Paramount Skydance has completed its $111B merger with Warner Bros. Discovery
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
> 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
Grease on the very corroded wheel of modern capitalism
My joke referred to having someone to blame in general.
I cant help but tell stories, sorry... I got a new job once, an inspection happened, same things were wrong as the previous 3 inspections but this time the other employees blamed me for everything. I greedily took the blame. I wish I had pictures of the faces they made.
they'll just use AI like everyone else but charge extra for it
...Paramount sulks, and bides its time....
That's what I've been thinking about so many "ordained" or duress "marriages" since long before 1989.
Seems very rational to me.
I'm sure they'll love it when this AI bubble pops too
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://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.
"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
Not understanding how investing works doesn’t make everyone else behave under your misunderstandings.
Or are you claiming anything that was a merger ends like Enron?
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.
Well you aren't losing your job
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.
> Nobody.
This might be true for AOL; I wasn't there except as an early/beta customer -- something like 25% off their hourly(!) fees for life! :-)
But at HBO this was absolutely a choice. We had @hbo.com email addresses; it was a race among all the TW siblings who would jump on the @aol.com bandwagon fastest, and our CIO was eager to win that race: we were among the first to switch, and it was a pain in the ass. As one example, there was no good out-of-office functionality. I had built that for HBO in the mid-'90s on MS Mail for Mac, so regressing that hard was a bitter pill.
As another fun piece of trivia, I got one of the "blueberry"s -- a blackberry purpose-built to work with aol.com email addresses, and housed in dark blue translucent plastic instead of black. Good times...
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.
Yeah, we weren't thrilled.
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.
https://www.972mag.com/ellisons-paramount-tiktok-israel-medi...
https://www.commondreams.org/news/paramount-merger-settlemen...
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.
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.
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.
$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 ;)
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...
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.
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...
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.
>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?
>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
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/02/narendra-modi-...
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.
If you want to split hairs between "controlled by Israel" and "controlled by people who's sole interest is supporting Israel", go ahead.
>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.
> 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...
Most of the gulf states are pretty much controlled by Zionists at this point anyway, or at least heavily aligned with them.
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.
There are. Check out No Kings. My smallish "city" has a protest every week, and organizes a larger one every few months. I go when I can. Most people driving by are even supportive.
> general strike
There was talk of this a while back, and I analyzed it at the time - I don't see how it would help. In fact it seemed like it would make our position worse. The regime wants economic destruction, so its cronies can swoop in to pick up the pieces. That's basically the main thing they want, and it seems like a general strike would be handing them even more chaos and destruction on a platter.
> Organizing groups that bring down whatever is left of US-justicias rotten arms on anyone trying to undermine democracy
From what I see, this is indeed happening at the state-by-state level. But it's happening slowly, and the distributedness makes it hard to see. And much of it gets stymied due to a lot of rotten interference by the federal government - they tend to get things moved things to federal court, where many of the judges are regime apparatchiks. And if they aren't, then the rioter in chief goes to work threatening them with stochastic violence.
> Organizing groups that offer support and counceling for any victim of the regime
There is definitely some of this at the grassroots level, but on the other hand it's pretty hard to help someone who has been dragged away to a concentration camp far away.
> Boycotts etc
Boycott who? The problem is all the corpos are basically in on it. I've stopped buying stuff at Home Depot, and now buy that stuff at Lowe's instead. Big whoop! I expect to find out down the line that Lowe's's corpo management is also full of fascists.
> start 40 years ago and don't let the country become this way.
While the issues have been apparent all along, the problem is that the corpo propaganda has been successful at stopping any sort of reform that would have alloed us to address this ahead of time. Glaring meta issues like campaign finance and non-plurality voting are basically opposed by both professional parties, who had been offering us the shit sandwich vs turd torta dynamic for decades.
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.
You used the term “us” so I’m playing along with that “us” vs. “them” state of mind.
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.
My point is that the US is responsible for its actions, and can’t excuse itself by claiming to be pushed around by anyone.
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...
“The violent genocide committed against an unjustly occupied people.”
ftfy
> 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.
The second mentions the US as well. I ask you - should a company want to hire people that are against its home country?
I could only find one publication of someone getting fired in this context, and even that was about this person using the brand logo for their protest as if it was on the company’s behalf. As evidence, none of the other employees participating in the same protest got fired for participating.
Edit: all this is far detached from your claim that you must “love” Israel. At most, don’t recruit the company’s brand to your protest.
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.
"Now I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds..."
not my downvote btw
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.
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.
That's why he said Israel. But good hasbara tactic conflating mention of Israel with "jews", keep it up.
Sorry, I don’t follow
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.
My point, which you haven’t addressed, is that the US is responsible for its actions, and can’t blame anyone else for the decisions it makes.
Israel’s decisions are not About the US, and US decisions are not About Israel. I oppose both of these perspectives that you presented.
You can’t reason about this war without discussing energy and China. Yet many people gleefully volunteer their mal informed opinions about geostrategic affairs without addressing the biggest geostrategic factors that have been driving US policy for decades if not centuries.
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.
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...
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The words and the performances, the chemistry and creativity of the actors, that's the real priceless stuff.
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.
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.
Cantrill tried to, as diplomatically as possible, warn everyone.
Nobody listened.
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...
and i'm not even someone you'd class as young anymore, so I don't think this is a younger generation thing
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.
I don't want to pay for that.
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".
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.
For me, the big screen and ambience play a big role.
Actually I've used the steam deck in this role a bunch, works great.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.)
I wonder if David Ellison is a fun guy IRL.
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.
Do Trekkies not crave novelty?
Or did we decide that isn't canon?
(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.
Maybe a Sora descendant will allow user-directed content to emerge.
Sadly that isn’t far removed from the novelty “Strange New Worlds” series they recently released. What a mess season 4 was. :(
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).
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."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman_vs._Teenage_Mutant_Ninj...
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.
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?
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.
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?
There were numerous memes at the time pointing out the shift in the language of NYT et al from discussing class issues to racial grievances. Clear as day in Google’s metrics of media terms.
That shift in focus is what broke Occupy Wall St as a class movement — and was adopted by Wall St to appoint commissars of that ideology in exchange. Woke.
The Obama -> Bernie -> Trump pipeline is a cohort of working Millennials, ie, the proletariat who have lost faith in Democrat politics serving capital and racial tribes rather than the working class. So they elected someone with the right platform they believed would break the system — following the rigging of the 2016 primary. They’re one of the relatively small (1-2%) but engaged cohorts that switch teams, eg, when the election comes down to under 1% difference, which way they vote matters — and they generally vote anti-establishment, with increasing aggression.
Democrats have completed failed to perceive that reality and engaged in name calling instead — eg, the multiple replies calling me a racist to slander me and poison the well for debate.
I usually don’t reply because there’s no point making serious discussions to people who have already made up their mind, eg, sibling replies.
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.
Concentrating so much power in the federal government is problematic, and unnecessary.
Besides, that does nothing to address this mega-merger.
> 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.
goebbels is the movie influence of hollywood. its appropriate regardless
Right wing people have repeatedly captured and destroyed journalism outlets they deem undesirable. Not that I’m saying CNN is any good.
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.
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."
But that's not what people were focusing on here, it's a lot of "Practically Likud" and the increasingly uncomfortable dog whistle "Zionist".
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.
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.
Never mind their overall impact on American policy and politics.
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.
Best of luck to you.
And the response is to do your own to another people? Great.
I’m beyond reproach if my practical response to needing a bathroom is to break into your home and defecate in your toilet?
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
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.
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 entire strategy behind the Oct 7 attack and why it was intended to disrupt normalization. There was a miscalculation on Hamas’s side of both how successful Oct 7 would be (lots of military personnel deployed to protect settlers elsewhere, Air Force on strike due to Bibi’s attempted coups, and apparently Bibi ignored several warnings from partner states), and how vicious Israel’s response would be.
But the basic theory of their attack “worked.”
The leadership-public support gap in KSA is much like the situation vis a vis the United States actually, where Israel is quickly becoming persona non grata across the entire political spectrum for Americans <30
Does your “not at peace with anyone” label apply in both directions now or just one?
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.
Sorry for the sarcasm.
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-...
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"
But probably not with Ellison in charge. He'll probably just drive both companies into the ground.
I'm not sure I was interested in either company by themselves—less likely to be interested in the merged one.
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.
https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/skydance-credit-rating-down...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-01/paramount... | https://archive.today/SEtX9
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 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.
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.
During the height of the pandemic I rewatched TNG. When Timescape opened with Picard, Data, Troy and Geordie on their way back to the Enterprise in a runabout and having dinner together. Having these characters I've known and lived for so long have a casual work meal made me miss office lunch so much I almost started to cry. No other show would have been able to do that
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.
I suppose if they did it gradually enough, they could potentially normalize more right leaning viewpoints to its audience without them noticing.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/09/25/paramount-hollywood-prom...
They had a Lower Decks cartoon crossover already, so they can't even deny the possibility now.
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.
but lack of reading, critical thought etc which are pervasive in the population it means a lot of people are susceptible to propaganda.
you already see it with the socialism movement.
what people don't get is that wealth is not a zero sum game. wealth has to be grown. wages have to be paid fairly too on the other end.
and there has to be no regulatory capture eg nimbyism, lack of worker protections and then housing has to be built to keep housing affordable.
Instead some individuals choose to root on the end of the artist.
r/stablediffusion seems to be a bit disconnected from reality, to put it nicely.
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.
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?
is the thing he's bringing... advertising for the movies theyre going to make?