America has lost 200k of jobs in media, film and the arts. How much is AI?
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To me, the entertainment industry suffers from a lot of the same problems in most other industries that chase "efficiency", in terms of resources used and profit made. Economies and industries and labor are interdependent and more "alive" than balance sheets and bank accounts.
For the film industry, when you start moving things away from LA to "save money", it has knock on effects that happen over long periods of time. Multiple Quarterly Earnings Reports long, if you will. Local businesses that depend on the film industry close due to less work, so then there is less expertise available. Less expertise means it can command high prices. Suddenly it's too expensive to film in LA altogether. So the rest of the jobs leave too.
This pattern seems super common, not just in the film industry.
It is a narrative that interweaves with AI, too. AI is supposedly an efficiency boom. In the macroeconomy, who is the "efficiency" we are chasing for, who benefits? Who is getting the money that was "saved"? Regular people do not have more more money or time. The "efficiency" is for people who are already very rich, to get richer. Is that worth the price we're paying? I know my answer. The article gets close to it by mentioning the consolidation in Hollywood, but I do not see how we fix this without enforcing our antitrust laws. It is embarrassing what we let rich people do in the name of stock price go up.
https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/what-re...
It is changing the economy. It is changing how work is done. We are not going back, even if the emphasis in the workplace and role it performs matures.
I'm not making a serious prediction that it will go away! I'm making an anti-prediction against the reflexive assumption of a massive increase in importance, to say that for all any would-be oracle knows, we could get the opposite, just as easily as their fortune-telling.
Its relevance lay more in shaping our diverse perception of reality than in reality itself.
Economists (including but not limited to Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers and Arthur Levitt) also spent a decade arguing against Brooksley Born's 1998 warnings that unregulated over-the-counter derivatives would inevitably lead to a financial crisis.
Economists can be spectacularly wrong and short-sighted (and blinded by prior assumptions of how things work) until suddenly the thing that should have been obvious the whole time is no longer ignorable.
The supposed massive GDP growth and jobs losses just aren’t there at this time, whatever the future may bring.
Anyway what I’m trying to say is that I think COVID and its aftermath is a much bigger factor here than AI, especially when it comes to “live / performing” art
Beyond that, my hobby is film and I know tons of people in the industry. I've made indie films with them.
All the jobs have gone to Europe. It's simply cheaper to film there now. Amazon and Netflix built infrastructure and taught local crews how during the pandemic content wars.
Looking at my Gen Z wife, all the eyeballs have gone to TikTok.
There's the answer.
When I was growing up movies were watched in cinemas. It was a big event and we saw maybe 5 a year.
Over time more start appearing on TV, but those tended to be a bit older, but also cherry picked the good ones. (I don't live in the US).
PayTV didn't appear until mid 80s. They had more movies, but again tended to cherry pick. VHS meant we recorded the ones we wanted to see. All these things together meant we tended to watch "good" movies.
Hollywood of course were making lots and lots of movies we never saw, or had and way to see. The bad stuff simply didn't have a channel to the world.
The arrival of Video Stores changed that. Suddenly the mediocre (and worse) had an outlet. And trust me, there was plenty of rubbish in there. But there was still a cost to distribute.
Today, distribution cost is zero. If Netflix commission a movie it'll get onto Netflix. Regardless of the result. Some really good stuff, most mediocre, lots of real rubbish.
Repeat for Amazon, Disney, Hulu, et al.
Overall movies haven't gotten worse. Objectively production values are higher. But your access to mediocre and bad movies has increased.
Judging past output though introduces survivor bias, which in turn makes comparison to today misleading.
The scene workers have gotten better though. And there are a lot of good movies being made still, but not by the mainstream industry that used to really deliver.
1. Beverly Hills Cop
2. Ghostbusters
3. The Terminator
4. Gremlins
5. A Nightmare on Elm Street
6. Police Academy
7. Dune
8. Repo Man
9. The NeverEnding Story
10. Karate Kid
11. Romancing the Stone
12. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Or pretty much any year from the 1980s and 1990s.
At some point we lost good writing in favor of silly jokes and narrative in favor of spectacle.
For a while in the oughts I taught a film history class, though, and even 2 decades ago the kiddos thought anything in black and white, much less with no sound or with subtitles, was literally unwatchable. I'm okay with the idea that the students' tastes in media are legitimate, though I have my own tastes and think they are differently-informed.
And further, I dunno if "silly jokes and narrative in favor of spectacle" are new. Think Keystone Cops and Busby Berkley.
I like Battleship Potemptkin and Citizen Kane as much as the next person, but that's not all of what was popular.
Paring the thousands of films from the 80s down to a list of 10 does a lot of work to make that looks like it was better, when in fact I was in middle school and I could literally go see a movie for 75c. I remember some really bad ones, and I am certain I've forgotten a lot of bad ones.
I also have problems making a list of good films from the last decade, but I think that's because I got burnt out and stopped watching long-form video mediums when I left my PhD program. I am not sure I have seen 10 long form narrative works in the last 5 years.
Funnily enough, those happen to be two movies I didn't enjoy beyond their historic relevance.
I'm not saying that spectacle and one-liners are bad - movies like that are included in my list for 1984. It is when you substitute good writing with funny lines and have spectacle instead of a compelling narrative that I see a problem.
...No wait, to be fair, they're very good at influencing. They can influence like no previous generation ever could.
As I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, CA's labor-pool's own hostility to the film industry (via strikes) also played a big role. They gave the studios the finger, then are surprised that the studios took their ball and went elsewhere.
Also, I see this anti-union sentiment a lot on HackerNews: Whenever unions strike, there is near universal rejection as a strategy. The anti-union sentiment on HN is tiring, especially from the US and UK. Those big strikes in Los Angeles resulted in large pay increases and/or expansion of territory (better payouts for streaming, etc.) for those union members. In short, it worked.
It's akin to the auto worker's unions, but without the same degree of government backstopping for the industry. The auto workers unions are an anchor around the necks of the auto industry, while government bailout dollars are a lifejacket - it's clear California (and more broadly the US) doesn't see the same need to subsidize the unions in TV and film.
Especially if we're talking about jobs in creative industries that require customers with the means to support and consume their output.
Besides, an overabundance of surplus labor, if properly managed, is as likely to lead to a better world than a worse one. There's no ironclad rule that everyone, or even the majority, need to work to live or live to work to be happy. And many creatives, in particular, would be happy and productive working on personal and noncommercial projects if funding were no longer an issue.
Of course there is. Permanently replacing labor is quite obviously and quite literally the point of AI. No previous tech shifts are comparable.
That's why the tall bank buildings that dot ~every small town (and plenty of big ones) in the US are full of bankers tending to paper ledgers, and with a secretary in front of every office. We still get milk delivered every day, as well as a block of river ice from last winter every 2 or 3 days (or more often if it's been particularly hot). We dig our ditches by hand, with hand-made shovels and pickaxes. The material for the clothes on our backs was woven on manual looms, from cotton that was harvested by hand, and carded by hand, and spun into thread by hand. We wear them in homes made with iron nails that were cut by hand, from ores that were mined by hand and smelted the only way we know how: With charcoal, in clay furnaces that were made with hands and that are stoked by hand.
Technology progresses. You're playing to an end-state of AI that assumes labor disappears entirely because you have yet to see what the new labor system looks like.
We'll survive this transition as well.
Oh please, do tell.
You people realize businesses used to have rooms full of humans who clacked away at typewriters right?
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg...
When you consider that this conversation assumes we are talking about the US and not the rest of the world? It is sobering.
The AI bet hinges entirely on the new types of work that arise from it.
If we think about it, AI can be seen as dumping cheap products below cost and disrupting the domestic market.
I mean the real cost of production is unknown due to skirting of copyright laws in many cases and even if we discount that, it is well known that AI is being pushed far below the actual costs for providers. There are disruptive technologies, yes but this is not the same if the real cost is hidden or deferred and it doesn't compare with horses/cars or whatever analogy that comes up often.
In the physical world, this is called dumping isn't it? Just because tech is involved it doesn't change the fact. Countries already have anti dumping laws.
Copyright laws themselves are not completely "real", not in the sense that digging coal out of the ground is. They were once tailored for Disney to maximize its profit; now that Disney is no longer the juggernaut it once was, they may be re-tailored to maximize the profits of the new juggernauts.
That's what AI companies are doing to cut costs dramatically, but since it's domestic, there's a sudden apathy towards the original claims.
Which(if any of this ever fucking mattered at all) would undermine the years long campaign of china-hate that at it's core, was large Capital holders being upset their outsourcing plan backfired once China was no longer a captive third-world backwater.
So here in the "west" we created our own machine to speed up the Chinese "Shanzai" and pretend like it's suddenly innovation instead of theft.
This whole situation is why one should never, ever trust the rich man's opinion on foreigners, as it's always always always just to line their pockets.
They have had 200 million in judgements against them by investors this year, and are filing Chapter 11 to reorganize debt and go private.
In other words, nothing to do with AI.
Of course they do. Median real weekly wages[1] have been rising for decades all while the average number of hours worked per worker have fallen[2].
Also, I chose weekly wages because annual wages are complicated by time off, which was the other item in question.
“If you would please look at the chart…” when it is known that inflation is a politically-charged figure that is indirectly manipulated to show much lower figures than the price increases the average person with average expenses (rent, car, fuel, food, etc.) experiences.
Let alone doing comparison of inflation over longer timespans. Garbage model in, garbage numbers out.
You can think of it with a thought experiment: A smartphone (with hypothetical internet) in 1920 would be worth almost all the money in the world. If you simply had one smartphone in 1920, the richest billionares would offer most of their wealth to have one. Hence in 1920, a smartphone would be worth at least $10M in todays money. Yet you can buy one for $500 today - so you are twenty-thousand times richer than 1920. The same applies for flatscreen TVs, antibiotics (really valueable when you need it), polio vacination etc.
You can't measure this with CPI, yet people complain about the CPI is fake. It is just a statistical average, no more no less. It always was irrelevant. It is the arguments people do with that number, that are bullshit. Basic statistics teach you never use an average to come to conclusions about the individual.
We literally have billionaires flying to space and longing for other planets today - way more useless than a smartphone.
Or the option to cross the atlantic in a day instead of 3 weeks. Etc.
The whole point is, basically everything that is widely available to the broad population today wasn't even available to the ultra wealthy back then, let alone the broad population. People just take this stuff for granted nowadays.
The problem with the CPI basket is, it needs to be constant of products to be comparable, so NO technological advancement is considered in that basket. Instead, they use the price of butter and tomatoes. Well, a fictious 1950s person wouldn't care that is can buy more butter or tomatoes than we can, but would want smartphone and a plane ticket to thailand.
The quality of the house your grandparents (for 1920 probably your grand-gran parents) is vastly different. Those houses cannot be compared at all, when I take my dump in the heated warmth in a nicely smelling place listening to some music over my airpods.
Let's look at some real numbers instead of a folksy parable about grandma. Here are recent stats about rent arrears:
https://www.baselane.com/resources/unpaid-rent-debt-statisti...
And rental affordability:
In 2026, a full-time worker needs to earn $34.73 per hour to afford a modest two-bedroom rental home in the U.S. and $29.19 to afford a modest one-bedroom rental.
And mortgage affordability:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/median-house-prices-vs-inco...
None of these are heading in the right direction.
That house trades at 13x now.
There is no house of any size for 3x in most areas of the UK.
You can’t handwave that away by saying “central heating”. The cost of part-of-a-house is far less than the total - not 10x more on top.
Part of the issue is population doubled since then but house building didn’t. Part is cheap debt in the 2000s turned everyone and their dog into buy-to-let landlords then AirBnB hosts.
It's a statistical tool concerning populations, not a sampling of what hacker news user cicko in their wisdom thinks increases quality of life.
The monetary reason is that the reason those things go down is because of technology advances and not because of changes in the value of the currency. Inflation should be about the currency, and less about what cool advances people are doing to make cheaper TVs and better websites
The practical reason is that if the basics like rent and food go up relative to wages, then a lot of people end up crushed by the basics alone and have no disposable income left for the cool stuff. The baskets are often too biased towards spending patterns of those who live the good life and for whom luxuries actually matter
Have you looked at the actual weights?
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/cpi_10142026.htm
Airline fares make up a whopping 1.04% of the CPI basket. "Information technology commodities" makes up a whopping 0.752%. Meanwhile the weights of essentials are: Food (13.507%), Energy (7.418%), Shelter (35.323%), Medical care services (6.834)
Aside from technological and scientific progress in the medical field, it's generally been shown that people's lives have gotten worse.
And that is the cause behind so much distrust in politics these days!
The problem is, sure, inflation as a whole using the official metrics may "only" be 3% YoY.
But WHAT THE FUCK does that have to do with the reality of the 99%, who see their grocery bill, their gas bill, their rents increasing far, far more than "official inflation" says?
The inflation basket includes way too much stuff people buy like, what, once every two decades like new kitchen appliances. It is of no use for me if that price stagnates.
Owners' equivalent rent of primary residence (sub6): score=-9.9748, rel_imp=24.937, yoy=3.3
Health insurance (sub4): score=-10.3886, rel_imp=0.818, yoy=-9.0
New vehicles (sub4): score=-11.6188, rel_imp=3.748, yoy=0.6
Used cars and trucks (sub4): score=-13.9776, rel_imp=2.688, yoy=-1.5
Motor vehicle insurance (sub4): score=-22.0197, rel_imp=2.531, yoy=-5.0
I doubt there is a compelling argument why people should have to use CPI as the comparison index. I'd consider any investment that only matched CPI to be losing value for example; they should be tracking something one of the monetary aggregates.
Looking at an article from the CATO institute, over the last 30 years wages have climbed 169 percent, while food prices 111 percent.
But an even better measure is PCE, or personal consumption index. Rather than CPI, or any other "household basics" measure, which subjectively categorize goods and then tracks those, PCE measures the total dollar amount spent by the entire U.S. consumer sector on goods and services. This is what is used by the FRED database referenced in the reply above.
https://www.cato.org/commentary/why-dire-pronouncements-abou...
It’s 30 to 50% of most peoples paycheck, it’s really the piece that matters and the one that is most complicated to solve.
I imagine they're in a high cost of living area, where tons of other people want to live. If that's the case, it probably shouldn't be any surprise that in a supply restricted market, the prices are also very high.
*edit: they're not in a _high_ cost living area, but it's not cheap either.
For examples:
1. there are 57,000 unoccupied apartments in NYC because city regulations on rents make them unprofitable to rent out.
2. the glacial pace of issuing building permits for burned out homes in LA.
3. the sudden influx of many millions of immigrants pushes up the demand for housing, resulting in higher prices
Which market are you thinking of?
Los Angeles? Where the homeowner vacancy rate is 0.7% and rental vacancy 4%?
If you literally weren't thinking of anywhere when your responded, where did you get the notion from?
[1] https://api.census.gov/data/missing_key.html +/- one percent
Please try again.
P.S. google "how many unoccupied apartments in nyc"
The market, left to its own, will keep building because someone will see the prices people are willing to pay and think “I want in on that” but then the government comes in and blocks them from building. No building = supply lower than demand which always equals higher costs
Further, It would only have taken you one 5 second search to see the ways government regulations can cause unoccupied apartments
https://www.google.com/search?q=in+what+ways+can+government+...
That's about 2.4% of the total number of rented apartments, and about 1.5% of the total housing stock.
How long do you think those apartments are unoccupied, on average?
What portion of the stock do you think would normally be healthy to have on the market?
> 1. there are 57,000 unoccupied apartments in NYC because city regulations on rents make them unprofitable to rent out.
> According to state data, approximately 57,421 rent-stabilized apartments were vacant across New York City
Is it actually more complex than that? If the regulation that makes it unprofitable to rent them out is rent control, that's still an accurate statement of why they're not being rented out.
I'm semi-convinced that the reason why we see so many bad ideas in housing is because the good ideas negatively affect too much of the voting public. Or, they perceive the ideas as negatively affecting them.
Perhaps my view is too California-brained, but homeowners here like high prices because it gives more flexibility to downsell, they can get large home equity loans, and Prop 13 ensures they won't be paying full property tax (at least if they've been living there for a while). Even for those planning on living there until they die, their children would still like to inherit a valuable place.
At any rate, I didn't intend to limit the reasons to just price. The solution is to build more housing, but building housing is unpopular, and it isn't hard to see why. So we end up with bad policy like rent control instead.
As a homeowner I don't want to see my home price go down relative to all other homes as that leaves me in a precious position if I need to move, but if all homes fall in price together then that actually makes the prospect of moving less risky as, if I have to move into a house that is a step-up from the one I have, the cost to do so is lower. That would be an improvement over the status quo. High housing prices are a problem even for those with significant equity in a home.
But who doesn't want to see their wage go down is those who build houses. This is the bottleneck. The vast majority of people cannot afford a new house, which means they're stuck in their used houses, which means there is no inventory opening up for those with no houses.
> it's just that the solutions are deeply unpopular.
Is it? The solution in motion is to use AI to push software developers out of software development so that they have to become construction workers, thereby increasing the supply of construction workers, pushing construction wages down. It doesn't seem that unpopular (at least not outside of HN, but even on HN many welcome it with open arms). Maybe it will become unpopular once the motions are complete? That's a tad bit late, though.
This is not true.
Not that it matters as I don’t think this is what motivates NIMBY’s but for anyone reading that believes so, this is incorrect.
The old single family home next to the new apartment building gains land value. And this shows up county after county [1]. Building more housing is a valuation win-win, the pie just grows.
[1] https://gardner.utah.edu/news/recent-apartment-construction-...
And this is why large property owners fund YIMBY organizations. I have no idea how they've managed to convince people of normal intelligence that relaxing restrictions on zoning lowers property values, and that's why the selfish senior citizens who stubbornly continute to live in the homes they've lived in for decades are against it. It doesn't make any mathematical sense at all. They just are willing to believe anything that promises to give them what they want, which is other people's homes who don't want to sell and who don't want to live next to 900 people on a tiny lot with no parking.
The most insulting part is when they pretend that this is racism, while YIMBYs have been gentrifying black people from the neighborhoods they've been in for centuries, into the woods. The reason they're so frustrated about senior citizens in San Francisco or wherever is because they can defend themselves, while black people can't. Black people are being annihilated from urban neighborhoods; you're seeing them replaced by rent-stressed immigrants who don't have families or connections in the country to retreat to.
> Building more housing is a valuation win-win, the pie just grows.
No, it's a win for people who sell. It's not a win for people who want to keep their homes, and their communities. It's a win for alienation and cultural destruction, pushed by people who either have no roots, or who keep their roots safely protected a thousand miles away.
Community is still community in a condo.
>>"pushed by people who either have no roots, or who keep their roots safely protected a thousand miles away"
Imperceptibly different from the argument JD Vance makes against immigrants. Maybe rethink that tack.
Noise and dust from construction are often mentioned as well. Construction means heavy trucks entering places where they usually don't intrude.
About half of US adults own their home. It goes up to ~2/3 if you include adult children, grandparents, etc. that live in the house but don't own it.
I wasn't trying to dance around this fact; my point is that a large fraction of the voting public has their interests aligned with keeping home prices high (presuming that these non-owning residents share interests with the people that do own the home).
Go to Manhattan and tell me that housing isn't built because of NIMBYism. It's: RTO (very important!), cost of land (land isn't increasing in volume), end of tax subsidies (programs that gave developers tax breaks), zoning (hey let's demolish all the jazz clubs in Greenwich Village and replace it with affordable housing - is that what you consider the correct line?), jobs (the economics of people moving to a place) and many many many more factors.
About once a week someone with a singular conception of the world of housing comes and you need to open their minds up a bit.
You want to lower housing costs? Maybe increase public transportation, give workers rights to work from home, and invest in expanding the suburbs by making them more dense. But don't do that until AFTER you've established the infrastructure piece. Not everyone wants to live in LA or Austin and spend hours in cars.
If you don't do these things then people all want to live in the same place, which is far more impactful than this "NIMBYism" thing, not everything is your local HOA or little town's regulations.
“hey let's demolish all the jazz clubs in Greenwich Village and replace it with affordable housing”
Or just rebuild them in the commercial space under the new taller condos, so more than just the nepo trust fund babies or lottery rent control people can live in them. These are all non-issues once you get over people’s aesthetic preferences.
This is not just a California issue, the space between downtown and midtown is severely under-built when compared to the economic output of those spaces.
How would Greenwich Village look if you turned it all into towers of rental apartments?
France uses expansion of the suburbs to make housing more available, and that includes trams, buses and yes, Metro expansion. You don't need to demolish the fucking bistros and parks to replace them with towers.
In NYC it could be done with NJ Transit being replaced, and better transportation. Then the border areas would become more dense because the investment returns would support it. People would want to move there to work in Manhattan.
Please don't turn world class cities into your LA or Houston Hellscapes of cars and highways. I'd rather pay a million dollars for a tiny one bedroom apartment in a real city than half the price in those soulless, cultureless places where you spend all day behind the wheel of a vehicle.
Back in the 1800’s when the more dense haussmanian architecture was put in. I’m sure their equivalent of pretty jazz clubs then were mowed down too. But over a 100 years the more housing made space for more people and better culturally richer city.
New York is a newer city, it’s time to densify is now.
I’m literally trying to densify, so that’s the anti-highway move. Tear down all of FDR and put in more NJ transit for all I care, I Love the Path.
We can do both, put more transit it and densify the low density sections of Manhattan. So more people have more choices.
Blocking this on aesthetic and legacy preferences is morally wrong.
Absolutely wrong. Haussmann's restructuring of the city was intended to REDUCE overcrowding and darkness due to the narrow alleyways, not to mention illness from the overcrowding. He lowered density, built parks, and then Paris expanded a lot when they absorbed the suburbs in the 1860's. Today Paris is extremely high density, and they're again expanding into the suburbs - look up Grand Paris projects. But the 6 story buildings aren't being demolished to make 30 story buildings like you seem to be suggesting is the thing to t do.
As much as I rail against a soulless place like Houston (with no housing restrictions like in NYC or Cali), I also don't want to turn our cities into Shanghai or New Delhi.
And by the way, what makes you think building more makes housing cheaper? It's not like making widgets in a factory. Gentrification makes things more, not less expensive - have you seen the history of Williamsburg, Brooklyn? Rezoning it turned it into a lux neighborhood with an Apple store, and attracted people from around the world.
There’s no point fighting against known norms in economics now. Induced demand in housing is hogwash: there are a certain number of people who dream of moving to east village and that number doesn’t magically grow if you build more housing. After decades of underbuilding, yes the demand is high, but it’s not infinite. Build out the suburbs too, build good transit, split the difference and the housing prices stabilize.
I was there a few years ago in the summer, and figured I’d go see live music at night, and there just was literally not any to see besides at the megavenues. And surprisingly few bookstores for a city that size. I think it’s possible there are more independent bookstores in New Orleans than in Houston, a much larger and wealthier city.
I’m not saying that’s the case. I’m only saying the metric “housing cost as percent of wages” isn’t enough to judge if people are doing worse or better
To take just one example: a 65inch tv costs just $700 compared to $4k just a few years ago
The problem isn't so much that housing has gotten expensive. It's that many of the existing places have moved up-market compared to what they were 30-40 years ago. 75 years ago, Scarsdale NY or parts of Long Island were expensive. But Palo Alto was a drab middle class suburb. As the tech economy has boomed, that has driven prices up in Palo Alto for the same reason they were already high in Scarsdale. And now you have to move to Gilroy.
People are moving out of opportunity zones (and you know…losing opportunity) or moving in with roommates to keep the average percentage low.
Feels like such a basic factor to miss for what is supposedly an economists blog. That metric means nothing.
That's a misleading metric for two reasons. First, "people" includes all the people who bought a house decades ago before the prices went up, and correspondingly paid the old prices instead of the current prices. And second, it assumes that if housing becomes more expensive what people all do is pay more for housing rather than being unable to afford it and then having to take a longer commute to access housing they can afford, live with their parents, become homeless, etc., which negatively impact the amount or type of housing they get instead of the amount they pay for it.
Meanwhile between 1984 and today median income increased by ~290% while median new home prices increased by ~425%:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N
And that's with the gap having reduced a bit in the last couple of years, since home prices have declined slightly since the peak in 2022 while median income continued its usual trend.
Both inflation and wages have not gone up uniformly since they started being tracked. We all know the Trump/Biden covid inflation was bad, but by the end of Biden's term wages had mostly caught back up. The second Trump administration's policies reversed that trend.
Housing in particular cratered in some areas during the GFC, but then went wild especially around the covid.
> Meanwhile between 1984 and today median income increased by ~290% while median new home prices increased by ~425%
The average FHA mortgage rate in 1984 was 13.2%. Today’s it’s 6.8%. The more expensive house with a cheaper mortgage costs $482 per month less and $173,000 less over the lifetime of the loan.
That's fine if there is then some other place with equivalent housing prices and job opportunities to what the parents had at the time.
> The average FHA mortgage rate in 1984 was 13.2%. Today’s it’s 6.8%. The more expensive house with a cheaper mortgage costs $482 per month less and $173,000 less over the lifetime of the loan.
Mostly because 1984 (the oldest date the graph had for median income) was a period with historically high interest rates:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/mortgage30us
They were more like 8% in the 1970s and basically where they are now in the 1990s.
From https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/rental-housing-unaffordabi...
> The net effect of this longer history is that renters today spend much more of their incomes on rent than they did in previous generations. The median renter household in 1960 spent less than a fifth of their income on rent. By 2022, housing costs consumed 31 percent of the median renter’s income. And in inflation-adjusted terms, the median rent is up 75 percent over these six decades while the median renter income has risen by just under 15 percent.
Even when I was a kid in the 1980s I didn't know a single person whose household had multiple bathrooms, a dishwasher, or air conditioning. Not a single one.
Part of the reason why standards have increased is because incomes have increased.
Average household size in 2020s: 2.6
Tennessee suburbs are eyewateringly expensive. Your parents made a living wage at a job that doesn't exist in the US anymore, and definitely isn't located in Tennessee anymore. The mean homebuyer is older than your parents.
You can get a cheap house in the middle of nowhere where all the industry was destroyed for imports, services destroyed for outsourcing and the retail was destroyed for the internet and big box chains, if you are a wealthy person who works remotely or at one of the local health insurance conglomerates.
If you are not a wealthy person who works remotely, you can't live there anymore; it is not cheap for you. In fact, all of your family (who has lived here, near each other, for generations) has to figure out where in the country they will have the best chance to feed themselves (or whether they should leave the country) and move there. Now, they're trying to get by without the support of each other, making them more alienated, isolated and dependent on corporations and the state.
There are natural limits to this sort of evil. People won't starve to death quietly.
By the people your parents voted in to do just that no less.
I also think it’s unfair to look at just food prices. Housing and healthcare have bloomed massively.
We should evaluate research by the research itself, rather than by the author’s subjectivity credibility alone. The is the point I was trying to make by providing alternative research and adding a little bit of nuance to the reply, but perhaps I should’ve been more forthright in addressing my own bias as well.
Why is this the argument when someone challenges your source, but when it comes to someone else's source your argument is:
> This is research from a labor advocacy group, with the explicit aim of the organization to advocate for this sort of thing. This doesn't mean the research is is automatically invalid, but it is bias worth mentioning.
Using CATO as a neutral source though, is sketch no matter what.
> Links the fucking CATO institute
Pot, meet kettle
2. Shelter accounts for roughly 34% of the CPI, whereas it makes up only about 16% to 17% of the PCE which underplays the pressures of housing people face. Housing arguably is one of the most basic necessity and people will spend on it. For majority of the people in the country housing as a % of income is the biggest expense, so weighing it at 16% sounds almost ridiculous.
3. PCE also famously isn’t based on household surveys like CPI which means it doesn’t accurately represent the actual inflation either.
4. PCE also doesn’t accurately represent lifestyle downgrades even though it tracks them. PCE will capture if you swap chicken for beef (like people are doing right now) but the conclusion you’ll come to is that people have the same amount of spending power as before.
So to point out how inanely out of touch economists are.
The problem with that is the worker economic base unit is a family not one person. Now compare 1960-70s where one person in the household works 40 hours a week. Compare with a modern family where both parents are working a combined 70-80 hours a week.
So yeah workers are working slightly less hours and families as a unit substantially more.
Not what real means!
But these transformations are not complete, and thus comparing "what people are getting for their money" now vs. then is challenging, complex and subject to a lot of debate and disagreement.
I addressed but one of your points here and ignored essentially the rest of your reply. A rather myopic one sentence reply to a more nuanced comment.
Sorry to sink to the lowest common denominator, friend. Thank you for making me see this.
re: regular people and their money, I will say, something about the bigger picture just feels off. I look at the graphs you linked to, and do not see it reflected in the people around me. I don't mean to be dismissive of the data, more that I feel like I am missing something, or it is, if that makes sense?
Furthermore, wealth applies more pressure against certain costs like housing[1] than against others like food or durable goods. Cheap toasters only go so far in making people feel like they aren’t falling behind.
[1] https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/home-prices-surge-five-tim...
The reluctance to give up resources also an understandable aspect of human nature, but power concentration in the hands of the few is always problematic. I'm very much a capitalist but the last few decades have persuaded me that wealth taxes are a necessary and moral correction to capitalism's unfortunate spiraling acceleration of inequality.
For instance: marketplace competition requires some regulation, but recognizing that regulation is a necessary evil with many opportunities for abuse (e.g. regulatory capture) helps inoculate against socialism's worst excesses.
Hooray for just-in-time scheduling where workers have to be available full time but rarely get scheduled full time. It’s an innovation that has been great for capital and terrible for labor.
The reality is that requiring benefits imposes a cost, and employers manage that cost by limiting who qualifies. So yes, this hurt many workers - and disproportionately impacted disadvantaged people who didn't make the full-time cliff.
Ignoring increntives is actually shaking your fist at the sky.
Typically the real disagreement here is over whether workers should get benefits at all.
EDIT: can we get another `vouch` or two for groundzeros2015's currently [dead] reply? It's well-argued and an olive branch and deserves to be visible.
Compare that to how much wealth appreciated, like a price of gold or real estate.
Median real wages increased by the narrowest possible meaning of this word.
Trickle down economy is literally a trickle.
> Of course they do.
That level of certainty is not justified.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL
People are earning about 12% more and working about 5% less since 1980, but everything costs roughly 3x what it did in 1980 relative to wages, and that's where most people are pinched.
There's twice as many scripted shows today and twice as many movies released despite the average person spending half the time they did 30 years ago watching TV and movies. For less than the price of a 1990s cable tv subscription we can access almost any movie, instantly streamed to our HDR TVs at home, on demand. The digital VFX we expect of a low tier direct to streaming show are better than the some of the best 90s movies (practical effects excluded).
There are hundreds of thousands of people across the world using the 4k camera in their pocket they bought for a few hundred dollars to make hyper specific media and distributing it free on YouTube. They are editing it in cheap or free video editors on their computer or built in to their phone.
It's easy to shit on modern media. With democratization comes slop. There's garbage now just like there was before. But we are absolutely benefitting off the efficency gains of the last few decades.
Outsourcing seems extremely short-sighted in this environment. You're devaluing your brand, and giving expertise and training to another place that can make their own products.
I also wonder how much can be attributed to weakened intellectual property protection. Comments in this thread say they don't pay for anything because they can watch it all for free.
There was nothing the business leaders could have done to prevent the effect of basically an unlimited supply of video entertainment being added to the market.
Before video this happened to text. Look at for example how NYT has shored itself up vs the many failed news outlets. Premium brand.
Most businesses in (professional) journalism failed and many jobs were lost.
Most business in (professional) video media production failed and many jobs were (or will continue to be) lost.
Supply greatly increases relative to demand, prices go down, only highest volume sellers can remain.
Ridiculous simplification.
Well, remind me not to hire you for an executive media position.
Hollywood got devalued because it is spending more money than before to get worse results than before.
If by "audience" you mean "people," sure, but I don't think that's particularly meaninful. I don't think I'm alone in thinking that podcasts and TV shows aren't even kind of comparable or able to replace one another.
Like the time I have for high quality stuff and low stuff are different and therefore different audiences. For Low quality stuff podcasts are fighting against tiktok
...because nothing in it supported the thesis?
Print and audio/video have been showing clear declines since the 90s, thanks to the death of print, CDs and cable. Maybe AI is part of this, maybe not, but if it is, we're talking about a slight change in slope. These industries were walking dead before CNNs were a thing.
The one industry where you'd expect to see the clearest impact (coding) is basically flat.
It's the same thing in business. One has to relentlessly decrease the cost of doing business, because your competitors are doing it as well. You run and run and stay in the same place.
I haven't read the cited article, but the professor would need to show that industry profit margins are increasing to make his point. I haven't seen any evidence that margins increased in general.
tv and movies killed radio and opera. and now tiktok is killing tv and movies. it's not complicated.
Sure, we can blame AI for a lot of crimes, but let’s start with the people who offshore everything first. Then when those offshore people get fired because of AI, you don’t feel so bad because it’s not like you’re firing anyone or killing any companies in the same country, right?
At the end of the day, what is the functional difference between offshoring and AI? People in this country still get fired and can’t find work, because the work is no longer done in this country. And then later, much of this work is no longer done by humans in any country.
Profits über alles.
Economic hubs work when there is more efficiency to be found in industrially-codependent resources being located close to each other, than there is in cheaper labor costs outside the hub. Hollywood's heyday was when there was enormous value to putting actors, agents, producers, cameras, sets, editors, VFX, writers all within close driving distance of each other, so that you could organize new movies and shows at the drop of a hat. In a day and age when teenagers are able to use cellphone cameras and pocketmoney to produce stories that are compelling enough to command attention and advertising dollars, the value of that geographic proximity has declined tremendously.
AI didn't build the coffin, but it's been putting nails in it.
Also, at the time (and still somewhat today), Netflix was the only one to really think globally about a content strategy.
Before I’d always feel distracted by things weighing on me that I needed to get done. Now a huge load of those things are asked of grok bot quickly, then I close the laptop and go spend time where I should be.
It feels like it’s lifting a huge burden from my daily life.
Software is a very clear example on this front. Valheim [1] is a game that was made mostly by one guy, at first at least. Not that long ago, this would have been a multi million dollar game produced by a wide array of people. It's just that tools, markets, and more have made it possible for even single developers to have an absurd degree of efficiency. And LLMs are probably going to bump this up exponentially.
This is why a metaphor I'm currently drawn to is one of people living in a very agrarian society just prior to the Industrial Revolution. What would they have envisioned being created? Super farms of course. And those super farms were indeed created, but the overall impact was such that those super farms became a practically inconsequential part of the overall economy. The future we're moving into isn't going to be the same but more efficient for those on top. That efficiency is going to revolutionize the economy in ways that are probably impossible to see from a distant, much how somebody living in an agrarian society couldn't have even begun to imagine the 'real' impact of the Industrial Revolution.
We’re now entering a new era where projects like Halo Reclaimer[1] are more creative and more popular than some of the slop put out by the AAA world with massive marketing budgets. There’s no slop, no micro transactions, just Halo Forge turbocharged by virtually anyone who loves Halo and has a Claude subscription.
[1] https://fangamesdb.com/games/project-reclaimer-halo-3.html
The main difference I see is they used Claude to write patch notes. ReSkate is pretty strict about only using AI for code, all assets and official comms are human made. I guess it's because a lot of their players are real life skaters and that community hates anything that looks fake.
The problem is, in a world running on next-quarter financials and bonuses, long-run disadvantages don't matter as long as the persons in charge of decisions can fuck off with golden parachutes before the house of cards crashes down.
> Competition increases, margins decrease, baseline minimal standard of quality for success increases.
Or everyone tacitly agrees on a new low standard of product, maybe adds in regulatory capture to prevent competition from rising, and even if you want, you won't be able to find an alternative. Enshittification galore.
Or are you an actual graphics designer or the like, who lost their job to AI?
Caviar progressist.
It has nothing to do with 'evil corporations chasing efficiency.' And you rightly point out, efficiency/productivity is literally what raises living standards for everyone.
The truth is, rising living standards have increased leisure time globally, and increased leisure time leads to increased demand for entertainment fit to your culture.
China now has 2X as many movie theaters as the US does. India produces 2,500 films per year today vs. 500 in Hollywood. Ditto for Europe (2500 films produced last year). South Korea went from nothing to a global entertainment player in 10 years. Their industries are still smaller than Hollywood but growing at faster rates.
Just like what happened to Detroit in the 1970s when Auto manufacturers started having to compete with other countries who built domestic car industries, the same exact thing happened to Los Angeles.
In both 1970s Detroit and 2010s LA, companies had focused on monetizing old cash cows (the superhero film was the chevy land yacht) while the market evolved under their feet, and unions had inflated wages/costs to the point of being wildly uncompetitive, so the industry supply chain went global. LA also refused to allow building new homes, so talent couldn't afford to stay even at $1,000/day union rates just for holding a light (that's an actual union rate for a gaffer in LA).
We're still just at the beginning of this in entertainment.
Technology has enabled the production and distribution of high end video content to drop dramatically, while at the same time demand for entertainment shifted from being heavily western to being much more diverse.
Overseas has so much film infrastructure now that Hollywood flies out the entire cast and essential crew (DP, etc.) to work on American productions overseas. They hire cheaper local crews (who are non-union), rent cheaper facilities, and even collect foreign tax subsidies.
It's far cheaper to produce everything in the UK, Eastern Europe, or Asia than it is to film in LA. Or even heavily tax-subsidized states like Georgia.
America can't compete on film production cost anymore. So it's halfway through the process of leaving, except for shots that need to film in iconic cities like New York for certain key scenes. But even then, you might see only part of the production happen in the US.
This started during the pandemic content streaming wars. There was a huge demand for content, American studios were shut down, and Amazon and Netflix dabbled with trying to shoot overseas. They found out the foreign infrastructure was just fine and that they just needed to teach the local crews a few things to be able to lift and shift the entire production pipeline. And it was so much cheaper that the choice to move everything was obvious.
Hollywood didn't lose its relevance overnight. It's been a slow moving process as the film -> digital -> portable transition made production cheaper, the internet made talent cultivation/distribution easier, studios and audiences expanded internationally, unions kept ratcheting up rates, LA refused to build homes while population ballooned, QE/ZIRP/0% rates re-inflated a housing bubble, unions kept raising rates to keep up with housing in LA, internet/social content began competing with studio productions hurting demand, the incestuous hollywood-to-traditional media marketing pipeline died (much of old print/tv media existed to market Hollywood stars and products), etc. etc.
Netflix is a global company marketing content for global audiences (the majority of their revenue is non-US) on a level that was unheard of during the heyday of Hollywood. There's a few billion people now who have TVs and enough leisure time to stream hours of film/tv content. This is just within the last 15 years.
Most of the markets growing the fastest aren't going to relate to blonde movie stars doing car chases around LA in the same way US or western European audiences (the bulk of film revenue in the early 2000s) used to.
Disagree. Good content is good content. International audiences show up for good American films, and Americans (increasingly) show up for good international films.
What are into the blonde movie stars is TikTok.
If you go to a bookstore and ask someone not particularly familiar with the industry to go find a comic book; you are very likely to have them hand a manga or manhwa tankobon[0] back to you. Trade paperbacks[1] are sold in bookstores, but the western comics section will be a small fraction of the manga & manhwa section.
The root cause of this is that in the 80s, comic book companies - say it with me, folks! - underwent massive amounts of consolidation to chase efficiencies at the expense of their ability to innovate and their ability to withstand systemic shocks. The particularized version of this is that the comic book companies ceded their cultural ubiquity to milk comics fans dry.
The efficiency being chased was "direct sales" - i.e. selling comic books to dedicated comic book stores, rather than in mass-market areas like grocery stores. A key thing to note is that the mass-market sellers retain the right to return unsold inventory and get a refund[3], but comic book stores bought on "all sales final" terms. What this ultimately meant was that comic book publishers didn't have to worry about the quality of the books anymore.
There was a long-standing cultural stigma in the US that comic books are for children. This was itself downstream of a push to censor comics that was partially successful and resulted in the Comics Code stunting the growth of the medium[4] in the US. Eventually, thanks to - among other things, Marvel wanting to publish an anti-drug PSA in a Spiderman book - the Comics Code Authority lost their power and we were able to publish comic books for adults in the US again.
Anyway, Alan Moore wrote a really gritty Batman book and kicked off a rush to capitalize on a growing adult comics wave. This, along with a bunch of people realizing that old #1s of comics published during Baby Boomers' childhoods[5] were super rare kicked off a huge speculator wave. The comics publishers - who at this point were just DC and Marvel - saw the dollar signs and started flooding the market with slop to meet the demands of speculators who were buying #1s just because they were a #1.
This continued until it could not. In an act of supreme hubris, Marvel decided to buy a comics distributor in pursuit of extreme vertical integration and wound up completely destroying their ability to correctly print a book. Then they went bankrupt, got bought out by a corporate raider, and sold their movie rights to anyone who had a buck. DC wound up in the hands of WB (lol), Marvel became a Disney property.
Yes, the 2010s comic book movie wave was directly caused by the 1990s comic book industry's death. And, for that matter, the exact same extreme consolidation that killed comics is coming for Hollywood. Disney bought Fox, Larry Ellison bought Paramount and WB and merged them into Skydance. The entirety of America's cultural industries are looking more and more like DC and Marvel fighting over the ashes of a culturally dead country.
[0] Japanese for trade paperback[1][2].
[1] English for tankobon[0].
[2] Okay, this term actually has two meanings:
1. A paperback that is not printed to mass-market standard. Publishers don't really do mass-market paperbacks anymore, even manga that is printed to mass-market sizes isn't priced like the mass-market books they are in Japan.
2. Anthologies of previously-published comic books - floppies in the western case, massive pulp-fiction magazine bricks in the Japanese case. Sometimes they're not even in paperback!
[3] Which, funnily enough doesn't even usually require returning the whole book, just the covers.
[4] The shit the Comics Code did to US comics makes the censorship changes in the 4Kids dubbed version of One Piece look liberating in comparison.
How is a very large operation more efficient at producing comic-book sales than a smaller operation?
Why cannot new comic-book companies easily be created? One guess I have is that most of the profit potential is in sales of new stories about characters that are well-known, like Superman or the Incredible Hulk, and copyright law prevents new entrants from selling those stories.
Rollercoaster Tycoon was also developed by one person. Developers could also be absurdly efficient in the past, see valve and half-life 1 as an example.
It means little to give examples of cases where developers punched above their weight and arguing it was because of reason X they could achieve it in the first place.
How many people failed, was it because of missing tools?
Like before, people will attribute some of their performance to tools, that in reality didn't matter at all.
When one guy (this guy certainly isn't the first or the best) makes a thing that manages to catch fire a bit, the big players can simply buy it. They can even force a sale, or otherwise refuse to let it be widely distributed or marketed. That's the stick, the carrot is that if it's genuinely resonant with people, they can just throw you life-changing money (i.e. pocket change for them) and generate billions for themselves.
Music barely democratized when production got in reach of the masses; as film production got cheaper, quality indy films became fewer and harder to find, and never in a theater; and as video games become cheaper to produce, Steam can make or break any of them at will, and do the same as any other monopolistic distributor - if they don't, it is by choice. If it is by choice, the person who made that choice will eventually be replaced with somebody who mocks that choice, because they will pay the most.
"Efficiency" doesn't benefit individuals at all without antitrust; it is extracted like any other value. One thing that changed about the music industry is that when it was a thousand companies, you could just bring talent and they would put you where you would earn them money - now that all media is owned by a few companies you are literally expected to bring a hit album to a record company before you get signed, and getting signed then gets you access to the media, wide distribution, and venues. They don't really even pay you, you pay them. Since they control distribution, they don't even really need talent - they can just imitate it. The reason they're giving you a deal is in order to tax your success.
The impact of the Industrial Revolution was that people were forced off of their farms, which were merged into super farms, exactly as they expected. They went from working for themselves for six hours a day, and living in relative comfort, to working for 14 hours a day and living in crime and disease ridden tenements. Their lifespans decreased by a decade. The air, land and food was poisoned. They likely died before they saw any improvements in this, and those improvements eventually came from anarchist and communist unions, and their own education about how they were being used. Then those unions and organizations were crushed, and their names were cursed; even somehow the word referring to the members of the "People's Party" became an epithet to throw at people who thought government had a responsibility to the people. Term limits were introduced so they wouldn't have a president like FDR again, although FDR's reforms ironically served to weaken the unions that saved them, so they could be destroyed completely subsequently in the name of war.
Even today, people say "you can't yell fire in a crowded theater" and don't know that it is something a judge said about a left-winger passing out antiwar pamphlets. They just repeat it, because they heard it. That's what happens when someone controls distribution.
I believe in efficiency. Efficiency under capitalism without effective devices to maintain competitive markets is simply more value for the parasites to extract.
Everybody found it easy to imagine the impact of the Industrial Revolution. That's why they broke frames.
The super farms are as important as ever.
Because farms are hyper competitive, it means that the surplus and efficiency gains are not kept by the farmers.
And it's not just 'super farms' - its' transportation that enabled 'regular labour farms' in low cost areas.
So the benefits go to distributors, packaged food makers, grocers and consumers.
In this case, mostly to consumers.
You can see the charts for the kinds of work people used to do vs, now aka we used to all live on farms, now we do all sorts of things.
This is why we're seeing an pushback on globalization, economic optimization doesn't always balance out with strategic considerations aka food supply security etc. and those are hard to put on the books because they feel like a 'non-market force'.
A 'subsidy' feels like welfare, it's really and adjust of the balance of power.
Except cinema tickets prices got raised, if we were still talking about Hollywood and its entertainment industry.
> Valheim [1] is a game that was made mostly by one guy, at first at least. Not that long ago, this would have been a multi million dollar game produced by a wide array of people.
Quoting outliers and exceptions is not supporting your argument. Concurrently, a lot of people figured they are super shrewd and will make AI-generated games and guess what, barely anyone buys them. There are social and taste factors in art. It's not a chart with a line climbing up. A lot of normal folk, myself included, see AI-generated entertainment as low-effort and a plot to get their money while the other guy is snoring and is having 2x RTX 5090's make him money in his sleep.
People don't like that. They don't have to be proficient in IT to see what's going on and to dislike it.
> The future we're moving into isn't going to be the same but more efficient for those on top.
Yes. That is what your parent comments are saying -- that they are not seeing the common folk get too many benefits (if any) when the dust settles, which it still has not. They/we are saying: it's going to get objectively and measurably better only for the richest class.
> That efficiency is going to revolutionize the economy in ways that are probably impossible to see from a distant, much how somebody living in an agrarian society couldn't have even begun to imagine the 'real' impact of the Industrial Revolution.
The only thing at this point that is likely being revolutionized is our cooking skills because we should learn to cook rats and roaches -- because those on top care not about you and me. No, scratch that. They care. But they want us gone.
Almost nobody wants human workers per se, they just don't have a choice. The LLM era shows this acutely and clearly; many businesses rushed to fire people BEFORE they had proof LLMs will get their work done at all. The social and economic aspects of "nobody wants human workers" have been there forever but it was accepted as a necessary evil.
Now, many capital holders have an excuse _and_ a tool to want less -- or zero -- human workers. We are currently living in this boiling pot and your vaguely optimistic comment does not line with the reality I am observing.
Maybe, historically speaking / era-wise, i.e. 50-ish years from now, everything will be alright, a new equilibrium will have been reached and the humanity will be objectively happier generally and per-capita.
That will not comfort a talented VFX artist, a programmer, a sysadmin, a lawyer, and many others, when they have to get their half-paid house confiscated and go live in shanty towns and form a gypsy-like society so they can survive at all.
"Historically..." arguments are boring. What happens _now_? How is society and economy and the rich class handling the turbulent changes in the last 2 years? How will they handle them in the next 5 years?
Everyone who uses those products and services. Prices go down and people can get much more in aggregate. More entertainment, healthcare, etc.
AI making things cheaper and faster makes it worse, not better because it drives competition up and strengthens the bridge trolls at the attention gate aka platforms while taking power from both viewers and creators.
I joined the VFX industry in 2007(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Compass_(film)), where a film like the golden compass required a large number of people to just make the fur look realistic (there were groomers who's job was to literally style hair.)
The huge increase in CPU power, and latterly GPU power meant that a few number of people could do a lot more. (software RnD was also crucial to this)
to hammer that home, the BBC version https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Dark_Materials_(TV_series) had way more furry animals, much more extensive digital sets, and with a combined run time of > 480 minutes vs 110. It was also done much cheaper.
TLDR its not just AI thats doing this. although it will be more and more now. as world models really kick into gear.
No I don't like it, but what am I to do?
> Who is getting the money that was "saved"? Regular people do not have more more money or time. The "efficiency" is for people who are already very rich, to get richer.
Pension funds and investment vehicles chase profit growth. The vast majority of people have a stake in that.
You think profit is anti-human?
I kind of agree with him: probably, a civilization deemed to be called "advanced" would have everything in place to sustain the basic needs of its members: that would be the baseline of everything
If there are too many people, that means birth control
Basic needs does not includes entertainments either :)
I am quitting my job because I've just realized that everything, without exception, that I've done as a programmer has been done with the goal of making already rich people even richer.
Do you have an idea as to what your new job will be, and if so, and will you be doing to ensure that you won't be making rich people even richer in this new position?
Most content sucks ass. What may appear to be bountiful content is actually a lot of okay and meh content. Very little of it fits to your actual taste preference. It's a whole lot of mediocre. We as humans do not know what plentiful content looks like. We've never lived in it.
Most movies suck. You doomscroll and are dissatisfied. You refresh your media recommendations and sigh. You are excited to see a new fantasy or sci-fi film that scratches that itch, yet often left disappointed.
We are still in a desert. Anyone who says otherwise is settling for the status quo that our childen will call primitive and beastly.
Jobs are disappearing because cheap/free ad subsidized content attracts more eyeball hours than produced and prestige content. It's the optimal pareto frontier of content and does the most bang for buck, most in aggregate eyeball hours.
When the tools enable more creation at scale by tasteful creators, we'll start to get closer to content abundance. We're not there yet.
That limit is called time, which people struggling to get by rarely have. And the "most bang for buck, most in aggregate eyeball hours" is an extraordinarily mono-dimensional take on media and film.
The hate for technological advances is so strong that we're wanting... Entertainment austerity for poor people?
Oh my God.
This community needs more hope.
> extraordinarily mono-dimensional take on media and film.
You're telling this to someone who is Meisner-trained, who acts and performs, who has directed, shot lots of films, and who is heavily involved in the arts. A24 is my jam, and even that's not enough to sate me.
I sincerely hope this isn't a performance.
I want better. Both as a consumer and creator in the arts.
This reminds me of the comparison between Japanese manga and American comics/graphic novels. Some people say the former offer a much wider variety of content and ideas because it is often started by a single (often quirky) author, whereas the latter is usually designed by a committee, which ends up favoring more bland ideas. Anime usually starts of as manga, and that's why anime is so creative as well.
Perhaps AI will help single authors create more work by themselves, and we'll have a renaissance of comic books and other forms of (mostly digital) entertainment in the west. And we'll spend less time watching those TV shows on streaming platforms that follow the same few recipes.
Understanding is a combination of consumption and reflection. There is simply not enough time to do so. This is driving a push towards content that is so simple to consume that it takes no effort.
There is a bit of a parallel here to what LLMs have done to software. They have sped up the act of writing the code, but have done little for everything on either side of the code writing.
There were trends in the past like the magical girl trend, giant robot trend, space opera trend, and high fantasy trend, but those always pulled from things like Japanese women's rejection of staid maturity, Japan's manufacturing boom and the rise of complex electronics, Star Wars and the exocolonization hype of the late 1970s, and Dungeons & Dragons and Wizardry. There was always something new outside of the sphere that got integrated into it. Nowadays many manga are copies of copies, where the things they're copying pulled from games like Tera Online, Xenoblade Chronicles, or Dragon Quest, and from landmark '90s manga and anime like Yu Yu Hakusho, Record Of Lodoss War, and Tenchi Muyo. Especially in the last seven or so years these properties are so many layers removed because of the copying that they don't know why certain plot tropes or character archetypes exist and thus don't know how to use them (or more importantly subvert them).
Sturgeon's Law obviously applies, but currently many of the best examples of ongoing manga and anime lie within a fraction of the diversity that used to exist. Comparing 2024-2026 to 2004-2006 (which was considered a dark age in anime and manga at the time) provides a pretty stark example. The same thing happened with American comics in the 1990s and 2000s before the indie comics boom following Diamond Distribution's years long fight with the industry. While kids don't have a reference for what's good or not because they don't have a back catalogue of experience to compare to, adults absolutely do. And adults are the ones that drive a majority of sales considering the anime boom started in the mid 1990s. They won't read or watch something that repeats a well worn premise but worse. So we might be about to see a collapse of manga as the snake reaches the end of eating it's own tail.
Hollywood's cost structure makes it impossible to try anything new. I'd contrast that to Japan where creators can write a "web novel", get a contract for a light novel, have a manga made, and then an anime, and maybe even some video games. And these all reinforce each other: last year I discovered an atrociously drawn anime that had got me curious about the source material -- that blew me away and I bought all of the printed materials that have come out so far and expect to buy all the rest.
Not least, Japan still gets new 4-panel comics like Bocci the Rock and The Demon Girl Next Door, something almost unthinkable of in the Land of the Nepo Baby where we haven't had a new one since Dilbert.
So while AI has potentially made it easier for some Japanese content to reach English-speaking Western audiences, I’m not so sure that it’s doing justice to the original creations.
Note: I’m not suggesting that AI doesn’t have a place in translation work, but it still needs close supervision from bilingual people.
For one thing I've watched enough anime that I have quite a bit of comprehension of spoken Japanese, there are a lot of things that you hear over and over again that stick in my mind. I will even instinctually translate English translations of anime back into idiomatic anime Japanese.
Another thing is that emotional comprehension of Japanese is really easy for English speakers. The people who make Chinese mobile games realize this and make Japanese the default for westerners as opposed to Chinese or English: Japanese speakers use tone to express emotion and I dare say are more expressive and more comprehensible emotionally to English speakers than English speakers.
My spoken Chinese comprehension is weak but I've been training myself to read it emotionally -- like emotionally Chinese was "inscrutable" [1] to me when I first started watching Chinese language media but I hear people speak Chinese every day at my Uni and I watch their faces out of the corner of my eye and maybe even drift into a synchronization trace and I can feel the rhythm of how their voice speeds up and slows down and the other cues and it seems really expressive to me.
Now I have a lot of respect for professional western voice actors who do "cartoons", I saw one who went to my acting school who did a 5 minute skit where he did about 20 different voices. There you really have madcap expressiveness but unfortunately the genre is limited and you just don't have the range of subjects and a stance which is just a bit more serious but still has a "cartoony" range of expression when things get heated.
[1] tone is semantic in Chinese so it is not used so much to express emotion
Wrt to voice actors, the world of today is far different from the VA world of yesteryear. There's a lot more competition and also less demand for somebody who can do a multitude of bombastic voices. It's rare that you need somebody like Dan Castellaneta or Mel Blanc. Partly I think because if you look at the trends, especially in Western cartoons and animation, the characters' voices are often very close to the voice actors' natural voices.
It isn't exactly a desert? It is more like a full buffet, but nothing but cheap, mass-produced sugar literally everywhere. All the 2-star donuts and chocolate cupcakes you can eat, and nothing but that.
Most new ones do, but they've been making like a dozen great ones each year for for like 80 years.
Honestly TV (including the back catalogs) are where most of the truly good video content is.
> cheap/free ad subsidized content attracts more eyeball hours than produced and prestige content
This part I really agree with. It's the reason shitty Netflix reality shows are among the most popular 'watercooler discussion' shows today.
If you build a really good game, there is a market for it. Otherwise it will be lost in an ocean of not-interesting titles.
If you have 0 standards.
No film, no music, no game.
There's good, but there is no truly magnificent to the level I burst into tears and see the face of God.
Come on people. Your standards are too low.
Producing things of value takes a lot of time and effort, you would be too busy to waste time lamenting about things outside of your control.
Anybody with a big imagination must feel trapped by mediocre content. Daydreams are often more enjoyable.
But not finding joy in anything is an actual sign of depression. Have some media standards declined? Yes, definitely. But by no means is literally everything bad now. You can still find plenty of non-formulaic media on streaming services.
Moving to something else that provides joy is a sign of healthy life, not depression. If you don't like modern media, you don't have to find some that you like, you can look somewhere else, in a completely different area.
Hang in there! It gets better!
Even if you take an old established media, like literature, you can trivially read all the classics by the time you are 30.
Saying that about gaming industry, which is barely 50 year old, is a joke.
One can only say that when they no idea what "high standards" actually means.
Some time ago I started playing all the games that to me felt worthwhile to play in roughly chronological order.
I think the project is overall quite different than "reading all the classics" though - a lot of old games have aged pretty poorly so I can either skip them or abandon after giving them a fair shot.
I'm currently roughly in the 2000-2010 era of games. (It's not pure chronological, because I tend to sort play order by console, then by series, then by year.)
I don't think this is true, at least not for an ordinary person, unless you're dedicating your life to it (hardly trivial) or ploughing your way through for the sake of completion rather than absorbing them intellectually and emotionally. Writers like Joyce can be difficult to even parse if you're trying to read their work quickly, and to truly understand it you'll probably need to engage with secondary sources. And then there's the likes of Proust, which aren't exactly difficult to read but are extremely long (and probably won't do much for you unless you take your time with them). There's no objectively valid set of 'classics' but we're talking about certainly hundreds and arguably thousands of books. A book a week every single week from the age of 15-30 would do it if we're taking about a medium-sized set of classics...
Or spend a lifetime reading and re-reading them non-trivially.
"My definition of a great story has nothing to do with 'a varied and interesting background.' It is: One that can be read with pleasure by a cultivated reader and reread with increasing pleasure."
- Gene Wolfe
Depends on how you define high quality, indie games with quality similar to Hollow Knight do not come out all the time.
It just is much harder to have that level of polish and amount of content without a bigger well oiled team, so almost no indie games reaches that level.
Which is completely expected, and not unique to this era. The commenter said "Released recently," as though there was some time where we were basking in masterpieces. If that's your definition for quality, the situation is still better now than it was at any other time in the industry.
There used to be hardly any indie scene. Steam was not dominant yet and consoles didn't let just anyone on their platforms. Because of this, there were far fewer games, and many of them were shit. But of course, we only remember the excellent ones, or the ones from our youth, as we do for film and music.
Today, the variety of different stories and risky ideas being tried dwarfs any other time, and people are pulling off more ambitious things with less money. And the games are also cheap. I got Songs of Syx for $25.
For what it's worth, there are a bunch of indie games I like more than Hollow Knight. I think it's a good game, but it's a pretty specific genre. I don't think we "peaked" there.
Even if we're over-estimating "excellent" by a lot, that's still more games that anyone can reasonably play.
But I suppose that's part of the problem with all media. We have more media than ever, so tastes get more divserse. This can consequently be bad for "cultural" purposes because you can meet 1000 people and struggle to find more than 2 who like the kinds of games or movies you watch regularly. So you instead default back 20 years ago to The Wire or Sopranos or The Dark Knight Rises, etc. Around the last time we have "mass culture". or Sports.
For gaming, GTA VI will be an interesting time, even if I don't personally care for the series. Because that may be the first time since perhaps Pokemon GO where you have so many subgroups of gaming aligning together for a single release.
If you have a limited interest in genres, no, you're not going to enjoy a lot of games, which has always been true. There is not some mythical time before now where a greater quantity of excellent games were being made.
Ever bothered to actually go through the "all new releases" list on steam and actually check each new release? You should try it.
99% of "stuff" there is worthless trash, think 0 effort assetflip, which is never going to make $100 steam tax back. 1% is barely passable, as in "not a blatant insult to consumer". Unique stuff worth playing is extremely rare, if you're not 7 years old and you played more than a couple of games in your life of course.
I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone who has played as many games as I have, and I couldn't disagree more. I find this sentiment more common amongst people who have played 20-30 games in their lifetime. The more I play, the more interested I am in the smaller titles sprinkled throughout the month. Even a janky, low budget game can do something unique. I have a massive backlog.
There are very cool games coming out every week, IMO. Just this next month,
- The Kingsfield inspired game Queen's Domain. That looks visually amazing.
- Noble Fates is a very cool Colony Sim that surpasses Rimworld in some respects (even if it comes short in others)
- Worship is a game where you play as a cult leader and command minions like Pikmin (I'm a sucker for cult games).
- County of Fortune is a massive city builder that goes a scale beyond what most city builders allow
- Silver Pines is a horror game borrowing from the genre's greats. It got a 97% on Steam.
This is a hot take indeed. Unless you use the word unique to pick only a single game from each genre, even a single genre has more games than I can hope to finish in a lifetime.
I mean, I still play Dune 2, warcraft II, sc:broodwars and C&C, in addition to Starcraft II.
And that's just a single genre.
As a kid, I played games with a board and counters. Sometimes I made my own board and counters. And there was only one channel on the B+W TV.
What a gross and completly apt terminology for the commoditization of art from the bureaucrats by the way.
You can make your album accessible to every human on earth for free.
So my Instagram is full of very very high quality music, much of it I'll only listen to once.
Music from all over the world.
Its great.
Yet sad. So much music I'll never get to. I have to spend 40 to 50 hours a week generating income. If only I did better on that Meta interview way back.
I'd be retired now, free to indulge in endless entertainment.
I also want to make games and music. Open source everything after 5 years. Honest games you buy once and self host forever.
It might be this one Yellow Economy[1]. But I'm not 100% sure.
[1] https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/yellow_economy_14_...
Some of this stuff is pre-AI, Photoshop smart tools stuff. Especially clothing ads. Nobody has a live model pose with each item color any more. Or even each item. (I used to know actress/model/waitress types in LA who did that. Grind job: "OK, the blue sweater is next, and hurry it up, we have 50 to do before lunch". But it paid OK.)
I can barely watch anything on Netflix due to issues like this:
"Matt Damon Says Netflix Wants Movies to Restate the ‘Plot Three or Four Times in the Dialogue’ Because Viewers are on ‘Their Phones While They’re Watching’"
https://variety.com/2026/film/news/matt-damon-netflix-movies...
I remember seeing an old article saying how terrible "Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back" was. Now often regarded as the best Star Wars movie, and featured in many "best movies of all times" lists.
I still think there is a problem with Hollywood movies today, also AAA video games, and I think it focuses on making a small number of blockbusters with insane budgets. These movies are not bad in a sense that they are incompetently made, the problem is that they have to be safe for the investors. So, no crazy ideas, wide target audience, inoffensive, familiar, etc... That's why we get so many sequels and remakes, can't go wrong with these, but unfortunately, you can't go outstandingly right either. Indie, on the other hand, is thriving, though more in games than in movies.
I highly recommend people watch Wick is Pain [0] because it raises several interesting point:
- The film almost didn't get made until Eva Longoria joined as a producer to help get it financed.
- a lot of the Gun Fu fight scenes were actually developed for Jason Statham but he thought it was too different
- both of the directors were fight choreographers and not seasoned directors
- the guns used in the movies are blank firing but have barrels that are welded closed. This is so that they can be used at close range to other actors (which is a newer technique)
- Chad S. has a great line about the later movies: "We thought 'can we do this next?' but then we remembered we own the IP for this franchise so we can do WHATEVER we want"
I say all of this to point out that I agree with your original point and wish that there were more money available to fund "outside the norm" movies that could lead to great new franchises.
i prefer watching older movies now where they actually "build the world" the movie is set within, instead of injecting politics from our world into some made up world.
i miss when fantasy and fiction actually met the definition.
actually on that point i’m all in on selling consumerism to as many people as possible. women are actually way easier to retain and far more susceptible to fomo.
great customers.
Every streaming service feels more and more user hostile. If I want to watch South Park it’s a 15$ a month subscription just for that .
Paramount Plus has nothing else.
I want to watch Lanterns, another 30$ a month.
Maybe King of The Hill , 20$ a month. The Reboot has this weird lazy animation style.
I do feel for anyone trying to find a new H1B sponsor. I've lived and worker as a foreigner before, its stressful for sure. It is also a tough spot for a country to be in, if your domestic labor is struggling to find or keep jobs itsnhard to justify continuing protections for foreign labor.
The average amount of time spent doing "Relaxing and leisure" activities (mostly TV) has increased 6% in the last twenty years. There was a small decrease after the post-COVID peak, but working time has also decreased in this time frame.
My hypothesis is, YT, Reels and TT are eating everyone’s lunch, as people spend more time on those. And for people who don’t watch much, there’s Spotify. Basically attention span degradation across all age groups.
What came out this year that you think you'll watch again in 10 years?
The industry goes through slumps and renaissance periods as the creative juices wax and wain. Game industry is falling into the same trends.
Even during creative slumps there's always someone out there not following the trends making something good
If certain ultra conservative countries don’t like LGBT representation they don’t get to be in your major movie.
At this point I don’t know the difference between Chat GPT writing the next marvel movie or Disney hiring someone. Either way the story needs to be crystal clear. You never watch something that makes you think.
I don't mind too much, I just miss overall quality and don't care who tf is "represented" or not.
But honestly I think most localized TV experiences are awkward. Switzerland barely is tho, that's clean and boring in a way but rarely awkward.
I bet the median American has more real disposable income than four years ago.
I bet the median American spends more in real terms on entertainment (and streaming specifically) than four years ago.
Almost without fail, the data in almost any area of modern life seems to be way less negative than people’s vibes about it are.
The streaming model has imho mostly killed old style television formats with the new way of hyping up a show in the first couple episodes by tossing money and talent, then leave people to hang with unsatisfying conclusions once you've got that sub money. It's all about convincing people to sign up and stay signed up with promises for new content. The quality of the content doesn't matter as long as there's a lot of it and it's enough to keep people from unsubscribing.
With traditional TV your value was directly determined by how many people were watching so you could sell addspace. And despite there being less choice and harder for independent players to get time, in some ways it was weirdly more democratic because if a show sucked or an episode sucked people would just change the channel or watch something else. With streaming they still do that but it's all in the same price scheme so doesn't hurt their bottom line. They're incentivised to just crank out as much crap as possible to keep subs up. Won't last.
The thing is that most people would rather not do that and prefer to keep watching garbage. You can only lead a horse to water...
This is funny, because every damn time I find something I want to watch its on paramount+.
There has to be a paradox/law named after this at this point. "The thing you're trying to watch will always be on the service you don't have."
The modern "Netfix model" has seemed to resulted in large number of new TV shows (relative to number of new movies) which always seem to get killed before their plotlines are resolved. And when I have something in mind I want to watch I often don't even know where to find it.
I'd prefer to go get DVDs from Blockbuster at this point - it'd be more convenient!
Although, I think Netflix also does not directly employ the people that make media, just like Apple. They just employ the people that curate it and distribute it.
Having fun isn't hard when you've got a library card!
[1] https://pages.skybrian.com/2026/us-households-by-income-band...
I think we could stop all content creation today and everyone would still have enough to last through their grandchildren's lifetimes.
And unlike a lot of things, media doesn't expire. I still regularly find albums, movies, and books from decades ago I enjoy today.
Media of all forms is just worth less now due to oversupply.
I don’t think people will ever really want to only watch old stuff, or lack desire for new stuff. But, in terms of thinking about the volume of media available I think the non-expiring idea is valid. YouTube alone has 500 hours of video uploaded every 1 minute.
If you don't know your history well, the whole setting for the Count of Monte Cristo is confusing af. So you now need to read up on the fall and rise of the monarchy and Napoleon, and his exile etc. Also a lot of words are just foreign to most people.
Where as reading a book written recently it's just way easier to get into it since it's written in the context of our collective memory (if that makes sense).
Media doesn't expire, but with increasing distance to the cultural context it was created in, enjoying any work in all its nuances becomes harder. Take for example Arrested Development - one of the funniest TV shows of this century, but unless you bring sufficient knowledge on the Bush Jr. administration, you'll miss the funniest layers of many jokes and stories.
And it gets all the more interesting to look back at how the Zeitgeist changed over time, as tropes evolve and tastes keep changing.
The per capita part is very important to explaining the figure, don't ignore it, but if you break oil (and related products like kerogen, bitumen and NGL) into light, medium and heavy we hit peak medium oil in 2008.
Isn't that explained by improvements in efficiency? i.e. it takes significantly less fuel to move the same mass than it did in 2008?
> So based on that, we believe what is most fair is to put current trends in because you cannot predict at what point consumers and demand is going to be -- you're going to begin to see demand destruction based on the pricing environment.
https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2026/04/23/so...
I expect AI use to cause an increase in output, not a decrease in employment. At least right now. In TV and Film it would translate to more content that was too expensive to film before. If your business is making movies and then suddenly the market is flooded with fast and cheap movies, then you're going to make more fast and cheap movies too!
Back in the early 1990s the widely referenced BBC guidelines required 99.9% accuracy overall. Nowadays it is assumed that viewers will be used to and understanding about frequent errors, and that you don't need to take pride on your product to keep them in your platform.
Then, because of legacy broadcasts and backwards compatibility, that carried over well into the 2010s.
Many people spend hours browsing Tik Tok rather than watching film or television.
Even long form YouTube videos are highly popular. Many folks spend time watching those rather than movies or tv. I believe Tom Hanks was speaking about this many years ago.
That being said….
I remember growing up and my teachers would always emphasize the importance of reading. I’m sure it would be a great thing for humanity if everyone spent their free time reading books rather than on film or television. In such a scenario would people complain about job loss then? This could be a fruitful idea for a science fiction short story come to think of it.
Since rolling back to at least the pre-radio days is unlikely, we might focus on educating consumers in a way that empowers them rather taking a top-down approach to control what people are allowed to do because we know what is best for everyone.
When I read, I don't get that feeling. Even here on HN where it is mostly wasting time.
I think this is why so much media has viewer comments. It's something to engage with and lose awareness of the passing time.
Isn’t this the wrong conclusion.
It’s that streaming as the monetization vehicle no longer creates an opportunity for movie maker to make huge returns.
Once, a blockbuster movie could make $1 billions.
Today, the movie maker only gets a sliver of the $12/mo subscription fee.
The consumer behavior, or opportunity as you put it, that supported those billion dollar blockbusters has changed largely due to competing media. Film and TV are not the only show in town anymore.
Streaming is bringing in similar/better money compared to cable TV, but the income pillars for movies used to be “theaters, rentals, cable TV” and now the pillars removed the rentals part.
Yes, sure, you still can rent and buy movies on the Apple TV Store, Vudu/Fandango, Amazon, and Google Play, but I get the sense that these income streams are a lot smaller than Blockbuster and Hollywood Video used to be.
This also seems like it was entirely the movie industry’s fault. They basically gifted leverage to Netflix by agreeing to license movies and TV for their monthly streaming service. By the time they realized what they were giving away it was too late: Netflix had enough money to produce their own content and they proved the business model to Apple and Amazon.
If I was going to argue against my own point I would perhaps say that the internet was bound to devalue content regardless of business model. Content used to be artificially limited by the channels available on our TV and the movie selection at our local video store. Now I might be happy to watch a show on YouTube for free instead of paying for an expensive streaming service. That wasn’t really even an option before unless I wanted to watch a small selection of terrestrial antenna channels.
You really need to factor them in and their earnings in any discussion like this. It's still smaller than consumer spending on this stuff was before but it's the growing part.
What percentage of the earnings of influencers flows back into the economy as part of production costs instead of small percentage as spending or sitting as wealth in banks.
I think either your $50B/yr in the US figure is low (would mean less than 1 in 6 dollars is earned in the US) or, I think more likely, your 3.2M figure is too high.
Where did you source the 3.2M figure?
Many seems unlikely. Influencer income follows a Pareto distribution so you would expect that most influencers who make more than 100k a year earn close to that.
(I still jump in for the occasional video tutorial etc but it’s always targeted - go for one thing, swoop in, close it when I’m done.
I had been replacing it with podcasts, but they are so ad-infested now that it's been pushing me more and more to audiobooks. I also watch a fair bit of content on smaller special interest platforms, like CrunchyRoll for Anime or Pepperbox for guns. They're easy to sub and unsub depending on what I'm interested in. I often rent old movies. And more and more... I read.
I had used Prime's videos for a while when they had something I liked, but the ads have gotten so bad that I now go out of my way not to emotionally invest in anything they produce. The experience has left me skeptical of other platform exclusive shows and I generally just go do something else with my time. I used to be a big fan of both Star Wars and Star Trek, but at some point they both started producing Platform Content and in response, I haven't watched anything from either for about a decade now.
That doesn't mean there isn't trash, and I suppose if tv series are your jam it's likely sub-par, but for me it's unmatched by light years.
"Let me tell you why!"
"Is not X, it's Y!"
and so on. It's so tiresome. I can't stand AI scripts. It makes the entire video feel like a waste of my time.
Every now and then I’d let my 3 and 5 year old pick what they want to watch (on my account, but I’m supervising them) and they’d find these Mario videos that are basically someone prompting “make as many YouTube channels with Mario videos as you can” and walked away from the computer. Each video is a bunch of 3 second clips smooshed together with no continuity, backgrounds constantly changing, suddenly there’s 100 Luigi’s in the background for no reason, etc. And my kids couldn’t get enough of it.
Suddenly our recommendations were all Mario videos, and banning the channels does nothing because they’re coming from hundreds of different channels.
I just locked the profile, deleted all its history, and never looked back. No more YouTube for them.
And how many people work on a well-loved indie artifact of about the same market position?
Gonna guess the latter supports way fewer jobs. (This isn't meant as a judgment in taste or moralizing--my own entertainment tastes run indie towards pretentious, so economically I'm part of the problem.)
Is more jobs better than less jobs? Or does this apply to only certain things?
Are you suggesting creatives just give their work away for free?
In contrast, thought-terminating clichés like "facebook boomer" show critical thinking on your part.
I fully agree with that: calling someone a "facebook boomer" is just plain pathetic.
(btw the boomers are my parents' generation: don't go thinking I take it personally. I'm a GenX'er and GenX'er are badass, which is why I don't give a flying fuck saying what I think).
Something something about the pot and calling some kettle black etc.
A side-effect of the democratization of content creation and the explosion of ways to consume content is that there’s more low-quality things to consume. Low-quality content will always be produced in greater abundance than high-quality so there’s more garbage to dig through, but there are still gems out there.
Personally, after years of infrequent movie attendance, this is the first month that I can remember in my adult life that my wife and I saw two movies in the theater and given the opportunity there’s a third we’d still like to see!
Apparently the amount of movies actually being produced has barely recovered to post 2008 levels.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/187122/movie-releases-in...
The 2023 Hollywood Strike strike, the COVID lockdowns shutting down theaters, and the aggressive film production (UK, Poland, Ireland, Norway, Italy, Spain, Colombia) and VFX (Ireland, India, Colombia) subsidizes right as American states like California, Georgia, NY, and others began cutting them meant much of the American film and television industry got obliterated earlier this decade.
The reality is revenue is roughly consistent, but production costs one you remove subsidies (like what most of the US and Canada did) become exhorbitant in low margin industries like entertainment.
It's now cheaper to produce an "American" movie or TV show in Ireland, using British actors affecting an American accent (thank Hugh Laurie, Idris Elba, and Dominic West for that), with post and VFX done in India than it is in the US.
This is something that has been reported on in the space for a decade now, but not much can be done.
This article is also another example of why HNers should stick to their own lane, as most lack context or visibility into other industries.
Also thought the graphs around covid were interesting, there wasn't a spike up or anything it's just been consistently down.
The article said we're not in a recession. I thought we were lol
This might well be true, and it fits in with the claim that constraints or limits can lead to more creative outcomes (currently on the HN front page[1]), but everything still had to pass the state censor's approval.
Is it a magic external power amplifier controlled by a handful of powerful companies? Like giant social networks for example, where the most successful network wins due to literal network effects coupled with the ability (capital, income) to pay for the technology and staff to run it. Or Big Oil who needs capital to exploit an oil field and ongoing money to pay their expert staff to work for them. Or Big Pharma, or Big Ag.
The alternate lens is that AI is like a dictionary or medicine reference or some other keystone textbook. Very expensive and time consuming to compile, but after that it requires little to no cost to duplicate and every copy helps a new person be better.
Unfortunately for the trillion dollar “labs”, I can’t see how AI is going to be the next Standard Oil, Meta, Pfizer, or John Deere. Unless the labs can somehow capture the market, destroy or outlaw the competition, or in some way cripple the general public’s ability to run their own models, then they are doomed to failure.
In the long run, Standard Oil will lose out to me hanging a solar panel off my balcony. Facebook is losing out to self organised networks using commodity chat apps (ahem, owned by whom? -all). The Labs will lose out to ollama.cpp running on my own hardware.
Now, one thing The Labs could do of course to defend against me running my own stuff, is to buy up all the VRAM so there’s none left for me! It’s as if my local inference was powered by milkshake, and they drank my milkshake, they drank it up!
Well since AI-generated content has no copyright, this should read, "..., to hide the prejury of asserting copyright over un-copyright-able material."
This is a common misconception.
1. The question of AI copyright is not fully settled, both in the US and other countries.
2. The current state of AI in the US is that AI generated works seem to be copyrightable if humans were involved in the creative process to a certain, currently fuzzy amount. However, this is not a fully settled legal question and could change in the coming years as case law establishes standards.
The amount of video being produced has never been higher, as well.
Rise of influencers and content creators - less hollywood gatekeeping and more commoditizing the distribution of content across YT, Tiktok, instagram. Big names moving out of networks and into distribution channels they have more control over - making more content, more money, and with less resources.
The bar is much much much higher today to standout and be worth one's attention, and most sources of entertainment/stimulation are very fungible.
When a job is no longer required, it means we (humanity) managed to do something clever to get it done with less labour - a great achievement!
This frees up those involved in that job to pursue other work, increases supply, and drives down prices - i.e. society overall experiences an increase in standards of living.
The only negatives are on the individual who's laid off through 1. frictional unemployment (the hardship someone goes through when switching jobs), and 2. potential salary reduction as they go from a lucrative job to being a newbie in their new career. But like any career, they can build that up again.
The best mindset is not to take any job/salary for granted in the first place, as it's not someone else's responsibility to employ us.
> increase supply
Not necessarily. Supply could stay the same.
> drives down prices
Not necessarily, if raw materials got more expensive.
> The only negatives are on the individual
You might want to have a look at youth unemployment rates. Sometimes, there simply are no jobs: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/unemployment-rate-for-you...
Changing careers reduces your income and your purchasing power. If it happens to too many people at once, standard of living decreases.
You simply neglect demand in your entire argument.
Try LLMing this (it efficiently interrogates both your assumptions in a single prompt):
> in standard economic thinking, is it possible for a job to be made redundant due to improvements in technology and that employee to be reassigned elsewhere, and for either long run supply to go down or long run prices to go up?
Note: there will always be edge cases, for example if I owned a business, I could theoretically replace someone with AI, and increase my prices, which would contradict the idea that greater efficiency always results in more supply and lower prices, but overall in the long-run that won't happen.
I noticed that a good percentage (between 30 and 50%) is AI generated and I was wondering what impact it had on the actors/musicians/... . I mean, with a few 10s of Euros now you can achieve something that before it would've costed you several thousands or tens of thousands (depends on the quality of the production I guess).
I assumed at the time it must've been a slaughter for that part of the gig economy and this seems to confirm it.
Also how much is the end of ZIRP and how much is jobs moving abroad? I'd love to see the article go a bit deeper
I'm sure all their fans will agree that it's a good thing Metallica has such a consistent track record of being all about "love, energy and heavy music", instead of ever divisively singing about or getting their hands dirty with politics, and stayed in their lane and stuck to romantic love songs and upbeat pop jingles like One, And Justice for All, Disposable Heros, Blackened, Eye of the Beholder, The Shortest Straw, Don't Tread on Me, For Whom the Bell Tolls, etc.
Maybe we haven't had enough time to see the full impact, but right now, most job losses seem to be attributable to shifting consumption habits and a supply of content (both professional and amateur) that vastly outweighs demand.
Who would know that optimizing for the next quarter would also not be a recipe for long term value creation in arts too?
At least some of this will be AI companies buying and scanning every book available...
In that case we're in deep shit. It's already worrisome to see the effects that various technological "advances" (like smartphones) have had on culture and society. This is likely to make things even worse.
> What actually happened is cooler than what could happen
It’s hard to think of a fictional story that beats actually rowing across the world.
They are totally different content, and one inarguably more addictive and shallow than the other
But you’re right.
For all this data knows, a decent number of them are making online content with AI assisted tools.
the author does concede the higher level data is less dramatic, in the closing statement but not before he got the clicks
American media dying is a natural effect that was ongoing even before AI
Technology has almost always been adopted in Hollywood.
Media grew to become social media, and skills of social media became relevant and new positions.
you have to be very careful quoting those sources that are based on incorrect data. One might have three jobs and make 5 times less than it used to be. It's a rabbit hole that needs its own thorough research.
- Kono Express. [1] Disney laid off an character animator from the Star Wars factory. The animator decided to see what was possible with the best modern tools. He's using both AI tools and Unreal Engine. There are six episodes now, and each one is a bit better than the last, as he gets a handle on the technology. The first episode looks like generic sci-fi stuff, at good quality but not yet perfect. By episode three, he has this nailed. It keeps getting better. Episode six [2] is a delight. He's now almost up to current Hollywood quality. One person, turning out half an hour of content every few weeks. Who needs Disney any more?
- Asian vertical dramas. 17,000 episodes per day. Apparently 55% of China's AI capacity is cranking these out. Search for "asian drama creation tools". Amusingly, Google and Bing have completely different tool lists. These are all software as a service products, with accounts and token charges. Currently, visuals are quite good, with some notable errors. Complex patterns on clothing don't stay consistent, for example. Continuity errors remain common. Automatically generated audio is currently terrible, at least in the English translations. Plots are so cliche that it's clear people are re-using the same prompts. "Heiress girl returns from countryside" is very popular. Here's a recent drama, about startup working hours.[3] The plot is silly but the visuals are OK.
- There's starting to be a thing for turning out movies based on old SF novels. So far, these seem unauthorized by the original author, but that will change. In time, every good book will have its movie.
The good stuff in this space is getting to be better than the Marvel Overexpanded Universe.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikm5lP0zsi0
Oh wow, someone did a dance, and then someone copied it, and then someone copied it, and then someone copied it, and then..
One tell of a hive minded thinker is when they have knee jerk reactions to things and shoot from the lip.
Personally responsibility, when averaged out to billions of people, being given choices based on the work of scientists, engineers and researchers, with no barrier to leverage your neurology and data?
I have never perfectly understood how we reconcile what happens at scale, where its trillions of choices every minute, over the user base the size of several countries with individual responsibility.
The best answer I have is that it should be a fair fight / Fair choice. There should be a reasonable expectation of what the average outcome in a given situation is, and the players should have equal ability to engage in that transaction.
Your experience being humanizing is one experience, the average experience being dehumanizing is still entirely possible.
I mean, If what I said affected your world view to the point that you have to respond the way you did, I am not sure what can be said to make it better for you.
This is the field of my work, so I know with certainty the point I am making.
My response to the situation was to learn and understand it so that it can be made better for normal people. So that they have an actual fair chance.
I assume you have the ability to acknowledge the difference between a single individual’s choice at one moment, and the choices of that individual at different times of the day.
Firms don’t bet on a single human making a reasonable choice. The bet that given enough humans, enough will be in the right circumstances to make the choices that benefit the firm.
Even individual agency shifts at different times, which is why food ads play at specific time slots.
No one is an island.
You know that the TikTok feeds are superior at giving the user what engages them and keeps them logged in. I think that is part of your point. You then introduce a "firms don't bet on a single human making a reasonable choice," and that they bet that "enough will be in the right circumstances to make the choices that benefit the firm." This is a conflation that you are making that you might think is necessary to support your hypothesis that the evil scientist, engineers, and researchers are twisting minds.
You can criticize them for making the product too responsive and addicting—sort of like you could criticize Frito Lay for the same thing. What you cannot argue is that the software engineers are trying to make the users bad, stupid, or fat.
Which returns to the original part of this discussion. I said that TikTok was replacing legacy media. When using TikTok was morally questioned, I responded that the output that is consumed is largely determined by the user, and I citied my experience of that.
If you are not saying that TikTok is purposively altering "normal" people in a negative way, but that simply the addictive nature of the software is leading to "normal" people to affect themselves in a negative way because of their choices and tastes, and that it is your job to help force TikTok to change the approach to maximizing engagement in order to protect the users from their bad choices and tastes, then you've got another argument on your hands entirely—one that has many levels that are open to attack.
Let's start with one: who are you to tell us who the "normal" people are, what they should be watching and how much of it, and how do you determine that? Maybe you work in a data role in this "field". What do you call that field? User experience? Information control? "Normal" individual taste and media consumption formation? All very interesting questions.
To go from working with the data to making the claims you have made, you are going to have to button those arguments up a lot.
Movies just don't make economic sense unless they're blockbusters and that's mainly because of the decline in movie theaters for various reasons but also the death of physical media sales. DVD sales in the 1990s were a bit of a Golden Age. Matt Damon talked about this [1].
Up until the 2000s the TV economic model was:
1. Produce a full season of TV, typically ~22 episodes, and air those on network TV. Sell ads;
2. Sell physical media. Unlike movies, this wasn't as big of a factor until serialized TV came about but it was a factor; and
3. Syndication. Basic cable channels and foreign distributors would pay to air TV shows.
Premium cable (eg HBO) was an exception. It still had foreign distribution but cable subscriptions replaced ad revenue.
In all of these cases, actors, writers, etc would get residuals or back end participation. For what became TV shows, there was a whole ecosystem of pilots. Scripts would be bought. Some would get greenlit for pilots. Some of those would get a half or full season order.
A TV season meant basically a full year of work for those involved. All the pilot activity meant more work. Residuals allowed actors and writers to survive between jobs. There are still people getting significant residuals from Friends from over 30 years ago.
All of that died with streaming. Netflix streaming first began as a means of monetizing old seasons of TV and older movies. It was additional revenue. But as Netflix grew, all the studios saw dollar signs and launched "me too" streaming services, most of which were doomed from the start. Streamers began to cannibalize the syndication and physical media revenue.
Netflix in particular made the decision relatively early that they needed original content to survive. By having a worldwide customer base, they didn't care about physical media and didn't have to pay for syndication. Also because of some unfortunate contracts in the late 2000s, there was little to no residuals for streaming so that too was more saved money.
And the cost-cutting continued. Smaller seasons (8-13 episodes) with smaller writing rooms meant fewer people employed, particularly when it might be 2-3 years between seasons. Suddenly you needed 2 jobs a year to survive where once it was 1. That's a huge difference because you're lucky to get 1 job. And you got no residuals on top of that.
This coincided with more general Hollywood cost-cutting to move productions out of LA to Canada (particularly Toronto but also Vancouver), Atlanta and elsewhere.
Hollywood was an ecosystem. Short term profit-seeking has basically destroyed it but also, so has the high cost of housing. LA used to be somewhere you could live cheaply and this enabled people to chase their dream. Many didn't make it but this was the entry to the funnel. Some did.
Now there are fewer jobs and those are increasingly dominated by second and third generation nepo babies.
Why do you think there's so much recycled IP now? Relaunches of 1990s and 2000s properties. The people involved are out of work. That's why. And it's easier to greenlight something with a track record. Also, notice how many podcasts there are of people who used to be in shows? The Office is particularly egregious for this. I swear half the cast have podcasts now. Why? Because they're out of work too.
I cannot overstate how much expensive housing has strangled Hollywood. Expensive housing is an input into everything you produce and do. Yet people see it as their retirement. What retirement? If your $200k house is now $1M, so is every other house. You still only own one housing unit's worth of wealth. So you need to multiple houses, to be a landlord or Airbnb host. And we wonder why the housing supply sucks.
> I cannot overstate how much expensive housing has strangled Hollywood.
I hardly know anything about the tv/movie industry, but this is a bit of funny juxtaposition when Toronto and Vancouver also have famously unaffordable housing.
Don't even get me started on shows. There are a ton of great ones but now they have 2-4, sometimes even 5 year gaps! The "increased" quality doesn't warrant it! I know people say "well now they're movie-grade" but I really could not care less. I don't need every episode of every show to be blockbuster quality. Just make it not suck! I would love to go to the movies and buy all the subscription services but it's simply not worth it! /rant
Kinda agreed with you though, but I’m also getting old, so maybe my judgement is skewed as well.
Barclays laying off thousands in the UK obviously puts the decision on AI productivity gain.
yeah, worthless analysis of side effects without taking into account any causation variable to anchor anything to anything.
Art is gatekept by distribution. You only pay artist because otherwise they will go independent or use the other studio/record-label/etc. It's the only reason artists got paid handsomely in the past.
Today, money only come from spotify, netflix, and soon one or two movie studios. News and Newspaper is already gone, it's past the point of monopoly and into billionaire personal toy.
This also answers why live performance is the only thing going up. It is the only thing that still require any choice from the artist. Everything else is give-me-or-media-or-else.
International media is much better than it used to be.
Lying preserves the legal basis for copyright?
Maybe what that means is this: it's not illegal to lie about something being copyrighted (to discourage copying) if you don't actually take it as far as taking someone to court over it.
With some amount of AI (zero) the resulting work is copyrighted. With some amount of AI (prompt "create influencer videos") the resulting work is not copyrighted.
Since laws are still in flux, and the line might still move, downplaying the use of AI makes it more likely your copyright will survive.
the media landscape has changed. youtube, tiktok, reels are the dominant media. the money the creators make there dwarfs this 200k loss of jobs.
The issue is, its global, creators aren't limited to desk jobs in america.
And I did not speak out
Because I was not an artist