every 1 minute.
It's hard to read old books sometimes. Unless you grew up doing it you just simply don't understand character intentions. Reading a Dostoyevsky book it's hard to relate to characters or even understand the outrage in a lot of scenes.
If you don't know your history well, the whole setting for the Count of Monte Cristo is confusing af. So you now need to read up on the fall and rise of the monarchy and Napoleon, and his exile etc. Also a lot of words are just foreign to most people.
Where as reading a book written recently it's just way easier to get into it since it's written in the context of our collective memory (if that makes sense).
> And unlike a lot of things, media doesn't expire. I still regularly find albums, movies, and books from decades ago I enjoy today.
Media doesn't expire, but with increasing distance to the cultural context it was created in, enjoying any work in all its nuances becomes harder. Take for example Arrested Development - one of the funniest TV shows of this century, but unless you bring sufficient knowledge on the Bush Jr. administration, you'll miss the funniest layers of many jokes and stories.
And it gets all the more interesting to look back at how the Zeitgeist changed over time, as tropes evolve and tastes keep changing.
I wish the article had split TV and movies because there are different factors at play.
Movies just don't make economic sense unless they're blockbusters and that's mainly because of the decline in movie theaters for various reasons but also the death of physical media sales. DVD sales in the 1990s were a bit of a Golden Age. Matt Damon talked about this [1].
Up until the 2000s the TV economic model was:
1. Produce a full season of TV, typically ~22 episodes, and air those on network TV. Sell ads;
2. Sell physical media. Unlike movies, this wasn't as big of a factor until serialized TV came about but it was a factor; and
3. Syndication. Basic cable channels and foreign distributors would pay to air TV shows.
Premium cable (eg HBO) was an exception. It still had foreign distribution but cable subscriptions replaced ad revenue.
In all of these cases, actors, writers, etc would get residuals or back end participation. For what became TV shows, there was a whole ecosystem of pilots. Scripts would be bought. Some would get greenlit for pilots. Some of those would get a half or full season order.
A TV season meant basically a full year of work for those involved. All the pilot activity meant more work. Residuals allowed actors and writers to survive between jobs. There are still people getting significant residuals from Friends from over 30 years ago.
All of that died with streaming. Netflix streaming first began as a means of monetizing old seasons of TV and older movies. It was additional revenue. But as Netflix grew, all the studios saw dollar signs and launched "me too" streaming services, most of which were doomed from the start. Streamers began to cannibalize the syndication and physical media revenue.
Netflix in particular made the decision relatively early that they needed original content to survive. By having a worldwide customer base, they didn't care about physical media and didn't have to pay for syndication. Also because of some unfortunate contracts in the late 2000s, there was little to no residuals for streaming so that too was more saved money.
And the cost-cutting continued. Smaller seasons (8-13 episodes) with smaller writing rooms meant fewer people employed, particularly when it might be 2-3 years between seasons. Suddenly you needed 2 jobs a year to survive where once it was 1. That's a huge difference because you're lucky to get 1 job. And you got no residuals on top of that.
This coincided with more general Hollywood cost-cutting to move productions out of LA to Canada (particularly Toronto but also Vancouver), Atlanta and elsewhere.
Hollywood was an ecosystem. Short term profit-seeking has basically destroyed it but also, so has the high cost of housing. LA used to be somewhere you could live cheaply and this enabled people to chase their dream. Many didn't make it but this was the entry to the funnel. Some did.
Now there are fewer jobs and those are increasingly dominated by second and third generation nepo babies.
Why do you think there's so much recycled IP now? Relaunches of 1990s and 2000s properties. The people involved are out of work. That's why. And it's easier to greenlight something with a track record. Also, notice how many podcasts there are of people who used to be in shows? The Office is particularly egregious for this. I swear half the cast have podcasts now. Why? Because they're out of work too.
I cannot overstate how much expensive housing has strangled Hollywood. Expensive housing is an input into everything you produce and do. Yet people see it as their retirement. What retirement? If your $200k house is now $1M, so is every other house. You still only own one housing unit's worth of wealth. So you need to multiple houses, to be a landlord or Airbnb host. And we wonder why the housing supply sucks.
> This coincided with more general Hollywood cost-cutting to move productions out of LA to Canada (particularly Toronto but also Vancouver), Atlanta and elsewhere.
> I cannot overstate how much expensive housing has strangled Hollywood.
I hardly know anything about the tv/movie industry, but this is a bit of funny juxtaposition when Toronto and Vancouver also have famously unaffordable housing.
It's purely anecdotal, but the word I've heard from the industry is that the number of sfx and animation jobs had stayed the same, but the bids are coming in much much lower. The example was $500k jobs were now coming in around $50k.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 23.4 ms ] threadProvide food for critical thinking instead of accusing people of not being critical thinkers.
For example, tell us what new media from the US is actually great today. What do the arts offer that is next level and worth watching? Is there a rise in arts in other counties that we are missing? What could Facebook boomers need that leads to more and higher quality arts and movies?
Are you suggesting creatives just give their work away for free?
In contrast, thought-terminating clichés like "facebook boomer" show critical thinking on your part.
I fully agree with that: calling someone a "facebook boomer" is just plain pathetic.
(btw the boomers are my parents' generation: don't go thinking I take it personally. I'm a GenX'er and GenX'er are badass, which is why I don't give a flying fuck saying what I think).
Something something about the pot and calling some kettle black etc.
A side-effect of the democratization of content creation and the explosion of ways to consume content is that there’s more low-quality things to consume. Low-quality content will always be produced in greater abundance than high-quality so there’s more garbage to dig through, but there are still gems out there.
Personally, after years of infrequent movie attendance, this is the first month that I can remember in my adult life that my wife and I saw two movies in the theater and given the opportunity there’s a third we’d still like to see!
The per capita part is very important to explaining the figure, don't ignore it, but if you break oil (and related products like kerogen, bitumen and NGL) into light, medium and heavy we hit peak medium oil in 2008.
Isn't that explained by improvements in efficiency? i.e. it takes significantly less fuel to move the same mass than it did in 2008?
> So based on that, we believe what is most fair is to put current trends in because you cannot predict at what point consumers and demand is going to be -- you're going to begin to see demand destruction based on the pricing environment.
https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2026/04/23/so...
Many people spend hours browsing Tik Tok rather than watching film or television.
Even long form YouTube videos are highly popular. Many folks spend time watching those rather than movies or tv. I believe Tom Hanks was speaking about this many years ago.
That being said….
I remember growing up and my teachers would always emphasize the importance of reading. I’m sure it would be a great thing for humanity if everyone spent their free time reading books rather than on film or television. In such a scenario would people complain about job loss then? This could be a fruitful idea for a science fiction short story come to think of it.
Since rolling back to at least the pre-radio days is unlikely, we might focus on educating consumers in a way that empowers them rather taking a top-down approach to control what people are allowed to do because we know what is best for everyone.
When I read, I don't get that feeling. Even here on HN where it is mostly wasting time.
I think this is why so much media has viewer comments. It's something to engage with and lose awareness of the passing time.
Apparently the amount of movies actually being produced has barely recovered to post 2008 levels.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/187122/movie-releases-in...
The 2023 Hollywood Strike strike, the COVID lockdowns shutting down theaters, and the aggressive film production (UK, Poland, Ireland, Norway, Italy, Spain, Colombia) and VFX (Ireland, India, Colombia) subsidizes right as American states like California, Georgia, NY, and others began cutting them meant much of the American film and television industry got obliterated earlier this decade.
The reality is revenue is roughly consistent, but production costs one you remove subsidies (like what most of the US and Canada did) become exhorbitant in low margin industries like entertainment.
It's now cheaper to produce an "American" movie or TV show in Ireland, using British actors affecting an American accent (thank Hugh Laurie, Idris Elba, and Dominic West for that), with post and VFX done in India than it is in the US.
This is something that has been reported on in the space for a decade now, but not much can be done.
This article is also another example of why HNers should stick to their own lane, as most lack context or visibility into other industries.
I expect AI use to cause an increase in output, not a decrease in employment. At least right now. In TV and Film it would translate to more content that was too expensive to film before. If your business is making movies and then suddenly the market is flooded with fast and cheap movies, then you're going to make more fast and cheap movies too!
Every streaming service feels more and more user hostile. If I want to watch South Park it’s a 15$ a month subscription just for that .
Paramount Plus has nothing else.
I want to watch Lanterns, another 30$ a month.
Maybe King of The Hill , 20$ a month. The Reboot has this weird lazy animation style.
I do feel for anyone trying to find a new H1B sponsor. I've lived and worker as a foreigner before, its stressful for sure. It is also a tough spot for a country to be in, if your domestic labor is struggling to find or keep jobs itsnhard to justify continuing protections for foreign labor.
The average amount of time spent doing "Relaxing and leisure" activities (mostly TV) has increased 6% in the last twenty years. There was a small decrease after the post-COVID peak, but working time has also decreased in this time frame.
https://www.bls.gov/tus/tables.htm
My hypothesis is, YT, Reels and TT are eating everyone’s lunch, as people spend more time on those. And for people who don’t watch much, there’s Spotify. Basically attention span degradation across all age groups.
If certain ultra conservative countries don’t like LGBT representation they don’t get to be in your major movie.
At this point I don’t know the difference between Chat GPT writing the next marvel movie or Disney hiring someone. Either way the story needs to be crystal clear. You never watch something that makes you think.
I don't mind too much, I just miss overall quality and don't care who tf is "represented" or not.
But honestly I think most localized TV experiences are awkward. Switzerland barely is tho, that's clean and boring in a way but rarely awkward.
I bet the median American has more real disposable income than four years ago.
I bet the median American spends more in real terms on entertainment (and streaming specifically) than four years ago.
Almost without fail, the data in almost any area of modern life seems to be way less negative than people’s vibes about it are.
The streaming model has imho mostly killed old style television formats with the new way of hyping up a show in the first couple episodes by tossing money and talent, then leave people to hang with unsatisfying conclusions once you've got that sub money. It's all about convincing people to sign up and stay signed up with promises for new content. The quality of the content doesn't matter as long as there's a lot of it and it's enough to keep people from unsubscribing.
With traditional TV your value was directly determined by how many people were watching so you could sell addspace. And despite there being less choice and harder for independent players to get time, in some ways it was weirdly more democratic because if a show sucked or an episode sucked people would just change the channel or watch something else. With streaming they still do that but it's all in the same price scheme so doesn't hurt their bottom line. They're incentivised to just crank out as much crap as possible to keep subs up. Won't last.
The thing is that most people would rather not do that and prefer to keep watching garbage. You can only lead a horse to water...
This is funny, because every damn time I find something I want to watch its on paramount+.
There has to be a paradox/law named after this at this point. "The thing you're trying to watch will always be on the service you don't have."
The modern "Netfix model" has seemed to resulted in large number of new TV shows (relative to number of new movies) which always seem to get killed before their plotlines are resolved. And when I have something in mind I want to watch I often don't even know where to find it.
I'd prefer to go get DVDs from Blockbuster at this point - it'd be more convenient!
Although, I think Netflix also does not directly employ the people that make media, just like Apple. They just employ the people that curate it and distribute it.
Having fun isn't hard when you've got a library card!
[1] https://pages.skybrian.com/2026/us-households-by-income-band...
They are totally different content, and one inarguably more addictive and shallow than the other
But you’re right.
This might well be true, and it fits in with the idea that constraints or limits can lead to more creative outcomes (currently on the HN front page[1]), but everything still had to pass the state censor's approval.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50225663
Soviet Union was one of last countries with true art. Art requires seriousness. Western art has turned into entertainment long ago. All movies are made so that you can accompany them with popcorn.
There were topis with sort of a prescribed understanding, mostly related to early history of the Soviets. There were opportunistic authors who produced politically correct slop. These fellas quickly changed course in 90s and now have mostly left for Israel. But there was also massive live stream of true art alongside all that, realistic, serious and even Christian: Russian classical culture is so deeply Christian that you pick it even in an atheistic setting.
It breaks the site guidelines to attack others like this, regardless of how wrong they are are you feel they are. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. If you could please review them and stick to the rules when posting, we'd appreciate it.
There was no art, only pro-government communist propaganda. In Soviet Union there was even popular saying regardless culture, that Stalin took over a Russia of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov, and left it with the Union of Soviet Writers.
You’re conflating the Stalinist period with the whole history of the USSR.
There is a famous quote of the judge on the Brodsky trial (1964): "Who have appointed you to be a Poet?". Аfter he sad that Soviet Government did no appointed him to be a Poet, he was sent in the gulag for 5 years. That is how "art" worked in the USSR.
Most content sucks ass. What may appear to be bountiful content is actually a lot of okay and meh content. Very little of it fits to your actual taste preference. It's a whole lot of mediocre. We as humans do not know what plentiful content looks like. We've never lived in it.
Most movies suck. You doomscroll and are dissatisfied. You refresh your media recommendations and sigh. You are excited to see a new fantasy or sci-fi film that scratches that itch, yet often left disappointed.
We are still in a desert. Anyone who says otherwise is settling for the status quo that our childen will call primitive and beastly.
Jobs are disappearing because cheap/free ad subsidized content attracts more eyeball hours than produced and prestige content. It's the optimal pareto frontier of content and does the most bang for buck, most in aggregate eyeball hours.
When the tools enable more creation at scale by tasteful creators, we'll start to get closer to content abundance. We're not there yet.
Hollywood's cost structure makes it impossible to try anything new. I'd contrast that to Japan where creators can write a "web novel", get a contract for a light novel, have a manga made, and then an anime, and maybe even some video games. And these all reinforce each other: last year I discovered an atrociously drawn anime that had got me curious about the source material -- that blew me away and I bought all of the printed materials that have come out so far and expect to buy all the rest.
Not least, Japan still gets new 4-panel comics like Bocci the Rock and The Demon Girl Next Door, something almost unthinkable of in the Land of the Nepo Baby where we haven't had a new one since Dilbert.
So while AI has potentially made it easier for some Japanese content to reach English-speaking Western audiences, I’m not so sure that it’s doing justice to the original creations.
Note: I’m not suggesting that AI doesn’t have a place in translation work, but it still needs close supervision from bilingual people.
https://www.cbr.com/crunchyroll-chatgpt-sub-anime
For one thing I've watched enough anime that I have quite a bit of comprehension of spoken Japanese, there are a lot of things that you hear over and over again that stick in my mind. I will even instinctually translate English translations of anime back into idiomatic anime Japanese.
Another thing is that emotional comprehension of Japanese is really easy for English speakers. The people who make Chinese mobile games realize this and make Japanese the default for westerners as opposed to Chinese or English: Japanese speakers use tone to express emotion and I dare say are more expressive and more comprehensible emotionally to English speakers than English speakers.
My spoken Chinese comprehension is weak but I've been training myself to read it emotionally -- like emotionally Chinese was "inscrutable" [1] to me when I first started watching Chinese language media but I hear people speak Chinese every day at my Uni and I watch their faces out of the corner of my eye and maybe even drift into a synchronization trace and I can feel the rhythm of how their voice speeds up and slows down and the other cues and it seems really expressive to me.
Now I have a lot of respect for professional western voice actors who do "cartoons", I saw one who went to my acting school who did a 5 minute skit where he did about 20 different voices. There you really have madcap expressiveness but unfortunately the genre is limited and you just don't have the range of subjects and a stance which is just a bit more serious but still has a "cartoony" range of expression when things get heated.
[1] tone is semantic in Chinese so it is not used so much to express emotion
Wrt to voice actors, the world of today is far different from the VA world of yesteryear. There's a lot more competition and also less demand for somebody who can do a multitude of bombastic voices. It's rare that you need somebody like Dan Castellaneta or Mel Blanc. Partly I think because if you look at the trends, especially in Western cartoons and animation, the characters' voices are often very close to the voice actors' natural voices.
It isn't exactly a desert? It is more like a full buffet, but nothing but cheap, mass-produced sugar literally everywhere. All the 2-star donuts and chocolate cupcakes you can eat, and nothing but that.
Most new ones do, but they've been making like a dozen great ones each year for for like 80 years.
Honestly TV (including the back catalogs) are where most of the truly good video content is.
> cheap/free ad subsidized content attracts more eyeball hours than produced and prestige content
This part I really agree with. It's the reason shitty Netflix reality shows are among the most popular 'watercooler discussion' shows today.
As a kid, I played games with a board and counters. Sometimes I made my own board and counters. And there was only one channel on the B+W TV.
What a gross and completly apt terminology for the commoditization of art from the bureaucrats by the way.
You can make your album accessible to every human on earth for free.
So my Instagram is full of very very high quality music, much of it I'll only listen to once.
Music from all over the world.
Its great.
Yet sad. So much music I'll never get to. I have to spend 40 to 50 hours a week generating income. If only I did better on that Meta interview way back.
I'd be retired now, free to indulge in endless entertainment.
It might be this one Yellow Economy[1]. But I'm not 100% sure.
[1] https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/yellow_economy_14_...
Also how much is the end of ZIRP and how much is jobs moving abroad? I'd love to see the article go a bit deeper
Also thought the graphs around covid were interesting, there wasn't a spike up or anything it's just been consistently down.
The article said we're not in a recession. I thought we were lol
To me, the entertainment industry suffers from a lot of the same problems in most other industries that chase "efficiency", in terms of resources used and profit made. Economies and industries and labor are interdependent and more "alive" than balance sheets and bank accounts.
For the film industry, when you start moving things away from LA to "save money", it has knock on effects that happen over long periods of time. Multiple Quarterly Earnings Reports long, if you will. Local businesses that depend on the film industry close due to less work, so then there is less expertise available. Less expertise means it can command high prices. Suddenly it's too expensive to film in LA altogether. So the rest of the jobs leave too.
This pattern seems super common, not just in the film industry.
It is a narrative that interweaves with AI, too. AI is supposedly an efficiency boom. In the macroeconomy, who is the "efficiency" we are chasing for, who benefits? Who is getting the money that was "saved"? Regular people do not have more more money or time. The "efficiency" is for people who are already very rich, to get richer. Is that worth the price we're paying? I know my answer. The article gets close to it by mentioning the consolidation in Hollywood, but I do not see how we fix this without enforcing our antitrust laws. It is embarrassing what we let rich people do in the name of stock price go up.
All the jobs have gone to Europe.
Looking at my Gen Z wife, all the eyeballs have gone to TikTok.
There's the answer.
When I was growing up movies were watched in cinemas. It was a big event and we saw maybe 5 a year.
Over time more start appearing on TV, but those tended to be a bit older, but also cherry picked the good ones. (I don't live in the US).
PayTV didn't appear until mid 80s. They had more movies, but again tended to cherry pick. VHS meant we recorded the ones we wanted to see. All these things together meant we tended to watch "good" movies.
Hollywood of course were making lots and lots of movies we never saw, or had and way to see. The bad stuff simply didn't have a channel to the world.
The arrival of Video Stores changed that. Suddenly the mediocre (and worse) had an outlet. And trust me, there was plenty of rubbish in there. But there was still a cost to distribute.
Today, distribution cost is zero. If Netflix commission a movie it'll get onto Netflix. Regardless of the result. Some really good stuff, most mediocre, lots of real rubbish.
Repeat for Amazon, Disney, Hulu, et al.
Overall movies haven't gotten worse. Objectively production values are higher. But your access to mediocre and bad movies has increased.
Judging past output though introduces survivor bias, which in turn makes comparison to today misleading.
The scene workers have gotten better though. And there are a lot of good movies being made still, but not by the mainstream industry that used to really deliver.
1. Beverly Hills Cop
2. Ghostbusters
3. The Terminator
4. Gremlins
5. A Nightmare on Elm Street
6. Police Academy
7. Dune
8. Repo Man
9. The NeverEnding Story
10. Karate Kid
11. Romancing the Stone
12. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Or pretty much any year from the 1980s and 1990s.
At some point we lost good writing in favor of silly jokes and narrative in favor of spectacle.
For a while in the oughts I taught a film history class, though, and even 2 decades ago the kiddos thought anything in black and white, much less with no sound or with subtitles, was literally unwatchable. I'm okay with the idea that the students' tastes in media are legitimate, though I have my own tastes and think they are differently-informed.
And further, I dunno if "silly jokes and narrative in favor of spectacle" are new. Think Keystone Cops and Busby Berkley.
I like Battleship Potemptkin and Citizen Kane as much as the next person, but that's not all of what was popular.
Paring the thousands of films from the 80s down to a list of 10 does a lot of work to make that looks like it was better, when in fact I was in middle school and I could literally go see a movie for 75c. I remember some really bad ones, and I am certain I've forgotten a lot of bad ones.
I also have problems making a list of good films from the last decade, but I think that's because I got burnt out and stopped watching long-form video mediums when I left my PhD program. I am not sure I have seen 10 long form narrative works in the last 5 years.
Funnily enough, those happen to be two movies I didn't enjoy beyond their historic relevance.
I'm not saying that spectacle and one-liners are bad - movies like that are included in my list for 1984. It is when you substitute good writing with funny lines and have spectacle instead of a compelling narrative that I see a problem.
...No wait, to be fair, they're very good at influencing. They can influence like no previous generation ever could.
As I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, CA's labor-pool's own hostility to the film industry (via strikes) also played a big role. They gave the studios the finger, then are surprised that the studios took their ball and went elsewhere.
Also, I see this anti-union sentiment a lot on HackerNews: Whenever unions strike, there is near universal rejection as a strategy. The anti-union sentiment on HN is tiring, especially from the US and UK. Those big strikes in Los Angeles resulted in large pay increases and/or expansion of territory (better payouts for streaming, etc.) for those union members. In short, it worked.
It's akin to the auto worker's unions, but without the same degree of government backstopping for the industry. The auto workers unions are an anchor around the necks of the auto industry, while government bailout dollars are a lifejacket - it's clear California (and more broadly the US) doesn't see the same need to subsidize the unions in TV and film.
Especially if we're talking about jobs in creative industries that require customers with the means to support and consume their output.
Besides, an overabundance of surplus labor, if properly managed, is as likely to lead to a better world than a worse one. There's no ironclad rule that everyone, or even the majority, need to work to live or live to work to be happy. And many creatives, in particular, would be happy and productive working on personal and noncommercial projects if funding were no longer an issue.
Of course there is. Permanently replacing labor is quite obviously and quite literally the point of AI. No previous tech shifts are comparable.
That's why the tall bank buildings that dot ~every small town (and plenty of big ones) in the US are full of bankers tending to paper ledgers, and with a secretary in front of every office. We still get milk delivered every day, as well as a block of river ice from last winter every 2 or 3 days (or more often if it's been particularly hot). We dig our ditches by hand, with hand-made shovels and pickaxes. The material for the clothes on our backs was woven on manual looms, from cotton that was harvested by hand, and carded by hand, and spun into thread by hand. We wear them in homes made with iron nails that were cut by hand, from ores that were mined by hand and smelted the only way we know how: With charcoal, in clay furnaces that were made with hands and that are stoked by hand.
Technology progresses. You're playing to an end-state of AI that assumes labor disappears entirely because you have yet to see what the new labor system looks like.
We'll survive this transition as well.
But understanding and acceptance are two very different concepts.
Oh please, do tell.
You people realize businesses used to have rooms full of humans who clacked away at typewriters right?
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg...
When you consider that this conversation assumes we are talking about the US and not the rest of the world? It is sobering.
The AI bet hinges entirely on the new types of work that arise from it.
If we think about it, AI can be seen as dumping cheap products below cost and disrupting the domestic market.
I mean the real cost of production is unknown due to skirting of copyright laws in many cases and even if we discount that, it is well known that AI is being pushed far below the actual costs for providers. There are disruptive technologies, yes but this is not the same if the real cost is hidden or deferred and it doesn't compare with horses/cars or whatever analogy that comes up often.
In the physical world, this is called dumping isn't it? Just because tech is involved it doesn't change the fact. Countries already have anti dumping laws.
Copyright laws themselves are not completely "real", not in the sense that digging coal out of the ground is. They were once tailored for Disney to maximize its profit; now that Disney is no longer the juggernaut it once was, they may be re-tailored to maximize the profits of the new juggernauts.
That's what AI companies are doing to cut costs dramatically, but since it's domestic, there's a sudden apathy towards the original claims.
Which(if any of this ever fucking mattered at all) would undermine the years long campaign of china-hate that at it's core, was large Capital holders being upset their outsourcing plan backfired once China was no longer a captive third-world backwater.
So here in the "west" we created our own machine to speed up the Chinese "Shanzai" and pretend like it's suddenly innovation instead of theft.
This whole situation is why one should never, ever trust the rich man's opinion on foreigners, as it's always always always just to line their pockets.
They have had 200 million in judgements against them by investors this year, and are filing Chapter 11 to reorganize debt and go private.
In other words, nothing to do with AI.
Of course they do. Median real weekly wages[1] have been rising for decades all while the average number of hours worked per worker have fallen[2].
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/les1252881600Q
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/avhwpeusa065nrug
Also, I chose weekly wages because annual wages are complicated by time off, which was the other item in question.
https://www.unitedforalice.org/essentials-index
Looking at an article from the CATO institute, over the last 30 years wages have climbed 169 percent, while food prices 111 percent.
But an even better measure is PCE, or personal consumption index. Rather than CPI, or any other "household basics" measure, which subjectively categorize goods and then tracks those, PCE measures the total dollar amount spent by the entire U.S. consumer sector on goods and services. This is what is used by the FRED database referenced in the reply above.
https://www.cato.org/commentary/why-dire-pronouncements-abou...
It’s 30 to 50% of most peoples paycheck, it’s really the piece that matters and the one that is most complicated to solve.
I'll wait for your next pilpul, rabbi
I imagine they're in a high cost of living area, where tons of other people want to live. If that's the case, it probably shouldn't be any surprise that in a supply restricted market, the prices are also very high.
*edit: they're not in a _high_ cost living area, but it's not cheap either.
For examples:
1. there are 57,000 unoccupied apartments in NYC because city regulations on rents make them unprofitable to rent out.
2. the glacial pace of issuing building permits for burned out homes in LA.
3. the sudden influx of many millions of immigrants pushes up the demand for housing, resulting in higher prices
Which market are you thinking of?
Los Angeles? Where the homeowner vacancy rate is 0.7% and rental vacancy 4%?
If you literally weren't thinking of anywhere when your responded, where did you get the notion from?
[1] https://api.census.gov/data/missing_key.html +/- one percent
Please try again.
P.S. google "how many unoccupied apartments in nyc"
The market, left to its own, will keep building because someone will see the prices people are willing to pay and think “I want in on that” but then the government comes in and blocks them from building. No building = supply lower than demand which always equals higher costs
Further, It would only have taken you one 5 second search to see the ways government regulations can cause unoccupied apartments
https://www.google.com/search?q=in+what+ways+can+government+...
That's about 2.4% of the total number of rented apartments, and about 1.5% of the total housing stock.
How long do you think those apartments are unoccupied, on average?
What portion of the stock do you think would normally be healthy to have on the market?
Scroll down a bit and read the section: "Key Causes of Vacancies"
What's a healthy vacancy rate in your opinion, and what do you make of NYC having a lower rate than the average American city?
Is it actually more complex than that? If the regulation that makes it unprofitable to rent them out is rent control, that's still an accurate statement of why they're not being rented out.
I'm semi-convinced that the reason why we see so many bad ideas in housing is because the good ideas negatively affect too much of the voting public. Or, they perceive the ideas as negatively affecting them.
Perhaps my view is too California-brained, but homeowners here like high prices because it gives more flexibility to downsell, they can get large home equity loans, and Prop 13 ensures they won't be paying full property tax (at least if they've been living there for a while). Even for those planning on living there until they die, their children would still like to inherit a valuable place.
At any rate, I didn't intend to limit the reasons to just price. The solution is to build more housing, but building housing is unpopular, and it isn't hard to see why. So we end up with bad policy like rent control instead.
As a homeowner I don't want to see my home price go down relative to all other homes as that leaves me in a precious position if I need to move, but if all homes fall in price together then that actually makes the prospect of moving less risky as, if I have to move into a house that is a step-up from the one I have, the cost to do so is lower. That would be an improvement over the status quo. High housing prices are a problem even for those with significant equity in a home.
But who doesn't want to see their wage go down is those who build houses. This is the bottleneck. The vast majority of people cannot afford a new house, which means they're stuck in their used houses, which means there is no inventory opening up for those with no houses.
> it's just that the solutions are deeply unpopular.
Is it? The solution in motion is to use AI to push software developers out of software development so that they have to become construction workers, thereby increasing the supply of construction workers, pushing construction wages down. It doesn't seem that unpopular (at least not outside of HN, but even on HN many welcome it with open arms). Maybe it will become unpopular once the motions are complete? That's a tad bit late, though.
This is not true.
Not that it matters as I don’t think this is what motivates NIMBY’s but for anyone reading that believes so, this is incorrect.
The old single family home next to the new apartment building gains land value. And this shows up county after county [1]. Building more housing is a valuation win-win, the pie just grows.
[1] https://gardner.utah.edu/news/recent-apartment-construction-...
And this is why large property owners fund YIMBY organizations. I have no idea how they've managed to convince people of normal intelligence that relaxing restrictions on zoning lowers property values, and that's why the selfish senior citizens who stubbornly continute to live in the homes they've lived in for decades are against it. It doesn't make any mathematical sense at all. They just are willing to believe anything that promises to give them what they want, which is other people's homes who don't want to sell and who don't want to live next to 900 people on a tiny lot with no parking.
The most insulting part is when they pretend that this is racism, while YIMBYs have been gentrifying black people from the neighborhoods they've been in for centuries, into the woods. The reason they're so frustrated about senior citizens in San Francisco or wherever is because they can defend themselves, while black people can't. Black people are being annihilated from urban neighborhoods; you're seeing them replaced by rent-stressed immigrants who don't have families or connections in the country to retreat to.
> Building more housing is a valuation win-win, the pie just grows.
No, it's a win for people who sell. It's not a win for people who want to keep their homes, and their communities. It's a win for alienation and cultural destruction, pushed by people who either have no roots, or who keep their roots safely protected a thousand miles away.
Community is still community in a condo.
>>"pushed by people who either have no roots, or who keep their roots safely protected a thousand miles away"
Imperceptibly different from the argument JD Vance makes against immigrants. Maybe rethink that tack.
Noise and dust from construction are often mentioned as well. Construction means heavy trucks entering places where they usually don't intrude.
About half of US adults own their home. It goes up to ~2/3 if you include adult children, grandparents, etc. that live in the house but don't own it.
I wasn't trying to dance around this fact; my point is that a large fraction of the voting public has their interests aligned with keeping home prices high (presuming that these non-owning residents share interests with the people that do own the home).
Go to Manhattan and tell me that housing isn't built because of NIMBYism. It's: RTO (very important!), cost of land (land isn't increasing in volume), end of tax subsidies (programs that gave developers tax breaks), zoning (hey let's demolish all the jazz clubs in Greenwich Village and replace it with affordable housing - is that what you consider the correct line?), jobs (the economics of people moving to a place) and many many many more factors.
About once a week someone with a singular conception of the world of housing comes and you need to open their minds up a bit.
You want to lower housing costs? Maybe increase public transportation, give workers rights to work from home, and invest in expanding the suburbs by making them more dense. But don't do that until AFTER you've established the infrastructure piece. Not everyone wants to live in LA or Austin and spend hours in cars.
If you don't do these things then people all want to live in the same place, which is far more impactful than this "NIMBYism" thing, not everything is your local HOA or little town's regulations.
“hey let's demolish all the jazz clubs in Greenwich Village and replace it with affordable housing”
Or just rebuild them in the commercial space under the new taller condos, so more than just the nepo trust fund babies or lottery rent control people can live in them. These are all non-issues once you get over people’s aesthetic preferences.
This is not just a California issue, the space between downtown and midtown is severely under-built when compared to the economic output of those spaces.
How would Greenwich Village look if you turned it all into towers of rental apartments?
France uses expansion of the suburbs to make housing more available, and that includes trams, buses and yes, Metro expansion. You don't need to demolish the fucking bistros and parks to replace them with towers.
In NYC it could be done with NJ Transit being replaced, and better transportation. Then the border areas would become more dense because the investment returns would support it. People would want to move there to work in Manhattan.
Please don't turn world class cities into your LA or Houston Hellscapes of cars and highways. I'd rather pay a million dollars for a tiny one bedroom apartment in a real city than half the price in those soulless, cultureless places where you spend all day behind the wheel of a vehicle.
Back in the 1800’s when the more dense haussmanian architecture was put in. I’m sure their equivalent of pretty jazz clubs then were mowed down too. But over a 100 years the more housing made space for more people and better culturally richer city.
New York is a newer city, it’s time to densify is now.
I’m literally trying to densify, so that’s the anti-highway move. Tear down all of FDR and put in more NJ transit for all I care, I Love the Path.
We can do both, put more transit it and densify the low density sections of Manhattan. So more people have more choices.
Blocking this on aesthetic and legacy preferences is morally wrong.
Absolutely wrong. Haussmann's restructuring of the city was intended to REDUCE overcrowding and darkness due to the narrow alleyways, not to mention illness from the overcrowding. He lowered density, built parks, and then Paris expanded a lot when they absorbed the suburbs in the 1860's. Today Paris is extremely high density, and they're again expanding into the suburbs - look up Grand Paris projects. But the 6 story buildings aren't being demolished to make 30 story buildings like you seem to be suggesting is the thing to t do.
As much as I rail against a soulless place like Houston (with no housing restrictions like in NYC or Cali), I also don't want to turn our cities into Shanghai or New Delhi.
And by the way, what makes you think building more makes housing cheaper? It's not like making widgets in a factory. Gentrification makes things more, not less expensive - have you seen the history of Williamsburg, Brooklyn? Rezoning it turned it into a lux neighborhood with an Apple store, and attracted people from around the world.
There’s no point fighting against known norms in economics now. Induced demand in housing is hogwash: there are a certain number of people who dream of moving to east village and that number doesn’t magically grow if you build more housing. After decades of underbuilding, yes the demand is high, but it’s not infinite. Build out the suburbs too, build good transit, split the difference and the housing prices stabilize.
I was there a few years ago in the summer, and figured I’d go see live music at night, and there just was literally not any to see besides at the megavenues. And surprisingly few bookstores for a city that size. I think it’s possible there are more independent bookstores in New Orleans than in Houston, a much larger and wealthier city.
I’m not saying that’s the case. I’m only saying the metric “housing cost as percent of wages” isn’t enough to judge if people are doing worse or better
To take just one example: a 65inch tv costs just $700 compared to $4k just a few years ago
People are moving out of opportunity zones (and you know…losing opportunity) or moving in with roommates to keep the average percentage low.
Feels like such a basic factor to miss for what is supposedly an economists blog. That metric means nothing.
That's a misleading metric for two reasons. First, "people" includes all the people who bought a house decades ago before the prices went up, and correspondingly paid the old prices instead of the current prices. And second, it assumes that if housing becomes more expensive what people all do is pay more for housing rather than being unable to afford it and then having to take a longer commute to access housing they can afford, live with their parents, become homeless, etc., which negatively impact the amount or type of housing they get instead of the amount they pay for it.
Meanwhile between 1984 and today median income increased by ~290% while median new home prices increased by ~425%:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N
And that's with the gap having reduced a bit in the last couple of years, since home prices have declined slightly since the peak in 2022 while median income continued its usual trend.
Both inflation and wages have not gone up uniformly since they started being tracked. We all know the Trump/Biden covid inflation was bad, but by the end of Biden's term wages had mostly caught back up. The second Trump administration's policies reversed that trend.
Housing in particular cratered in some areas during the GFC, but then went wild especially around the covid.
> Meanwhile between 1984 and today median income increased by ~290% while median new home prices increased by ~425%
The average FHA mortgage rate in 1984 was 13.2%. Today’s it’s 6.8%. The more expensive house with a cheaper mortgage costs $482 per month less and $173,000 less over the lifetime of the loan.
That's fine if there is then some other place with equivalent housing prices
> The average FHA mortgage rate in 1984 was 13.2%. Today’s it’s 6.8%. The more expensive house with a cheaper mortgage costs $482 per month less and $173,000 less over the lifetime of the loan.
Mostly because 1984 (the oldest date the graph had for median income) was a period with historically high interest rates:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/mortgage30us
They were more like 8% in the 1970s and basically where they are now in the 1990s.
From https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/rental-housing-unaffordabi...
> The net effect of this longer history is that renters today spend much more of their incomes on rent than they did in previous generations. The median renter household in 1960 spent less than a fifth of their income on rent. By 2022, housing costs consumed 31 percent of the median renter’s income. And in inflation-adjusted terms, the median rent is up 75 percent over these six decades while the median renter income has risen by just under 15 percent.
Even when I was a kid in the 1980s I didn't know a single household that had multiple bathrooms or air conditioning.
Part of the reason why standards have increased is because incomes have increased.
Average household size in 2020s: 2.6
Tennessee suburbs are eyewateringly expensive. Your parents made a living wage at a job that doesn't exist in the US anymore, and definitely isn't located in Tennessee anymore. The mean homebuyer is older than your parents.
You can get a cheap house in the middle of nowhere where all the industry was destroyed for imports, services destroyed for outsourcing and the retail was destroyed for the internet and big box chains, if you are a wealthy person who works remotely or at one of the local health insurance conglomerates.
If you are not a wealthy person who works remotely, you can't live there anymore; it is not cheap for you. In fact, all of your family (who has lived here, near each other, for generations) has to figure out where in the country they will have the best chance to feed themselves (or whether they should leave the country) and move there. Now, they're trying to get by without the support of each other, making them more alienated, isolated and dependent on corporations and the state.
There are natural limits to this sort of evil. People won't starve to death quietly.
By the people your parents voted in to do just that no less.
I also think it’s unfair to look at just food prices. Housing and healthcare have bloomed massively.
We should evaluate research by the research itself, rather than by the author’s subjectivity credibility alone. The is the point I was trying to make by providing alternative research and adding a little bit of nuance to the reply, but perhaps I should’ve been more forthright in addressing my own bias as well.
Why is this the argument when someone challenges your source, but when it comes to someone else's source your argument is:
> This is research from a labor advocacy group, with the explicit aim of the organization to advocate for this sort of thing. This doesn't mean the research is is automatically invalid, but it is bias worth mentioning.
Using CATO as a neutral source though, is sketch no matter what.
Pot, meet kettle
2. Shelter accounts for roughly 34% of the CPI, whereas it makes up only about 16% to 17% of the PCE which underplays the pressures of housing people face. Housing arguably is one of the most basic necessity and people will spend on it. For majority of the people in the country housing as a % of income is the biggest expense, so weighing it at 16% sounds almost ridiculous.
3. PCE also famously isn’t based on household surveys like CPI which means it doesn’t accurately represent the actual inflation either.
4. PCE also doesn’t accurately represent lifestyle downgrades even though it tracks them. PCE will capture if you swap chicken for beef (like people are doing right now) but the conclusion you’ll come to is that people have the same amount of spending power as before.
So to point out how inanely out of touch economists are.
The problem with that is the worker economic base unit is a family not one person. Now compare 1960-70s where one person in the household works 40 hours a week. Compare with a modern family where both parents are working a combined 70-80 hours a week.
So yeah workers are working slightly less hours and families as a unit substantially more.
Not what real means!
But these transformations are not complete, and thus comparing "what people are getting for their money" now vs. then is challenging, complex and subject to a lot of debate and disagreement.
re: regular people and their money, I will say, something about the bigger picture just feels off. I look at the graphs you linked to, and do not see it reflected in the people around me. I don't mean to be dismissive of the data, more that I feel like I am missing something, or it is, if that makes sense?
Furthermore, wealth applies more pressure against certain costs like housing[1] than against others like food or durable goods. Cheap toasters only go so far in making people feel like they aren’t falling behind.
[1] https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/home-prices-surge-five-tim...
The reluctance to give up resources also an understandable aspect of human nature, but power concentration in the hands of the few is always problematic. I'm very much a capitalist but the last few decades have persuaded me that wealth taxes are a necessary and moral correction to capitalism's unfortunate spiraling acceleration of inequality.
For instance: marketplace competition requires some regulation, but recognizing that regulation is a necessary evil with many opportunities for abuse (e.g. regulatory capture) helps inoculate against socialism's worst excesses.
Hooray for just-in-time scheduling where workers have to be available full time but can’t work full time. It’s an innovation that has been great for capital and terrible for labor.
The reality is that requiring benefits imposes a cost, and employers manage that cost by limiting who qualifies. So yes, descriptively this unintentionally hurt many workers - and disproportionately impacted disadvantaged people who didn't make the full-time cliff.
Ignoring this is actually shaking your fist at the sky.
Compare that to how much wealth appreciated, like a price of gold or real estate.
Median real wages increased by the narrowest possible meaning of this word.
Trickle down economy is literally a trickle.
> Of course they do.
That level of certainty is not justified.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL
People are earning about 12% more and working about 5% less since 1980, but everything costs roughly 3x what it did in 1980 relative to wages, and that's where most people are pinched.
There's twice as many scripted shows today and twice as many movies released despite the average person spending half the time they did 30 years ago watching TV and movies. For less than the price of a 1990s cable tv subscription we can access almost any movie, instantly streamed to our HDR TVs at home, on demand. The digital VFX we expect of a low tier direct to streaming show are better than the some of the best 90s movies (practical effects excluded).
There are hundreds of thousands of people across the world using the 4k camera in their pocket they bought for a few hundred dollars to make hyper specific media and distributing it free on YouTube. They are editing it in cheap or free video editors on their computer or built in to their phone.
It's easy to shit on modern media. With democratization comes slop. There's garbage now just like there was before. But we are absolutely benefitting off the efficency gains of the last few decades.
Outsourcing seems extremely short-sighted in this environment. You're devaluing your brand, and giving expertise and training to another place that can make their own products.
I also wonder how much can be attributed to weakened intellectual property protection. Comments in this thread say they don't pay for anything because they can watch it all for free.
There was nothing the business leaders could have done to prevent the effect of basically an unlimited supply of video entertainment being added to the market.
Before video this happened to text. Look at for example how NYT has shored itself up vs the many failed news outlets. Premium brand.
Most businesses in (professional) journalism failed and many jobs were lost.
Most business in (professional) video media production failed and many jobs were (or will continue to be) lost.
Ridiculous simplification.
Well, remind me not to hire you for an executive media position.
Hollywood got devalued because it is spending more money than before to get worse results than before.
If by "audience" you mean "people," sure, but I don't think that's particularly meaninful. I don't think I'm alone in thinking that podcasts and TV shows aren't even kind of comparable or able to replace one another.
Like the time I have for high quality stuff and low stuff are different and therefore different audiences. For Low quality stuff podcasts are fighting against tiktok
...because nothing in it supported the thesis?
Print and audio/video have been showing clear declines since the 90s, thanks to the death of print, CDs and cable. Maybe AI is part of this, maybe not, but if it is, we're talking about a slight change in slope. These industries were walking dead before CNNs were a thing.
The one industry where you'd expect to see the clearest impact (coding) is basically flat.
It's the same thing in business. One has to relentlessly decrease the cost of doing business, because your competitors are doing it as well. You run and run and stay in the same place.
I haven't read the cited article, but the professor would need to show that industry profit margins are increasing to make his point. I haven't seen any evidence that margins increased in general.
tv and movies killed radio and opera. and now tiktok is killing tv and movies. it's not complicated.
Sure, we can blame AI for a lot of crimes, but let’s start with the people who offshore everything first. Then when those offshore people get fired because of AI, you don’t feel so bad because it’s not like you’re firing anyone or killing any companies in the same country, right?
At the end of the day, what is the functional difference between offshoring and AI? People in this country still get fired and can’t find work, because the work is no longer done in this country. And then later, much of this work is no longer done by humans in any country.
Profits über alles.
Economic hubs work when there is more efficiency to be found in industrially-codependent resources being located close to each other, than there is in cheaper labor costs outside the hub. Hollywood's heyday was when there was enormous value to putting actors, agents, producers, cameras, sets, editors, VFX, writers all within close driving distance of each other, so that you could organize new movies and shows at the drop of a hat. In a day and age when teenagers are able to use cellphone cameras and pocketmoney to produce stories that are compelling enough to command attention and advertising dollars, the value of that geographic proximity has declined tremendously.
AI didn't build the coffin, but it's been putting nails in it.
Also, at the time (and still somewhat today), Netflix was the only one to really think globally about a content strategy.
Before I’d always feel distracted by things weighing on me that I needed to get done. Now a huge load of those things are asked of grok bot quickly, then I close the laptop and go spend time where I should be.
It feels like it’s lifting a huge burden from my daily life.
Software is a very clear example on this front. Valheim [1] is a game that was made mostly by one guy, at first at least. Not that long ago, this would have been a multi million dollar game produced by a wide array of people. It's just that tools, markets, and more have made it possible for even single developers to have an absurd degree of efficiency. And LLMs are probably going to bump this up exponentially.
This is why a metaphor I'm currently drawn to is one of people living in a very agrarian society just prior to the Industrial Revolution. What would they have envisioned being created? Super farms of course. And those super farms were indeed created, but the overall impact was such that those super farms became a practically inconsequential part of the overall economy. The future we're moving into isn't going to be the same but more efficient for those on top. That efficiency is going to revolutionize the economy in ways that are probably impossible to see from a distant, much how somebody living in an agrarian society couldn't have even begun to imagine the 'real' impact of the Industrial Revolution.
[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/892970/Valheim/
We’re now entering a new era where projects like Halo Reclaimer[1] are more creative and more popular than some of the slop put out by the AAA world with massive marketing budgets. There’s no slop, no micro transactions, just Halo Forge turbocharged by virtually anyone who loves Halo and has a Claude subscription.
[1] https://fangamesdb.com/games/project-reclaimer-halo-3.html
The main difference I see is they used Claude to write patch notes. ReSkate is pretty strict about only using AI for code, all assets and official comms are human made. I guess it's because a lot of their players are real life skaters and that community hates anything that looks fake.
The problem is, in a world running on next-quarter financials and bonuses, long-run disadvantages don't matter as long as the persons in charge of decisions can fuck off with golden parachutes before the house of cards crashes down.
> Competition increases, margins decrease, baseline minimal standard of quality for success increases.
Or everyone tacitly agrees on a new low standard of product, maybe adds in regulatory capture to prevent competition from rising, and even if you want, you won't be able to find an alternative. Enshittification galore.
Or are you an actual graphics designer or the like, who lost their job to AI?
Caviar progressist.
It has nothing to do with 'evil corporations chasing efficiency.' And you rightly point out, efficiency/productivity is literally the only thing that raises living standards.
The truth is, rising living standards have increased leisure time globally, and increased leisure time leads to increased demand for entertainment fit to your culture.
China now has 2X as many movie theaters as the US does. India produces 2,500 films per year today vs. 500 in Hollywood. Ditto for Europe (2500 films produced last year). South Korea went from nothing to a global entertainment player in 5 years. Their industries are still smaller than Hollywood but growing at faster rates.
Just like what happened to Detroit in the 1970s when Auto manufacturers started having to compete with other countries who built domestic car industries, the same exact thing happened to Los Angeles.
In both 1970s Detroit and 2010s LA, companies had focused on monetizing old cash cows (the superhero film was the chevy land yacht) while the market evolved under their feet, and unions had inflated wages/costs to the point of being wildly uncompetitive, so the industry supply chain went global. LA also refused to build homes, so talent couldn't afford to stay even at $1000/day union rates just for holding a light (that's an actual union rate for a gaffer in LA).
We're still just at the beginning of this in entertainment.
Technology has enabled the production and distribution of high end video content to drop dramatically, while at the same time demand for entertainment shifted from being heavily western to being much more diverse.
Overseas has so much film infrastructure now that Hollywood flies out the entire cast and essential crew (DP, etc.) to work on American productions overseas. They hire cheaper local crews (who are non-union), rent cheaper facilities, and even collect foreign tax subsidies.
It's far cheaper to produce everything in the UK, Eastern Europe, or Asia than it is to film in LA. Or even heavily tax-subsidized states like Georgia.
America can't compete on film production cost anymore. So it's halfway through the process of leaving, except for shots that need to film in iconic cities like New York for certain key scenes. But even then, you might see only part of the production happen in the US.
This started during the pandemic content streaming wars. There was a huge demand for content, American studios were shut down, and Amazon and Netflix dabbled with trying to shoot overseas. They found out the foreign infrastructure was just fine and that they just needed to teach the local crews a few things to be able to lift and shift the entire production pipeline. And it was so much cheaper that the choice to move everything was obvious.
Hollywood didn't lose its relevance overnight. It's been a slow moving multi-decade process as the film -> digital -> portable transition made production cheaper, the internet made talent cultivation easier, studios and audiences expanded internationally, unions kept ratcheting up rates, LA refused to build homes while population ballooned and the government kept interest rates at 0 to re-inflate the housing market, unions kept raising rates to keep up with COL in LA, etc. etc.
Netflix is a global company marketing content for global audiences (the majority of their revenue is non-US) on a level that was unheard of during the heyday of Hollywood. There's a few billion people now who have TVs and enough leisure time to stream film/tv content. This is just within the last 15 years.
Most of the markets growing the fastest aren't going to relate to blonde movie stars prancing around LA in the same way US or western European audiences (the bulk of film revenue in the early 2000s) used to.
Disagree. Good content is good content. International audiences show up for good American films, and Americans (increasingly) show up for good international films.
What are into the blonde movie stars is TikTok.
If you go to a bookstore and ask someone not particularly familiar with the industry to go find a comic book; you are very likely to have them hand a manga or manhwa tankobon[0] back to you. Trade paperbacks[1] are sold in bookstores, but the western comics section will be a small fraction of the manga & manhwa section.
The root cause of this is that in the 80s, comic book companies - say it with me, folks! - underwent massive amounts of consolidation to chase efficiencies at the expense of their ability to innovate and their ability to withstand systemic shocks. The particularized version of this is that the comic book companies ceded their cultural ubiquity to milk comics fans dry.
The efficiency being chased was "direct sales" - i.e. selling comic books to dedicated comic book stores, rather than in mass-market areas like grocery stores. A key thing to note is that the mass-market sellers retain the right to return unsold inventory and get a refund[3], but comic book stores bought on "all sales final" terms. What this ultimately meant was that comic book publishers didn't have to worry about the quality of the books anymore.
There was a long-standing cultural stigma in the US that comic books are for children. This was itself downstream of a push to censor comics that was partially successful and resulted in the Comics Code stunting the growth of the medium[4] in the US. Eventually, thanks to - among other things, Marvel wanting to publish an anti-drug PSA in a Spiderman book - the Comics Code Authority lost their power and we were able to publish comic books for adults in the US again.
Anyway, Alan Moore wrote a really gritty Batman book and kicked off a rush to capitalize on a growing adult comics wave. This, along with a bunch of people realizing that old #1s of comics published during Baby Boomers' childhoods[5] were super rare kicked off a huge speculator wave. The comics publishers - who at this point were just DC and Marvel - saw the dollar signs and started flooding the market with slop to meet the demands of speculators who were buying #1s just because they were a #1.
This continued until it could not. In an act of supreme hubris, Marvel decided to buy a comics distributor in pursuit of extreme vertical integration and wound up completely destroying their ability to correctly print a book. Then they went bankrupt, got bought out by a corporate raider, and sold their movie rights to anyone who had a buck. DC wound up in the hands of WB (lol), Marvel became a Disney property.
Yes, the 2010s comic book movie wave was directly caused by the 1990s comic book industry's death. And, for that matter, the exact same extreme consolidation that killed comics is coming for Hollywood. Disney bought Fox, Larry Ellison bought Paramount and WB and merged them into Skydance. The entirety of America's cultural industries are looking more and more like DC and Marvel fighting over the ashes of a culturally dead country.
[0] Japanese for trade paperback[1][2].
[1] English for tankobon[0].
[2] Okay, this term actually has two meanings:
1. A paperback that is not printed to mass-market standard. Publishers don't really do mass-market paperbacks anymore, even manga that is printed to mass-market sizes isn't priced like the mass-market books they are in Japan.
2. Anthologies of previously-published comic books - floppies in the western case, massive pulp-fiction magazine bricks in the Japanese case. Sometimes they're not even in paperback!
[3] Which, funnily enough doesn't even usually require returning the whole book, just the covers.
[4] The shit the Comics Code did to US comics makes the censorship changes in the 4Kids dubbed version of One Piece look liberating in comparison.
[5] https://www.xkcd.com/988&...
Rollercoaster Tycoon was also developed by one person. Developers could also be absurdly efficient in the past, see valve and half-life 1 as an example.
It means little to give examples of cases where developers punched above their weight and arguing it was because of reason X they could achieve it in the first place.
How many people failed, was it because of missing tools?
Like before, people will attribute some of their performance to tools, that in reality didn't matter at all.
When one guy (this guy certainly isn't the first or the best) makes a thing that manages to catch fire a bit, the big players can simply buy it. They can even force a sale, or otherwise refuse to let it be widely distributed or marketed. That's the stick, the carrot is that if it's genuinely resonant with people, they can just throw you life-changing money (i.e. pocket change for them) and generate billions for themselves.
Music barely democratized when production got in reach of the masses; as film production got cheaper, quality indy films became fewer and harder to find, and never in a theater; and as video games become cheaper to produce, Steam can make or break any of them at will, and do the same as any other monopolistic distributor - if they don't, it is by choice. If it is by choice, the person who made that choice will eventually be replaced with somebody who mocks that choice, because they will pay the most.
"Efficiency" doesn't benefit individuals at all without antitrust; it is extracted like any other value. One thing that changed about the music industry is that when it was a thousand companies, you could just bring talent and they would put you where you would earn them money - now that all media is owned by a few companies you are literally expected to bring a hit album to a record company before you get signed, and getting signed then gets you access to the media, wide distribution, and venues. They don't really even pay you, you pay them. Since they control distribution, they don't even really need talent - they can just imitate it. The reason they're giving you a deal is in order to tax your success.
The impact of the Industrial Revolution was that people were forced off of their farms, which were merged into super farms, exactly as they expected. They went from working for themselves for six hours a day, and living in relative comfort, to working for 14 hours a day and living in crime and disease ridden tenements. Their lifespans decreased by a decade. The air, land and food was poisoned. They likely died before they saw any improvements in this, and those improvements eventually came from anarchist and communist unions, and their own education about how they were being used. Then those unions and organizations were crushed, and their names were cursed; even somehow the word referring to the members of the "People's Party" became an epithet to throw at people who thought government had a responsibility to the people. Term limits were introduced so they wouldn't have a president like FDR again, although FDR's reforms ironically served to weaken the unions that saved them, so they could be destroyed completely subsequently in the name of war.
Even today, people say "you can't yell fire in a crowded theater" and don't know that it is something a judge said about a left-winger passing out antiwar pamphlets. They just repeat it, because they heard it. That's what happens when someone controls distribution.
I believe in efficiency. Efficiency under capitalism without effective devices to maintain competitive markets is simply more value for the parasites to extract.
Everybody found it easy to imagine the impact of the Industrial Revolution. That's why they broke frames.
The super farms are as important as ever.
Because farms are hyper competitive, it means that the surplus and efficiency gains are not kept by the farmers.
And it's not just 'super farms' - its' transportation that enabled 'regular labour farms' in low cost areas.
So the benefits go to distributors, packaged food makers, grocers and consumers.
In this case, mostly to consumers.
You can see the charts for the kinds of work people used to do vs, now aka we used to all live on farms, now we do all sorts of things.
This is why we're seeing an pushback on globalization, economic optimization doesn't always balance out with strategic considerations aka food supply security etc. and those are hard to put on the books because they feel like a 'non-market force'.
A 'subsidy' feels like welfare, it's really and adjust of the balance of power.
Except cinema tickets prices got raised, if we were still talking about Hollywood and its entertainment industry.
> Valheim [1] is a game that was made mostly by one guy, at first at least. Not that long ago, this would have been a multi million dollar game produced by a wide array of people.
Quoting outliers and exceptions is not supporting your argument. Concurrently, a lot of people figured they are super shrewd and will make AI-generated games and guess what, barely anyone buys them. There are social and taste factors in art. It's not a chart with a line climbing up. A lot of normal folk, myself included, see AI-generated entertainment as low-effort and a plot to get their money while the other guy is snoring and is having 2x RTX 5090's make him money in his sleep.
People don't like that. They don't have to be proficient in IT to see what's going on and to dislike it.
> The future we're moving into isn't going to be the same but more efficient for those on top.
Yes. That is what your parent comments are saying -- that they are not seeing the common folk get too many benefits (if any) when the dust settles, which it still has not. They/we are saying: it's going to get objectively and measurably better only for the richest class.
> That efficiency is going to revolutionize the economy in ways that are probably impossible to see from a distant, much how somebody living in an agrarian society couldn't have even begun to imagine the 'real' impact of the Industrial Revolution.
The only thing at this point that is likely being revolutionized is our cooking skills because we should learn to cook rats and roaches -- because those on top care not about you and me. No, scratch that. They care. But they want us gone.
Almost nobody wants human workers per se, they just don't have a choice. The LLM era shows this acutely and clearly; many businesses rushed to fire people BEFORE they had proof LLMs will get their work done at all. The social and economic aspects of "nobody wants human workers" have been there forever but it was accepted as a necessary evil.
Now, many capital holders have an excuse _and_ a tool to want less -- or zero -- human workers. We are currently living in this boiling pot and your vaguely optimistic comment does not line with the reality I am observing.
Maybe, historically speaking / era-wise, i.e. 50-ish years from now, everything will be alright, a new equilibrium will have been reached and the humanity will be objectively happier generally and per-capita.
That will not comfort a talented VFX artist, a programmer, a sysadmin, a lawyer, and many others, when they have to get their half-paid house confiscated and go live in shanty towns and form a gypsy-like society so they can survive at all.
"Historically..." arguments are boring. What happens _now_? How is society and economy and the rich class handling the turbulent changes in the last 2 years? How will they handle them in the next 5 years?
Everyone who uses those products and services. Prices go down and people can get much more in aggregate. More entertainment, healthcare, etc.
AI making things cheaper and faster makes it worse, not better because it drives competition up and strengthens the bridge trolls at the attention gate aka platforms while taking power from both viewers and creators.
I joined the VFX industry in 2007(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Compass_(film)), where a film like the golden compass required a large number of people to just make the fur look realistic (there were groomers who's job was to literally style hair.)
The huge increase in CPU power, and latterly GPU power meant that a few number of people could do a lot more. (software RnD was also crucial to this)
to hammer that home, the BBC version https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Dark_Materials_(TV_series) had way more furry animals, much more extensive digital sets, and with a combined run time of > 480 minutes vs 110. It was also done much cheaper.
TLDR its not just AI thats doing this. although it will be more and more now. as world models really kick into gear.
No I don't like it, but what am I to do?
> Who is getting the money that was "saved"? Regular people do not have more more money or time. The "efficiency" is for people who are already very rich, to get richer.
Pension funds and investment vehicles chase profit growth. The vast majority of people have a stake in that.
You think profit is anti-human?
I kind of agree with him: probably, a civilization deemed to be called "advanced" would have everything in place to sustain the basic needs of its members: that would be the baseline of everything
If there are too many people, that mean birth control
Basic needs does not includes entertainments either :)
I am quitting my job because I've just realized that everything, without exception, that I've done as a programmer has been done with the goal of making already rich people even richer.
Do you have an idea as to what your new job will be, and if so, and will you be doing to ensure that you won't be making rich people even richer in this new position?
Technology has almost always been adopted in Hollywood.
Media grew to become social media, and skills of social media became relevant and new positions.
International media is much better than it used to be.
I think we could stop all content creation today and everyone would still have enough to last through their grandchildren's lifetimes.
And unlike a lot of things, media doesn't expire. I still regularly find albums, movies, and books from decades ago I enjoy today.
Media of all forms is just worth less now due to oversupply.
I don’t think people will ever really want to only watch old stuff, or lack desire for new stuff. But, in terms of thinking about the volume of media available I think the non-expiring idea is valid. YouTube alone has 500 hours of video uploaded every 1 minute.
If you don't know your history well, the whole setting for the Count of Monte Cristo is confusing af. So you now need to read up on the fall and rise of the monarchy and Napoleon, and his exile etc. Also a lot of words are just foreign to most people.
Where as reading a book written recently it's just way easier to get into it since it's written in the context of our collective memory (if that makes sense).
Media doesn't expire, but with increasing distance to the cultural context it was created in, enjoying any work in all its nuances becomes harder. Take for example Arrested Development - one of the funniest TV shows of this century, but unless you bring sufficient knowledge on the Bush Jr. administration, you'll miss the funniest layers of many jokes and stories.
And it gets all the more interesting to look back at how the Zeitgeist changed over time, as tropes evolve and tastes keep changing.
Movies just don't make economic sense unless they're blockbusters and that's mainly because of the decline in movie theaters for various reasons but also the death of physical media sales. DVD sales in the 1990s were a bit of a Golden Age. Matt Damon talked about this [1].
Up until the 2000s the TV economic model was:
1. Produce a full season of TV, typically ~22 episodes, and air those on network TV. Sell ads;
2. Sell physical media. Unlike movies, this wasn't as big of a factor until serialized TV came about but it was a factor; and
3. Syndication. Basic cable channels and foreign distributors would pay to air TV shows.
Premium cable (eg HBO) was an exception. It still had foreign distribution but cable subscriptions replaced ad revenue.
In all of these cases, actors, writers, etc would get residuals or back end participation. For what became TV shows, there was a whole ecosystem of pilots. Scripts would be bought. Some would get greenlit for pilots. Some of those would get a half or full season order.
A TV season meant basically a full year of work for those involved. All the pilot activity meant more work. Residuals allowed actors and writers to survive between jobs. There are still people getting significant residuals from Friends from over 30 years ago.
All of that died with streaming. Netflix streaming first began as a means of monetizing old seasons of TV and older movies. It was additional revenue. But as Netflix grew, all the studios saw dollar signs and launched "me too" streaming services, most of which were doomed from the start. Streamers began to cannibalize the syndication and physical media revenue.
Netflix in particular made the decision relatively early that they needed original content to survive. By having a worldwide customer base, they didn't care about physical media and didn't have to pay for syndication. Also because of some unfortunate contracts in the late 2000s, there was little to no residuals for streaming so that too was more saved money.
And the cost-cutting continued. Smaller seasons (8-13 episodes) with smaller writing rooms meant fewer people employed, particularly when it might be 2-3 years between seasons. Suddenly you needed 2 jobs a year to survive where once it was 1. That's a huge difference because you're lucky to get 1 job. And you got no residuals on top of that.
This coincided with more general Hollywood cost-cutting to move productions out of LA to Canada (particularly Toronto but also Vancouver), Atlanta and elsewhere.
Hollywood was an ecosystem. Short term profit-seeking has basically destroyed it but also, so has the high cost of housing. LA used to be somewhere you could live cheaply and this enabled people to chase their dream. Many didn't make it but this was the entry to the funnel. Some did.
Now there are fewer jobs and those are increasingly dominated by second and third generation nepo babies.
Why do you think there's so much recycled IP now? Relaunches of 1990s and 2000s properties. The people involved are out of work. That's why. And it's easier to greenlight something with a track record. Also, notice how many podcasts there are of people who used to be in shows? The Office is particularly egregious for this. I swear half the cast have podcasts now. Why? Because they're out of work too.
I cannot overstate how much expensive housing has strangled Hollywood. Expensive housing is an input into everything you produce and do. Yet people see it as their retirement. What retirement? If your $200k house is now $1M, so is every other house. You still only own one housing unit's worth of wealth. So you need to multiple houses, to be a landlord or Airbnb host. And we wonder why the housing supply sucks.
[1]: https://streamable.com/pedvjq
> I cannot overstate how much expensive housing has strangled Hollywood.
I hardly know anything about the tv/movie industry, but this is a bit of funny juxtaposition when Toronto and Vancouver also have famously unaffordable housing.