Whether or not this deal gets regulatory approval depends entirely on whether or not Reed Hastings sufficiently kisses the ring when it comes to Donald Trump.
I'm personally against this. We've had too much consolidation. It's subscribers who will pay for this with hiked subscription fees.
Any pretense of government regulation is basically gone. Everything is for sale. What determines outcomes is corruption and loyalty. This is really no different to the Russian oligarchs under Putin. The SEC, FTC and DOJ are a joke, just tools to punish ideological foes and people who don't pay up.
All these companies are a consequence will become more ideologically conservative and that's a real problem for media companies because conservatives can't produce good content. Good content challenges the status quo and asks questions, two things conservatives simply don't tolerate. This will do nothing good for HBO.
What's become clear is we need to bring Section 230 into the modern era. We allow companies to not be treated as publishers for user-generated content as long as they meet certain obligations.
We've unfortunately allowed tech companies to get away with selling us this idea that The Algoirthm is an impartial black box. Everything an algorithm does is the result of a human intervening to change its behavior. As such, I believe we need to treat any kind of recommendation algorithm as if the company is a publisher (in the S230 sense).
Think of it this way: if you get 1000 people to submit stories they wrote and you choose which of them to publish and distribute, how is that any different from you publishing your own opinions?
We've seen signs of different actors influencing opinion through these sites. Russian bot farms are probably overplayed in their perceived influence but they're definitely a thing. But so are individual actors who see an opportunity to make money by posting about politics in another country, as was exposed when Twitter rolled out showing location, a feature I support.
We've also seen this where Twitter accounts have been exposed as being ChatGPT when people have told them to "ignore all previous instructions" and to give a recipe.
But we've also seen this with the Tiktok ban that wasn't a ban. The real problem there was that Tiktok wasn't suppressing content in line with US foreign policy unlike every other platform.
This isn't new. It's been written about extensively, most notably in Manufacturing Consent [1]. Controlling mass media through access journalism (etc) has just been supplemented by AI bots, incentivized bad actors and algorithms that reflect government policy and interests.
We're now at the point where the most accurate predictor of what the administration and Congress will do comes from stock trades. You want to predict a land war in Venezuela? Just watch defense contractor and energy stocks.
We should force all elected officials and senior public servants to put their assets into a blind trust for their entire term plus two years. They should be forbidden from investing directly. So should their immediate family.
But the problem is so much larger than that. The government as a whole is captured by the donor class. It's so well known that even without an explicit quid pro quo, you and your immediate family will be looked after if you play ball. Vote for tax cuts, deregulation or th einterests of some industry and after your political career, you will have a nice 6 or 7 figure job for life. So will your spouse and children.
What brought the most recent government shutdown to an end? The evidence points to politicals who were beholden to the aviation industry. The disruption to air travel was really starting to bite. Tim Kaine in particular. But it's not just one guy. Chuck Schumer whipped votes to end the shutdown and subbed out John Ossoff who would otherwise face backlack in 2026. Every single Senator who "broke ranks" is either retiring or won't face a primary until 2028 or 2030. That's not an accident and many of them are highly funded by the commericial aviation industry.
What's depressing is how little money it takes to buy our government.
Translating PDFs is more complicated than that because the strcture of a PDF document doesn't lend itself well to this kind of thing.
For example: if there's a dish name with a 2 line description below it and some allergy symbols below that, in HTML you can imagine the document structure that produces that. In PDF terms that might be 4 separate objects and, in particular, the eyes can see the two lines are adjacent so they fit together but the document structure doesn't really represent it taht way, necessarily.
This might also not work with translation because the lines are set for the size of the text they contain. Same for resizing the font.
Put another waay, PDF should be viewed as a typeset and layout format, not a document format.
I think you're misunderstanding what I'm describing. It's getting a screenshot of the visible portion of the rendered document, not the document itself with all the tags and nastiness inside. The same feature works with a photo of handwritten text, where obviously no digital document exists. It's not perfect, but usually adequate for menu translation.
Oh God I love the analogy of OpenAI being Netscape. As someone who was an adult in the 1990s, this is so apt. Companies at that time were trying to build a moat around the World Wide Web. They obviously failed. I've thought that OpenAI too would fail but I've never thought about it like Netscape and WWW.
OpenAI should be looking at how Google built a moat around search. Anyone can write a Web crawler. Lots of people have. But no one else has turned search into the money printing machine that Google has. And they've used that to fund their search advantage.
I've long thought the moat-buster here will be China because they simply won't want the US to own this future. It's a national security issue. I see things like DeepSeek is moat-busting activity and I expect that to intensify.
Currently China can't buy the latest NVidia chips or ASML lithography equipment. Why? Because the US said so. I don't expect China to tolerate this long term and of any country, China has desmonstrated the long-term commitment to this kind of project.
Short term thinking and short term profit seeking are going to destroy every industry they touch. This article failed to bring up 2 important points.
Firstly, we've been here before, specifically in 2008. This was the real impact of the GFC. The junior hiring pipeline got decimated in many industries and never returned. This has created problems for an entire generation (ie the millenials) who went to college and accumulated massive amounts of debt for careers that never eventuated. Many of those careers existed before 2008.
The long-term consequences of this are still playing out. It's delaying life milestones like finding a partner, buying a house, having a family and generally just having security of any kind.
Secondly, there is a whole host of other industries this has affected that the author couldn't pointed to. The most obvious is the entertainment industry.
You may have asked "why do we need to wait 3 years between seasons of 8 episodes now when we used to put out 22 episodes a year?" It's a good question and the answer is this exact same kind of cost-cutting. Writers rooms got smaller and typically now the entire season is written and then it's produced when the writers are no longer there with the exception of the showrunner, who is the head writer.
So writers are rarely on set now. This was the training ground for future showrunners. Also, writers were employed for 9 months or more for the 22 episode run and now they're employed for maybe 3 months so need multiple jobs a year. Getting jobs in this industry is hard and time-consuming and the timing just may not work out.
Plus the real cost of streaming is how it destroyed residuals because Netflix (etc) are paying far fewer residuals (because they're showing their own origianl content) and those residuals sustained workers in the entertainment industry so they could have long-term careers and that experience wouldn't be lost. The LA entertainmen tindustry is in a dire state for these reasons and also because a lot of it is being offshored to further reduce costs.
Bear in mind that the old system produced cultural touchstones and absolute cash cows eg Seinfeld, Friends, ER.
Circling back, the entire goal of AI Is to displace workers and cut costs. That's it. It's no more compolicated than that. And yes, junior workers and less-skilled workers will suffer first and the most. But those junior engineers would otherwise be future senior engineers.
What I would like for people to understand that all of this is about short-term decisions to cut costs. It's no more complicated than that.
For example, the death of optical media has had a massive impact on the entertainment industry, particularly movies. Matt Damon has spoken about this, on Hot Wings of all places [1].
Streaming began as a alternate path for monetizing old content other than cable TV syndication. And it was excelelnt for this in the early years. At that time it was bonus income.
But streaming also ushered in a golden age for watching serialized content so it's a mixed bag.
Loss of writers is just one factor. Filming fewer episodes, moving production out of the US and loss os residuals all contribute to killing this ecosystem.
This doesn't have anything to do with my reply. You're equating what is essentially a play in a warehouse with million dollar per minute productions that have the quality of summer movies.
It's absolutely true that team cohesion impacts results but so do other factors, such as psychological safety [1], work-life balance and flexibility.
And you know what? Employers don't care about any of this, like at all. RTO mandates are nothing more than soft layoffs aimed to suppressing labor costs. Why? Because some people will quit, which is cheaper than severance, and those that remains will have to do their work for no extra compensation and also won't be asking for raises because they fear losing their own jobs. Win win (for the employer).
Profits have a tendency to decrease over time [2]. Investors demand it. To a point you can expand to counteract this. Ultimately though, every company either goes bust or reaches the end-state of having to raise prices and lower costs to maintain profit growth.
Employers are not on your side. We collectively saved companies from going bust in the pandemic by WFH. For tech companies in particular who had had a decade of market-driven increases in labor costs, this turned into a massive opportunity to institute what I call permanent layoff culture. These companies will layoff 5% of their staff every year forever for no other reason to suppress labor costs.
If remote work didn’t actually result in higher productivity the entire industry wouldn’t be trying to ship the labor base to India. Everything is going overseas. Even some doctors offices are employing video check in services.
I’ve heard the same thing since 1999 and yet many of us on HN graduated high school or college in the 2000s/2010s and have been employed for decade(s) with successful careers.
If remote work actually resulted in higher productivity, the first attempt to ship the labor base offshore would have worked. (Not that remote is the only variable there, but you brought it up.) With LLMs they see an opening to try again, now that they view labor as commodity babysitters of LLM output.
It's a mistake to view this from the perspective of productivity and whether or not someone can do their job at home or not. Clearly they can. We kept these companies alive by WFH during the pandemic. But they simply don't care.
RTO mandates are nothing more than soft layoffs. People have moved. People may not be able to come back. People may simply not want to. Some of those people will quit. And that's cheaper than a severance package.
We are in permanent layoff culture now. Why? To suppress wages and get more work for no extra compensation. 5% of the staff gets fired? The other 95% has to do their work for no extra money AND they're not demanding pay raises. Win win.
Over time profits have a tendency to shrink and the only way to maintain the insatiable appetite for increasing profits is, ultimately, by raising prices and cutting costs. I wish more people realized this is all that's going on.
This is a solved problem. When you sell a house in the US, you ahve to determine what your capital gain is for tax purposes. That includes all purchase and selling costs (eg agents fees, transfer taxes, etc). Those are all added to the purchase price to determine your cost basis.
The capital gain is simply the sale price minus the cost basis, which might be a loss.
So if you've paid unrealized capital gains taxes along the way, you either get credit for those taxes already paid (and possibly get a refund if you've overpaid) or they're simply added to the cost basis.
Good. IMHO unrealized gains and profit shifting are two of the biggest problems in modern taxation that need to be addressed.
Many people will have heard about the Buy Borrow Die strategy by now. In case not, it's basically where you don't sell an asset (and thus have to pay taxes on the gain). You use it as collateral for a loan and just spend the laon while the asset continues to appreciate (hopefully) faster than the interest rate. What's particularly gross about this is that many asets in many countries can be inherited by children on what's called a stepped up basis, meaning the base value for determining any capital gains taxes resets to the current market value when the owner dies. This is a massive tax break for the wealthy.
Companies have their own version of this. This has been somewhat (but not entirely) addressed in the US tax code now but it used to be that foreign corporate profits did not incur US corporate taxes as long as the money wasn't repatriated, meaning it stays overseas. But you know what you can do? That's right. Borrow money used those foreign profits as collateral and wait long enough for the US government to give you a tax holiday or to otherwise change the rules (which they did).
IMHO borrowing money against an asset should be realizing a gain and borrowing against foreign profits should be repatriating those profits.
Some will argue how you can't tax unrealized gains or it's not fair, we do it all the time. They're called property taxes.
Profit shifting is still a big problem. This is where, for example, tech companies would sell ads and services in the UK at "cost" to their Irish subsidiary, who would make all the profits. Almost nothing in UK profits where the tax rate is higher. Transfer pricing is (generally) illegal. Profit shifting isn't. What's the difference? Yes.
I think the EU and the US in particular need to start doing what I call profit apportionment, meaning if 50% of your revenue is booked in the US then 50% of your worldwide profits are taxable in the US.
You might say "they'll hide profits in subsidiaries" but really this is a solved problem already. We ahve ways of dealing with subsidiaries that are at arms length or not. We also have financial reporting to stock markets and there's really no reason tax authorities couldn't use published financial statements as a basis for taxation.
> You use it as collateral for a loan and just spend the laon while the asset continues to appreciate (hopefully) faster than the interest rate.
Gosh, that hopefully is doing a lot for you sentence lol. Risk based economies function on that "hopefully". To phrase this another way, "if you borrow money against an asset, invest it in the economy, and make more than the interest in returns, you can avoid selling the asset to cover the loan", which sounds a whole lot more sane. It's a bit scary to imagine a world in which borrowing against an asset could not be profitable as that would mean that all investment in the economy would halt, no?
I'm not even against this tax fwiw but you're glossing over some major details in how that tax deferral works. The major issue is how cap gains is handled on death.
> What's particularly gross about this is that many asets in many countries can be inherited by children on what's called a stepped up basis, meaning the base value for determining any capital gains taxes resets to the current market value when the owner dies. This is a massive tax break for the wealthy.
Right, I read your comment. You still clearly state that this is a loophole and when you then follow up to say "particularly gross" the clear implication is that it's a "gross loophole".
The ability to borrow against an asset is not a loophole.
I agree that borrowing against unrealized gains is crap, it's lead to major economic divide. However, just make borrowing against unrealized gains illegal. Taxing unrealized gains is the wrong solution for a real problem.
Um, I don't know what information you're getting but this is easily Googleable eg [1]:
> The tax basis of property acquired by a beneficiary from someone who dies is ordinarily the property's fair market value at the date of the decedent's death.
I'm personally against this. We've had too much consolidation. It's subscribers who will pay for this with hiked subscription fees.
Any pretense of government regulation is basically gone. Everything is for sale. What determines outcomes is corruption and loyalty. This is really no different to the Russian oligarchs under Putin. The SEC, FTC and DOJ are a joke, just tools to punish ideological foes and people who don't pay up.
All these companies are a consequence will become more ideologically conservative and that's a real problem for media companies because conservatives can't produce good content. Good content challenges the status quo and asks questions, two things conservatives simply don't tolerate. This will do nothing good for HBO.
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