> One of the longest-running tropes at The Verge is that a workable antitrust policy for the United States would be simply to forbid companies from buying Time Warner because it has never worked and it may never work again, and that we should just pass one law.
Checks out:
Jan 11, 2001: AOL and Time Warner merged to create AOL Time Warner
June 14, 2018: AT&T acquired Time Warner, renamed WarnerMedia
April 8, 2022: WarnerMedia spun out of AT&T, merged with Discovery
They did, but first they rebranded them as Max, thus destroying the incredible name value of HBO. It was renamed back to HBO as part of the spinout IIRC.
My favorite part of that story is that McKinsey both advised WarnerBros Discovery to make that change, and then advised them to change it back, making millions each time. I wish I made that much money being bad at my job.
You misunderstand their job. They get paid millions to carefully construct a report that supports whatever stupid plan the coke-fueled execs came up with.
They are also functionally both a way for certain well-connected shareholders to exert disproportionate influence and a placating propaganda machine for the shareholders who aren't
Grease on the very corroded wheel of modern capitalism
McKinsey and other management consultants exist to launder decisions made by upper management that management do not want to face consequences for. "It's not my fault, the consultants advised me that was the best option"
You can replace low and maybe mid skill employees with software but it’s the high end ones consultants or CEO that are great at their jobs with good software can be orders of magnitude more efficient.
March, 1989: Time and Warner announce merger, Paramount launches hostile bid for Time.
January, 1990: Time responds by buying Warner Communications for $14 billion.
are you too young to have lived through the multiple recessions that have happened in the past few decades or Bernie Madoff or Enron? Or Theranos and FTX? and that's just off the top, give me ten minutes to dig in and I'll get you at least twenty more
Pedantic. The point was "aren't investors rational" and they clearly hop on short term fads to their and our detriment. Plus saying Enron wasn't a product of a merger is very funny
For example if you bought S&P 500 in Jul 1929, you got your investment back in 1955 (inflation adjusted). If you bought S&P 500 in Apr 2000, you got your investment back in 2014 (inflation adjusted).
99.99% of people are not investing a lump sum on one date and liquidating it all on another date. Extend this graph to today, and it will be much greener.
your own NYT link shows the vast majority of withdrawal dates to have a median of 4.1% followed by the 'slightly above inflation' group then the 'did not keep up with inflation' group with the green returns being the smallest likelihood. there's even this literal quote in the article:
"Market returns are more volatile than most people realize,” Mr. Easterling said, “even over periods as long as 20 years.”
in your second link, a commenter rightfully calls out that the log scale makes the data reductive
I think whatever it is that you need to fall asleep at night is your own habit - it doesn't need to be the rest of ours
With passive investment everyone is buying crap all the time because they have no ability to discern what is or isn’t crap and the base assumption is 95% of stocks are losers but the other 5% win big
Really thinking about what happens with these mergers and splits. In the end it is just moving numbers from one pile to an other. Nothing is really created or destroyed...
Well there is massive waste of time on doing all the stuff need for it to happen. But I think they would have come up with something as unproductive as that anyway so overall it is not like that time would have been spend for anything actually productive.
Made up "value" moving from one place to an other. Just so that some people have something to do. And most likely they would not have much productive things to do in any case.
If they destroy things that were servicing public good like jobs, the market they are selling into, etc, it becomes the governments job to care. If you are advocating for zero oversight of corporations by government I don’t think you’ve seen the consequences of the last 40 years of the US. Monopolies only serve the owning class at the expense of the people.
I was at HBO during the AOL merger, and for a time my work email became gcanyon0264@aol.com, because AOL corporate email shared namespace with its customers, and my personal AOL account was… gcanyon@aol.com
> because AOL corporate email shared namespace with its customers
I wonder where this ranks in the top 5 stupidest things I've ever heard. It's bad enough merging customer databases when two companies merge.
No other major ISP has ever done this that I know of. Likely because it's completely unnecessary. Who made this decision (and why weren't they fired immediately)?
Nobody. Going back to 1989 every AOL account had a screen name that was used as your login and your identity. Being an employee was just a flag on your account in the database.
In 1993 AOL launched its internet gateway that accepted something@aol.com and put it in your AOL Mail box. You could tell that someone was an AOL employee because a banner (I think it was) appeared at the top of the message telling you.
Some of the network engineering folks had real aol.net addresses, but I don't know how that was handled internally. I also think the Netscape folks eventually made enough of a stink to keep their previous email address too.
Ah, so this is why our email addresses are @gmail.com and not @google.com.
I was always wondering about that; it seemed to me that it would have been free advertising to Google if their users had to write and say @google.com all the time.
By that logic we should encourage giant companies to buy Warner Brothers. Each time it fails, it helps topple leviathans, which decreases market concentration.
This time at least it succeeds immensely, at one thing. At helping America cash out one of it's greatest soft empires of all time: Hollywood.
All that culture that America has built for ourselves and exported to the world is now owned in massive part by sovereign wealth at Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Dubai. Perhaps our greatest export (along with, as every feel knows, microcode and pizza delivery), now massively foreign owned, given up.
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/hollywood-hungry-gu...
And boatload of debt has been raised, to grease the handoff, to payoff some of the richest people for the acquisition, thanks to the overwhelming investment of these brutal human-rights-violating unfree countries, a massive 40,000 lb albatross of debt to wear around Hollywood's neck. All to do what America lately has traded its past couple bits of good and values for: helping a couple extremely rich dudes cash out, get filthy rich.
This is more consolidation of US media under extremely pro-Israel ownership. I don't think this will work out as well as they hope (look at CBS -- Bari Weiss has driven it into the ground) but it's scary how much US media a foreign adversary now has direct editorial control over, including both "news" and "entertainment", including TikTok.
Is it possible the next administration sues to break them up? Couldn't they also just launch endless investigations of the owners until they spun it off into its own thing
Hypothetically California could have done something to prevent the merger. Then they [Paramount] leave California, as threatened, and then complete the merger.
The Federal government is the entity which needs to be the enforcer of antitrust. Otherwise major companies like these WILL pick and and leave the state blocking them. It's a 111 billion deal - this is worth moving states for the parties involved.
Okay. They should have called the bluff. It'd be better if the federal government did this, but that's not the world we live in right now.
Here's the issue: nothing stops them from leaving the state anyway after the deal is made. The concessions lack any weight. California folded potentially for nothing.
There is already a deep recession in the creative industry in LA, film jobs are down by a third since 2022. They’re not negotiating from a position of strength
I'm aware. There's a lot of FUD around this industry and a large corporation leaving wouldn't help.
At the same time, this promise to "support labor" falls flat when they have been actively combatting with it for recent years. Their words ring hollow.
And if we're being realistic: this is mostly Newsom trying to cover his tracks and look "strong" for 2028.
The next administration absolutely could, but that would require them to care more about about the well-being of the country than they do about themselves and the bribes and favors they could rake in if they don't.
That's seems to be the fatal flaw in our system. Congress, the FTC, and the president need to willing to put the interests of the nation above the interests of corporations. Maybe I'll live to see that happen, but a lot of people have died waiting for it (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e5/The_Boss...) and it gets less likely all the time.
$111 billion sheds a lot of gratuity as it moves from one place to another.
The "big deal" is what it does for the shareholders in black & white.
A number of those very major shareholding individuals who have the most to gain have been pushing for a deal forever, and naturally all the retail investors will be entitled to go along for the ride.
But probably a greater number of insiders who are pushing for the deal are not that major of a shareholder or even shareholders at all. Corporate employees who are higher-ups and in accessory corporations like banks and consultants within range, can often be subject to bonuses and commissions anyway which can motivate them en masse much more so than whether they had any nominal amount in their retail portfolio or not. There might even be a legislator or two who stands to gain somewhere along the line, sooner or later.
The number of people who are going to get rich without having to have been opportune shareholders can really make the difference.
The big shareholders were already rich or were going to get richer anyway.
That's probably what the extra $11 billion is for, for everybody else close to the deal, and that's even more incentive for them to expedite.
You can only imagine that one guy negotiated an extra 10% more than a $100 billion deal was worth, especially since the buyers could easily afford it. But then gets 10% of that so he gets a billion, bringing the final total to $111 billion so no other numbers need to be adjusted ;)
Have you been paying attention to american politics the last 15 years or so? It's become astoundingly clear that Mossad has blackmail material on virtually every major politician and uses it to get its way - including billions of dollars in funding and drawing the US into conflicts that do not benefit us and instead result in the deaths of Americans (and as of Trump's statement yesterday, the threat of bombings on American soil.)
>but it's scary how much US media a foreign adversary now has direct editorial control over
It's not antisemitic to criticize Israel, but this language is verging on antisemitic because Israel very much does not have "direct editorial control" over Skydance. David Ellison is the one with "direct editorial control" and you can certainly say he's "extremely pro-Israel" but he himself is not "a foreign adversary" by any definition of those words. So either you're being hyperbolic with the meaning of "direct editorial control" or you're insinuating that David Ellison will defer to Israel on everything because he's Jewish which is a common antisemitic trope[1]. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the former, but the latter is enough of a possibility that I would suggest rephrasing this comment to avoid giving supporters of Israel a legitimate line of complaint against your underlying point.
Yes, military service is compulsory in Israel so using "ex-IDF soldier" in this context does stick out because it isn't actually adding any new details. It gives the impression that the reason that language was chosen was that it implies something more nefarious than "Israeli" without the requirement of actually detailing what makes it nefarious.
When I discovered that Dr. Ruth Westheimer had been a particularly fearsome and accurate ace sniper [who 'never killed anybody'] for the IDF, I came to the conclusion that that was completely in-character for what she did stateside, on the airwaves and in other popular media in these United States. I mean, same thing for Netta Barzilai. Bravissimo.
If you want to make an accusation, make an accusation. Do you think a specific person at the head of this company is "a foreign advisory"? Because the vagueness of an accusation can come across like a dog whistle. If you believe ethics and facts are on your side, what's the point of being vague?
>David Ellison appoints Israeli to lead merged Paramount-Warner studios
The same thing happened with the Tik Tok purchase, the entire point of handing control of the Tik Tok algorithm to Larry Ellison was so that they could clamp down on the discussion about the genocide in Gaza. You can see the results of it in the reports that the world Jewish congress put out directly:
>TikTok is the exception, removing 64% of content overall (and 71% of
content formally reported to it), compared to 12–15% on every other major platform.
It seems like you fully ignored my point, so I'll repeat myself:
>you can certainly say he's "extremely pro-Israel" but he himself is not "a foreign adversary" by any definition of those words.
All you're showing is that his family is pro-Israel, but that does not mean they are controlled by Israel. These conversations about Israel always seem to remove the agency on the American end which is where a lot of the historical antisemitic tropes live. Whether it's intentional or not, it's phrased in a way that evokes the trope of a shadowy cabal of Jews pulling the strings behind the scenes, and other countries rarely get talked about in this same way. For example, have you ever heard anyone suggest Google and Microsoft are controlled by India because their CEOs were born in India?
"controlled by Israel" is kind of impossible to prove and that was never anyone's argument. But it's very obvious that these people are placing ethnic affinity and the interests of a foreign nation above the United States. They are going out of their way to buy media to shape the discourse of this country in favor of a foreign nation and a specific ethnic group.
>other countries rarely get talked about in this same way
They actually do, but the Israeli lobby has grown so powerful that it is now dominating most of the political action in the USA in a way that has become impossible to ignore.
There are actually plenty of conversations to be had about Indian ethnic affinity and lobbying. USINPAC is the Indian lobbying organization which is actually modeled after AIPAC (the notorious Israeli lobbying group which has political control over most of the US congress).
There is a looming argument which hasn't yet entered the public mainstream discourse about Indian foreign influence and Indian ethnic nepotism in the United States, but that is an entirely separate conversation.
Most Indian CEOs are the same caste (Brahmin) and there is a good argument that many of them have been nominated by the boards of their companies and institutional investors with large stakes so that they can navigate India's notorious bureaucracy and deepen ties to the country, which supplies much of the cheap labor for the tech industry. Many of them have direct ties to the Bharatiya Janata Party in India and can use the access to people like Modi to access more Indian labor as well as build more in India. Modi talks openly about exporting human capital and using its diaspora to wield influence in the United States. One can argue that they are taking a cue from Israel here.
>Narendra Modi urges the Indian diaspora to become an extension of foreign policy
>"controlled by Israel"... was never anyone's argument.
Yes it was. My comment was directly in response to someone saying "it's scary how much US media a foreign adversary now has direct editorial control over". I know that was not your argument, but it was someone's argument and I responded to refute it. I don't know what point you thought was being discussed, but it's now clear you misread the conversation.
They put Bari Weiss in charge of CBS news. Her only credential is being rabidly zionist. This trait got her blog purchased for 100s of millions of dollars (!!) and then put her in charge of CBS news.
If you want to split hairs between "controlled by Israel" and "controlled by people who's sole interest is supporting Israel", go ahead.
Before the Tik Tok purchase went through, the prime minister of Israel gave a talk in which he said:
>But we have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefields with which we engage, and the most important ones are on social media. And the most important purchase that's going on right now is? Tik Tok. Number One.
Later, control of the Tik Tok algorithm was given to Larry Ellison and they immediately used it to clamp down on discussion of the genocide in Gaza (as well as any other types of discussion they deem "antisemitism").
Now Larry Ellison's son has been given control of all these other media companies and has appointed an Israeli to run things.
This is DIRECT evidence of Larry and David Ellison working directly with the highest levels of a foreign government to manipulate public opinion on behalf of that foreign government.
Obviously Larry Ellison had met with Netanyahu, or with someone in the Israeli government, and discussed the details of this deal. If the government of Israel can ask a citizen in a different country to do something on their behalf, that is a form of control.
Let’s check where much of the ownership and money come from. From the LA Times:
> The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday granted Paramount Skydance’s request to allow Middle Eastern royal families to hold a substantial stake in a merged Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery.
> Foreign investors, including the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi, are slated to indirectly own nearly 50% of the equity in David Ellison’s proposed mega-studio. That will give them a hefty stake in CBS, CNN, Comedy Central, HBO and two historic Hollywood film studios.
So foreign “adversaries” literally own enormous stakes in these companies and have been cleared by the FCC. Yet only possible pro-Israel influence by Ellison gets called out?
When they take dollars for oil, they would rather swap paper currency with real assets (ownership of firms). If US doesn't want that, they should make moves to remove USD as a reserve currency or preferred currency for global trade.
What about the pesky fact that there is a huge difference between the operational owner of a company and it's investors. Oh and those gulf state investors are aligned with the Zionists.
Stating obvious falsehoods as if they were true doesn't help your Zionist cause anymore. It's not only the Taliban and everyone knows it, so don't bother gaslighting. Just look at half of Eurpope. Or the Ed Sheeran debacle.
The European countries you're pointing towards are similar to the US in that most of their populace doesn't support the Israeli government but their politicians effectively do. Even the most vocally anti-Israel country, Ireland, is in truth the biggest US regime ally in the EU. This renders their Israel talk completely meaningless.
The part of Europe you're talking about is also more like a fifth than half.
Please. Ellison controls it, the gulf states are just investors. They also invested in Twitter, but people call out Elon, and no one has a problem with that.
Most of the gulf states are pretty much controlled by Zionists at this point anyway, or at least heavily aligned with them.
I think it's great that the America supports Israel, whose values and interests basically align with the West, over the rest of the Middle East, Russia and China with their values, which being as diplomatic as possible, do not.
Just take a look at all the countries that are the most against Israel. They are a mixture of failed states, third world and what they all share in common is a distressing lack of regard for human rights. Both of other nationalities and their own. Europe is unfortunately going in that direction, and I believe it's no coincience that they are simultaneously becoming worse countries and more anti Israel. It's not causation but it is correlation.
The US couped, invaded, and destroyed tens of countries since WW2 until now. Israel is still massacring civilians in Gaza during a ceasefire and continuing their pogrom in the West Bank, killing people and stealing more lands. This is your example of human rights?
Yes. Your argument is fallacious because it's classic whataboutism. Just because the US have done some morally questionable things doesn't mean they are not committed to humanism in general and by comparison to all the other countries I've mentioned, they are so much better. And their trajectory over time is one of continued improvement.
As for your charges against Israel, they are factually incorrect. Israel is not still massacring civilians in Gaza, neither did they at any point engage in anything like a systemic, strategic program of killing civilians in Gaza. If you want to know what the casualty figures would look like if that was indeed the case, look at Iran which did do just that with the protests last year where they succeeded in murdering in one week roughly the amount of people Israel killed in Gaza in an entire year of active fighting. The worst you can accuse them of is of not doing enough to minimize civilian casualties. I will argue they did plenty but that's for another time. As for "progroms" in the West Bank, I would love to see what you're talking about. For your reference this is a wikipedia page on progroms[1] For some context, the number of extremist violent settlers that the whole world is fixated on numbers according to estimates in the dozens to hundreds.
Finally, I will leave it up to your imagination what it would look like if the roles were reversed, if the Arabs were dominant in Israel and the Jews were a minority, to help things along, here's examples from the wider Arab world[2]
those charges are very factually correct. eg. israel has killed >1000 civilian gazans since signing the ceasefire. thats about the same as how iran responded to a similar uprising as oct 7th. by comparison israel has killed at the very lowest, 70k civilians, probably more like 300k -500k if anyone is ever allowed to investigate the rubble from israel's subsequent destruction of civilian homes and infrastructure.
the systematic killing is pretty clear - tell people to evacuate to an israeli defined "safe zone" and then drop bombs on it. other defined policies had the idf mowing down escaped israeli-citizen hostages waving white flags and approaching the gaza border. assigning snipers to get headshots on children.
its a system informed by the fact that going too hard would result in instant sanctions, but the intent is made plenty clear, and the results are easily visible by counting the number of living gazans still in northern gaza.
palestine was under arab and turkish rules for centuries, and jews did much better than arabs are under israeli occupation
if the west was more values-similar with israel, there would be constant swastikas drawn on everything jewish owned or in jewish view, with a couple real true blue nazis going around beating up, killing, and stealing jewish property, and the government would keep pardoning them and insisting its not a problem because its only a couple hundred thousand nazis in a country witb many millions.
i sure saw in that video where cnn gets attacked by the idf clearing the way for settlers that the west bank is covered in stars of david, drawn the same way swatstikas are to terrorize people
Wow. You managed to cram so much propaganda into one post it's pretty impressive.
Civilians like maybe Ali Al-Amoudi? Or maybe Muhammad Yazouri? Nayal Abu Obeid? Izz al-Din al-Beik? Izz al-Din al-Haddad? Mohammed Odeh?
Is there any combatant Hamas doesn't call a civilian?
Since Hamas hasn't disarmed and Gaza wasn't demilitarized there is effectively no ceasefire. There is a war and Israel is attacking military targets as it is allowed to do under international law. Minimizing civilian casualties as it is required to do.
If Hamas, the democratically elected government of Gaza, has a problem with that then it can surrender.
Israel has only attacked the safe zone when there were military targets present, such as the attack on Mohammed Deif. That's on Hamas. Once you get the civilian/combatant breakdown from Hamas then we can check how many civilians per capita were attacked in humanitarian zones (very few) vs. zones that were evacuated (the majority).
EDIT: Re: The Ottomans. Massacred Jews in Safed in 1517. Ethnically cleansed Jaffa of Jews in 1917. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. No comparison whatsoever to Israeli Arabs who are equal citizens in Israel. As to the Palestinians in the occupied territories, they're not citizens. Also AFAIK the Jews didn't mount a campaign of suicide bombings against the Arabs or fire rockets into Arab cities.
Arab jews did not want to move to Israel, they were fine living among muslims. Mossad faked terrorist bombings in Baghdad and killed bunch of jews to create an illusion of jew hatred in Iraq.
Next you’re going to say that all the antisemitic commenters on HN are also Mossad in an attempt to convince Jews to move to Israel.
Are you Mossad?
I note that you wrote: “typical jewish propaganda and hasbara” - you forgot to say “Zionist” or “Israeli”. Was that a slip or have your handlers in Israel instructed you to be openly antisemitic now?
israel shares that same lack of care gor human rights. consider the use of rape and possibly bestiality to torture hostages in prisons, the state protection of terrorists, the lack of gay or even interfaith marriage, the genocide in gaza.
israel doesnt at all align with (modern) western values, instead more like the old apartheid south africa, or really, more like nazi germany in terms of supremacism and industrial might put towards surveiling and killing the less-than-human people you allude to as being less-than-human.
the causation of all those failed states is israel. it makes failed states because those are easier to conquer land from, and cant fight against all the abuses of humans.
sure, the US was half supportive of the nazis too, but that wasn't a good thing.
>consider the use of rape and possibly bestiality to torture hostages in prisons, the state protection of terrorists, the lack of gay or even interfaith marriage, the genocide in gaza.
Argument: Unproven claims, there are virtually no jewish terrorists, anyway in your own distorted mind Israel is a terrorist state.
Counterpoint: Oct 7, Bibas family, Hamas, Palestinan Authority/PLO, Islam.
>the lack of gay or even interfaith marriage, the genocide in gaza.
........
...
I mean, lets just take a moment to reflect on this. For more context Israel has a pretty strong gay culture, so your complaint is about a legal technicality. So you are mentioning that in the same breath as the the death of 70,000 Gazans? And you think that's somehow an argument that makes you look good???
I am a pretty outspoken supporter of Israel, but I have never come close to that level of disrespect to the Palestinian people as you have managed.
>the causation of all those failed states is israel. it makes failed states because those are easier to conquer land from, and cant fight against all the abuses of humans.
The causation of all those failed states is Third World values. Like blaming everyone else for their own failures.
You don’t get it, in their twisted worldview, Israel is to blame for anything. Coincides is exactly what’s being taught in every household in the failed states surrounding Israel. No jobs? Israel. Illness and death? Israel. Taliban slaughtering people? Israel.
Instead of understanding that these governments use the Israeli Palestinian conflict as a scapegoat, and Israel as a boogeyman, just to make the populous blind to the true cause for their suffering.
It's simple: I don't want billions of taxpayer dollars going to a country that enforces the Hannibal Directive or the Dahiya doctrine.
If the Israeli government cooperates with the ICC, adopts full secularity and stops undermining their neighbors security, then I'd feel a lot better supporting them. Right now I'm only ashamed. There is no upside to sending Israel foreign aid after Likud manipulated Trump into starting an illegal war.
Dahyia doctrine - this means inflict damage on your enemy in such way that will deter him from ever trying to attack you again. It was named in the 2006 Lebanon war, which Hezbollah started, after which nasrallah admitted that if he knew of the Israeli response, he would not have started the war. I suppose your a 5 star general with a better way of creating deterrence.
Hannibal directive - affects only soldiers, and it means that the army must do whatever’s necessary to prevent a kidnapping. This is after a soldier was kidnapped into Gaza, kept there for 5 years without seeing any natural party to assess his condition (which is illegal but no one cares about that when Israelis are the victims), and eventually was released against 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, one of which was sinwar. Again, I assume you are a 5 star general that can find a better solution.
Israel is a secular state. The only thing controlled by religion is marriage (btw USA gives weapons to turkey, Saudi Arabia, UAE, where is the protest against support of these unsecular countries?)
And finally - how exactly is the Iran war illegal?
If Israel wanted to clean their slate, they can always present their case to the ICC. Little wonder that Likud lashes out and call the ICC "biased" for not sharing their beliefs, but such is the culture gap that the Israeli state has fostered. And such is the standards of cooperation and compliance that the rest of the world has come to expect since the horror of WWII. It's hard to not blame Israel for the terrible optics that their leadership has promoted and incorporated into their state's identity. The whataboutism in your comment proves that you also know it's wrong, but just refuse to hold Israel accountable the way that the House of Saud is (very justifiably) criticized. It's clear that Israel demands an ethical double-standard from the world.
Congress never agreed to it. Israel can fight all they want, but extended US operations are jeopardized without a congressional authorization. The upcoming midterms are going to shake things up, and it's very possible that the War Powers Resolution of 1973 will be enforced to stop funding for in-theater operations outside of CENTCOM basics and foreign aid. The war isn't popular, and US taxpayers can only foot the bill for so long before they abandon Likud's warmongering initiatives. Even Trump doesn't want to escalate, considering how many threats he wussed out of.
Yeah, it's not great that the head of the corporation is so close with Netanyahu, but there are more immediate problems for the US. These corporations aren't ideological though, they'll just do whatever it takes to get what more of what they want. David Ellison and his daddy have both been more than happy to throw huge piles of money at Democrats and support them when they thought it was convenient. When Republicans are out of power they'll support whoever replaces them. When you have no morals whatsoever what difference is there in supporting a Democrat, or a genocide, or a Republican?
They pushed us into an unwinnnable quagmire that is helping to destroy our global leadership position - like Grump himself, their effects are indistinguishable from what an adversary would do.
The U.S. cannot claim to be "pushed" into any war. The US chose to participate in this war and chooses to stay involved every single day since it started.
"The US" is not a singular entity making an explicit deliberate choice, right? Just as it makes sense to say that Grump dragged the US into this war, it also makes sense to say that Israel helped. Of course both along with half of US voters. Think joint responsibility, not severable.
Yeah, but I have not seen anyone really do anything opposed to the war (or all the other shit), so its fair to say that the US made the choice to approve of the war.
US is not a single entity, it consists of a lot of politicians on the AIPAC's payroll or have videos of themselves doing illegal stuff on some tropical island
And the citizens do not have enough spine to bring their politicians to justice. If they weren't causing so much death and destruction around the globe the sidestepping-of-responsibility-shuffle of the american people would be really funny to watch.
What exactly are you imagining could be done? I'm all ears. Seriously, please, offer suggestions!
From my perspective the situation is that my fellow citizens who would be the most predisposed towards extrajudicial violence that might "bring their politicians to justice" are also the most steeped in propaganda and so end up getting their own itches scratched by that very state organized death and destruction.
> And the citizens do not have enough spine to bring their politicians to justice.
This really betrays a lack of understanding of the structure of the government in the US. The Constitution, for better and worse, heavily insulates the government from tempestuous public opinion. The framers were readers of greek history who understood that democracy was a condition that a republic could devolve into. They built the system to give the voters the vibes that they had a say in the workings of their government while ensuring that in reality they had no such thing.
I am not the most powerful empire in the world. It would sure be nice if I were, but unfortunately I am not.
So what exactly do you mean by my own choices? I do take responsibility for my own choices. I've done nothing that majorly supports this war.
What I have done that supports this war: 1. continue to pay taxes and otherwise participate in society. 2. voted for conservative (ie democrat) politicians that might work to oppose the con artist in chief regardless of their general support for Israel (although since we're talking about the Iran War specifically, I don't know if this actually counts)
Meanwhile I have protested, the regime in general not the war specifically. Stand out on a corner, sign, smile and wave. Most people honk in support, but once again what can they actually do? There is of course always more one can do to express opposition. But not working hard enough to oppose something is not the same as choosing to support it.
I assume you understand that you're not actually talking to the United States itself with this comment, so it seems like you're trying to assert some principle of collective guilt? I'd say that's an awful lot like the tripe that's used to try and justify the genocide in Gaza, whereby every Palestinian civilian is purportedly responsible for Hamas's rockets (etc). Or to justify the rockets themselves for that matter, whereby every Israeli is purportedly responsible for their government's atrocities.
Do they have the US interests at heart? Or their own? I think the latter, almost certainly. That makes them adversarial from a game theory perspective at the very least.
I am pretty sure that the ellisons care more about US interests than israeli interests. Whether they are selfish is orthogonal to whether they are a foreign adversary. Most people are selfish.
A lot of citation needed. Requiring that folks shut the hell up about the current political cause célèbre while at work is not the same as requiring that they "love Israel".
> An anonymous Substack, Oracle For Palestine, written by a group of Oracle employees, claims that that “our leadership’s unquestioning public support for Israel” has led to a failure of the company to address the one-sided political positions taken by top management and the discrimination faced by employees who don’t share the political views of management.
> “In response to legitimate concerns, many of us have been referred to internal mental health resources rather than having those concerns addressed appropriately,” said the group in a post last year.
> For employees, it’s clear: if you’re not for America or Israel, don’t work here
It sounds like internal opposition to Israel is punished at Oracle by systemically discounting their detractors as mentally unwell. You must love Israel at Oracle to avoid this discriminatory action.
US politicians are supposed to represent their voters who elected them. A foreign state putting massive resources into a state-supported program to get them to represent the foreign state's interest instead, is obviously a foreign adversary. It doesn't get much more adverserial than that! It's a direct attack on US internal democracy.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
You've just been raised to consider this as "normal". There's nothing normal about it, and if any other new country had started doing this you'd have recognized it for what it is.
Before someone says "all countries do this" - no they don't. Scale matters, impact matters.
Israel and her children have been weaponized by the democratic West (including México and Ukraine) as an arsenal of vengeance against our perceived adversaries, but Israel and her children cannot be contained or controlled by the democratic West forever.
"Now I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds..."
You could also say that Trump and a significant portion of the Republican party were weaponized by the rest of the party and are not so easily contained or controlled now.
They're killing Americans in the West Bank, grabbing US tax payer money while laughing at how easy Americans are to manipulate, aggressively spying on all kinds of US targets incl by placing spy equipment on Secret Service vehicles during visits, spitting on Christians who visit Israel, harassing American lawmakers and diplomats, dragging the US into wars that don't serve its interests or the interests of its other partners, draining US military equipment meant to protect other assets etc. etc.
I am sure no other country could get away with the amount of shit the Israelis pull on a regular basis.
> I am sure no other country could get away with the amount of shit the Israelis pull on a regular basis.
German here. Assuming you're American, that's a rich list LOL.
> aggressively spying on all kinds of US targets incl by placing spy equipment on Secret Service vehicles during visits
The US spies on everyone, including allies as nominally close as Germany. Thanks Snowden for revealing that one. And both the US and Russia are known to use their embassies as SIGINT collection bases.
> dragging the US into wars that don't serve its interests or the interests of its other partners
The US has dragged all of NATO into the mess that Afghanistan ended up being. I might let that one slide because 9/11 was a thing, but a few years later Bush dragged a bunch of other European countries into the mess that Iraq ended up being, and just this year, Trump was pissed that we didn't want to join the fun of bombing Iraq.
> draining US military equipment meant to protect other assets
Trump gave all but zero warning about invading Iran to anyone (well he did toy with the idea, but everyone dismissed it as the usual "deranged madman" brainfarts), leading to everyone (funnily including the US) emptying their entire stockpile of anti-air missiles out of sheer necessity. Millions of dollars just to take a glorified lawnmower on wings.
Israel didn't need to drag the US into bombing Iran. Many parts of the US Republicans have wanted to bomb the Mullahs into submission for decades.
I am not American but given Germany's own role in much of what is going on in Gaza and the West Bank, the weapons shipments to Israel, (no 2 supplier after the US) and the diplomatic cover it gives to Israel, there's a lot Germany still needs to reflect on today.
Hint: The lesson was supposed to be that genocide is bad, period. Not that it's ok as long as it is some of the descendants Germany hurt doing it this time.
Getting us into a useless war that decimates our economy isn't very allied of them. A waste of intelligent people and decades of political connections too, Trump is so easy to manipulate you don't NEED to be secretive.
This is not about the jews.. this is about the billionaires taking over media. If you're going to be angry, please place your anger in the right direction and don't get all antisemetic. Elon buying X, Bezos buying washington post, ellison controlling media... They are slowly controlling the stack.
You're right it's not about Jewish people; particularly in the US, but also in Europe, there are millions of Jewish people who are not Zionist, denounce the Israeli government and are great people.
That's why he said Israel. But good hasbara tactic conflating mention of Israel with "jews", keep it up.
I’m sorry, but I can’t help but see this view as ultra US centric. The Israeli government wanted to strike at Iran and needed a strong ally. It’s not a ploy to set a trap for the US, which is bonkers.
Here, let me rephrase it to be Israel-centric for you:
The Israeli government didn't need America to join. If they wanted to kill the ayatollah, they could do it alone. If they wanted to denuclearize Iran, every single expert affirmed that it wasn't a realistic goal, no matter how many allies they had. The net outcome of this war is extremely negative for the United States so far, and scott-free for Israel. Defense commentators had been predicting this Iran war manipulation for decades, and warned US policymakers to oppose it as far as they could. Israeli lobbyists now propose US enlistment laws, such is their need for wanton escalation under Trump: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260903-a-proposal-seeks-...
So, what was the goal? For decades, Netanyahu has used the threat of violence and war to secure his position as prime minister. He campaigned for Yitzhak Rabin's assassination, denied any incitement, and then took his place when he was killed. He's ostensibly corrupt and stands accused of manufacturing crises to enable his political support. His administration spends hundreds of millions of dollars rehabilitating his internationally reviled image. I wasn't born yesterday, you can't ambiguate Likud's history of escalation, assassination and manipulation.
What an anti semetic remark. You seem to have no issue with Saudi owning a major portion of tech, a country where lgtbq, woman’s, freedom of speech, and minority rights is not really a thing.
Being anti-Zionist and concerned about the single largest US donor to the IDF now controlling a massive chunk of American MSM is not antisemitic. I also didn't say anything about Saudi Arabia, so I don't know why you're trying to put words in my mouth there. For the record I don't think anyone should have a major position in tech, that's a huge problem.
Also, Israel is murdering women, children, lgbtq and attacking our freedom of speech (they also have murdered more journalists than any country in history and will not allow journalists into Gaza), so that's certainly a priority to address, especially since I as a US citizen am made complicit in these actions. The consent for these crimes against humanity was manufactured by the very MSM that Ellison is buying here. It's a move in the wrong direction.
You keep saying he’s donated to the IDF. Do you have any source for that? Now if you mean FIDF, that is an organization which is somewhat equivalent to the USO program. Not really “military”, in the sense that no munitions were bought.
I've said it once. This is the second time you've lied about what I've said in this thread. I don't feel the need to continue this conversation, but here's more background on Ellison (and other billionaires) donations to the IDF:
Has she driven it into the ground? Remember that the goal is not to provide entertainment or news, but to act as a politically-aligned propaganda outlet. Has it really failed to achieve that goal?
A behemoth indeed but the numbers also tell an interesting story. For TV screen share, Youtube has ~13% of total US viewing time vs ~6% for Paramount/Warner. They also go into this merger with staggering debt which does not bode well.
This would be the anti anti trust argument - that it's not studio vs studio, but it's type of screen-time vs other types of screen-time.
Was it Reed Hastings that was painting Netflix's main rival not other streaming platforms, but other types of leisure like video games? This was during the streaming wars IIRC.
Regardless of how you look at it, this is yet another confluence of IP franchises merging together, whatever juice is left in them squeezed out and reprocessed over and over over time. Kind of what Oracle is in software I guess?
Working in an adjacent entertainment IP focus business myself, my eyes are glazing over a bit at this point.
This is the same argument from when Sirius and XM radio merged. It didn't matter that they were monopolizing satellite radio because the real competition was terrestrial radio and internet radio.
Yeah, it's a rhetorical maneuver that's as old as monopoly power when you think about it.
"Actually we're really David and we need to band together against Goliath." Points at imagined external threat
The part that's wild to me is that we know that this merger extends to politics and control over media. The IP's, studios, franchises, all the actual businesses are just part of the estate. It's the Hearst Media Empire story retold again.
> Was it Reed Hastings that was painting Netflix's main rival not other streaming platforms, but other types of leisure like video games?
Yes. He always told us that we don't need to worry about the other streamers nearly as much as we have to worry about them turning off the TV and playing games or (gasp!) going outside. TikTok/Instagram Reels wasn't a thing yet, but if it were, I'm sure they would have been on the list too.
From my perspective YouTube has quietly won the streaming wars. It has a vastly wider variety of content, especially for non-fiction shows. In the cases where there's more direct genre competition, I tend to prefer YouTube overall because, despite its offerings being generally lower budget, they tend to represent a wider variety of "editorial voices". There's a lot of outright slop to wade through, ofc, but there's also a lot of creative risk taking out there to discover.
Meanwhile, yeah, Paramount, Time Warner, Disney, etc. have all become so money-minded and risk-averse that it reminds me of the twilight days of the old Hollywood studio system, where all the major production companies were locked into a heated battle to determine who could be the absolute blandest.
I kind of agree, and it's interesting how Nebula and Spotify (at least their video efforts) have been based on elevating and funding those ultra-budget YouTube creators. Like I watch Lindsay Ellis and Practical Engineering and SkillUp all on non-YouTube platforms now, despite YouTube being the recommendation algorithm that originally brought me there.
It's really the opposite model of the "major" streaming players who fund tentpole releases in the conventional Hollywood way, and then have a long tail of niche content (cooking reality shows and the like) that are clearly on a much tighter budget, but still basically modeled on being a cheaper version of a cable show rather than a much better funded version of a YouTube comedy troupe.
I was just listening to an interview with an up and coming playwright, and he made an interesting point that he really doesn’t like how expensive live theater has become. I guess he has been deliberately targeting super low budget not-even-off-broadway venues because he felt that a big budget stifles creativity. The more money the production stands to lose, the more pressure there is to play it safe.
That kind of describes my relationship with Nebula. There’s a lot of great stuff on there, and lately I have been watching it more than YouTube. But still, YouTube is where I tend to go when I’m looking to find something new that I genuinely haven’t seen before. I think the lower floor for production values is a big part of that.
I would definitely encourage folks to seek out community theatre where you are. Not that I don't enjoy a full on broadway-style blowout every now and then, but it's also been shocking to me how much of the difference between a $40 seat and a $150 seat is pyrotechnics and spectacle that don't really make the experience for me.
The words and the performances, the chemistry and creativity of the actors, that's the real priceless stuff.
> despite its offerings being generally lower budget, they tend to represent a wider variety of "editorial voices".
There's a huge amount of censorship with youtube though. The movies and shows on cable and streaming services can still talk about dead people without being forced to say they are "unalived". CNN can talk about a pandemic without calling it a "panini". Besides censoring specific words and phrases Youtube demonitizes entire genres of content along with anything that is "unfriendly" to advertisers. If that's the future of media in the US we're screwed.
You're misinterpreting what "threat" means. And in fact he used the word "competition."
He was talking about the "incumbent" they are trying to displace. Netflix's challenge was not getting people to switch from watching Hulu to Netflix, but to get them not to sleep in order to watch Netflix.
That's not true. That's the point. It is the same thing as what Reed Hastings is saying. He thinks he is saying some deep insightful thing, and it's ridiculous. It's 200% wrong.
> Regardless of how you look at it, this is yet another confluence of IP franchises merging together, whatever juice is left in them squeezed out and reprocessed over and over over time. Kind of what Oracle is in software I guess?
Cantrill tried to, as diplomatically as possible, warn everyone.
> Was it Reed Hastings that was painting Netflix's main rival not other streaming platforms, but other types of leisure like video games? This was during the streaming wars IIRC.
Yea, and spending time with your friends and family, meeting new people, sleeping...
From [1]:
> “Think about if you didn’t watch Netflix last night: What did you do? There’s such a broad range of things that you did to relax and unwind, hang out, and connect—and we compete with all of that.”
When I read that interview, I became a lot more cautious of using Netflix and other streaming platforms, knowing their design is adversarial to my values (I want to be deliberate about what I watch, not be manipulated into mindless consumption).
youtube has slowly become like 90% of my TV time over the past few years, I think it's the fact that you don't have to commit to watching 40+ minutes of something every time and there's just way too much interesting content on it
and i'm not even someone you'd class as young anymore, so I don't think this is a younger generation thing
I'm in the opposite camp. I find Youtube exhausting, and it keeps getting worse and worse.
Their ads are terrible. And since I watch via a device like Roku, etc, I have to put up with them. I've actively removed them from my devices. Occasionally, I feel like looking up some video. I install it, and often before I even watch the video I uninstall it because the awful UI reminds me of all the other awful stuff in it.
Curation doesn't exist. I have to work hard to find good content. Harder than any video service out there.
And shorts. Oh. Dear. God.
For some very targeted stuff (home repairs, video game walkthroughs), it's great. For the rest, it just sucks.
>Youtube without ads is still worse than pretty much all the major streaming services with ads.
Depends on what you watch, as always. my YT feed is a mix of news, random gaming content, documentaries on a variety of topics, and odd little tech trivia. It covers all the bases at once.
Any other streaming service is simply "okay, maybe there's 1-2 shows on here I want to watch". Then I just pluck it onto my NAS and move about on my day. Why would I pay for a streaming service that struggles to even keep the few shows I like on there running past 1-2 seasons?
Nebula is the only other service I ever considered paying for. It's not a "Youtube killer" and misses out on a lot of the odd trivia sides of YT, but it overally feels more fleshed out on content than Netflix".
> Any other streaming service is simply "okay, maybe there's 1-2 shows on here I want to watch".
If there's even 1 show I want to watch, it's great to watch it. The problem with Youtube is even when they have stuff I want to watch, it's a pain to watch it. Their UI is atrocious!
> Why would I pay for a streaming service that struggles to even keep the few shows I like on there running past 1-2 seasons?
You just unsubscribe at that point.
Know how much stuff I had bookmarked on Youtube that is no longer available? A whole damn lot.
Maybe I'm missing something, but every video service Ui feels the same these days. Grid of videos with some loose sorting, click to play/pause, seek controls. I wouldn't call any of them good/bad on UI alone.
Of all of the various online services, YouTube is the one where I feel I get the most value in return for paying for premium. 90% of my video and music consumption is through YouTube, and it's all ad-free. (Well, except that so much of hobby YouTube is implicitly all ad because the video is about some piece of hobby gear, but that's sort of the nature of the beast.)
I've never watched a YouTube short.
My recommendations are all very well aligned with my interests. The trick here is to go through your watch history and delete things that are leading the recommendation algorithm astray. I am ruthless about that.
> 90% of my video and music consumption is through YouTube, and it's all ad-free.
If it works for you, great! Most video I watch is in the form of TV shows and movies. And Youtube sucks for that. Youtube is great for some hobby stuff. I used to like it for reviews, but even that sucks now - when I do a search I'm inundated with low effort reviews (i.e. by people who haven't used the product they're reviewing).
But if there's a creator you really like and follow, I can understand that.
> I've never watched a YouTube short.
Don't you think they should give you an option not to present them to you, given that you don't watch them?
> My recommendations are all very well aligned with my interests. The trick here is to go through your watch history and delete things that are leading the recommendation algorithm astray. I am ruthless about that.
I don't want to pay money and then have to do this. This is a pain I don't have to deal with in any other service.
> Don't you think they should give you an option not to present them to you, given that you don't watch them?
Yes, I certainly do! The fact that YouTube still tries to get me to watch Shorts every few weeks is 100% a user-hostile choice. Seems like basically every app these days does that kind of shit. It makes me sad, but it's pretty clearly in the set of things I can't change, so I try to just be mindful of the serenity prayer and accept it.
There are a few ways to disable/hide shorts. One day I said to a friend, “man I wish I could block these things, they’re insulting to my intelligence and just encourage clicking around” and my friend said “I’ve been blocking them for a while, just do this.” And while I can’t remember what “this” was, it’s worth a quick google.
Shorts are like the video equivalent of snacking on Doritos all day long.
I imagine they are that's why I pay for YT Premium, which I think is my most bang for buck subscription based on the amount of time I spend watching it
> Curation doesn't exist.
I don't find this a problem personally because 95% of my feed is just channels I'm subscribed to but YMMV depends on what you expect out of it
I watch Youtube on a Chromecast using the SmartTube app, which is a 3rd party front-end (side-loaded APK) for Youtube that eliminates all the ads, and lets you configure practically everything. Don't like "shorts", just disable them and they are gone. That's the main reason I sought out an alternative to the Youtube app, I hated the shorts and there was no way to get rid of them in the Youtube app.
I used to pay for a Youtube subscription to get rid of the ads, but that doesn't include the in-video ads that content creators put in there - but SmartTube has that covered too, in most videos I watch the in-video ads are skipped too. I have 5 chromecasts on the 5 TVs around my house, and every one of them has SmartTube installed. I wouldn't want to watch Youtube without it.
Are you watching YouTubeTV, or just independent-ish creator YouTube?
I watch probably an hour of YouTube a week and would watch more if I could find anything good.
My favorite TV of the past five years is probably Severance. Is there anything of that caliber on YouTube? One of the best movies I saw last year was on Netflix (Train Dreams). Are there great movies on YouTube?
I’d love to year about some of your favorite stuff on YouTube.
independent-ish creators (I'm aware that a lot of channels seem to be bought out by private equity lately), but mostly science, technology, speedrunning, mysteries, recipe guides, things like that, basically stuff that I'm interested in
Oh nice. I never thought of looking for recipes on YouTube before.
How much work do you put into curating your feed? Mine is terrible. For example, I’ll watch a video on how to fix my dishwasher and suddenly it thinks I want to fix all dishwashers.
There is some good content, but sadly the bulk of youtube now is someone sitting in a room reading an AI script for 30 minutes covering 2 minutes of content.
> you don't have to commit to watching 40+ minutes of something
This is funny because I have stopped clicking YouTube links for the simple reason that every video seems to be 45+ minutes. Which I get is based on how monetization works on YouTube.
Like Old Twitter, short-form video is a forcing function with value in forcing posters to get to the point. (I have never seen a YouTube Shorts or whatever link in the wild.)
X (Formerly Twitter) (The everything app) does have a huge issue with long drawn on tweets now. Not to mention people who try and bait people in with intentionally cutting things off.
Alone, their annual streaming revenue was something like $10 billion each compared to Netflix/YouTube at $50-$60 billion each, so they're lagging
(eg radio vs TV).
Seems to me that these companies will say pretty much whatever during the merger process, and as long as there's no concrete repercussions written down somewhere, just do whatever since it's much harder to break a company apart than it is to block a merger.
The pre-merger settlement approved by the current supreme court was that Skydance would: (1) Agree to production quota of 30 movies per year, (2) Domestic spending commitments, and (3) Separate cable package negotiations.
Film Rights: Star Trek, Gremlins, Beetlejuice, DC Comics, Tom & Jerry, Harry Potter, Citizen Kane, Transformers, A Quiet Place, Looney Tunes, The Conjuring, Mortal Kombat, Game of Thrones, Dora The Explorer, Mission Impossible, The Lord of the Rings, SpongeBob SquarePants, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Dune 3, Minecraft, MonsterVerse
Remember that Citizen Kane is the movie about a media tycoon who buys everything he can and ends up alone in a mansion full of stuff.
(Within context of larger canon, I take S2 as a cautionary tale about what happens if humanity is allowed to retain an identity of an independent polity on the interstellar stage. Federation's biggest benefit for the galaxy turns out to be keeping humans contained and putting their energy and creativity into more useful pursuits than asserting independence on other people's territory.)
But let's not forget that Lower Decks and SNW corrected hard on earier NuTrek transgressions against the utopian future.
So you’re saying this opens up the possibility of some wild crossover media stories. Star Trek exploring new worlds that also include krypton, cybertron, and the game of thrones world. Oh Dune too. And maybe do the time travel thing to see a Lord of the Rings middle earth. And have Dora graduate to captain of a star ship (or explore the sea and encounter SpongeBob and Aquaman). Batman can team up with the Mission Impossible crew to solve a mystery. Ninja turtles in a mortal kombat? Wonder Woman in Westeros with Harry Potter?
Maybe a Sora descendant will allow user-directed content to emerge.
> Star Trek exploring new worlds that also include krypton, cybertron, and the game of thrones world. Oh Dune too. And maybe do the time travel thing to see a Lord of the Rings middle earth.
Sadly that isn’t far removed from the novelty “Strange New Worlds” series they recently released. What a mess season 4 was. :(
I've heard that Strange New Worlds was the best of Nu-Trek, so that's disheartening. Star Trek seems to have lost its way from the start of Enterprise (the prequel series) onward.
Strange New Worlds started off strong, so I’d definitely recommend it. But it lost its way in the later series.
Lower Decks was a reverse of that. Took a while to find itself but finished strong. I’d also highly recommend Lower Decks, albeit you need to watch it thinking of it as a beta-cannon type show (ie set in the ST universe but not itself a ST show).
Nothing of the sort would ever happen. They would be insane to risk the integrity of their IPs by doing something so ridiculous.
That said, as snowflakey as Star Trek fans are, I would love to see their reaction to Dora the Explorer ordering Batman to launch photon torpedos at Unicron. They'd probably complain about "yet another DEI captain."
>Maybe a Sora descendant will allow user-directed content to emerge.
Sora didn't die because UGC social media doesn't work. Sora died because UGC social media would just be reposted to Tiktok.
These new tech companies are still too obsessed with 2000's/2010's versions of monetization. sell it as a service on a subscription (with some free tier rate throttling) focused on content creators (who will make the money back by posting) and it would have at least lasted longer.
> Can this be undone in the future if folks realize it was too monopolistic and it was in fact an anti-trust violation?
I predict the democrats winning, shoving it all under that table and pushing for "reconciliation" and "moving forward" while continuing the rotten status quo that got Trump elected in the first place. Maybe a few token prosecutions of low level wage workers involved.
Circa 2008, into 2010, you had the Democrats running on holding Wall St accountable and a genuine class movement to reform capital in the US, Occupy Wall St.
Obama et al instead tore open old racial wounds, thereby destroying class solidarity in exchange for Wall St promoting their ideology, thereby creating “Woke”.
This was the origin of the Obama -> Bernie -> Trump cohort, who helped bring Trump into power a decade later.
Which part are you struggling to take as in good faith?
I’m sure it’s not your preferred narrative of the times, but we both knew that before I answered; so what is it that strikes you as in bad faith rather than my genuine interpretation of events?
I'm struggling to follow. The typical Obama was divisive/made race and issue has actually been a right wing dog whistle for "he is black and I don't like that."
Ah yes, we all remember how America had no racism or anything like that before 2008.
Just like the emancipation proclamation solved slavery, racism was solved in the 60s. We definitely don't have (literally the same) people running around being rather transparent in their moronic racism all the time.
How dare Obama talk about a problem that affects 30% of the country continuously.
IMO, a better solution for the broadcast media part of this is to delegate content regulation to the states when the signal from a tv/radio station is entirely within one state (and some kind of join regulation when it spans >1).
Concentrating so much power in the federal government is problematic, and unnecessary.
I don't see it as a great idea to divide how content within a country is presented into 50 pieces based on whatever ideology that state's leadership has at that time.
Besides, that does nothing to address this mega-merger.
serious question how could you possible argue this is monopolistic when Disney, Netflix, and Youtube exist. It doesn't pass the barest level of scrutiny.
Monopoly is the wrong word, but it has a close cousin, “anticompetitive”. For free market people one of the major role of the government is maintaining competition and avoiding collusion, combining to competitors is straightforward collusion.
Yes. Ellison was called a sociopath by Oracle employees a long time ago, and most of Oracle's customers seem to agree. Hence the quote:
> Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think "oh, the lawnmower hates me" – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle.
There wouldn't be a clear "undo" button after years of joint operation. A future administration could in principle order the Time Warner assets to be spun back off, but realistically that'd be a huge headache, and I'd rather they spend their time and political capital imprisoning everyone who negotiated the deal.
Literally the only difference between him and the rest of the wannabe media barons, but you could fart the word “Israel” with your armpit and get upvotes these days.
Well no, the difference is that this merger is in favor with the current administration which has engaged in a broad and pervasive pattern of authoritarian behaviors while being in lock-step with Israel's interests.
This merger is only happening because the deal that the seller actually preferred (Netflix buying them) was unlikely to be approved by regulators. The President literally came out right after the deal was approved and said "it could be a problem" and "I would have a say" in whether it went through.
In fact the very existence of Paramount Skydance itself, as a merged entity, appears to have been contingent upon Paramount modifying its own HR policies, placing a government ombudsman at their marquee journalistic outlet (CBS), and paying $16 million to Trump's "presidential library fund."
A weird cult existing doesn’t change tbat “Zionism” remain overwhelmingly popular among Jews. Granted since the term has been demonized and represented as something heinous this is the result:
https://www.jewishdatabank.org/api/download/?studyId=1277&me...
So 90% believe that Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state, but they aren’t stupid and it’s obvious to anyone with a brain that “Zionist” has become a kind of slur in the hands of so many.
It really isn’t hard to understand, it’s just convenient for people to hide behind. You meet a white nationalist and they don’t open with a Hitlergrusse, they talk about “preserving the family” or “13/50” and so on. You didn’t invent this shit.
Well hold on now… you’re upset about people using a term that accurately and precisely describes a set of beliefs… that the believes of those beliefs readily label themselves as…
And then you’re calling 50-120 million Americans “a weird cult”?
Are you a parody? I’m honestly baffled.
And by the way, it’s hilarious to claim that Ellison being Jewish (is he? I honestly have no idea) or Zionism would be “literally the only thing unique about him” compared to the rest of the media barons. Not only is there a lot of other stuff that’s unique about him/his company, as I’ve articulated, but also his Zionist beliefs aren’t unique whatsoever among his peers!
You truly live in a hall of mirrors.
Zionist is a slur, and not only is Ellison uniquely a Zionist, but it’s in fact the only unique thing about him and his company. Totally insane shit.
People who believe in an imminent “end times” are in a cult, I don’t care if the religion is ancient or brand new. “We have to prepare the world for Armageddon, and that can only happen when the Jews return to Israel,” is a batshit thing to believe.
Never mind their overall impact on American policy and politics.
But someone’s belief that their special book gives them a special right to a special plot of land is in fact so special that it can’t even be labeled with its own name…?
Yeah they’re all fucking crazy people.
Calling evangelicals evangelicals is fine. Calling zionists Zionists is fine.
Both terms have besmirched connotations because both belief systems are besmirched. Simple as that.
Zionism isn’t religious for a large number of Jews, it’s just a practical response to centuries of pogroms and genocide. Stellar wordplay though, very much how I expect sincere people to act when pressed on the reality of how the cause they claim to care about has been hijacked by bigots.
but uhh, zionism is the same idea as white nationalism.
a jewish state is the same in concept as a white state - a place where the non-white or non-jews are second class citizens, and really, should be removed because they have no place in the state.
even if 90% of white people believed in a white nationalist state, white nationalism would still be bad on its own merrits. its not racist to be against ethnostates, regardless of whos ethnostate it is
Great rant, but there’s a flaw in your otherwise deeply informed and informative analysis.
21% of Israeli CITIZENS… with full voting rights and legal protections, are Arabs. They’re no less citizens of Israel than black Americans are of the US, and yeah that comes with some measure of mutual ethnic and religious tension… it is the Middle East. That’s not the same as a white “utopia” or the usual South Africa comparison.
A lot of the talk around this is layered bad faith, misinformation, and outright bullshit that’s accepted simply because it’s convenient to do so. After all if you believe that shit you can feel justified in your enmity towards a whole people in the name of justice.
By the way how many Jews are citizens of Arab majority nations? How many even live there? Did they live there at one point and did they all magically leave or was there a huge explosion? Just some food for thought.
Students of history have noticed an inconvenient truth that Western Europe nations were sort of unanimous in systematically converting, suppressing, and expelling Jews over several centuries. Those students, born in Allied nations since WWII, somehow unquestioningly accept that antisemitism is a cardinal sin, and we conclude that all those kings and princesses and rulers must have been wrong and bad and very evil people for enacting such policies.
Russia was historically particularly vicious against the Kievan Rus', and Jews were prohibited from even living in the capital city. The term "beyond the Pale" applied in Ukraine as much as it applied to UK-occupied Ireland. But today on television, we have a pretty and delicate blonde empress making a totes adorbs farce of Catherine the Great's bloody legacy.
The democratic West is now a guaranteed safe haven for Eastern Bloc dissidents and refugees, with open arms and blank checks.
Arab Muslims and Israelis need to get along now, because there's a significant mosque dropped on top of Temple Mount, and they're our last best hope for something. And "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". For now.
That’s the thing, increasingly they do get along. One of the major reasons that Hamas pulled the trigger on October 7 was to make sure that accords between KSA and Israel didn’t proceed. One after another countries in the region have made peace with Israel and vice versa, with notable exceptions that aren’t at peace with anyone.
There's only 21% because of the nakba, which was done in part because the ideals of democracy was incongruous with the ethnical composition of the land.
It makes me uncomfortable when people refer to black people as “thugs” with a wink and a nod as well. You aren’t clever for using dog whistles, it’s been a notable feature of antisemitism to “play with words” as Sartre put it.
Still if I’m to consult my subconscious… it tells me that a lot of people use causes and movements to justify the sort of bullying, hateful, trend-chasing behavior they always displayed all along. It’s when people feel they have free license to let go that you learn more about THEM.
Don't think about CNN specifically, but rather about one more cable news network lurching to the right & the diversity of viewpoints being reported being decreased. Ellison's effect on CBS News is clear.
"Centrist" in a grassroots political perspective means one sees merit in the values generally (purportedly) held by both tribes. "Centrist" for an oligarch just means they place bets on both horses.
It is in your best interest. All this innovation is sure to mean better quality of life for the average person, and not at all a widening of the income gap.
First it was Time in 1990, then AOL then AT&T then Discovery and now this. That's 5 owners since 90 for Warner Brothers and none of those really worked out well. I don't know enough to know if this stands a better chance, but if I was going to bet, I'd bet Warner has a new owner before 2030.
This is the first time they are being bought by another company that makes content. Every other purchase was to add content creation to an existing company. So maybe there is chance.
But probably not with Ellison in charge. He'll probably just drive both companies into the ground.
Are they being bought by another company that makes content? Seems like the money is coming from Larry Ellison, whose main business is Oracle. Or the Saudis. Either way, neither Skydance not Paramount’s core businesses perform well enough to get this deal done.
ATT shareholders lost $50B on Time Warner. And ATT lost $15B at least on DirecTV. Comcast is desperately trying to get rid of NBC Universal.
I would bet Ellison loses on this merger too. No one under the age of 60 cares about these legacy media companies to justify tens of billions of dollar valuations. At best, professional media studios are just an add on business for companies like Amazon and Apple and Disney and Sony, with Netflix being the outlier.
They'll merge everything into some Skydance+ app, place ads in the basic tier with 720p, you'll get 1080p with ads for the price of Netflix (probably because of the "premium" HBO content) and then some insane subscription for the full 4K catalogue.
IMO Star Trek is mostly dead anyways. The Orville was the best Star Trek in a very long time. Strange Worlds started so strong but season 3 and 4 really took a nose five r
I've found season 4 of SNW to be the best Star Trek in the 21st century. Can you share what you enjoyed more in its earlier seasons?
DSC and Picard were long slogs in the spirit of "grit" and "realism." SNW having fun, switching up the mood every episode, and telling stories is a breath of fresh air. Strange New Episodes! The Henson Studio collaboration was amazing. Since Netflix canned Dark Crystal, I've been missing my weird muppets traveling across time and space.
Both LD and SNW managed to get less of that Kurtzman stink compared to Academy, DSC, or the movie which shall never be named. I hope they'll let the franchise mellow until they find new direction. (And a new owner.)
* Lower Decks is the truest Trek to ever Trek, but I know that's asinine so I saved my opinion for the footnote.
* ENT was off to a good start, but the 9/11-ification of TV took it off course.
I didn't like DSC and most of Picard either, just like you because it was too gritty. Although it certainly helped that TNG is by faaar my favorite of the Treks.
I liked that season 1 and 2 of SNW felt like the stakes were lower and there were fewer gimmicky episodes. The muppet episode for me for example was a huge negative. So was the fake documentary, the Event Horizon remake and of course the double episode where they were fighting manifested evil which to be couldn't be further from the Trek spirit.
> Although it certainly helped that TNG is by faaar my favorite of the Treks.
The final season of Picard was pure fan service AND I LOVED EVERY MOMENT OF IT! Even when I'm critical of Trek, I'm still there and trying to enjoy. Thank you for sharing.
Fun fact: Skydance was originally started as a vehicle to buy David Ellison an acting career [1], which spent $60M on Fly Boys. It grossed $17M. There's a very real "failed in Hollywood to alt-right" pipeline, actually.
The truth is that Hollywood was already dying and it had been systematically dismantled by short-term profit seeking. It dismantled the system that created hugely valuable properties like Friends, Cheers, ER, Seinfeld, etc where 22 episodes were created every year to a system where streamers could cut out having to pay for syndication by creating 8 episodes every 3-4 years.
You see a lot of stars of shows having podcasts now from shows that ended years or even decades ago (The Office, The Sopranos). In a healthy ecosystem, successful actors would be working actors.
You see productions chase tax rebates all across North America such as Georgia and Canada where once productions were typically based in LA and that had a ton of ecosystem benefits. As soon as the tax rebates go, so do the productions.
Gavin Newsom clearly isn't serious about becoming president because approving this merger is going to lead to even more layoffs and fewer productions. It's going to be deeply unpopular in California. For good reason.
So what's core to all this (IMHO) is... housing. Housing is an input cost to everything in that locations. LA used to be relatively cheap. It had a mix of housing types from single family homes to mansions to budget apartments so Ho actors, writers, etc could reasonably start out.
And then with declining demand as productions spread out and less pilots and shows were being made overall, the industry has become dominated by nepo babies.
I actually think that in future centuries when history is written about the turning point for American empire, it'll be the downfall of Hollywood. You cannot overstate the value the US had to export culture to the entire world with Hollywood.
>Fun fact: Skydance was originally started as a vehicle to buy David Ellison an acting career
Damn, I wish my daddy was a multi-billionaire and fund my hobbies with 8 figures.
>So what's core to all this (IMHO) is... housing.
The Backrooms and Obsession were made by youtubers with shoestring budgets.
The core is Hollywood hasn't made any new innovative and memorable IPs to convince people to spend money watching them in over a decade. People aren't gonna go to the cinema to watch a crappy new sequel/reboot of the Terminator or the Matrix when they can watch the better originals they already have at home on DVD for free as many times they want.
>the industry has become dominated by nepo babies
More like it's been dominated by accountants and nepo-babies cosplaying as socialist political activists to score brownie points with the public but with zero talent to create something good worth watching. "Evil cannot create anything new it can only corrupt and ruin what good forces have invented or made"
I don't get how anyone views this as a monopoly? As a media company, they provide entertainment. It's hard to argue that if the quality of entertainment slips, people are forced to continue consuming the entertainment. There are already SOOO many alternatives; everyone and their mothers are starting up their own paid streaming services (Nebula, etc...) and anyone can start a YouTube channel and get millions of viewers if they have good content. (And don't offend the YouTube overlords)
If we want to talk about monopolies, let's talk about YouTube. That's a far larger gatekeeper, and they have a proven track record of shutting people out for breaking their random rules, with little oversight.
CNN will become another Fox News, leaving The New York Times as the last remaining bastion of independent reporting on what the current administration is doing.
I was worried about this at first, but it probably doesn't make business sense to try and pivot CNN's slant that way. It would alienate its current audience and damage its brand. I can't imagine many Fox News enjoyers wanting to watch CNN even if it shifts its slant more right. So what would the target audience be?
I suppose if they did it gradually enough, they could potentially normalize more right leaning viewpoints to its audience without them noticing.
So they’ve committed to for example releasing 30-32 movies a year for the next five years [1] but after that, no promises. Good thing mergers are famously temporary and we never need to worry about the next 10 years! Oh wait…
> Editorial Independence Board” for CBS News and CNN. The board’s members would be chosen by Skydance and report to the company’s board of directors.
stupid shit like this is why people - younger people - end up yearning for failed communist / socialist policies. because after all there's no accountability in the system.
the system has failed them. it has failed to be impartial. to hold elite greed at bay.
laws are broken daily, the judiciary is captured. what a tragedy.
The most significant thing here is not just the inevitable loss of jobs and the adverse effects of conglomeration/monopolies, but that the most historically filmmaker/artist-friendly studio is now co-owned by MAGA billionaires and the Saudis, direct opponents to democracy.
In 1 or 2 years AI movies will be better in everything. From acting , to camera work to environments to story telling. Check out the quality of some of work already out there. There is a massive shift going on. China is going full speed mode. The film industry will be reshaped. Warner Bros should have used those billions to purchase products like seadance. Otherwise they are out
We in this community don't exactly fit the "tragic failed artist" archetype that well. Heck, I'm sure many of us can in fact fun artseeking now after a some 10-20+ years in the tech industry.
Instead some individuals choose to root on the end of the artist.
Even if it gets good enough, you're forgetting about everything else that goes into movie making and distribution. Hollywood will keep their hold on media, they just might use AI to increase profits even higher.
i am extremely wary of making any predictions about ai, given what's happened in the last year, but i would put good money on hollywood being around in 2 years. there's much more to the movie industry than slapping some video together.
r/stablediffusion seems to be a bit disconnected from reality, to put it nicely.
The vibe I get is like when the Meta VR app store product launched, and there was huge promises and optimism about all the amazing apps and experiences, but when you bought it and actually tried, it was a few juiced up flagship things and a bunch of shovelware.
I've seen plenty of negative (and legitimate) sentiment around this merger but I'm cautiously optimistic that David Ellison, being half the age of anyone else with greenlight authority, will do something different/better.
Skydance/Paramount has had plenty of success attracting young audiences via UFC & gaming partnerships, so I'm not sure that's a counterpoint. Re forumulaic/bland that's a personal taste thing and not worth arguing.
The key contributor to Hollywood's waning influence is the generation gap; it's a cultural institution that is supposed to be culturally salient. Take the Mandalorian movie as an example; the biggest studio using the biggest IP to spend $300M on a movie... which lost $100M. That movie was competing at the box office at the same time with Obsession, which was made for $750k by a young Youtuber has made over half a billion worldwide.
As of today Ellison has an extraordinary amount of greenlight authority in an industry whose decision-makers are overwhelmingly a generation older. He can shake things up if he wants to, and I hope he does.
> As of today Ellison has an extraordinary amount of greenlight authority in an industry whose decision-makers are overwhelmingly a generation older.
Who do you think he has more in common with? An average consumer his own age, or adult members of any age from the elite class that hes likely spent most of his time around?
Being formulaic and bland is an important aspect of expecting someone to “do something different” or “shake things up”. If the owner of a film studio has so much green light power but the studio has primarily produced film following a single formula, which the audiences have grown bored with (hence bland), then how can there be an expectation of that owner suddenly doing something different simply because they bought another studio?
Nilay Patel: https://www.theverge.com/podcast/1004286/senator-adam-schiff...
> One of the longest-running tropes at The Verge is that a workable antitrust policy for the United States would be simply to forbid companies from buying Time Warner because it has never worked and it may never work again, and that we should just pass one law.
Checks out:
Jan 11, 2001: AOL and Time Warner merged to create AOL Time Warner
June 14, 2018: AT&T acquired Time Warner, renamed WarnerMedia
April 8, 2022: WarnerMedia spun out of AT&T, merged with Discovery
Oh this is hilarious. Didn't AT&T also acquire HBO and spin them off too?
They did, but first they rebranded them as Max, thus destroying the incredible name value of HBO. It was renamed back to HBO as part of the spinout IIRC.
The "credit" for that move actually belongs to WarnerBros Discovery
My favorite part of that story is that McKinsey both advised WarnerBros Discovery to make that change, and then advised them to change it back, making millions each time. I wish I made that much money being bad at my job.
You misunderstand their job. They get paid millions to carefully construct a report that supports whatever stupid plan the coke-fueled execs came up with.
They are also functionally both a way for certain well-connected shareholders to exert disproportionate influence and a placating propaganda machine for the shareholders who aren't
Grease on the very corroded wheel of modern capitalism
McKinsey and other management consultants exist to launder decisions made by upper management that management do not want to face consequences for. "It's not my fault, the consultants advised me that was the best option"
One of those jobs LLMs can easily take over.
I'm not sure if you are suggesting the CEO hedging their bets or the consultants, but I'd say both of those jobs could be replaced by an LLM.
You can replace low and maybe mid skill employees with software but it’s the high end ones consultants or CEO that are great at their jobs with good software can be orders of magnitude more efficient.
Nope the entire point of the job is to have a person to blame when it goes wrong.
the blame is absorbed by McKinsey the corporation, not the people working there
they'll just use AI like everyone else but charge extra for it
Consultants are for decision based evidence making.
They also somehow made everyone download new apps because apparently the old one couldn't be updated.
HBO was part of Time Warner.
March, 1989: Time and Warner announce merger, Paramount launches hostile bid for Time. January, 1990: Time responds by buying Warner Communications for $14 billion.
...Paramount sulks, and bides its time....
Time? Warner? What were they doing in bed together to begin with?
That's what I've been thinking about so many "ordained" or duress "marriages" since long before 1989.
Companies wasting their money is the company's problem and it's really unclear to me why the government should give a single damn.
Just because they get it wrong doesn’t make it right. You don’t even need to reach back 100 years to sort this.
Because big companies destroying value makes the world worse? They're sucking up capital and not delivering anything to justify it.
Won't investors just learn to avoid investing in companies like that?
Would you like to buy some tulips?
Deep cut, this[0].
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania?wprov=sfti1
are you too young to have lived through the multiple recessions that have happened in the past few decades or Bernie Madoff or Enron? Or Theranos and FTX? and that's just off the top, give me ten minutes to dig in and I'll get you at least twenty more
None of those were the result of mergers.
Pedantic. The point was "aren't investors rational" and they clearly hop on short term fads to their and our detriment. Plus saying Enron wasn't a product of a merger is very funny
Passive investors earned 10% per year for the last 30 years doing no work and taking on no risk.
Seems very rational to me.
I'm sure passive investors loved the dotcom bubble and the housing market crash
I'm sure they'll love it when this AI bubble pops too
If they were passive, they wouldn’t care, because they should not have a reason to liquidate all equities during the few down years.
It really depends on luck, timing and inflation.
For example if you bought S&P 500 in Jul 1929, you got your investment back in 1955 (inflation adjusted). If you bought S&P 500 in Apr 2000, you got your investment back in 2014 (inflation adjusted).
https://www.multpl.com/inflation-adjusted-s-p-500
99.99% of people are not investing a lump sum on one date and liquidating it all on another date. Extend this graph to today, and it will be much greener.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011...
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/s/oLP2K6gdbC
Plus it’s political suicide to let SP500 stagnate or drop.
your own NYT link shows the vast majority of withdrawal dates to have a median of 4.1% followed by the 'slightly above inflation' group then the 'did not keep up with inflation' group with the green returns being the smallest likelihood. there's even this literal quote in the article:
"Market returns are more volatile than most people realize,” Mr. Easterling said, “even over periods as long as 20 years.”
in your second link, a commenter rightfully calls out that the log scale makes the data reductive
I think whatever it is that you need to fall asleep at night is your own habit - it doesn't need to be the rest of ours
Why would you use inflation adjusted numbers? It seems like the proper comparison would be t-bills or cds.
Passive investors were still taking on risk
With passive investment everyone is buying crap all the time because they have no ability to discern what is or isn’t crap and the base assumption is 95% of stocks are losers but the other 5% win big
If everyone is buying crap all the time, how do businesses fail? Wouldn’t they be able to succeed by just issuing more shares?
A lot of them do and have. Companies really only fail when lenders stop lending.
No. Every investor is just living the Arrested Development “…but it might work for us” meme.
Really thinking about what happens with these mergers and splits. In the end it is just moving numbers from one pile to an other. Nothing is really created or destroyed...
Well there is massive waste of time on doing all the stuff need for it to happen. But I think they would have come up with something as unproductive as that anyway so overall it is not like that time would have been spend for anything actually productive.
Made up "value" moving from one place to an other. Just so that some people have something to do. And most likely they would not have much productive things to do in any case.
> Nothing is really created or destroyed...
Well you aren't losing your job
If they destroy things that were servicing public good like jobs, the market they are selling into, etc, it becomes the governments job to care. If you are advocating for zero oversight of corporations by government I don’t think you’ve seen the consequences of the last 40 years of the US. Monopolies only serve the owning class at the expense of the people.
I was at HBO during the AOL merger, and for a time my work email became gcanyon0264@aol.com, because AOL corporate email shared namespace with its customers, and my personal AOL account was… gcanyon@aol.com
> because AOL corporate email shared namespace with its customers
I wonder where this ranks in the top 5 stupidest things I've ever heard. It's bad enough merging customer databases when two companies merge.
No other major ISP has ever done this that I know of. Likely because it's completely unnecessary. Who made this decision (and why weren't they fired immediately)?
> Who made this decision
Nobody. Going back to 1989 every AOL account had a screen name that was used as your login and your identity. Being an employee was just a flag on your account in the database.
In 1993 AOL launched its internet gateway that accepted something@aol.com and put it in your AOL Mail box. You could tell that someone was an AOL employee because a banner (I think it was) appeared at the top of the message telling you.
Some of the network engineering folks had real aol.net addresses, but I don't know how that was handled internally. I also think the Netscape folks eventually made enough of a stink to keep their previous email address too.
Ah, so this is why our email addresses are @gmail.com and not @google.com.
I was always wondering about that; it seemed to me that it would have been free advertising to Google if their users had to write and say @google.com all the time.
Merging banks also seems to be a fun endeavor
> top 5 stupidest things I've ever heard
Yeah, we weren't thrilled.
By that logic we should encourage giant companies to buy Warner Brothers. Each time it fails, it helps topple leviathans, which decreases market concentration.
Time Warner: "No, I am the pill that poisons."
This time at least it succeeds immensely, at one thing. At helping America cash out one of it's greatest soft empires of all time: Hollywood.
All that culture that America has built for ourselves and exported to the world is now owned in massive part by sovereign wealth at Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Dubai. Perhaps our greatest export (along with, as every feel knows, microcode and pizza delivery), now massively foreign owned, given up. https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/hollywood-hungry-gu...
And boatload of debt has been raised, to grease the handoff, to payoff some of the richest people for the acquisition, thanks to the overwhelming investment of these brutal human-rights-violating unfree countries, a massive 40,000 lb albatross of debt to wear around Hollywood's neck. All to do what America lately has traded its past couple bits of good and values for: helping a couple extremely rich dudes cash out, get filthy rich.
This is more consolidation of US media under extremely pro-Israel ownership. I don't think this will work out as well as they hope (look at CBS -- Bari Weiss has driven it into the ground) but it's scary how much US media a foreign adversary now has direct editorial control over, including both "news" and "entertainment", including TikTok.
https://www.972mag.com/ellisons-paramount-tiktok-israel-medi...
Is it possible the next administration sues to break them up? Couldn't they also just launch endless investigations of the owners until they spun it off into its own thing
Sadly that probably won't happen:
https://www.commondreams.org/news/paramount-merger-settlemen...
The article is a bit foolish.
Hypothetically California could have done something to prevent the merger. Then they [Paramount] leave California, as threatened, and then complete the merger.
The Federal government is the entity which needs to be the enforcer of antitrust. Otherwise major companies like these WILL pick and and leave the state blocking them. It's a 111 billion deal - this is worth moving states for the parties involved.
Okay. They should have called the bluff. It'd be better if the federal government did this, but that's not the world we live in right now.
Here's the issue: nothing stops them from leaving the state anyway after the deal is made. The concessions lack any weight. California folded potentially for nothing.
There is already a deep recession in the creative industry in LA, film jobs are down by a third since 2022. They’re not negotiating from a position of strength
I'm aware. There's a lot of FUD around this industry and a large corporation leaving wouldn't help.
At the same time, this promise to "support labor" falls flat when they have been actively combatting with it for recent years. Their words ring hollow.
And if we're being realistic: this is mostly Newsom trying to cover his tracks and look "strong" for 2028.
The next administration absolutely could, but that would require them to care more about about the well-being of the country than they do about themselves and the bribes and favors they could rake in if they don't. That's seems to be the fatal flaw in our system. Congress, the FTC, and the president need to willing to put the interests of the nation above the interests of corporations. Maybe I'll live to see that happen, but a lot of people have died waiting for it (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e5/The_Boss...) and it gets less likely all the time.
You can count on the corporate Dems to gnash their teeth and wring their hands and collect their paycheck.
111x less likely than with a mere "unicorn."
$111 billion sheds a lot of gratuity as it moves from one place to another.
The "big deal" is what it does for the shareholders in black & white.
A number of those very major shareholding individuals who have the most to gain have been pushing for a deal forever, and naturally all the retail investors will be entitled to go along for the ride.
But probably a greater number of insiders who are pushing for the deal are not that major of a shareholder or even shareholders at all. Corporate employees who are higher-ups and in accessory corporations like banks and consultants within range, can often be subject to bonuses and commissions anyway which can motivate them en masse much more so than whether they had any nominal amount in their retail portfolio or not. There might even be a legislator or two who stands to gain somewhere along the line, sooner or later.
The number of people who are going to get rich without having to have been opportune shareholders can really make the difference.
The big shareholders were already rich or were going to get richer anyway.
That's probably what the extra $11 billion is for, for everybody else close to the deal, and that's even more incentive for them to expedite.
You can only imagine that one guy negotiated an extra 10% more than a $100 billion deal was worth, especially since the buyers could easily afford it. But then gets 10% of that so he gets a billion, bringing the final total to $111 billion so no other numbers need to be adjusted ;)
I don't see how. The government approved the merger. Absent breaking the conditions that were attached to the merger, it's a done deal.
Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta was going to call Ellisons bluff and scrap the merger until Gavin Newsom personally pressured Bonta to let it happen*.
You have a fundamental misunderstanding of the political spectrum if you believe that establishment democrats will do anything to prevent this.
https://www.wsj.com/business/media/paramount-warner-bros-dea...
Under what criteria exactly is Israel a "foreign adversary"...?
Have you been paying attention to american politics the last 15 years or so? It's become astoundingly clear that Mossad has blackmail material on virtually every major politician and uses it to get its way - including billions of dollars in funding and drawing the US into conflicts that do not benefit us and instead result in the deaths of Americans (and as of Trump's statement yesterday, the threat of bombings on American soil.)
>but it's scary how much US media a foreign adversary now has direct editorial control over
It's not antisemitic to criticize Israel, but this language is verging on antisemitic because Israel very much does not have "direct editorial control" over Skydance. David Ellison is the one with "direct editorial control" and you can certainly say he's "extremely pro-Israel" but he himself is not "a foreign adversary" by any definition of those words. So either you're being hyperbolic with the meaning of "direct editorial control" or you're insinuating that David Ellison will defer to Israel on everything because he's Jewish which is a common antisemitic trope[1]. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the former, but the latter is enough of a possibility that I would suggest rephrasing this comment to avoid giving supporters of Israel a legitimate line of complaint against your underlying point.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_loyalty#Jews
What about his co-CEO, an ex-IDF soldier?
Isn't technically every Israeli adult over a certain age ex-IDF? I had understood service to be compulsory for all citizens.
Yes, military service is compulsory in Israel so using "ex-IDF soldier" in this context does stick out because it isn't actually adding any new details. It gives the impression that the reason that language was chosen was that it implies something more nefarious than "Israeli" without the requirement of actually detailing what makes it nefarious.
When I discovered that Dr. Ruth Westheimer had been a particularly fearsome and accurate ace sniper [who 'never killed anybody'] for the IDF, I came to the conclusion that that was completely in-character for what she did stateside, on the airwaves and in other popular media in these United States. I mean, same thing for Netta Barzilai. Bravissimo.
Until just 2 years ago, it was not compulsory for Haredi Jews. So no.
If you want to make an accusation, make an accusation. Do you think a specific person at the head of this company is "a foreign advisory"? Because the vagueness of an accusation can come across like a dog whistle. If you believe ethics and facts are on your side, what's the point of being vague?
its not a dog whistle, it is proven fact that some jews have repeatedly betrayed the interests of the United States and engaged in espionage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_and_Ethel_Rosenberg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Pollard
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben-Ami_Kadish
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_espionage_in_the_Unite...
https://greydynamics.com/sayanim-jewish-diaspora-mossad-supp...
The owners openly talk about Israel often and loudly.
Larry Ellison:
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/larry-ellison-vetted-marco-ru...
>Larry Ellison Vetted Marco Rubio for Fealty to Israel
Indeed Israeli media covers this also:
https://forward.com/fast-forward/853703/david-ellison-appoin...
>David Ellison appoints Israeli to lead merged Paramount-Warner studios
The same thing happened with the Tik Tok purchase, the entire point of handing control of the Tik Tok algorithm to Larry Ellison was so that they could clamp down on the discussion about the genocide in Gaza. You can see the results of it in the reports that the world Jewish congress put out directly:
>https://wjc-org-website.s3.amazonaws.com/horizon/assets/YNN3...
>TikTok is the exception, removing 64% of content overall (and 71% of content formally reported to it), compared to 12–15% on every other major platform.
It seems like you fully ignored my point, so I'll repeat myself:
>you can certainly say he's "extremely pro-Israel" but he himself is not "a foreign adversary" by any definition of those words.
All you're showing is that his family is pro-Israel, but that does not mean they are controlled by Israel. These conversations about Israel always seem to remove the agency on the American end which is where a lot of the historical antisemitic tropes live. Whether it's intentional or not, it's phrased in a way that evokes the trope of a shadowy cabal of Jews pulling the strings behind the scenes, and other countries rarely get talked about in this same way. For example, have you ever heard anyone suggest Google and Microsoft are controlled by India because their CEOs were born in India?
"controlled by Israel" is kind of impossible to prove and that was never anyone's argument. But it's very obvious that these people are placing ethnic affinity and the interests of a foreign nation above the United States. They are going out of their way to buy media to shape the discourse of this country in favor of a foreign nation and a specific ethnic group.
>other countries rarely get talked about in this same way
They actually do, but the Israeli lobby has grown so powerful that it is now dominating most of the political action in the USA in a way that has become impossible to ignore.
There are actually plenty of conversations to be had about Indian ethnic affinity and lobbying. USINPAC is the Indian lobbying organization which is actually modeled after AIPAC (the notorious Israeli lobbying group which has political control over most of the US congress).
https://www.trackaipac.com/
There is a looming argument which hasn't yet entered the public mainstream discourse about Indian foreign influence and Indian ethnic nepotism in the United States, but that is an entirely separate conversation.
Most Indian CEOs are the same caste (Brahmin) and there is a good argument that many of them have been nominated by the boards of their companies and institutional investors with large stakes so that they can navigate India's notorious bureaucracy and deepen ties to the country, which supplies much of the cheap labor for the tech industry. Many of them have direct ties to the Bharatiya Janata Party in India and can use the access to people like Modi to access more Indian labor as well as build more in India. Modi talks openly about exporting human capital and using its diaspora to wield influence in the United States. One can argue that they are taking a cue from Israel here.
>Narendra Modi urges the Indian diaspora to become an extension of foreign policy
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/02/narendra-modi-...
>"controlled by Israel"... was never anyone's argument.
Yes it was. My comment was directly in response to someone saying "it's scary how much US media a foreign adversary now has direct editorial control over". I know that was not your argument, but it was someone's argument and I responded to refute it. I don't know what point you thought was being discussed, but it's now clear you misread the conversation.
They put Bari Weiss in charge of CBS news. Her only credential is being rabidly zionist. This trait got her blog purchased for 100s of millions of dollars (!!) and then put her in charge of CBS news.
If you want to split hairs between "controlled by Israel" and "controlled by people who's sole interest is supporting Israel", go ahead.
Before the Tik Tok purchase went through, the prime minister of Israel gave a talk in which he said:
>But we have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefields with which we engage, and the most important ones are on social media. And the most important purchase that's going on right now is? Tik Tok. Number One.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3tdrO8bA7rs
Later, control of the Tik Tok algorithm was given to Larry Ellison and they immediately used it to clamp down on discussion of the genocide in Gaza (as well as any other types of discussion they deem "antisemitism").
Now Larry Ellison's son has been given control of all these other media companies and has appointed an Israeli to run things.
This is DIRECT evidence of Larry and David Ellison working directly with the highest levels of a foreign government to manipulate public opinion on behalf of that foreign government.
Obviously Larry Ellison had met with Netanyahu, or with someone in the Israeli government, and discussed the details of this deal. If the government of Israel can ask a citizen in a different country to do something on their behalf, that is a form of control.
Let’s check where much of the ownership and money come from. From the LA Times:
> The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday granted Paramount Skydance’s request to allow Middle Eastern royal families to hold a substantial stake in a merged Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery.
> Foreign investors, including the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi, are slated to indirectly own nearly 50% of the equity in David Ellison’s proposed mega-studio. That will give them a hefty stake in CBS, CNN, Comedy Central, HBO and two historic Hollywood film studios.
So foreign “adversaries” literally own enormous stakes in these companies and have been cleared by the FCC. Yet only possible pro-Israel influence by Ellison gets called out?
1: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/20... 2: https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2026/04/15/qatar_is...
Out of those 3, one is a covert ally of Israel and the other is an overt ally. David and Larry Ellison are avowed Zionists.
When they take dollars for oil, they would rather swap paper currency with real assets (ownership of firms). If US doesn't want that, they should make moves to remove USD as a reserve currency or preferred currency for global trade.
Naturally. Because OP isn't going to let pesky facts interfere with his narrative.
What about the pesky fact that there is a huge difference between the operational owner of a company and it's investors. Oh and those gulf state investors are aligned with the Zionists.
Of course they are. Who isn't? The Taliban?
Stating obvious falsehoods as if they were true doesn't help your Zionist cause anymore. It's not only the Taliban and everyone knows it, so don't bother gaslighting. Just look at half of Eurpope. Or the Ed Sheeran debacle.
Don't know if you noticed but Europe isn't doing great at the moment especially not France. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8x23706pvz3o
I think you could make a graph showing the inverse relationship between how pro palestinian a country is, versus how crap of a place it is to live in.
> the inverse relationship
So you're saying if a place is more pro-palestinian it's less crap to live there. Makes sense.
The European countries you're pointing towards are similar to the US in that most of their populace doesn't support the Israeli government but their politicians effectively do. Even the most vocally anti-Israel country, Ireland, is in truth the biggest US regime ally in the EU. This renders their Israel talk completely meaningless.
The part of Europe you're talking about is also more like a fifth than half.
Yeah but it's not just the Taliban, which is absurd.
Please. Ellison controls it, the gulf states are just investors. They also invested in Twitter, but people call out Elon, and no one has a problem with that.
Most of the gulf states are pretty much controlled by Zionists at this point anyway, or at least heavily aligned with them.
And what's wrong with that?
I think it's great that the America supports Israel, whose values and interests basically align with the West, over the rest of the Middle East, Russia and China with their values, which being as diplomatic as possible, do not.
Just take a look at all the countries that are the most against Israel. They are a mixture of failed states, third world and what they all share in common is a distressing lack of regard for human rights. Both of other nationalities and their own. Europe is unfortunately going in that direction, and I believe it's no coincience that they are simultaneously becoming worse countries and more anti Israel. It's not causation but it is correlation.
Not sure what your values are, but mine don't include decades of apartheid followed by genocide.
Mine don't either.
> distressing lack of regard for human rights
The US couped, invaded, and destroyed tens of countries since WW2 until now. Israel is still massacring civilians in Gaza during a ceasefire and continuing their pogrom in the West Bank, killing people and stealing more lands. This is your example of human rights?
Yes. Your argument is fallacious because it's classic whataboutism. Just because the US have done some morally questionable things doesn't mean they are not committed to humanism in general and by comparison to all the other countries I've mentioned, they are so much better. And their trajectory over time is one of continued improvement.
As for your charges against Israel, they are factually incorrect. Israel is not still massacring civilians in Gaza, neither did they at any point engage in anything like a systemic, strategic program of killing civilians in Gaza. If you want to know what the casualty figures would look like if that was indeed the case, look at Iran which did do just that with the protests last year where they succeeded in murdering in one week roughly the amount of people Israel killed in Gaza in an entire year of active fighting. The worst you can accuse them of is of not doing enough to minimize civilian casualties. I will argue they did plenty but that's for another time. As for "progroms" in the West Bank, I would love to see what you're talking about. For your reference this is a wikipedia page on progroms[1] For some context, the number of extremist violent settlers that the whole world is fixated on numbers according to estimates in the dozens to hundreds.
Finally, I will leave it up to your imagination what it would look like if the roles were reversed, if the Arabs were dominant in Israel and the Jews were a minority, to help things along, here's examples from the wider Arab world[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogroms_in_the_Russian_Empire
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_...
It's not whataboutism if you're comparing apples with apples. Just saying.
those charges are very factually correct. eg. israel has killed >1000 civilian gazans since signing the ceasefire. thats about the same as how iran responded to a similar uprising as oct 7th. by comparison israel has killed at the very lowest, 70k civilians, probably more like 300k -500k if anyone is ever allowed to investigate the rubble from israel's subsequent destruction of civilian homes and infrastructure.
the systematic killing is pretty clear - tell people to evacuate to an israeli defined "safe zone" and then drop bombs on it. other defined policies had the idf mowing down escaped israeli-citizen hostages waving white flags and approaching the gaza border. assigning snipers to get headshots on children.
its a system informed by the fact that going too hard would result in instant sanctions, but the intent is made plenty clear, and the results are easily visible by counting the number of living gazans still in northern gaza.
palestine was under arab and turkish rules for centuries, and jews did much better than arabs are under israeli occupation
if the west was more values-similar with israel, there would be constant swastikas drawn on everything jewish owned or in jewish view, with a couple real true blue nazis going around beating up, killing, and stealing jewish property, and the government would keep pardoning them and insisting its not a problem because its only a couple hundred thousand nazis in a country witb many millions.
i sure saw in that video where cnn gets attacked by the idf clearing the way for settlers that the west bank is covered in stars of david, drawn the same way swatstikas are to terrorize people
Wow. You managed to cram so much propaganda into one post it's pretty impressive.
Civilians like maybe Ali Al-Amoudi? Or maybe Muhammad Yazouri? Nayal Abu Obeid? Izz al-Din al-Beik? Izz al-Din al-Haddad? Mohammed Odeh?
Is there any combatant Hamas doesn't call a civilian?
Since Hamas hasn't disarmed and Gaza wasn't demilitarized there is effectively no ceasefire. There is a war and Israel is attacking military targets as it is allowed to do under international law. Minimizing civilian casualties as it is required to do.
If Hamas, the democratically elected government of Gaza, has a problem with that then it can surrender.
Israel has only attacked the safe zone when there were military targets present, such as the attack on Mohammed Deif. That's on Hamas. Once you get the civilian/combatant breakdown from Hamas then we can check how many civilians per capita were attacked in humanitarian zones (very few) vs. zones that were evacuated (the majority).
EDIT: Re: The Ottomans. Massacred Jews in Safed in 1517. Ethnically cleansed Jaffa of Jews in 1917. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. No comparison whatsoever to Israeli Arabs who are equal citizens in Israel. As to the Palestinians in the occupied territories, they're not citizens. Also AFAIK the Jews didn't mount a campaign of suicide bombings against the Arabs or fire rockets into Arab cities.
There's many problems here. But scream bloody murder about propaganda and then push this on people:
> If Hamas, the democratically elected government of Gaza, has a problem with that then it can surrender.
The last election in Gaza was over two decades ago.
Hamas seized and have kept control of Gaza. Coincidentally, they are the only people with weapons in Gaza.
Doesn't mean they didn't enjoy broad support up to and including Oct7.
Who knew that militant resistance against a genocidal occupying force might be popular amongst the victims of said occupation and genocide.
typical jewish propaganda and hasbara.
Arab jews did not want to move to Israel, they were fine living among muslims. Mossad faked terrorist bombings in Baghdad and killed bunch of jews to create an illusion of jew hatred in Iraq.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1950%E2%80%931951_Baghdad_bomb...
That's absolute nonsense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farhud listed to Gad Saad about what he experienced in Lebanon.
Jews were ethnically cleansed from all Arab countries.
Re: your link. I mean the Iraqi authorities said so. Yeah right.
Next you’re going to say that all the antisemitic commenters on HN are also Mossad in an attempt to convince Jews to move to Israel.
Are you Mossad?
I note that you wrote: “typical jewish propaganda and hasbara” - you forgot to say “Zionist” or “Israeli”. Was that a slip or have your handlers in Israel instructed you to be openly antisemitic now?
israel shares that same lack of care gor human rights. consider the use of rape and possibly bestiality to torture hostages in prisons, the state protection of terrorists, the lack of gay or even interfaith marriage, the genocide in gaza.
israel doesnt at all align with (modern) western values, instead more like the old apartheid south africa, or really, more like nazi germany in terms of supremacism and industrial might put towards surveiling and killing the less-than-human people you allude to as being less-than-human.
the causation of all those failed states is israel. it makes failed states because those are easier to conquer land from, and cant fight against all the abuses of humans.
sure, the US was half supportive of the nazis too, but that wasn't a good thing.
>consider the use of rape and possibly bestiality to torture hostages in prisons, the state protection of terrorists, the lack of gay or even interfaith marriage, the genocide in gaza.
Argument: Unproven claims, there are virtually no jewish terrorists, anyway in your own distorted mind Israel is a terrorist state.
Counterpoint: Oct 7, Bibas family, Hamas, Palestinan Authority/PLO, Islam.
>the lack of gay or even interfaith marriage, the genocide in gaza.
........
...
I mean, lets just take a moment to reflect on this. For more context Israel has a pretty strong gay culture, so your complaint is about a legal technicality. So you are mentioning that in the same breath as the the death of 70,000 Gazans? And you think that's somehow an argument that makes you look good???
I am a pretty outspoken supporter of Israel, but I have never come close to that level of disrespect to the Palestinian people as you have managed.
>the causation of all those failed states is israel. it makes failed states because those are easier to conquer land from, and cant fight against all the abuses of humans.
The causation of all those failed states is Third World values. Like blaming everyone else for their own failures.
You don’t get it, in their twisted worldview, Israel is to blame for anything. Coincides is exactly what’s being taught in every household in the failed states surrounding Israel. No jobs? Israel. Illness and death? Israel. Taliban slaughtering people? Israel.
Instead of understanding that these governments use the Israeli Palestinian conflict as a scapegoat, and Israel as a boogeyman, just to make the populous blind to the true cause for their suffering.
It's simple: I don't want billions of taxpayer dollars going to a country that enforces the Hannibal Directive or the Dahiya doctrine.
If the Israeli government cooperates with the ICC, adopts full secularity and stops undermining their neighbors security, then I'd feel a lot better supporting them. Right now I'm only ashamed. There is no upside to sending Israel foreign aid after Likud manipulated Trump into starting an illegal war.
Wow that’s a lot to unpack.
Dahyia doctrine - this means inflict damage on your enemy in such way that will deter him from ever trying to attack you again. It was named in the 2006 Lebanon war, which Hezbollah started, after which nasrallah admitted that if he knew of the Israeli response, he would not have started the war. I suppose your a 5 star general with a better way of creating deterrence.
Hannibal directive - affects only soldiers, and it means that the army must do whatever’s necessary to prevent a kidnapping. This is after a soldier was kidnapped into Gaza, kept there for 5 years without seeing any natural party to assess his condition (which is illegal but no one cares about that when Israelis are the victims), and eventually was released against 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, one of which was sinwar. Again, I assume you are a 5 star general that can find a better solution.
Israel is a secular state. The only thing controlled by religion is marriage (btw USA gives weapons to turkey, Saudi Arabia, UAE, where is the protest against support of these unsecular countries?)
And finally - how exactly is the Iran war illegal?
Most 5-star generals don't do this, because they're held accountable by international law, and/or a military court that doesn't exonerate them after committing war crimes on camera: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-13/israel-idf-drops-sde-...
If Israel wanted to clean their slate, they can always present their case to the ICC. Little wonder that Likud lashes out and call the ICC "biased" for not sharing their beliefs, but such is the culture gap that the Israeli state has fostered. And such is the standards of cooperation and compliance that the rest of the world has come to expect since the horror of WWII. It's hard to not blame Israel for the terrible optics that their leadership has promoted and incorporated into their state's identity. The whataboutism in your comment proves that you also know it's wrong, but just refuse to hold Israel accountable the way that the House of Saud is (very justifiably) criticized. It's clear that Israel demands an ethical double-standard from the world.
> Hannibal directive - affects only soldiers
Officially, maybe. In practice, we know that Israeli forces have deliberately killed civilians and reservists during Hannibal scenarios, too: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240709-israels-use-of-ha...
> how exactly is the Iran war illegal?
Congress never agreed to it. Israel can fight all they want, but extended US operations are jeopardized without a congressional authorization. The upcoming midterms are going to shake things up, and it's very possible that the War Powers Resolution of 1973 will be enforced to stop funding for in-theater operations outside of CENTCOM basics and foreign aid. The war isn't popular, and US taxpayers can only foot the bill for so long before they abandon Likud's warmongering initiatives. Even Trump doesn't want to escalate, considering how many threats he wussed out of.
Is Israel the main concern? They gave tens of millions to Trump. They are now Republican media.
Yeah, it's not great that the head of the corporation is so close with Netanyahu, but there are more immediate problems for the US. These corporations aren't ideological though, they'll just do whatever it takes to get what more of what they want. David Ellison and his daddy have both been more than happy to throw huge piles of money at Democrats and support them when they thought it was convenient. When Republicans are out of power they'll support whoever replaces them. When you have no morals whatsoever what difference is there in supporting a Democrat, or a genocide, or a Republican?
I'm not pro-Israel by any means but foreign adversary is a bit much.
They pushed us into an unwinnnable quagmire that is helping to destroy our global leadership position - like Grump himself, their effects are indistinguishable from what an adversary would do.
The U.S. cannot claim to be "pushed" into any war. The US chose to participate in this war and chooses to stay involved every single day since it started.
"The US" is not a singular entity making an explicit deliberate choice, right? Just as it makes sense to say that Grump dragged the US into this war, it also makes sense to say that Israel helped. Of course both along with half of US voters. Think joint responsibility, not severable.
Yeah, but I have not seen anyone really do anything opposed to the war (or all the other shit), so its fair to say that the US made the choice to approve of the war.
Try saying something against Israel with that famous American free speech.
US is not a single entity, it consists of a lot of politicians on the AIPAC's payroll or have videos of themselves doing illegal stuff on some tropical island
And the citizens do not have enough spine to bring their politicians to justice. If they weren't causing so much death and destruction around the globe the sidestepping-of-responsibility-shuffle of the american people would be really funny to watch.
What exactly are you imagining could be done? I'm all ears. Seriously, please, offer suggestions!
From my perspective the situation is that my fellow citizens who would be the most predisposed towards extrajudicial violence that might "bring their politicians to justice" are also the most steeped in propaganda and so end up getting their own itches scratched by that very state organized death and destruction.
> And the citizens do not have enough spine to bring their politicians to justice.
This really betrays a lack of understanding of the structure of the government in the US. The Constitution, for better and worse, heavily insulates the government from tempestuous public opinion. The framers were readers of greek history who understood that democracy was a condition that a republic could devolve into. They built the system to give the voters the vibes that they had a say in the workings of their government while ensuring that in reality they had no such thing.
No one pushed “you”, the most powerful empire in the world, into anything. Take responsibility for your own choices.
You used the term “us” so I’m playing along with that “us” vs. “them” state of mind.
I am not the most powerful empire in the world. It would sure be nice if I were, but unfortunately I am not.
So what exactly do you mean by my own choices? I do take responsibility for my own choices. I've done nothing that majorly supports this war.
What I have done that supports this war: 1. continue to pay taxes and otherwise participate in society. 2. voted for conservative (ie democrat) politicians that might work to oppose the con artist in chief regardless of their general support for Israel (although since we're talking about the Iran War specifically, I don't know if this actually counts)
Meanwhile I have protested, the regime in general not the war specifically. Stand out on a corner, sign, smile and wave. Most people honk in support, but once again what can they actually do? There is of course always more one can do to express opposition. But not working hard enough to oppose something is not the same as choosing to support it.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear, but by “you” I meant the United States.
My point is that the US is responsible for its actions, and can’t excuse itself by claiming to be pushed around by anyone.
I assume you understand that you're not actually talking to the United States itself with this comment, so it seems like you're trying to assert some principle of collective guilt? I'd say that's an awful lot like the tripe that's used to try and justify the genocide in Gaza, whereby every Palestinian civilian is purportedly responsible for Hamas's rockets (etc). Or to justify the rockets themselves for that matter, whereby every Israeli is purportedly responsible for their government's atrocities.
Do they have the US interests at heart? Or their own? I think the latter, almost certainly. That makes them adversarial from a game theory perspective at the very least.
I am pretty sure that the ellisons care more about US interests than israeli interests. Whether they are selfish is orthogonal to whether they are a foreign adversary. Most people are selfish.
not sure about that, really
They literally condition your employment at Oracle to you loving Israel.
A lot of citation needed. Requiring that folks shut the hell up about the current political cause célèbre while at work is not the same as requiring that they "love Israel".
"If Oracle employees don't agree with our mission to support Israel maybe we aren't the right company for them"[1].
Some "really profoundly scary technology" was provided to the Israeli military by Oracle[2].
Given they're really happy to be political[3], this isn't your average 'no politics at work'.
1 - https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3912017...
2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8yo7_Inikg
3 - https://www.ynetnews.com/tech-and-digital/article/h1w11pj11a...
> cause célèbre
“The violent genocide committed against an unjustly occupied people.”
ftfy
Literally? Care to provide a source for that?
From Responsible Statecraft: https://responsiblestatecraft.org/oracle-tiktok-israel-26741...
> An anonymous Substack, Oracle For Palestine, written by a group of Oracle employees, claims that that “our leadership’s unquestioning public support for Israel” has led to a failure of the company to address the one-sided political positions taken by top management and the discrimination faced by employees who don’t share the political views of management.
> “In response to legitimate concerns, many of us have been referred to internal mental health resources rather than having those concerns addressed appropriately,” said the group in a post last year.
From a Ctech interview with Safra Catz: https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/t05ji8sue
> For employees, it’s clear: if you’re not for America or Israel, don’t work here
It sounds like internal opposition to Israel is punished at Oracle by systemically discounting their detractors as mentally unwell. You must love Israel at Oracle to avoid this discriminatory action.
Larry Ellison is the largest private donor to the IDF in the world.
Can’t you say that about every other country?
Obviously not Canada.
I bet if you ask a few Canadians, at least some will tell you that the US is adversarial to Canada.
Yes? Maybe its ok to think that other states don't have your states interests at heart?
States have interests, not hearts.
Ok. Artichokes have hearts and no interests.
US politicians are supposed to represent their voters who elected them. A foreign state putting massive resources into a state-supported program to get them to represent the foreign state's interest instead, is obviously a foreign adversary. It doesn't get much more adverserial than that! It's a direct attack on US internal democracy.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
You've just been raised to consider this as "normal". There's nothing normal about it, and if any other new country had started doing this you'd have recognized it for what it is.
Before someone says "all countries do this" - no they don't. Scale matters, impact matters.
Israel and her children have been weaponized by the democratic West (including México and Ukraine) as an arsenal of vengeance against our perceived adversaries, but Israel and her children cannot be contained or controlled by the democratic West forever.
"Now I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds..."
You could also say that Trump and a significant portion of the Republican party were weaponized by the rest of the party and are not so easily contained or controlled now.
not my downvote btw
They're killing Americans in the West Bank, grabbing US tax payer money while laughing at how easy Americans are to manipulate, aggressively spying on all kinds of US targets incl by placing spy equipment on Secret Service vehicles during visits, spitting on Christians who visit Israel, harassing American lawmakers and diplomats, dragging the US into wars that don't serve its interests or the interests of its other partners, draining US military equipment meant to protect other assets etc. etc.
I am sure no other country could get away with the amount of shit the Israelis pull on a regular basis.
> I am sure no other country could get away with the amount of shit the Israelis pull on a regular basis.
German here. Assuming you're American, that's a rich list LOL.
> aggressively spying on all kinds of US targets incl by placing spy equipment on Secret Service vehicles during visits
The US spies on everyone, including allies as nominally close as Germany. Thanks Snowden for revealing that one. And both the US and Russia are known to use their embassies as SIGINT collection bases.
> dragging the US into wars that don't serve its interests or the interests of its other partners
The US has dragged all of NATO into the mess that Afghanistan ended up being. I might let that one slide because 9/11 was a thing, but a few years later Bush dragged a bunch of other European countries into the mess that Iraq ended up being, and just this year, Trump was pissed that we didn't want to join the fun of bombing Iraq.
> draining US military equipment meant to protect other assets
Trump gave all but zero warning about invading Iran to anyone (well he did toy with the idea, but everyone dismissed it as the usual "deranged madman" brainfarts), leading to everyone (funnily including the US) emptying their entire stockpile of anti-air missiles out of sheer necessity. Millions of dollars just to take a glorified lawnmower on wings.
Israel didn't need to drag the US into bombing Iran. Many parts of the US Republicans have wanted to bomb the Mullahs into submission for decades.
I am not American but given Germany's own role in much of what is going on in Gaza and the West Bank, the weapons shipments to Israel, (no 2 supplier after the US) and the diplomatic cover it gives to Israel, there's a lot Germany still needs to reflect on today.
Hint: The lesson was supposed to be that genocide is bad, period. Not that it's ok as long as it is some of the descendants Germany hurt doing it this time.
Bari Weiss is an American, not an Israeli. Calling American Jews “foreign adversaries” is just evil.
Their spyware is also fully integrated into CENTCOM too.
Yes. It seems to be a very domestic adversary.
They meddle in other countries politics more than Russia. They are an adversary to everyone except themselves. Explains a lot really...
Getting us into a useless war that decimates our economy isn't very allied of them. A waste of intelligent people and decades of political connections too, Trump is so easy to manipulate you don't NEED to be secretive.
You've managed to work your favorite conspiracy into this completely unrelated conversation as well! Congrats!
It’s not a conspiracy. It’s well documented and easily evident. You can start by reading The Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.
And working Israel into every conversation. What is that evidence of?
Larry Ellison owned Paramount Skydance.
He is the largest private donor to the IDF and literally vetted Marco Rubio for Israel, https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/larry-ellison-vetted-marco-ru...
tell me, is ignorance as blissful as they say it is?
are you unfamiliar with bari weiss and CBS?
John Mearsheimer is the same guy who justifies why Ukraine deserves to be occupied by Russia.
Apparently you haven't listened to his discussions on the topic. He says no such thing.
Uh Israel's influence in the US is pretty well understood by the average American now. You can put away your propaganda as it doesn't work anymore.
This is not about the jews.. this is about the billionaires taking over media. If you're going to be angry, please place your anger in the right direction and don't get all antisemetic. Elon buying X, Bezos buying washington post, ellison controlling media... They are slowly controlling the stack.
Calling out israel is not antisemitic.
You're right it's not about Jewish people; particularly in the US, but also in Europe, there are millions of Jewish people who are not Zionist, denounce the Israeli government and are great people.
That's why he said Israel. But good hasbara tactic conflating mention of Israel with "jews", keep it up.
Adversary, as in “wants the US to lose”?
Sorry, I don’t follow
Likud would't have started a war with Iran if they wanted the US to win.
I’m sorry, but I can’t help but see this view as ultra US centric. The Israeli government wanted to strike at Iran and needed a strong ally. It’s not a ploy to set a trap for the US, which is bonkers.
Here, let me rephrase it to be Israel-centric for you:
The Israeli government didn't need America to join. If they wanted to kill the ayatollah, they could do it alone. If they wanted to denuclearize Iran, every single expert affirmed that it wasn't a realistic goal, no matter how many allies they had. The net outcome of this war is extremely negative for the United States so far, and scott-free for Israel. Defense commentators had been predicting this Iran war manipulation for decades, and warned US policymakers to oppose it as far as they could. Israeli lobbyists now propose US enlistment laws, such is their need for wanton escalation under Trump: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260903-a-proposal-seeks-...
So, what was the goal? For decades, Netanyahu has used the threat of violence and war to secure his position as prime minister. He campaigned for Yitzhak Rabin's assassination, denied any incitement, and then took his place when he was killed. He's ostensibly corrupt and stands accused of manufacturing crises to enable his political support. His administration spends hundreds of millions of dollars rehabilitating his internationally reviled image. I wasn't born yesterday, you can't ambiguate Likud's history of escalation, assassination and manipulation.
What an anti semetic remark. You seem to have no issue with Saudi owning a major portion of tech, a country where lgtbq, woman’s, freedom of speech, and minority rights is not really a thing.
Being anti-Zionist and concerned about the single largest US donor to the IDF now controlling a massive chunk of American MSM is not antisemitic. I also didn't say anything about Saudi Arabia, so I don't know why you're trying to put words in my mouth there. For the record I don't think anyone should have a major position in tech, that's a huge problem.
Also, Israel is murdering women, children, lgbtq and attacking our freedom of speech (they also have murdered more journalists than any country in history and will not allow journalists into Gaza), so that's certainly a priority to address, especially since I as a US citizen am made complicit in these actions. The consent for these crimes against humanity was manufactured by the very MSM that Ellison is buying here. It's a move in the wrong direction.
You keep saying he’s donated to the IDF. Do you have any source for that? Now if you mean FIDF, that is an organization which is somewhat equivalent to the USO program. Not really “military”, in the sense that no munitions were bought.
> You keep saying he’s donated to the IDF.
I've said it once. This is the second time you've lied about what I've said in this thread. I don't feel the need to continue this conversation, but here's more background on Ellison (and other billionaires) donations to the IDF:
https://truthout.org/articles/these-billionaires-subsidize-t...
Has she driven it into the ground? Remember that the goal is not to provide entertainment or news, but to act as a politically-aligned propaganda outlet. Has it really failed to achieve that goal?
I agree that's the goal, looks like the ratings are down quite a bit though so in that sense the goal is failing:
https://www.rawstory.com/bari-weiss-60-minutes-2677864198/
A behemoth indeed but the numbers also tell an interesting story. For TV screen share, Youtube has ~13% of total US viewing time vs ~6% for Paramount/Warner. They also go into this merger with staggering debt which does not bode well.
I wonder what that % would look like for US voters over 60
I imagine that’s a segment with a declining NPV, which is generally not a good thing to finance on debt.
This would be the anti anti trust argument - that it's not studio vs studio, but it's type of screen-time vs other types of screen-time.
Was it Reed Hastings that was painting Netflix's main rival not other streaming platforms, but other types of leisure like video games? This was during the streaming wars IIRC.
Regardless of how you look at it, this is yet another confluence of IP franchises merging together, whatever juice is left in them squeezed out and reprocessed over and over over time. Kind of what Oracle is in software I guess?
Working in an adjacent entertainment IP focus business myself, my eyes are glazing over a bit at this point.
This is the same argument from when Sirius and XM radio merged. It didn't matter that they were monopolizing satellite radio because the real competition was terrestrial radio and internet radio.
Yeah, it's a rhetorical maneuver that's as old as monopoly power when you think about it.
"Actually we're really David and we need to band together against Goliath." Points at imagined external threat
The part that's wild to me is that we know that this merger extends to politics and control over media. The IP's, studios, franchises, all the actual businesses are just part of the estate. It's the Hearst Media Empire story retold again.
> Was it Reed Hastings that was painting Netflix's main rival not other streaming platforms, but other types of leisure like video games?
Yes. He always told us that we don't need to worry about the other streamers nearly as much as we have to worry about them turning off the TV and playing games or (gasp!) going outside. TikTok/Instagram Reels wasn't a thing yet, but if it were, I'm sure they would have been on the list too.
“Being an adult is staring at medium screens all day to come home and stare at a little screen while a big screen is on in the background”
https://x.com/andlikelaura/status/1392091221032460291
From my perspective YouTube has quietly won the streaming wars. It has a vastly wider variety of content, especially for non-fiction shows. In the cases where there's more direct genre competition, I tend to prefer YouTube overall because, despite its offerings being generally lower budget, they tend to represent a wider variety of "editorial voices". There's a lot of outright slop to wade through, ofc, but there's also a lot of creative risk taking out there to discover.
Meanwhile, yeah, Paramount, Time Warner, Disney, etc. have all become so money-minded and risk-averse that it reminds me of the twilight days of the old Hollywood studio system, where all the major production companies were locked into a heated battle to determine who could be the absolute blandest.
I kind of agree, and it's interesting how Nebula and Spotify (at least their video efforts) have been based on elevating and funding those ultra-budget YouTube creators. Like I watch Lindsay Ellis and Practical Engineering and SkillUp all on non-YouTube platforms now, despite YouTube being the recommendation algorithm that originally brought me there.
It's really the opposite model of the "major" streaming players who fund tentpole releases in the conventional Hollywood way, and then have a long tail of niche content (cooking reality shows and the like) that are clearly on a much tighter budget, but still basically modeled on being a cheaper version of a cable show rather than a much better funded version of a YouTube comedy troupe.
I was just listening to an interview with an up and coming playwright, and he made an interesting point that he really doesn’t like how expensive live theater has become. I guess he has been deliberately targeting super low budget not-even-off-broadway venues because he felt that a big budget stifles creativity. The more money the production stands to lose, the more pressure there is to play it safe.
That kind of describes my relationship with Nebula. There’s a lot of great stuff on there, and lately I have been watching it more than YouTube. But still, YouTube is where I tend to go when I’m looking to find something new that I genuinely haven’t seen before. I think the lower floor for production values is a big part of that.
I would definitely encourage folks to seek out community theatre where you are. Not that I don't enjoy a full on broadway-style blowout every now and then, but it's also been shocking to me how much of the difference between a $40 seat and a $150 seat is pyrotechnics and spectacle that don't really make the experience for me.
The words and the performances, the chemistry and creativity of the actors, that's the real priceless stuff.
> despite its offerings being generally lower budget, they tend to represent a wider variety of "editorial voices".
There's a huge amount of censorship with youtube though. The movies and shows on cable and streaming services can still talk about dead people without being forced to say they are "unalived". CNN can talk about a pandemic without calling it a "panini". Besides censoring specific words and phrases Youtube demonitizes entire genres of content along with anything that is "unfriendly" to advertisers. If that's the future of media in the US we're screwed.
Reed Hastings may be rich, but he is a fucking moron. By his logic the greatest threat to entertainment is people who parent without screens.
You're misinterpreting what "threat" means. And in fact he used the word "competition."
He was talking about the "incumbent" they are trying to displace. Netflix's challenge was not getting people to switch from watching Hulu to Netflix, but to get them not to sleep in order to watch Netflix.
Evil maybe, but nothing moronic about it.
But why? People not sleeping translates to negative profit and value to the company
Why would that be true?
That's not true. That's the point. It is the same thing as what Reed Hastings is saying. He thinks he is saying some deep insightful thing, and it's ridiculous. It's 200% wrong.
You all seem extremely confused about this statement. Go see it in context lol.
> Regardless of how you look at it, this is yet another confluence of IP franchises merging together, whatever juice is left in them squeezed out and reprocessed over and over over time. Kind of what Oracle is in software I guess?
Cantrill tried to, as diplomatically as possible, warn everyone.
Nobody listened.
> Was it Reed Hastings that was painting Netflix's main rival not other streaming platforms, but other types of leisure like video games? This was during the streaming wars IIRC.
Yea, and spending time with your friends and family, meeting new people, sleeping...
From [1]:
> “Think about if you didn’t watch Netflix last night: What did you do? There’s such a broad range of things that you did to relax and unwind, hang out, and connect—and we compete with all of that.”
When I read that interview, I became a lot more cautious of using Netflix and other streaming platforms, knowing their design is adversarial to my values (I want to be deliberate about what I watch, not be manipulated into mindless consumption).
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/40491939/netflix-ceo-reed-hastin...
Why do they even want you watching? Once the fee is paid isn’t it better you don’t watch kind of like the gym?
They need to keep you watching to a certain extent, otherwise you'd eventually question why you're subscribed in the first place.
youtube has slowly become like 90% of my TV time over the past few years, I think it's the fact that you don't have to commit to watching 40+ minutes of something every time and there's just way too much interesting content on it
and i'm not even someone you'd class as young anymore, so I don't think this is a younger generation thing
I'm in the opposite camp. I find Youtube exhausting, and it keeps getting worse and worse.
Their ads are terrible. And since I watch via a device like Roku, etc, I have to put up with them. I've actively removed them from my devices. Occasionally, I feel like looking up some video. I install it, and often before I even watch the video I uninstall it because the awful UI reminds me of all the other awful stuff in it.
Curation doesn't exist. I have to work hard to find good content. Harder than any video service out there.
And shorts. Oh. Dear. God.
For some very targeted stuff (home repairs, video game walkthroughs), it's great. For the rest, it just sucks.
If you have the ads turned off, it's a lot nicer. I got that with some family bundle for more Drive space.
Let me put it this way.
Youtube without ads is still worse than pretty much all the major streaming services with ads.
I don't want to pay for that.
>Youtube without ads is still worse than pretty much all the major streaming services with ads.
Depends on what you watch, as always. my YT feed is a mix of news, random gaming content, documentaries on a variety of topics, and odd little tech trivia. It covers all the bases at once.
Any other streaming service is simply "okay, maybe there's 1-2 shows on here I want to watch". Then I just pluck it onto my NAS and move about on my day. Why would I pay for a streaming service that struggles to even keep the few shows I like on there running past 1-2 seasons?
Nebula is the only other service I ever considered paying for. It's not a "Youtube killer" and misses out on a lot of the odd trivia sides of YT, but it overally feels more fleshed out on content than Netflix".
> Any other streaming service is simply "okay, maybe there's 1-2 shows on here I want to watch".
If there's even 1 show I want to watch, it's great to watch it. The problem with Youtube is even when they have stuff I want to watch, it's a pain to watch it. Their UI is atrocious!
> Why would I pay for a streaming service that struggles to even keep the few shows I like on there running past 1-2 seasons?
You just unsubscribe at that point.
Know how much stuff I had bookmarked on Youtube that is no longer available? A whole damn lot.
Maybe I'm missing something, but every video service Ui feels the same these days. Grid of videos with some loose sorting, click to play/pause, seek controls. I wouldn't call any of them good/bad on UI alone.
Or just watch Youtube on a laptop, and install an ad blocker.
Depends on the personality. Do you watch movies on a laptop?
For me, the big screen and ambience play a big role.
For the big screen, I have another tiny PC and a wireless keyboard.
HDMI cables are cheap. The best roku is a 30ft HDMI cable.
Actually I've used the steam deck in this role a bunch, works great.
Of all of the various online services, YouTube is the one where I feel I get the most value in return for paying for premium. 90% of my video and music consumption is through YouTube, and it's all ad-free. (Well, except that so much of hobby YouTube is implicitly all ad because the video is about some piece of hobby gear, but that's sort of the nature of the beast.)
I've never watched a YouTube short.
My recommendations are all very well aligned with my interests. The trick here is to go through your watch history and delete things that are leading the recommendation algorithm astray. I am ruthless about that.
> 90% of my video and music consumption is through YouTube, and it's all ad-free.
If it works for you, great! Most video I watch is in the form of TV shows and movies. And Youtube sucks for that. Youtube is great for some hobby stuff. I used to like it for reviews, but even that sucks now - when I do a search I'm inundated with low effort reviews (i.e. by people who haven't used the product they're reviewing).
But if there's a creator you really like and follow, I can understand that.
> I've never watched a YouTube short.
Don't you think they should give you an option not to present them to you, given that you don't watch them?
> My recommendations are all very well aligned with my interests. The trick here is to go through your watch history and delete things that are leading the recommendation algorithm astray. I am ruthless about that.
I don't want to pay money and then have to do this. This is a pain I don't have to deal with in any other service.
> Don't you think they should give you an option not to present them to you, given that you don't watch them?
Yes, I certainly do! The fact that YouTube still tries to get me to watch Shorts every few weeks is 100% a user-hostile choice. Seems like basically every app these days does that kind of shit. It makes me sad, but it's pretty clearly in the set of things I can't change, so I try to just be mindful of the serenity prayer and accept it.
There are a few ways to disable/hide shorts. One day I said to a friend, “man I wish I could block these things, they’re insulting to my intelligence and just encourage clicking around” and my friend said “I’ve been blocking them for a while, just do this.” And while I can’t remember what “this” was, it’s worth a quick google.
Shorts are like the video equivalent of snacking on Doritos all day long.
I know how to disable them on my PC. How do I disable them on Roku?
> Their ads are terrible.
I imagine they are that's why I pay for YT Premium, which I think is my most bang for buck subscription based on the amount of time I spend watching it
> Curation doesn't exist.
I don't find this a problem personally because 95% of my feed is just channels I'm subscribed to but YMMV depends on what you expect out of it
I watch Youtube on a Chromecast using the SmartTube app, which is a 3rd party front-end (side-loaded APK) for Youtube that eliminates all the ads, and lets you configure practically everything. Don't like "shorts", just disable them and they are gone. That's the main reason I sought out an alternative to the Youtube app, I hated the shorts and there was no way to get rid of them in the Youtube app.
I used to pay for a Youtube subscription to get rid of the ads, but that doesn't include the in-video ads that content creators put in there - but SmartTube has that covered too, in most videos I watch the in-video ads are skipped too. I have 5 chromecasts on the 5 TVs around my house, and every one of them has SmartTube installed. I wouldn't want to watch Youtube without it.
https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube/releases
Are you watching YouTubeTV, or just independent-ish creator YouTube?
I watch probably an hour of YouTube a week and would watch more if I could find anything good.
My favorite TV of the past five years is probably Severance. Is there anything of that caliber on YouTube? One of the best movies I saw last year was on Netflix (Train Dreams). Are there great movies on YouTube?
I’d love to year about some of your favorite stuff on YouTube.
independent-ish creators (I'm aware that a lot of channels seem to be bought out by private equity lately), but mostly science, technology, speedrunning, mysteries, recipe guides, things like that, basically stuff that I'm interested in
Oh nice. I never thought of looking for recipes on YouTube before.
How much work do you put into curating your feed? Mine is terrible. For example, I’ll watch a video on how to fix my dishwasher and suddenly it thinks I want to fix all dishwashers.
There is some good content, but sadly the bulk of youtube now is someone sitting in a room reading an AI script for 30 minutes covering 2 minutes of content.
> you don't have to commit to watching 40+ minutes of something
This is funny because I have stopped clicking YouTube links for the simple reason that every video seems to be 45+ minutes. Which I get is based on how monetization works on YouTube.
Like Old Twitter, short-form video is a forcing function with value in forcing posters to get to the point. (I have never seen a YouTube Shorts or whatever link in the wild.)
X (Formerly Twitter) (The everything app) does have a huge issue with long drawn on tweets now. Not to mention people who try and bait people in with intentionally cutting things off.
Alone, their annual streaming revenue was something like $10 billion each compared to Netflix/YouTube at $50-$60 billion each, so they're lagging (eg radio vs TV).
It's never been a better time to start consuming less. Let's drive that demand way, way down.
Can this be undone in the future if folks realize it was too monopolistic and it was in fact an anti-trust violation?
I wonder if David Ellison is a fun guy IRL.
He has a nice yacht, I bet it's fun on the yacht.
Seems to me that these companies will say pretty much whatever during the merger process, and as long as there's no concrete repercussions written down somewhere, just do whatever since it's much harder to break a company apart than it is to block a merger.
The pre-merger settlement approved by the current supreme court was that Skydance would: (1) Agree to production quota of 30 movies per year, (2) Domestic spending commitments, and (3) Separate cable package negotiations.
Assets: TNT, CBS, CNN, MTV, TCM, Showtime, Adult Swim, DC Studios, Paramount+, Nickelodeon, HBO/HBO Max, Comedy Central, Cartoon Network
Film Rights: Star Trek, Gremlins, Beetlejuice, DC Comics, Tom & Jerry, Harry Potter, Citizen Kane, Transformers, A Quiet Place, Looney Tunes, The Conjuring, Mortal Kombat, Game of Thrones, Dora The Explorer, Mission Impossible, The Lord of the Rings, SpongeBob SquarePants, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Dune 3, Minecraft, MonsterVerse
Remember that Citizen Kane is the movie about a media tycoon who buys everything he can and ends up alone in a mansion full of stuff.
Nothing on that list should have lived this long.
As a Trekkie, I'm offended.
Then you are too invested for your own good.
Do Trekkies not crave novelty?
You have to cling to some beacon of hope in a world that decided future is dead and proceeded to drown itself in its own dystopia fetishism.
I thought Trek had turned from hope to dystopia with the release of Picard.
Or did we decide that isn't canon?
Went better with S3.
(Within context of larger canon, I take S2 as a cautionary tale about what happens if humanity is allowed to retain an identity of an independent polity on the interstellar stage. Federation's biggest benefit for the galaxy turns out to be keeping humans contained and putting their energy and creativity into more useful pursuits than asserting independence on other people's territory.)
But let's not forget that Lower Decks and SNW corrected hard on earier NuTrek transgressions against the utopian future.
As a Star Trek fan, I agree with gp.
I would say Mortal Kombat slaps but it commits a lot more violence than that.
So you’re saying this opens up the possibility of some wild crossover media stories. Star Trek exploring new worlds that also include krypton, cybertron, and the game of thrones world. Oh Dune too. And maybe do the time travel thing to see a Lord of the Rings middle earth. And have Dora graduate to captain of a star ship (or explore the sea and encounter SpongeBob and Aquaman). Batman can team up with the Mission Impossible crew to solve a mystery. Ninja turtles in a mortal kombat? Wonder Woman in Westeros with Harry Potter?
Maybe a Sora descendant will allow user-directed content to emerge.
> Star Trek exploring new worlds that also include krypton, cybertron, and the game of thrones world. Oh Dune too. And maybe do the time travel thing to see a Lord of the Rings middle earth.
Sadly that isn’t far removed from the novelty “Strange New Worlds” series they recently released. What a mess season 4 was. :(
I've heard that Strange New Worlds was the best of Nu-Trek, so that's disheartening. Star Trek seems to have lost its way from the start of Enterprise (the prequel series) onward.
Strange New Worlds started off strong, so I’d definitely recommend it. But it lost its way in the later series.
Lower Decks was a reverse of that. Took a while to find itself but finished strong. I’d also highly recommend Lower Decks, albeit you need to watch it thinking of it as a beta-cannon type show (ie set in the ST universe but not itself a ST show).
Nothing of the sort would ever happen. They would be insane to risk the integrity of their IPs by doing something so ridiculous.
That said, as snowflakey as Star Trek fans are, I would love to see their reaction to Dora the Explorer ordering Batman to launch photon torpedos at Unicron. They'd probably complain about "yet another DEI captain."
> They would be insane to risk the integrity of their IPs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman_vs._Teenage_Mutant_Ninj...
>Maybe a Sora descendant will allow user-directed content to emerge.
Sora didn't die because UGC social media doesn't work. Sora died because UGC social media would just be reposted to Tiktok.
These new tech companies are still too obsessed with 2000's/2010's versions of monetization. sell it as a service on a subscription (with some free tier rate throttling) focused on content creators (who will make the money back by posting) and it would have at least lasted longer.
Please enjoy this SlopGen Fantasy Skydance Kingdom.
https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6ac56dbab5448191866eb7c80c31c025
> 1) Agree to production quota of 30 movies per year,
Why? Does the population need movies? Who does this even benefit?
> (2) Domestic spending commitments, and
Never heard of Hollywood accounting? They have mastery of exploiting loopholes.
> (3) Separate cable package negotiations.
What's "cable"? Is that the 1900's alternative to putting up a TV antenna?
If the Trumps get their cut, you're golden.
> Can this be undone in the future if folks realize it was too monopolistic and it was in fact an anti-trust violation?
I predict the democrats winning, shoving it all under that table and pushing for "reconciliation" and "moving forward" while continuing the rotten status quo that got Trump elected in the first place. Maybe a few token prosecutions of low level wage workers involved.
An extra sprinkle of race-baiting and you’d have the Obama-era Occupy Wall St special.
Please expand on this. I always find these sorts of comments to be illuminating in one way or the other.
Circa 2008, into 2010, you had the Democrats running on holding Wall St accountable and a genuine class movement to reform capital in the US, Occupy Wall St.
Obama et al instead tore open old racial wounds, thereby destroying class solidarity in exchange for Wall St promoting their ideology, thereby creating “Woke”.
This was the origin of the Obama -> Bernie -> Trump cohort, who helped bring Trump into power a decade later.
Is there some deeper analysis you can link, right now it is really, really hard to assume good faith.
I’m genuinely curious:
Which part are you struggling to take as in good faith?
I’m sure it’s not your preferred narrative of the times, but we both knew that before I answered; so what is it that strikes you as in bad faith rather than my genuine interpretation of events?
I'm struggling to follow. The typical Obama was divisive/made race and issue has actually been a right wing dog whistle for "he is black and I don't like that."
>Obama et al instead tore open old racial wounds
Ah yes, we all remember how America had no racism or anything like that before 2008.
Just like the emancipation proclamation solved slavery, racism was solved in the 60s. We definitely don't have (literally the same) people running around being rather transparent in their moronic racism all the time.
How dare Obama talk about a problem that affects 30% of the country continuously.
IMO, a better solution for the broadcast media part of this is to delegate content regulation to the states when the signal from a tv/radio station is entirely within one state (and some kind of join regulation when it spans >1).
Concentrating so much power in the federal government is problematic, and unnecessary.
I don't see it as a great idea to divide how content within a country is presented into 50 pieces based on whatever ideology that state's leadership has at that time.
Besides, that does nothing to address this mega-merger.
It’s lower risk than allowing one lunatic to do it.
serious question how could you possible argue this is monopolistic when Disney, Netflix, and Youtube exist. It doesn't pass the barest level of scrutiny.
Monopoly is the wrong word, but it has a close cousin, “anticompetitive”. For free market people one of the major role of the government is maintaining competition and avoiding collusion, combining to competitors is straightforward collusion.
Should we wonder if Goebbels was a fun guy irl? I don't get it.
Are you seriously making that comparison?
Should we compare Ellison to a lawnmower instead, as bcantrill so eloquently did?
Never make the mistake of anthropomorphizing David Ellison.
Is that a reference? If so, I’m not familiar with it
Yes. Ellison was called a sociopath by Oracle employees a long time ago, and most of Oracle's customers seem to agree. Hence the quote:
> Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think "oh, the lawnmower hates me" – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2308s
He's literally the media arm of a genocidal state, what do you want?
You’re misusing the word “literally”
He's literally buying up american media to make them the arm of a genocidal state, so no, I am literally not.
i bet warner bros has made an absolute ton of goebbels inspired scenes.
goebbels is the movie influence of hollywood. its appropriate regardless
I learned from working with some that psychopaths are a lot of fun going for a drink after work, but at work they make your life a misery.
There wouldn't be a clear "undo" button after years of joint operation. A future administration could in principle order the Time Warner assets to be spun back off, but realistically that'd be a huge headache, and I'd rather they spend their time and political capital imprisoning everyone who negotiated the deal.
How long until the US just has The Media Company that controls nearly all high-budget mass media and film industries in that country?
Is that even a risk? There's still Disney, Comcast, Sony, Netflix, Amazon, Apple...
The tech companies may not merge until way later, but I can imagine the legacy media conglomerates buying up one another.
not a fan of CNN, but a very right leaning person is the owner of CNN now. pre-dictatorship vibes!!
I don’t follow the sentiment.
Right wing people have repeatedly captured and destroyed journalism outlets they deem undesirable. Not that I’m saying CNN is any good.
Ah yes, but Larry Ellison is Jewish.
Literally the only difference between him and the rest of the wannabe media barons, but you could fart the word “Israel” with your armpit and get upvotes these days.
More importantly he's a zionist and put bari Weiss in charge. It's pretty clear what they want to do.
Well no, the difference is that this merger is in favor with the current administration which has engaged in a broad and pervasive pattern of authoritarian behaviors while being in lock-step with Israel's interests.
This merger is only happening because the deal that the seller actually preferred (Netflix buying them) was unlikely to be approved by regulators. The President literally came out right after the deal was approved and said "it could be a problem" and "I would have a say" in whether it went through.
In fact the very existence of Paramount Skydance itself, as a merged entity, appears to have been contingent upon Paramount modifying its own HR policies, placing a government ombudsman at their marquee journalistic outlet (CBS), and paying $16 million to Trump's "presidential library fund."
I'm not arguing any of that, obviously this all reeks of corruption and cronyism as almost everything in this admin does.
But that's not what people were focusing on here, it's a lot of "Practically Likud" and the increasingly uncomfortable dog whistle "Zionist".
If the correct label for a person's beliefs is "an increasingly uncomfortable dog whistle" umm... maybe the label isn't the problem...
When your label applies to 95% of an ethnicity maybe you’re just a bigot hiding behind a cause.
There are more American evangelicals who are Zionists than there are Jews in the entire world bro.
A weird cult existing doesn’t change tbat “Zionism” remain overwhelmingly popular among Jews. Granted since the term has been demonized and represented as something heinous this is the result: https://www.jewishdatabank.org/api/download/?studyId=1277&me...
So 90% believe that Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state, but they aren’t stupid and it’s obvious to anyone with a brain that “Zionist” has become a kind of slur in the hands of so many.
It really isn’t hard to understand, it’s just convenient for people to hide behind. You meet a white nationalist and they don’t open with a Hitlergrusse, they talk about “preserving the family” or “13/50” and so on. You didn’t invent this shit.
Well hold on now… you’re upset about people using a term that accurately and precisely describes a set of beliefs… that the believes of those beliefs readily label themselves as…
And then you’re calling 50-120 million Americans “a weird cult”?
Are you a parody? I’m honestly baffled.
And by the way, it’s hilarious to claim that Ellison being Jewish (is he? I honestly have no idea) or Zionism would be “literally the only thing unique about him” compared to the rest of the media barons. Not only is there a lot of other stuff that’s unique about him/his company, as I’ve articulated, but also his Zionist beliefs aren’t unique whatsoever among his peers!
You truly live in a hall of mirrors.
Zionist is a slur, and not only is Ellison uniquely a Zionist, but it’s in fact the only unique thing about him and his company. Totally insane shit.
People who believe in an imminent “end times” are in a cult, I don’t care if the religion is ancient or brand new. “We have to prepare the world for Armageddon, and that can only happen when the Jews return to Israel,” is a batshit thing to believe.
Never mind their overall impact on American policy and politics.
But someone’s belief that their special book gives them a special right to a special plot of land is in fact so special that it can’t even be labeled with its own name…?
Yeah they’re all fucking crazy people.
Calling evangelicals evangelicals is fine. Calling zionists Zionists is fine.
Both terms have besmirched connotations because both belief systems are besmirched. Simple as that.
Zionism isn’t religious for a large number of Jews, it’s just a practical response to centuries of pogroms and genocide. Stellar wordplay though, very much how I expect sincere people to act when pressed on the reality of how the cause they claim to care about has been hijacked by bigots.
Best of luck to you.
>Zionism isn’t religious for a large number of Jews, it’s just a practical response to centuries of pogroms and genocide
And the response is to do your own to another people? Great.
If it’s a practical response then where does the “right” originate from?
I’m beyond reproach if my practical response to needing a bathroom is to break into your home and defecate in your toilet?
but uhh, zionism is the same idea as white nationalism.
a jewish state is the same in concept as a white state - a place where the non-white or non-jews are second class citizens, and really, should be removed because they have no place in the state.
even if 90% of white people believed in a white nationalist state, white nationalism would still be bad on its own merrits. its not racist to be against ethnostates, regardless of whos ethnostate it is
Great rant, but there’s a flaw in your otherwise deeply informed and informative analysis.
21% of Israeli CITIZENS… with full voting rights and legal protections, are Arabs. They’re no less citizens of Israel than black Americans are of the US, and yeah that comes with some measure of mutual ethnic and religious tension… it is the Middle East. That’s not the same as a white “utopia” or the usual South Africa comparison.
A lot of the talk around this is layered bad faith, misinformation, and outright bullshit that’s accepted simply because it’s convenient to do so. After all if you believe that shit you can feel justified in your enmity towards a whole people in the name of justice.
By the way how many Jews are citizens of Arab majority nations? How many even live there? Did they live there at one point and did they all magically leave or was there a huge explosion? Just some food for thought.
Students of history have noticed an inconvenient truth that Western Europe nations were sort of unanimous in systematically converting, suppressing, and expelling Jews over several centuries. Those students, born in Allied nations since WWII, somehow unquestioningly accept that antisemitism is a cardinal sin, and we conclude that all those kings and princesses and rulers must have been wrong and bad and very evil people for enacting such policies.
Russia was historically particularly vicious against the Kievan Rus', and Jews were prohibited from even living in the capital city. The term "beyond the Pale" applied in Ukraine as much as it applied to UK-occupied Ireland. But today on television, we have a pretty and delicate blonde empress making a totes adorbs farce of Catherine the Great's bloody legacy.
The democratic West is now a guaranteed safe haven for Eastern Bloc dissidents and refugees, with open arms and blank checks.
Arab Muslims and Israelis need to get along now, because there's a significant mosque dropped on top of Temple Mount, and they're our last best hope for something. And "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". For now.
That’s the thing, increasingly they do get along. One of the major reasons that Hamas pulled the trigger on October 7 was to make sure that accords between KSA and Israel didn’t proceed. One after another countries in the region have made peace with Israel and vice versa, with notable exceptions that aren’t at peace with anyone.
There's only 21% because of the nakba, which was done in part because the ideals of democracy was incongruous with the ethnical composition of the land.
If it makes you uncomfortable, then your subconscious mind is trying to tell you something.
It makes me uncomfortable when people refer to black people as “thugs” with a wink and a nod as well. You aren’t clever for using dog whistles, it’s been a notable feature of antisemitism to “play with words” as Sartre put it.
Still if I’m to consult my subconscious… it tells me that a lot of people use causes and movements to justify the sort of bullying, hateful, trend-chasing behavior they always displayed all along. It’s when people feel they have free license to let go that you learn more about THEM.
Don't think about CNN specifically, but rather about one more cable news network lurching to the right & the diversity of viewpoints being reported being decreased. Ellison's effect on CBS News is clear.
Where "right" means specifically "Likud"
He's donated to and voted for candidates of both parties, and claims to be a centrist.
"Centrist" in a grassroots political perspective means one sees merit in the values generally (purportedly) held by both tribes. "Centrist" for an oligarch just means they place bets on both horses.
Yes! What the consumer needs! Less competition! Hurrah!
Sorry for the sarcasm.
Less regulation means more innovation!
I will believe this internet comment. Thanks!
It is in your best interest. All this innovation is sure to mean better quality of life for the average person, and not at all a widening of the income gap.
First it was Time in 1990, then AOL then AT&T then Discovery and now this. That's 5 owners since 90 for Warner Brothers and none of those really worked out well. I don't know enough to know if this stands a better chance, but if I was going to bet, I'd bet Warner has a new owner before 2030.
This is the first time they are being bought by another company that makes content. Every other purchase was to add content creation to an existing company. So maybe there is chance.
But probably not with Ellison in charge. He'll probably just drive both companies into the ground.
Are they being bought by another company that makes content? Seems like the money is coming from Larry Ellison, whose main business is Oracle. Or the Saudis. Either way, neither Skydance not Paramount’s core businesses perform well enough to get this deal done.
At least it drains a few hundred billion dollars from the Ellisons.
I'm reading in most news sources that this merger is just wonderful and will benefit my life greatly
So what does this mean? Superman vs. the Transformers?
I'm not sure I was interested in either company by themselves—less likely to be interested in the merged one.
That sounds awesome.
Seems fine. There are more options for entertainment than ever. Often these mergers don't work out anyway.
how exactly do they "not work out"? its two behemoths merging for the sake of more money
ATT shareholders lost $50B on Time Warner. And ATT lost $15B at least on DirecTV. Comcast is desperately trying to get rid of NBC Universal.
I would bet Ellison loses on this merger too. No one under the age of 60 cares about these legacy media companies to justify tens of billions of dollar valuations. At best, professional media studios are just an add on business for companies like Amazon and Apple and Disney and Sony, with Netflix being the outlier.
the concern isn't about entertainment, it's control of TV news networks
You have to admit that David Ellison is extremely talented at being born to one of the wealthiest people in human history.
he worked pretty hard for that
So when do they raise prices and start laying folks off?
They already acknowledged layoffs so likely within 30 days the cull list will be presented to senior leadership.
Their debt load is enormous due to how quickly debt costs have risen from M&A talks to issuing the debt.
https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/skydance-credit-rating-down...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-01/paramount... | https://archive.today/SEtX9
I'm sure they'll figure that out.
Or maybe "because it makes business sense" wasn't the point of it?
Seems more like an ideological project than good business.
Do we really need two Ellisons?
Do we even need one?
Its so weird how these layoffs somehow targeted every left wing news organization or show. We just cant be certain how that happened. oh well
so does this mean i get paramount plus for free with my hbo?
It means they are going to raise prices for both platforms because they can.
And then everything else will follow suit. Not that they haven't already been doing just that.
Plus ads. And biographies of Trump's kids.
Everybody just stop subscribing and do something else and pirate the shit out of their content.
Already unsubscribed when the news broke about a possible merger. I think I'm down to just youtube premium and Dropout now.
If it makes them more money
Free? I don’t think a monopoly knows the meaning of that word
It means that Paramount Plus is saddled with debt, and HBO is saddled with debt. And that someone needs to pay off that debt.
They'll merge everything into some Skydance+ app, place ads in the basic tier with 720p, you'll get 1080p with ads for the price of Netflix (probably because of the "premium" HBO content) and then some insane subscription for the full 4K catalogue.
Interesting numerology behind the $111B figure.
Who else is mourning the end of Star Trek?
IMO Star Trek is mostly dead anyways. The Orville was the best Star Trek in a very long time. Strange Worlds started so strong but season 3 and 4 really took a nose five r
I've found season 4 of SNW to be the best Star Trek in the 21st century. Can you share what you enjoyed more in its earlier seasons?
DSC and Picard were long slogs in the spirit of "grit" and "realism." SNW having fun, switching up the mood every episode, and telling stories is a breath of fresh air. Strange New Episodes! The Henson Studio collaboration was amazing. Since Netflix canned Dark Crystal, I've been missing my weird muppets traveling across time and space.
Both LD and SNW managed to get less of that Kurtzman stink compared to Academy, DSC, or the movie which shall never be named. I hope they'll let the franchise mellow until they find new direction. (And a new owner.)
* Lower Decks is the truest Trek to ever Trek, but I know that's asinine so I saved my opinion for the footnote.
* ENT was off to a good start, but the 9/11-ification of TV took it off course.
I have a hard time saying Lower Decks is my favorite Star Trek show, but it really kind of is.
I didn't like DSC and most of Picard either, just like you because it was too gritty. Although it certainly helped that TNG is by faaar my favorite of the Treks.
I liked that season 1 and 2 of SNW felt like the stakes were lower and there were fewer gimmicky episodes. The muppet episode for me for example was a huge negative. So was the fake documentary, the Event Horizon remake and of course the double episode where they were fighting manifested evil which to be couldn't be further from the Trek spirit.
> Although it certainly helped that TNG is by faaar my favorite of the Treks.
The final season of Picard was pure fan service AND I LOVED EVERY MOMENT OF IT! Even when I'm critical of Trek, I'm still there and trying to enjoy. Thank you for sharing.
Hard disagree.
Fun fact: Skydance was originally started as a vehicle to buy David Ellison an acting career [1], which spent $60M on Fly Boys. It grossed $17M. There's a very real "failed in Hollywood to alt-right" pipeline, actually.
The truth is that Hollywood was already dying and it had been systematically dismantled by short-term profit seeking. It dismantled the system that created hugely valuable properties like Friends, Cheers, ER, Seinfeld, etc where 22 episodes were created every year to a system where streamers could cut out having to pay for syndication by creating 8 episodes every 3-4 years.
You see a lot of stars of shows having podcasts now from shows that ended years or even decades ago (The Office, The Sopranos). In a healthy ecosystem, successful actors would be working actors.
You see productions chase tax rebates all across North America such as Georgia and Canada where once productions were typically based in LA and that had a ton of ecosystem benefits. As soon as the tax rebates go, so do the productions.
Gavin Newsom clearly isn't serious about becoming president because approving this merger is going to lead to even more layoffs and fewer productions. It's going to be deeply unpopular in California. For good reason.
So what's core to all this (IMHO) is... housing. Housing is an input cost to everything in that locations. LA used to be relatively cheap. It had a mix of housing types from single family homes to mansions to budget apartments so Ho actors, writers, etc could reasonably start out.
And then with declining demand as productions spread out and less pilots and shows were being made overall, the industry has become dominated by nepo babies.
I actually think that in future centuries when history is written about the turning point for American empire, it'll be the downfall of Hollywood. You cannot overstate the value the US had to export culture to the entire world with Hollywood.
[1]: https://brobible.com/culture/article/david-ellison-tried-to-...
>Fun fact: Skydance was originally started as a vehicle to buy David Ellison an acting career
Damn, I wish my daddy was a multi-billionaire and fund my hobbies with 8 figures.
>So what's core to all this (IMHO) is... housing.
The Backrooms and Obsession were made by youtubers with shoestring budgets.
The core is Hollywood hasn't made any new innovative and memorable IPs to convince people to spend money watching them in over a decade. People aren't gonna go to the cinema to watch a crappy new sequel/reboot of the Terminator or the Matrix when they can watch the better originals they already have at home on DVD for free as many times they want.
>the industry has become dominated by nepo babies
More like it's been dominated by accountants and nepo-babies cosplaying as socialist political activists to score brownie points with the public but with zero talent to create something good worth watching. "Evil cannot create anything new it can only corrupt and ruin what good forces have invented or made"
The Backrooms and Obsession also aren't your typical Hollywood productions. Heck, they got all the Hollywood producers browning their pants instead.
If it's innovative it's not Hollywood, so we can conclude that Hollywood isn't innovative?
I don't get how anyone views this as a monopoly? As a media company, they provide entertainment. It's hard to argue that if the quality of entertainment slips, people are forced to continue consuming the entertainment. There are already SOOO many alternatives; everyone and their mothers are starting up their own paid streaming services (Nebula, etc...) and anyone can start a YouTube channel and get millions of viewers if they have good content. (And don't offend the YouTube overlords)
If we want to talk about monopolies, let's talk about YouTube. That's a far larger gatekeeper, and they have a proven track record of shutting people out for breaking their random rules, with little oversight.
How much did the Gulf states pledge towards this?
Saudis, Abu Dhabi and Qatar put in 24B and own 38.5% of the company.
CNN will become another Fox News, leaving The New York Times as the last remaining bastion of independent reporting on what the current administration is doing.
Associated Press?
I was worried about this at first, but it probably doesn't make business sense to try and pivot CNN's slant that way. It would alienate its current audience and damage its brand. I can't imagine many Fox News enjoyers wanting to watch CNN even if it shifts its slant more right. So what would the target audience be?
I suppose if they did it gradually enough, they could potentially normalize more right leaning viewpoints to its audience without them noticing.
Try to square Bari Weiss’ continued presence with a want for CBS to do well. Expect similar treatment for CNN.
So they’ve committed to for example releasing 30-32 movies a year for the next five years [1] but after that, no promises. Good thing mergers are famously temporary and we never need to worry about the next 10 years! Oh wait…
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/09/25/paramount-hollywood-prom...
T-Mobile raised a lot of plan prices exactly 5 years after their merger with Sprint.
Apparently the Force Majeure section of the deal is very weak, so if there's the slightest upset, they get out of that.
Say goodbye to Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
When do we get Bugs Bunny on the Enterprise ?
I'm not even mad. Let's do it. With Marvin the Martian.
They had a Lower Decks cartoon crossover already, so they can't even deny the possibility now.
That would be less immersion breaking then some of the recent Strange New World episodes.
> Editorial Independence Board” for CBS News and CNN. The board’s members would be chosen by Skydance and report to the company’s board of directors.
stupid shit like this is why people - younger people - end up yearning for failed communist / socialist policies. because after all there's no accountability in the system.
the system has failed them. it has failed to be impartial. to hold elite greed at bay.
laws are broken daily, the judiciary is captured. what a tragedy.
So they see one failed system and reach for another. Maybe the systems are the problem?
Holy shit. Hacker news going crazy with bots. Who woulda guessed this
Another nail in Americas coffin.
It's yet another oligarchy centralization play. I assume more to come.
Good. Time for someone else to have a go.
Let's hope that the fears of new owners being rightwing are correct so we can finally see The Censored Eleven in their full glory.
The most significant thing here is not just the inevitable loss of jobs and the adverse effects of conglomeration/monopolies, but that the most historically filmmaker/artist-friendly studio is now co-owned by MAGA billionaires and the Saudis, direct opponents to democracy.
In 1 or 2 years AI movies will be better in everything. From acting , to camera work to environments to story telling. Check out the quality of some of work already out there. There is a massive shift going on. China is going full speed mode. The film industry will be reshaped. Warner Bros should have used those billions to purchase products like seadance. Otherwise they are out
Some of you are outright hostile towards art and it's gross.
To be fair to art, commercial movie theaters are increasingly comparable to theme parks.
art has been outright hostile to those not born with rich parents that can fund artseeking.
Where did art hurt you?
We in this community don't exactly fit the "tragic failed artist" archetype that well. Heck, I'm sure many of us can in fact fun artseeking now after a some 10-20+ years in the tech industry.
Instead some individuals choose to root on the end of the artist.
Ai is the ultimate form of art made by humans.
** Professor Farnsworth saying "I don't want to live on this planet anymore" meme **
So all TV is going to be republican propaganda now. Cool from some perspectives, horrible from the other 9 out of 10 situations.
From what I see on r/stablediffusion, Hollywood has maybe 2 years left, in the optimistic case.
Even if it gets good enough, you're forgetting about everything else that goes into movie making and distribution. Hollywood will keep their hold on media, they just might use AI to increase profits even higher.
But why Hollywood?
i am extremely wary of making any predictions about ai, given what's happened in the last year, but i would put good money on hollywood being around in 2 years. there's much more to the movie industry than slapping some video together.
r/stablediffusion seems to be a bit disconnected from reality, to put it nicely.
ehhhh i dunno about that. the stuff i've seen from people, and watched looks much better than most crap hollywood puts out anymore
to reiterate: there is more to the movie industry than putting a video together
Please post a link to some of this "stuff". I'm begging you.
But nobody will pay for that
The vibe I get is like when the Meta VR app store product launched, and there was huge promises and optimism about all the amazing apps and experiences, but when you bought it and actually tried, it was a few juiced up flagship things and a bunch of shovelware.
I'll pass on slop stories and the quality of the visuals won't change that.
im seeing a lot more focus on emotions/emotional acting - its incredible. maybe 3 years and most likely from china.
Can we point to a single good piece of longform content from AI before trying to tick a clock on when Hollywood as a whole will end?
I've seen plenty of negative (and legitimate) sentiment around this merger but I'm cautiously optimistic that David Ellison, being half the age of anyone else with greenlight authority, will do something different/better.
His running of Skydance says otherwise. The most formulaic and bland film studio there is.
Skydance/Paramount has had plenty of success attracting young audiences via UFC & gaming partnerships, so I'm not sure that's a counterpoint. Re forumulaic/bland that's a personal taste thing and not worth arguing.
The key contributor to Hollywood's waning influence is the generation gap; it's a cultural institution that is supposed to be culturally salient. Take the Mandalorian movie as an example; the biggest studio using the biggest IP to spend $300M on a movie... which lost $100M. That movie was competing at the box office at the same time with Obsession, which was made for $750k by a young Youtuber has made over half a billion worldwide.
As of today Ellison has an extraordinary amount of greenlight authority in an industry whose decision-makers are overwhelmingly a generation older. He can shake things up if he wants to, and I hope he does.
> As of today Ellison has an extraordinary amount of greenlight authority in an industry whose decision-makers are overwhelmingly a generation older.
Who do you think he has more in common with? An average consumer his own age, or adult members of any age from the elite class that hes likely spent most of his time around?
False dichotomy. He obviously has materially different generational priors.
Being formulaic and bland is an important aspect of expecting someone to “do something different” or “shake things up”. If the owner of a film studio has so much green light power but the studio has primarily produced film following a single formula, which the audiences have grown bored with (hence bland), then how can there be an expectation of that owner suddenly doing something different simply because they bought another studio?
there was a mandalorian movie?
is the thing he's bringing... advertising for the movies theyre going to make?
As long as you are hoping he has a really, really, really positive view of Israel you're going to be happy!