Nonsense. It's clearer than ever that you don't need a $500m budget to make even a blockbuster film anymore (esp if you don't have to pay Adam Sandler $48m to be in it - is he really worth that? cmon...).

These people are signing their names to this in the belief that their 'star power' carries some credibility. I don't know with whom but my point is that they can make productions themselves.

Joss Whedon made Dr Horrible's Singalong in 2007-8 for $450k and it made $3m as of 2012 - in fact it made him personally more than 2012 Avengers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The tools available in 2026 are an order of magnitude more powerful/easy.

I get that literally every issue for you is a launching point for an anticapitalist screed but this is just silly.

First, production tools have gotten ridiculously cheap.
Distribution costs are now - depending on how you choose to distribute - basically ZERO. You claim 'capitalism has broken' mantra with your usual sky-is-falling hyperbole when in fact, never in the history of media has Hollywood had *less* of a lock on distribution than they do at this moment.
If Tom Cruise wants to make a film about X, the fact that he doesn't have to pay "Tom Cruise" level salary means he - as the production studio - stands to make a massive, massive $ even with Hollywood accounting.

The idea that this isn't tenable unless there's a BILLION dollar studio behind it is... the sort of thing a billion dollar studio would say.

And last time I checked, Joe Bob the youtuber can make a more profitable, more-popular short than the aggressively-awful, beloved-IP-actually-destroying shit coming from Disney. You picked a fairly bottom-of-the-barrel example there.

Like most Marxists you seem to miss that the *basis* of capitalism is RISK to the capitalists. Marx himself just ... omitted ... this from Das Kapital. Yes, the deep pocket stars - if they really believe that something sacred is going to be lost in the consolidation of power in media (in fact, I might even agree with them in principle, I just don't really care), enough that they are willing to very-bravely-sign-their-names (lol), then as I said: they should put some of their vast wealth up to fix it.
They certainly have a better chance to do so then you or me.

Not every problem needs to have nanny government swooping in to fix things. Oh no, a "monopolistic" situation exists in Hollywood entertainment? I can't think of an industry I personally care less about breaking monopolies. It is a PURE LUXURY good. People don't have to consume it, and are doing less so than ever. Fuck, that's a good thing in my view.

Who cares what the self-important talent thinks?
If they want to do something about it, take their vast wealth and instead of buying a 3rd home in St Tropez, set up a production co-op.
It's been done before.

"United Artists is an American film production and distribution company owned by Amazon MGM Studios. In its original operating period, it was founded on February 5, 1919 by Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks as a venture premised on allowing actors to control their own financial and artistic interests rather than being dependent upon commercial studios." (wiki)

Put up, or shut up.

....part of me wonders about the opposite end of the 'tragedy of the commons'.

If a state were, for example, to ban all power plants within its borders, should it benefit from electric power created by such plants? (Of course the libertarian capitalist answer is they they're free to do so, but this gives pricing leverage to the states that ARE willing to suffer the siting of a power plant in their borders....)

Same with data centers. I recognize all their ills, and that (it certainly seems) that much of them are driven by people generating AI videos of the six-million-dollar-man as a cat. Will they suffer for that choice somehow? Should they?

The level of bad faith argumentation here is sadly, unsurprising.

The same /. bunch who seem to generally believe that "everyone should learn coding!" are a fairly narrow socio economic cadre who would predictably denigrate faith. As Haidt would define you/us, it's WEIRD: Western, educated, individualist, rich, and democratic.
Understand, you are a tiny, tiny fraction of people in the world. There are literally billions of people enjoying very happy fulfilling lives for generation after generation in the faith contexts you sneer at.
To assert you have some sort of a magical monopoly on truth that they don't have access to is, well, bordering on Papal infallibility.
They don't lust for our lives; in fact to many of them our lives are empty, valueless scrabbling over material goods and status unmoored from family, tradition, culture, and continuity.

To the point of the article: llms aren't people. The idea of teaching them faith is fundamentally stupid and is nothing more then a propaganda exercise to promote them commercially.

It feels like we can agree on that without needing to virtue-signal to each other about how and why we all despise religion with a moral certainty that wouldn't be unfamiliar to a Christian missionary determined to save brown people's souls.

If it helps, I fully agree you shouldn't have kids?

Why am I utterly not shocked that rsilvergun believes it failed because it didn't go woke enough?
The simpler explanation, that people were tired of having a parade of identity-characters shoved down their throat in lieu of actually-compelling plots, of course can't be the case?

Setting ENTIRELY aside the woke crap, starfleet academy was awful. 90210 in space storylines and writing were childish. TOS stories faced serious moral dilemma and yes, often solved them with a liberal, positive, idealistic outcome. Deeply unlikable teenagers saving the day because of (implausible mcguffin) is just lame and lazy as fuck. Everyone *hated* Wesley Crusher, of COURSE we should fill a ship with even more repellent versions of him, focus on their inter social Twilight-caliber bullshit, and frame it with Star Trek.... OF COURSE the fan base will love it! Green light that!

.. maybe they would understand 1248 words is in no sense a "summary"?

...except that even with all those things, German fertility (Germans 1.23, Non natives 1.84) (highest in 33 y https://qz.com/811195/immigran...) is STILL lower than US norms (https://www.statista.com/statistics/226292/us-fertility-rates-by-race-and-ethnicity) (whites 1.56, average 1.65).

If Germans is such a paradise for mothers having kids...why aren't they?

I know it's important for you to misstate the reality but illegals != Immigrants.

And yes, by all means blame Trump for a birth rate decline that's been steady since more or less the late 50s.

(shrug)
I too for the opposite reason, having been banned just before musk buyout for saying "we have trannies doing strip shows for children" in a David Axelrod thread.

And no, I won't delete a factually true post just to rescue a shit account.

Sort of shitty to drag Mandela's name into this.

(I mean, he was a **convicted felon** who also wandered around free for years before he died, right?)

I just got the encl nastygram from our corporate IT
"We have recently noticed your use of unapproved AI tools, which creates a risk of data leakage. You must not use any AI tools that have not been officially approved when working with business-related information. This includes data such as profits, order quantities, and similar metrics, as well as MS Office files, emails, or any other content containing business information.
We want you to use MS 365 Copilot. ....Microsoft Copilot MS 365 protects our intellectual property."

(I'd asked grok for some lunar orbital data and calculations for fun...so not business-related in any case...)

What are the odds that pointing out in writing to my corporate IT that MS's own terms say "for entertainment purposes only" to say nothing of "We donâ(TM)t own Your Content, but we may use Your Content to operate Copilot and improve it. By using Copilot, you grant us permission to use Your Content, which means we can copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, edit, translate, and reformat it, and we can give those same rights to others who work on our behalf." is just going to get me more nastygrams and probably on someone's shitlist?

I would guess 100%, and didn't even need Copilot or grok or gemini to figure it out!

As I recall, Ohio toll highways did this years ago; if your time stamp at the booth was less than a certain number of minutes since the previous, you got a ticket for speeding.
Infallible, and took away the point really.

Sure, I guess you could speed and then pull over waiting before you cross the next gate but... Why bother?

Yes.
Have you heard the quality of her court discussions?
A Supreme Court justice that argues against the minutiae of 'legalese' seriously?