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jparishy 17 hours ago [-]
I liked this article. I appreciate that it didn't try to say it is or isn't AI.
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.
somenameforme 10 hours ago [-]
In general I fully agree except with your conclusion. In the short-run efficiency immediately benefits the established players, but in the long-run it benefits, more or less literally, everybody except them. Because as you bring the price down on things you enable more efficient competition. Competition increases, margins decrease, baseline minimal standard of quality for success increases.
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.
"that those super farms became a practically inconsequential part of the overall economy. " - not really.
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.
AyanamiKaine 2 hours ago [-]
Sadly, I believe this is a case of survivorship bias.
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.
patrickk 9 hours ago [-]
Not only is Valheim remarkable for the fact that’s it’s largely a one man show, it’s also a labour of love that couldn’t come out of the AAA gaming world, which is creatively bankrupt. They’re busy trashing beloved gaming series left and right and shuttering once beloved studios.
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.
Reclaimer looks great. It's like ReSkate for Halo, looks a bit newer and less polished but still great. I think I saw a video about this mod from a gaming creator on Youtube. I just don't get why it's closed source, if the anti cheat code is sensitive they can just keep that one part private and release the rest.
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.
pembrook 6 hours ago [-]
I'm amazed nobody has challenged OP on his narrative for why the film industry left LA since it's completely wrong.
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.
echelon 5 hours ago [-]
This is exactly correct.
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.
Kaedon 3 hours ago [-]
Overall feels right but started happening well before pandemic, back in 2012-2013, lots of shows in Romania, Atlanta, etc.
foobarian 4 hours ago [-]
This seems to pretty much line up with what OP said.
mschuster91 8 hours ago [-]
> In the short-run efficiency immediately benefits the established players, but in the long-run it benefits, more or less literally, everybody except them.
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.
oblio 6 hours ago [-]
Are you proposing to sacrifice others from a position of wealth, privilege and safety, for long term benefits?
Or are you an actual graphics designer or the like, who lost their job to AI?
pessimizer 2 hours ago [-]
This is not "software," this is video games. Video game nonsense is such a drop in the bucket, and it matters orders of magnitude less than video game addicts think it does. I could maybe understand it being mentioned in comparison to the film industry - they're both artistic creations that require a bunch of work by large teams. But that's also what's exceptional about them - 1) they mostly fail, and 2) they require expensive marketing and distribution.
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.
solatic 12 hours ago [-]
> when you start moving things away from LA to "save money"
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.
alex43578 10 hours ago [-]
Another huge nail was the strikes - business will continue with or without those on the picket line, but it just moved to where there weren't strikes.
matwood 5 hours ago [-]
I think people incorrectly ignore the strikes. The workers had very little leverage and gave a huge opening for Netflix who had the capital to move production anywhere.
Also, at the time (and still somewhat today), Netflix was the only one to really think globally about a content strategy.
kakapo5672 59 minutes ago [-]
Yep. My father was in the biz, and I heard the stories at the dinner table. This has been a long evolution, and the old ecology no longer exists. AI has just given the pre-existing trend another (vary large) extra kick.
cm2187 12 hours ago [-]
There are also tax considerations, even movies get shot away from Hollywood.
12 hours ago [-]
derektank 16 hours ago [-]
>Regular people do not have more more money or time
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].
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.
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.
I feel like people complain about “food” but it’s a stand-in and that the cumulative increase in rent, transportation and food probably rose faster than wages. So Cato reply “but food hasn’t grown as fast as wages” is a myopic retort (admittedly one they acknowledge) that tries to fight the narrow factual argument ignoring the broader one where the emotional narrative probably remains true.
pj_mukh 15 hours ago [-]
Also we can probably simplify this bucket even more and just talk about the elephant in the room which is rent/mortgage.
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.
SyzygyRhythm 14 hours ago [-]
It's not very complicated; it's just that the solutions are deeply unpopular. Making housing affordable by definition means driving down prices. But existing homeowners don't like to see their home prices go down! And about 2/3 of the US public lives in a house owned by a resident.
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.
nradov 14 hours ago [-]
You're mistaken about the reasons why solutions are unpopular. Have you actually talked to the most active NIMBYs who oppose new housing development? Most of them are barely aware of affordability and home prices. They have lived in the same neighborhood for decades and intend so stay there until they die so prices don't impact them at all. Instead they are concerned about quality of life issues: traffic, parking, noise, petty crime.
Geezus_42 3 hours ago [-]
Or just straight up bigotry. They love to claim apartments increase crime, but then act like row houses are somehow different.
pj_mukh 12 hours ago [-]
“Making housing affordable by definition means driving down prices.”
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.
But unless you intend to sell up then what you now have is a more crowded neighborhood and in some cases higher property taxes.
germinalphrase 3 hours ago [-]
Density supports local businesses though. An apartment building was built a block from my home about a decade ago. I was promised congestion, parking issues, and petty crime - but what I got was a brewery, a cafe, and a restaurant that survived COVID. Feels like a win for me.
harvey9 4 minutes ago [-]
You objectively have a more crowded neighborhood though, regardless of you being happy with the end result.
pessimizer 1 hours ago [-]
> The old single family home next to the new apartment building gains land value.
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.
pj_mukh 45 minutes ago [-]
Gentrification doesn't cause displacement, a lack of housing options does. The part that tenant activists have not accepted is: The "gentrifiers" are coming whether you build housing or not, the question is are we going to build enough housing to keep the existing community in place or not.
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.
inglor_cz 9 hours ago [-]
IDK if things are fundamentally different in Czechia, but I talked to a lot of Czech NIMBYs and they almost never mention home prices. What they usually obsess about is change in a neighborhood that they are used to and want to keep intact. The resentment against new people and new buildings is just palpable, even if the newcomers would be solid middle class.
Noise and dust from construction are often mentioned as well. Construction means heavy trucks entering places where they usually don't intrude.
adaml_623 9 hours ago [-]
Saying, "2/3 of the US public lives in a house owned by a resident" sounds like a phrase talking around the problem that young people can't afford to move out of the family home.
A true fact but with a story behind it.
win311fwg 12 hours ago [-]
> But existing homeowners don't like to see their home prices go down!
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.
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.
AnthonyMouse 10 hours ago [-]
> The share of income people spend on housing has been very stable over 40 years
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%:
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.
rayiner 4 hours ago [-]
Those are fair points. But I think it’s also misleading to look at prices in a fixed location over time, which ignores that places can become relatively more desirable and move upmarket. Yeah, your parents bought a house in Mountain View for cheap. But they were moving to escape high housing prices in the New York or Chicago suburbs where they grew up.
> 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.
matwood 5 hours ago [-]
This is a good point. Also, anytime there is a discussion about inflation, there should be a timeline included.
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.
pj_mukh 12 hours ago [-]
Fighter planes coming back with holes must mean the parts with the holes are the ones that need reinforcing.gif
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.
4 hours ago [-]
rectang 10 hours ago [-]
That stability claim is an average for all American households, gathering together high-income households and long-tenure homeowners along with poor renters. But in a K-shaped economy where the wealthy do well and the rest do worse, averaging the two forks of the K hides the hardship of those on the lower fork.
> 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.
laughing_man 8 hours ago [-]
That's not dispositive, though, since it may be that people spend more on rent because they can, i.e. other things have become relatively less expensive.
rectang 4 hours ago [-]
When real income goes up 15% but rent goes up 75%, people are absorbing a cost, not flaunting their wealth.
astura 3 hours ago [-]
A lot of people spend more on housing because standards have greatly increased. The average square footage of living space per person has doubled since the 1970s and tripled since the 1950s. A modest home in 2020s was a luxury house in the 50s. Families have gotten smaller and houses have ballooned.
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.
infinite_spin 15 hours ago [-]
a friend showed me their budget recently, and about 45 hours of their wages go to rent each month (for a single room in a house with roommates). That seems very high to me, and their rent is considered "low" in their area (a small suburb)
zdragnar 14 hours ago [-]
Assuming they work full time, that is pretty average. The old "30%" rule is that you should spend no more than 30% of your pre-tax wages on rent. Your friend is spending just over a quarter post-taxes.
ijooz 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Barbing 12 hours ago [-]
Hobbies can help avoid thinking about religion when it’s not on anyone’s mind!
12 hours ago [-]
SirMaster 11 hours ago [-]
That seems high. 14 hours of my salary (pretax) goes to my rent.
WalterBright 14 hours ago [-]
The government heavily interferes in the housing industry. Hence, the higher costs. It's the same for everything the government interferes with - such as education and health care.
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
throwaway2037 11 hours ago [-]
> 1. there are 57,000 unoccupied apartments in NYC because city regulations on rents make them unprofitable to rent out.
The correct quote should be:
> According to state data, approximately 57,421 rent-stabilized apartments were vacant across New York City
The key term here is "rent-stabilized". And the reasons why they are vacant is much more complex "because city regulations on rents make them unprofitable to rent out". That is simply one category of rent-stabilized apartments that are vacant.
WalterBright 30 minutes ago [-]
"rent-stabilized" is just another word for "rent control", which is the government setting the prices.
laughing_man 8 hours ago [-]
I don't think it's much more complicated than that. If you own a "rent-stabilized" apartment there's going to be a very low limit to the amount of money you're willing to spend to keep it habitable. If it needs a lot of money to make it legal to rent out, you're just going to leave it vacant. You don't really have a choice.
AnthonyMouse 10 hours ago [-]
> And the reasons why they are vacant is much more complex "because city regulations on rents make them unprofitable to rent out".
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.
0c3ca83 12 hours ago [-]
> there are 57,000 unoccupied apartments in NYC
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?
WalterBright 11 hours ago [-]
google prompt: "how many unoccupied apartments in nyc"
Scroll down a bit and read the section: "Key Causes of Vacancies"
0c3ca83 4 hours ago [-]
Google tells me that this number includes units on the market between tenants. I would quite like there to be a nonzero number of units available for rent if I move.
What's a healthy vacancy rate in your opinion, and what do you make of NYC having a lower rate than the average American city?
Timon3 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
socalgal2 13 hours ago [-]
I genuinely can not understand how anyone with basic knowledge of economics could believe that government intervention is not responsible for the majority of rent price increases
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
That’s another bad metric without more nuance. if I used to pay 30% and now pay 50% but the remaining 50% buys 2x what it used to then overall I’m still doing better
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
ethersteeds 12 hours ago [-]
You are right, I'll just eat a 65 inch TV and live in the box.
darth_avocado 15 hours ago [-]
1. PCE tracks spending by and on behalf of households, including employer-paid health insurance and government-funded medical programs like Medicare. Arguably this does not reflect out-of-pocket costs or the immediate cash-flow reality experienced by a regular household.
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.
jparishy 16 hours ago [-]
Hey thanks for posting this perspective w/ the link. Fun rabbit hole to go down stuck in a hotel tonight. I wonder if you think something explanatory is missing in _all_ of these different indices, in the "where there's smoke, there's fire" sense of economic anxiety on display today
rayiner 12 hours ago [-]
The sense of economic anxiety is due to increasing economic efficiency and sorting. It's not that the cost of living somewhere has gone up as much as people think. It's that the market is efficiently allocating housing in the place you grew up, near your parents, family, and friends, to Google and Facebook engineers. But you can still get a house twice as big as what your parents had at your age in a new subdivision in Tennessee.
pessimizer 1 hours ago [-]
> But you can still get a house twice as big as what your parents had at your age in a new subdivision in Tennessee.
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.
HWR_14 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, you can afford a very nice house in Tennessee if you can work remotely with a Silicon Valley salary.
4 hours ago [-]
openasocket 15 hours ago [-]
I’m not necessarily disputing your point, but it’s very odd to downplay one source for potential bias, and then follow up with a study from the CATO Institute. Like, the CATO institute is openly a libertarian think tank founded by one of the Koch brothers.
I also think it’s unfair to look at just food prices. Housing and healthcare have bloomed massively.
manlymuppet 15 hours ago [-]
Of course you’re right. Food isn’t the whole picture, and no think tank is perfect.
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.
solomonb 11 hours ago [-]
> We should evaluate research by the research itself
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.
intended 13 hours ago [-]
Yeah, CATO is … not what I would reach for to make a point on neutrality.
rayiner 12 hours ago [-]
Who is neutral in your opinion?
intended 11 hours ago [-]
On this topic? I would have to check. R/badeconomics ? R1 means that its impenetrable to average pontification. The Fed data is neutral.
Using CATO as a neutral source though, is sketch no matter what.
11 hours ago [-]
rpcope1 15 hours ago [-]
> calls a labor advocacy group biased
> Links the fucking CATO institute
Pot, meet kettle
PaulDavisThe1st 1 hours ago [-]
This is tricky. Household basics have not remained constant in the sense of being the same product. Out of household basics, like healthcare, also show similar transformations.
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.
derektank 16 hours ago [-]
The term “real” means the values are adjusted for inflation
roenxi 6 hours ago [-]
darth_avocado is implying that he'd rather use a different index to measure inflation. Which is reasonable, this game where "real" doesn't mean real is not helpful. I've been seeing "real" growth in my gold holdings for years but mysteriously enough the weight hasn't changed. And while I'm ranting it drives me mad that we're supposed to pretend exponentially increasing prices are "stable", that is about as unstable as prices can get without starting a mathematics degree.
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.
bmitc 7 hours ago [-]
How does inflation explain $5/gallon gas or $3,000 single bedroom apartment rent or $300 grocery bills for a few grocery bags or $50 to ship small packages or any other ridiculous cost increases we experience?
gruez 5 hours ago [-]
Because "inflation" is a weighted average, and there's no law that says that every good/service in an economy must increase in price by the same amount?
smallmancontrov 16 hours ago [-]
...which is notorious for using a dogshit basket and basket-update methodology to make the number look good.
littlecranky67 10 hours ago [-]
The basket is dogshit, but not for the reason you probably think. Our lives improved tremendously by technology: internet, smartphone, videogames, netflix & co, medical progress, online shopping of any goods you can possible imagine, ability to travel the world for cheap.
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.
bartnp 8 hours ago [-]
Funny, for me it seems terrible exactly for the opposite reason. These kinds of baskets are too heavily weighted by things that go relatively down in costs like technology and airplane tickets.
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
gruez 4 hours ago [-]
>Funny, for me it seems terrible exactly for the opposite reason. These kinds of baskets are too heavily weighted by things that go relatively down in costs like technology and airplane tickets.
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)
cicko 9 hours ago [-]
I'm sorry but videogames and Netflix have done exactly nothing for my quality of life. In fact, I wish there were less of both, and multiple other things you listed. I think we have a significantly different understanding of quality.
cedilla 8 hours ago [-]
You might as well complain about that the basket contains tomatoes because you don't like tomatoes.
It's a statistical tool concerning populations, not a sampling of what hacker news user cicko in their wisdom thinks increases quality of life.
littlecranky67 9 hours ago [-]
It is just an example, but you come to the base of my argument: CPI basket is an average - and you cannot use it to make statements about individuals. If Netflix is nothing to you, then look at houses: My granparents (born even after 1920s) had an outhouse. That means, every time you need to use the bathroom, you left your house through the garden - come wind and weather. That meant in the winter, you were walking through the snow and do your business in a small, smelly outhouse without no access to running water whatsover at sub-zero degrees. Yet there are people running around saying that our grandparents could afford houses, while we can't anymore.
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.
versteegen 7 hours ago [-]
Getting offtopic... for my father growing up in the Netherlands, the early 50's was still as you describe: an outhouse with a bucket, no running water, an uninsulated house with a roof that let in snow; he caught every illness. They had electricity but no appliances (except a radio?). By the time he was 18, they had a heater, fridge, freezer, washing machine, he had a (rusty) Mercedes and they got a TV soon after. So progress has been very uneven and if you only go back 40 years goods are far more comparable.
astura 1 hours ago [-]
In a video Ann Reardon, a popular Australian YouTuber, tested a vintage hand-cranked stand mixer invented in Australia. She explained the context of a hand cranked stand mixer - that rural homes in Australia didn't have electricity until well into the 1960s.
jodrellblank 5 hours ago [-]
My grandparents’ house’s purchase price, inflation-adjusts to 3x the current average salary in the UK.
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.
goodmythical 4 hours ago [-]
Here in the US there are tons of homes available for 3x median income.
TheOtherHobbes 6 hours ago [-]
If your grandparents were born in the 1920s they'd have been adult in the 50s, and outhouses were already rare except in rural areas. The 40s/50 building boom built suburbia, not shacks with outhouses.
Let's look at some real numbers instead of a folksy parable about grandma. Here are recent stats about rent arrears:
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.
Aside from technological and scientific progress in the medical field, it's generally been shown that people's lives have gotten worse.
Avicebron 16 hours ago [-]
Yup. The St. Louis Fed is a joke. Inflation of owners' equivalent rent alone blows the whole argument up..
vconnor 11 hours ago [-]
I love that any time there’s a discussion about inflation, someone posts that link.
“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.
littlecranky67 10 hours ago [-]
It is not necessarily politically influence. You simply cannot measure inflation properly. See my siblin comment about technology - it is just impossible to compare the life of a 1920s person to a 2020s person based on tomatos, butter and rent. Because the access to products that didn't exist at the given quality level in 2020 is impossible to price in.
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.
mschuster91 8 hours ago [-]
> The term “real” means the values are adjusted for inflation
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.
chorsestudios 16 hours ago [-]
They do have more money, less spending power.
JumpCrisscross 14 hours ago [-]
> Meanwhile household basics increased faster than wages
Not what real means!
13 hours ago [-]
vkou 10 hours ago [-]
People lack money, but a Netflix (or some other streaming) subscription is a very cheap way to buy a lot of entertainment, and just about everyone has at least one.
HWR_14 5 hours ago [-]
About 25% of Americans have a Netflix account.
vkou 1 hours ago [-]
How many have cable? Paramount? Disney plus?
Gibbon1 14 hours ago [-]
I first saw the claim everything is hunky dory because workers are working fewer hours from a economist probably ten years ago. The idea is workers are choosing to work fewer hours and instead enjoy more leisure.
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.
constant_flux 16 hours ago [-]
I don't find either of these charts dispositive by themselves. The cost of healthcare, education, housing, transportation, and insurance have easily outpaced any growth in wages. Another facet of this debate is that cheaper goods aren't necessarily of equal or better quality.
> Of course they do.
That level of certainty is not justified.
HDThoreaun 14 hours ago [-]
[dead]
rectang 16 hours ago [-]
> the average number of hours worked per worker have fallen
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.
matt_heimer 15 hours ago [-]
Yep, keep everyone part-time so they don't get benefits.
groundzeros2015 15 hours ago [-]
which is in unintended but predictable side effect of requiring those benefits for full-time employees.
kraken_cult 15 hours ago [-]
shakes fist at sky "if only we didn't have to pay those pesky benefits then we wouldn't be forced to make the roles abusive contractor/part-time roles...Wild people even try to take this stance.
groundzeros2015 14 hours ago [-]
I'm baffled. Do you not see the normative vs descriptive claim here?
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.
rectang 14 hours ago [-]
Then can we agree on a government funded safety net for the sake of labor mobility? ;)
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.
groundzeros2015 14 hours ago [-]
I do agree. A government funded benefit is an explicit tax and spend. A mandate to provide a benefit is a hidden tax where it's not clear who is paying.
jparishy 16 hours ago [-]
Upvote for bringing data, since I did not. That said, that quote was in reference to AI, so referred to the past 3-4 years. And of course, our money today is not worth as much as it was 20+ years ago. Also many important goods and services increased in price at a higher rate than inflation or wage increases. It might be interesting to look at such industries for a history of consolidation or PE-involvement.
manlymuppet 16 hours ago [-]
The data by the Fed linked above is inflation adjusted.
jparishy 16 hours ago [-]
I realized after, yeah, thanks for calling out though.
manlymuppet 14 hours ago [-]
You are welcome. Though seeing your overwhelming openness and good nature in the rest of this thread, I now feel some regret in how I replied to you here.
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.
derektank 16 hours ago [-]
For what it's worth, I thought the rest of your comment was a very accurate description of how labor and capital are reallocated within an industry. The question is simply whether it's a bad thing that Hollywood studios have decamped for Atlanta and Toronto. For the people working in LA that don't want to move, I'm sure the answer is yes. But on net, I think it's probably meant more and better work for more people in general.
treis 4 hours ago [-]
At least in Atlanta it seems like a lot of production bounced to even cheaper locales as tax subsidies became a bit less generous. We're at like half our 2022 peak dollar wise.
jparishy 15 hours ago [-]
I really appreciate your perspective. Mine is definitely malleable on these topics; they're complicated and I'm not an economist.
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?
rectang 15 hours ago [-]
Since the 1980s, the wealthy have done fantastic while the rest have not done nearly as well. The argument from CATO and others is that we should be content with the majority of households taking home a shrinking share of an increasing pie so long as their absolute purchasing power isn’t decreasing, but that argument feels wrong in part because it’s human nature to measure status relative to others rather than in absolute terms.
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.
This seems to be a common argument essentially “If a rich guy get $1000 and as a result I get $10, then I shouldn’t complain because I got $10” but this glosses over the fact that money is a proxy for power. The rich guy got more power over resources from this deal. Over the years this leads to more power inequality which is bad because now the rich guy can start doing other things to me and I have no recourse.
rectang 14 hours ago [-]
I agree, but I don't think many wealthy people are open to that perspective. Many seem to credit themselves with having created an environment where everyone's lot is improving in absolute terms, and don't see anything wrong with accumulating outsized relative power for themselves.
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.
yoyohello13 13 hours ago [-]
It’s a difficult conversation to have because critiquing the wealth accumulation tends to get you shouted down as a communist. I’m a believer in capitalism as well but our current system has produced people that are so wealthy they are effectively above the law. Some limit on wealth accumulation really needs to happen.
rectang 13 hours ago [-]
To escape the "communist" critique, I think it's worthwhile to grapple with opposing all concentration of power, whether private or public, governmental or corporate.
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.
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.
jacobolus 12 hours ago [-]
Real wages are inflation adjusted. So if everything costs 336% of what it did in 1980, and the real ages are 112% of what they were, then that means nominal wages are 376% of what they were.
QuesnayJr 12 hours ago [-]
It doesn't make sense to compare CPI to real wages. Real wages are wages divided by CPI or another inflation index.
stonogo 16 hours ago [-]
Nicely sliced. Weekly wages for full time workers have been rising for decades while fewer workers work full time. I don't think this data backs your assertion.
derektank 16 hours ago [-]
The number of full time workers as a percent of the total employees has gone from roughly 84% (rounding up) in 1979 to roughly 82% (rounding down) today. There was a spike in people working part time in the wake of the GFC, but we've returned to trend.
Also, I chose weekly wages because annual wages are complicated by time off, which was the other item in question.
manlymuppet 16 hours ago [-]
Something like 80% of workers are full time.
11 hours ago [-]
scotty79 16 hours ago [-]
25% increase in half a century? We ahd like 3 technological revolutions since then and economy grew massively.
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.
steele 15 hours ago [-]
Boomers gonna boom
PaulDavisThe1st 1 hours ago [-]
I remember a few years there was a comment or a linked piece on HN in which someone (a programmer) said (I paraphrase):
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.
andsoitis 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Pension funds and investment vehicles chase profit growth. The vast majority of people have a stake in that.
Geezus_42 3 hours ago [-]
Only because it's a requirement if you ever want to retire in a society that puts profit above human life.
andsoitis 1 hours ago [-]
> Only because it's a requirement if you ever want to retire in a society that puts profit above human life.
You think profit is anti-human?
segmondy 16 hours ago [-]
Why? AI is taking jobs. getty images just filed bankruptcy, stackoverflow went from heavy use to almost no use. AI is taking jobs, tipping toeing around it isn't the best thing. It needs to be said, and then what next needs to be figured out because first we talk about 200k jobs, then we will next talk about 2 million and then 20million
jasomill 14 hours ago [-]
Or not. Significant shifts in the nature of emplyoment are undoubtably disruptive, but there's no particular reason to believe this one will result in mass unemployment any more than previous shifts have done so.
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.
intended 13 hours ago [-]
A surplus of labor, by definition, reduces the value of labor. Most people are labor, so this means their earning potential is reduced, which means their social mobility, ability to take care of themselves, is reduced.
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.
rewgs 13 hours ago [-]
> there's no particular reason to believe this one will result in mass unemployment any more than previous shifts have done so.
Of course there is. Permanently replacing labor is quite obviously and quite literally the point of AI. No previous tech shifts are comparable.
ssl-3 13 hours ago [-]
> 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.
rewgs 13 hours ago [-]
Very glib, but you're missing my point.
aeon_ai 12 hours ago [-]
No, you're missing his.
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.
LunaSea 4 hours ago [-]
Yes, because the "smarter tasks" that can't be automated and that become the new job sources don't exist.
12 hours ago [-]
BoxwoodSeed 8 hours ago [-]
Are you conveniently forgetting about all the tech shifts from the past that did replace labor permanently? The printing press, steam machine, electricity, electronic computers,... even something banal like an elevator used to need a skilled laborer to operate it and now no longer does.
mbesto 3 hours ago [-]
> No previous tech shifts are comparable.
Oh please, do tell.
You people realize businesses used to have rooms full of humans who clacked away at typewriters right?
Stackoverflow killed itself long before AI appeared: they developed so hostile and toxic culture that it basically collapsed its utility to zero.
blltprfmnk 16 hours ago [-]
Economists keep saying over and over that so far AI has had minimal impact on the economy. That may change in time, but we aren’t seeing massive losses as a result of AI, despite some C suites using that as an excuse to lay off after over hiring.
This is my first time seeing this publication. It was insightful -- thank you for sharing.
esafak 16 hours ago [-]
Change comes slowly, then all at once.
jasomill 14 hours ago [-]
Sometimes. And often in unanticipated directions.
card_zero 16 hours ago [-]
So for instance like if AI becomes slowly less relevant, then is discarded all at once. Change will be surprising! That much is likely.
groundzeros2015 15 hours ago [-]
I'm a pretty big AI skeptic, but can't get behind this comment.
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.
card_zero 3 hours ago [-]
"Matures", like fades into the background. That's kind of the null hypothesis.
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.
adrianN 15 hours ago [-]
I'm still patiently waiting for this whole "Internet" thing to become less relevant too. It surely is just a fad with no economic benefits.
georgemcbay 16 hours ago [-]
> Economists keep saying over and over that so far AI has had minimal impact on the economy.
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.
jasomill 14 hours ago [-]
True. But it's also true that "the thing that should have been obvious the whole time" may turn out not to be so obvious after all. For example, the inevitability of poor working conditions leading to a worldwide socialist revolution and the collapse of capitalism.
WalterBright 14 hours ago [-]
The economies that have collapsed are the socialist ones.
rylando 16 hours ago [-]
Breaking news, frog in pot says water isn’t too hot yet
echelon 16 hours ago [-]
I live in Atlanta ("y'allywood"), a formerly big LA film outsourcing location. They shot much of Marvel and Netflix stuff here pre-2023. The unit below me has been rented to Winona Ryder and Dave Bautista.
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.
otterley 16 hours ago [-]
That’s really good insight! The graph only includes US employment. To see global employment instead would be enlightening.
sizzle 11 hours ago [-]
How much vfx is being done by AI video editing software/ massive gpu clusters over previous locally employed vfx studio artists? Maybe I’m thinking about this wrong but isn’t the compute/AI vfx models now reducing the amount of humans needed to edit things like Marvel character’s special effects scenes, etc?
echelon 5 hours ago [-]
VFX has already been outsourced for over a decade. Look at the film credits and you'll see lots of Eastern European and Asian studios.
someguydave 16 hours ago [-]
yes and also movies have gotten worse (more poorly written)
bruce511 14 hours ago [-]
They haven't really, it just seems like it, and for that you can blame better distribution.
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.
rightbyte 10 hours ago [-]
No way. It is not sampling bias. Big budget movies have gotten worse script wise compared to the 90s and 00s.
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.
BoxwoodSeed 7 hours ago [-]
If that was the only reason I could name a dozen watchable movies from the last decade, but I can't. I can name a dozen good movies from 1984:
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.
matwood 5 hours ago [-]
I love all those movies because they are from my generation, but how many of those would be considered good with today's audiences?
fx1994 1 hours ago [-]
Well, my kids like old movies, they just didn't had a chance to watch them. We are rewatching old stuff like Alien, Terminator, etc. and they are surprised how good those movies are. Last night we watched movie "Kiss Me, Stupid" 1964, kids loved it.
BoxwoodSeed 1 hours ago [-]
Good movies are just good movies. Recently I've been watching titles from the 1920s and those are a lot of fun, too.
At some point we lost good writing in favor of silly jokes and narrative in favor of spectacle.
scarecrowbob 44 minutes ago [-]
I believe this first sentence to be true, but I'm skeptical about the last sentence.
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.
Fricken 6 hours ago [-]
The whole culture has gotten worse. The bright young talents of gen Z just aren't showing up in any medium.
...No wait, to be fair, they're very good at influencing. They can influence like no previous generation ever could.
WalterBright 14 hours ago [-]
People don't usually re-run the bad stuff from years ago.
jasomill 14 hours ago [-]
These are far more plausible explanations. AI can no doubt bring certain efficiencies, but for the most part consumers seem to be squarely rejecting primarily AI-generated creative output.
nradov 15 hours ago [-]
It's crazy how California and the LA area local governments killed their "golden goose" by driving out the film industry. I guess progressives can't stop themselves from doing that, but it's always sad to see.
throwaway2037 10 hours ago [-]
They didn't kill the golden goose. Other places implemented tax benefits to encourage film making. That is why so much filming is done in Canada, New Zealand, and various Central European nations. If anything, the golden goose flew away. As a counterpoint: What do you think California and LA area local gov'ts should have done differently?
alex43578 6 hours ago [-]
Not keep adding to the taxes, expenses, and red tape? Work to address the outrageous cost of living in CA that indirectly drives expenses for labor? It's a million and one policies that all contribute to how running a labor heavy business in CA is increasingly challenging (bearing in mind that those factors matter less to a software shop or Apple).
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.
gedy 15 hours ago [-]
I’m not a fan of many progressive causes, but this is absolutely more an issue with globalization and easy ability to move jobs overseas to cheaper areas.
jasomill 14 hours ago [-]
Absolutely, along with the rise in popularity in unscripted and nonprofessional content due to non-AI technologies drastically lowering the cost floor for production and distribution. AI will no doubt contribute to these trends, but I suspect its impact will be more evolutionary than revolutionary.
devsda 13 hours ago [-]
> AI is taking jobs, tipping toeing around it isn't the best thing. It needs to be said, and then what next needs to be figured out
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.
inglor_cz 9 hours ago [-]
"real cost of production is unknown due to skirting of copyright 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.
MSFT_Edging 4 hours ago [-]
I think the person you're replying to is trying to draw a parallel to the common "china cheats" narrative that centers copyright and "stealing" designs.
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.
devsda 4 hours ago [-]
Copyright laws are real for the purpose of calculating cost because humans and other non AI business are still bound and limited by them.
16 hours ago [-]
icantevenhold 16 hours ago [-]
Maybe a lot of people worked at stackoverflow idk;
but I have been organising electronic “underground” music nights for 15+ years and basically stopped now because there just wasn’t a big enough audience anymore.
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
Gareth321 9 hours ago [-]
> In the macroeconomy, who is the "efficiency" we are chasing for, who benefits? Who is getting the money that was "saved"?
Everyone who uses those products and services. Prices go down and people can get much more in aggregate. More entertainment, healthcare, etc.
gmerc 9 hours ago [-]
The primary issue is that the digital economy is attention supply locked now that services expansion has hit a wall. And so the only way to extract infinite growth money going forward, which dealing with commoditisation and erosion of talent and technology moats in any form, is to lay off people.
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.
BLKNSLVR 17 hours ago [-]
Offshoring of manufacturing to China is the analogy that springs to mind for me.
derekdahmer 15 hours ago [-]
To use your example of the movie industry, everyone gets the benefits of the effiency gains.
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.
groundzeros2015 15 hours ago [-]
Modern technology makes distribution free, so then you need to compete on brand and quality.
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.
lotsofpulp 8 hours ago [-]
Hollywood got devalued because people prefer spending time on Youtube/TikTok/Instagram/Reddit/Discord/Video Games/Hacker News/etc.
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.
groundzeros2015 7 hours ago [-]
Nothing they could have done? That’s crazy.
Before video this happened to text. Look at for example how NYT has shored itself up vs the many failed news outlets. Premium brand.
lotsofpulp 7 hours ago [-]
Even though the businesses are not comparable since journalism is a far less capital intensive business than video media production, I don't see how your example of 1 business thriving while almost all others failed is incongruent with the theme of the linked article which is loss of many jobs in the media production business.
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.
MentalM 5 hours ago [-]
> Hollywood got devalued because people prefer spending time on Youtube/TikTok/Instagram/Reddit/Discord/Video Games/Hacker News/etc.
Hollywood got devalued because it is spending more money than before to get worse results than before.
bradknowles 13 hours ago [-]
Rhythm and Hues (Oscar award winner for “Life of Pi”) was killed because it was cheaper to move that work offshore.
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.
timr 14 hours ago [-]
> I liked this article. I appreciate that it didn't try to say it is or isn't AI.
...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.
hn_throwaway_99 14 hours ago [-]
FWIW, there was a very good recent NY Times opinion piece titled "I Teach at a Business School. It's Time to Shut Them Down." by a professor at the University of Cambridge business school who argues that these schools have solely promulgated this idea of "efficiency" as their primary output to the detriment of society at large. Worth a read if you're interested in the topic.
WalterBright 14 hours ago [-]
Consider "The Red Queen" by Ridley book. It's premise is that evolution constantly improves a species, but since other species also are improving, the species runs and runs but stays in the same place.
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.
KaiserPro 6 hours ago [-]
outsourcing is part of the thing, but efficiency is also a bigger factor.
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?
j45 16 hours ago [-]
Efficiency could mean creating more with the same labour, not creating the same amount with less labour.
jparishy 16 hours ago [-]
Yes, it definitely can. That's sort of why I kept putting it in scarequotes. I am not skeptic of AI, fwiw. Mostly just our current crop of corpo/gov leadership and their views on what healthy economy looks like.
14 hours ago [-]
doctorpangloss 14 hours ago [-]
look all the commenters here... this is a lot of words with way too much intellectualizing.
tv and movies killed radio and opera. and now tiktok is killing tv and movies. it's not complicated.
throwaway2037 10 hours ago [-]
You raise a good point, but I would like to add more nuance. Traditional TV is largely displaced by YouTube (small content creators) and streaming (Netflix, etc.) Traditional film has moved nearly entirely to streaming, but there is more of it now than ever before. TikTok is something truly generational to me. Just like Instagram largely killed the blog because it allowed normies to watch the amazing lives of the top 5%. TikTok allows young people (mostly women) to gossip faster than ever before.
nradov 15 hours ago [-]
The legacy media industry had a huge amount of fat and inefficiency, lots of people sitting around pretending to work. Joe Rogan produces a top podcast that pulls a larger audience than the vast majority of TV shows, and does everything with about 5 employees. Regardless of what you think of him personally or the podcast content, that is amazing efficiency. And he started it before LLMs were even a thing.
jasomill 15 hours ago [-]
While I suspect you're not wrong about either inefficiency in large, well-funded media organziations or the efficiency of Rogan's operation, comparing his podcast to anything but a substantially similar TV show is hardly a fair comparison. Even a relatively low-budget scripted TV series is going to require a cast, writers, props, sets, costumes, hair and makeup, lighting, camera work, craft services, transportation, significantly more editing and postproduction, the list goes on, plus directors and producers and administrative personnel to manage all of this.
nradov 14 hours ago [-]
And that's exactly the point. It is unfair. TV shows and podcasts are both competing for the same audience, and yet the podcast can do it an order of magnitude cheaper.
rewgs 14 hours ago [-]
> TV shows and podcasts are both competing for the same audience.
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.
simonra 10 hours ago [-]
Wouldn't "audience" and "people" both just be a proxy for "time" though?
niltecedu 4 hours ago [-]
Not really, the time I set aside for shows, podcast, movies and games is all different. I am not going to give up watching slow horses to watch a podcast,
simonra 3 hours ago [-]
Sure, but for people without abundant time to spend alone then watching a show this evening kind of precludes also ingesting a podcast before tomorrow. It's not like the labour movements around the world have negotiated significantly more free time for the big mass of working humans since Netflix said that sleep is their biggest competitor back in 2017.
arusahni 15 hours ago [-]
That's not necessarily an apples-to-apples comparison. The inputs for an unscripted podcast are vastly different from a scripted TV show. They're different mediums for expression, and each carries different costs.
brightball 12 hours ago [-]
I can’t speak to everyone, but grok bot is helping me gain so much efficiency in managing all of the things that I have going on in my life that I feel much more present now.
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.
izend 2 hours ago [-]
The quality of Hollywood movies has gone down substantially.
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’"
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.
Gormo 1 hours ago [-]
Maybe they could divide movies into a series of standalone segments that tell the story one chunk at a time, and then begin each segment with a short recap of what happened in the previous segments. They could even release the segments sequentially over time, and keep people coming back to it over the course of weeks or months.
Verdex 1 hours ago [-]
Ah yes, the audience is ignoring our low quality content because it's low content and ignorable so we're going to lower the quality even more strategy. I wonder if it'll pay off for them...
jeltz 28 minutes ago [-]
Maybe if we lower the quality a bit more it will finally work.
sjdh76 17 hours ago [-]
Before AI showed up the UN released a report on the Attention Economy. It said Supply of content had vastly outstripped Demand. It decoupled because entertainment/media was being used to push other products. The telcos, amazon, google/fb and many others were all subsidizing content to push some other product. Exploding info chasing finite non growing eyeballs and time.
jubilee33 16 hours ago [-]
Creative content will become more personal and less profitable, art being some sort of commercial enterprise is a relative new phenomenon, we will survive without it. Most artists will have to generate income by performance or physical creation, just like it has been for the whole time before it was commoditized to feed the "attention economy"
What a gross and completly apt terminology for the commoditization of art from the bureaucrats by the way.
Gigachad 17 hours ago [-]
I'm looking at gaming these days and there's such an endless selection of excellent games I'd love to play. But there are far more great games than I have time to play. So when I see stuff like using AI to make games faster, I can only think what is the point, The market won't buy or play more games so something else has to give.
xpct 16 hours ago [-]
I feel completely the opposite. Mind, I play games a fair bit, but I generally don't feel that excited about most, and I'd say a lot of them have very repetitive tropes. I'm generally in the market for 30h+ spent on a game, so that filters out a lot of the more trendy stuff.
Gigachad 15 hours ago [-]
That sounds more like you are burned out on gaming in general. I don’t think infinite AI slop games would help here.
indrex 11 hours ago [-]
It could be much better games too developed using AI assistance. Just saying, using AI is not necessarily slop.
asdff 14 hours ago [-]
Online games though you pretty much have to follow the herds to the newest titles. You could stick around but it usually isn't pretty: tough to find full lobbies or full of sweats or both.
stopsayingsorry 17 hours ago [-]
"there's such an endless selection of excellent games"
If you have 0 standards.
satvikpendem 17 hours ago [-]
There are more games at any standard than one's lifetime to play them in.
wiseowise 8 hours ago [-]
No, not at all. You can count on one hand quality games released recently.
Sankozi 38 minutes ago [-]
Why limit yourself to only recent games? They are often unpolished and overhyped. I only buy recent games if I trust the developer (and even then I often wait a bit before starting playing them).
Capricorn2481 8 hours ago [-]
This is the language of people just looking at high budget games. Much like people insisting there are no good films when they only look at superhero movies. Quality indie titles come out all the time.
Jensson 1 hours ago [-]
> Quality indie titles come out all the time.
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.
echelon 17 hours ago [-]
Nothing meets my standards. Nothing.
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.
stopsayingsorry 16 hours ago [-]
The solution to that is not to continue to seek consumption, but starting creation. Your consumption phase is done.
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.
jamesdftx 14 hours ago [-]
Thank you for this comment. I myself just got into vibe coding a few projects and anecdotally I've never been more excited about the future barring the economic implications of a world more reliant on AI. It feels as if the parent comment should take your recommendation to heart and start creating!!!
satvikpendem 9 hours ago [-]
This and your below comment border on satire and could pass for something on r/iamverysmart.
nonameiguess 6 hours ago [-]
People are expecting too much out of sitting in a chair watching a screen, whether or not you're partially in control of what happens or just passively consuming. At some point, if you want to see the face of God, you need to go trek to the south pole, sail around the world, learn to scuba dive and spend time with sperm whales and orcas. I don't think it's the "creators" here who are deficient. No depiction of action can ever beat the real thing. And nobody needs to make the real thing. It's just there and you only have to go find it. At least for now. We're quickly bulldozing and paving the entire world to build more space for computers, so get it while it's still possible.
card_zero 16 hours ago [-]
Everybody is maliciously taking you seriously :D
Hang in there! It gets better!
whoanoway 16 hours ago [-]
[dead]
azan_ 16 hours ago [-]
Listen to Bach, if that doesn’t work then your standards are not high but completely wrong.
ofjcihen 16 hours ago [-]
Honestly sounds like you’re just depressed. I don’t even mean that in a mean way.
AdrianB1 4 hours ago [-]
You don't need to be depressed to see a decline in the outside world. For people that are old enough, it is quite obvious.
ofjcihen 3 hours ago [-]
Hah…trust me, I’m old enough.
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.
AdrianB1 3 hours ago [-]
> But not finding joy in anything is an actual sign of depression.
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.
ofjcihen 3 hours ago [-]
Sure, but that’s not what OP said is it?
echelon 14 hours ago [-]
I think I've just got a bigger imagination than the kind of people who can sit down to enjoy Netflix.
Anybody with a big imagination must feel trapped by mediocre content. Daydreams are often more enjoyable.
stopsayingsorry 16 hours ago [-]
Nonsense.
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.
retsibsi 10 hours ago [-]
> literature, you can trivially read all the classics by the time you are 30
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...
RunSet 5 hours ago [-]
> Even if you take an old established media, like literature, you can trivially read all the classics by the time you are 30.
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
Marsymars 15 hours ago [-]
Hey, I actually have "played all the classics" for some definition of the term.
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.)
satvikpendem 9 hours ago [-]
Which classics? There is more than the English language in the world. You could even learn every single language and read their classics, much less all good books in human history. You are either underestimating the amount of text corpus that exists or overestimating people's reading and comprehension speed.
lelandbatey 13 hours ago [-]
Games unlike books can have depth in duration of playing. While possible to play a game for 500 hours and feel very different about it on hour 501 vs 51, while books (usually) do not deliver such a feeling. Thus "playing all the classics" has much more dimensionality and as a result, requires much more time than just literally playing it once through and being done.
jameshart 9 hours ago [-]
Games work in very different ways. Some are narratives where unless you complete them it isn’t really true to say you’ve fully played them. Others are essentially skill-acquisition challenges - you don’t have to finish Sonic the Hedgehog or ‘beat’ Civilization to be able to say you’ve played them. And others are goalless sandboxes - the Sims or Minecraft, where what you get out of it depends entirely on what you put into it.
otterley 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
wvenable 16 hours ago [-]
There are roughly 50-70 new games released on Steam every day. I think there's pretty good review metrics available that you can assume 2-5% of those could be categorized as "Excellent". So that's around 1–3 excellent new games per day on just one platform.
Even if we're over-estimating "excellent" by a lot, that's still more games that anyone can reasonably play.
stopsayingsorry 16 hours ago [-]
>There are roughly 50-70 new games released on Steam every day.
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.
wvenable 14 hours ago [-]
Even if another game was never released ever again, you could still find enough fantastic games to last a lifetime.
matwood 5 hours ago [-]
That's how I feel about the current streaming content library and the list of books I want to read and the YT channels I want to watch and the list goes on... The fact that there is so much media vying for our time is one of the drivers bringing down old school media.
lelanthran 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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.
5 hours ago [-]
Capricorn2481 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.
versteegen 7 hours ago [-]
Thanks for pushing back, completely agree. GP's 99% trash is a massive exaggeration. It's actually super tough out there for indie game devs, and you have to put up with people lumping your game in with actual trash without a chance.
AdrianB1 4 hours ago [-]
Your are overestimating by orders of magnitude. There is not even one excellent game per year, lately.
Silver Pines, Order of the Sinking Star, Hellraiser, Retrospace. Those all came out in the past month.
skeptic_ai 2 hours ago [-]
Ok but nothing seems excellent there tbh. Even for free I wouldn’t play them.
johnnyanmac 14 hours ago [-]
just clicking on your link: Final Fantasy Resonance would likely be regarded as "excellent". If you're a fan of RPGs.
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.
skeptic_ai 2 hours ago [-]
But I hate all about final fantasy starting from the name. So id say is not excellent
johnnyanmac 11 minutes ago [-]
Yes. That's why I left the rest of my commentary on media.
honeycrispy 17 hours ago [-]
I started building a game on a custom engine a few years ago and I used to think about selling it, but nowadays the market is so oversaturated I tend to think of it as nothing more than a coding exercise.
AdrianB1 4 hours ago [-]
The market is oversaturated of mediocre games, but I struggle to find any notable titles in the past 5 years. 30 years I was pirating games I did not afford, in the past 15-20 years I bought all the games I played, but in the past few years I don't remember buying too many games because there was nothing interesting. The last games I bought were Cyberpunk 2077 (+ extension), an indie game (Forgotten City) and Stalker 2 (a disapointment).
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.
skydhash 17 hours ago [-]
Same thing here. I gave up on gaming all together because my library grew too much. As a kid, I didn’t even own a console, I had to borrow gameboy or go to my friend house and even then it was just an handful of cartridges. Even now, I plan to just focus on small sample of programming languages and ecosystems, and learn them inside out. There’s just too much stuff out there.
WalterBright 14 hours ago [-]
> As a kid, I didn’t even own a console
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.
hparadiz 16 hours ago [-]
Same thing with books but no one says to stop writing.
Gormo 1 hours ago [-]
We were in the "Chase the Chuck Wagon" phase of the TV and movie industry long before AI was a factor.
999900000999 15 hours ago [-]
It's also very easy to make high quality content. You can record a professional album with 5000$ in gear. Live instruments and all.
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.
nradov 15 hours ago [-]
I guess preferences vary, but the idea of spending my retirement consuming "content" seems like a type of hell.
999900000999 15 hours ago [-]
Just this summer I went to concerts in 3 different countries.
I also want to make games and music. Open source everything after 5 years. Honest games you buy once and self host forever.
rixed 10 hours ago [-]
Could you give any hint about the title/authors/year of this report that would allow me to find it?
asabla 8 hours ago [-]
I would be very interested to read the report too.
It might be this one Yellow Economy[1]. But I'm not 100% sure.
Haha, look at the old B+W Perry Mason TV episodes. He drives all kinds of different cars. Those cars were definitely product placements.
big_hacker 8 hours ago [-]
Chat apps are cutting a slice into the supply side directly.
echelon 17 hours ago [-]
There is infinite demand for content (to the limit that human attention can absorb it).
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.
giovannibonetti 17 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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.
intended 13 hours ago [-]
We are getting hammered by a massive increase in generation of content, and no change in our ability to consume content.
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.
matwood 5 hours ago [-]
> We are getting hammered by a massive increase in generation of content, and no change in our ability to consume content.
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.
Avicebron 17 hours ago [-]
> There is infinite demand for content (to the limit that human attention can absorb it).
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.
echelon 17 hours ago [-]
> which people struggling to get by rarely have
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.
dualvariable 17 hours ago [-]
> We are still in a desert.
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.
stopsayingsorry 16 hours ago [-]
A barn full of fodder for cattle would be a more fitting analogy.
PaulHoule 17 hours ago [-]
I would look to the culture industry in Japan as an alternative to the gatekeeping-industrial complex we call Hollywood.
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.
16 hours ago [-]
oidar 14 hours ago [-]
I haven't investigated it much, but I imagine that LLMs have made it easier for japanese culture products to release products in English language. Is industry in Japan taking advantage of nearly free translation for it's print products?
vunderba 2 hours ago [-]
I've heard stories of rather poor translation work since Sony purchased Crunchyroll (a popular AI streaming site) and started using AI for a lot of English subs.
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.
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.
Animats 15 hours ago [-]
The real job losses are probably in commercial art. If you're making an illustration for an ad, that's almost certainly automated now. Looking at when the decline started, it's about when Stable Diffusion got going.
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.)
bamboozled 5 hours ago [-]
I'd say a huge amount of advertising is now "influencers" and podcasters selling things, probably more akin to 1940s radio advertisements.
999900000999 18 hours ago [-]
No one has any money and entertainment is the first thing you cut.
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.
kaseijin 17 hours ago [-]
I just don't pay for it. If there's something I really wanna watch I might buy one month of the service binge it then cancel.
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.
skybrian 12 hours ago [-]
In the US, there are a lot more rich people than there used to be [1] and they're often driving prices up because they can afford to pay. (Most obviously in real estate.)
and the content strangely sucks most of the time. like no one can write, edit, direct, or act anymore. Not always but strangely often.
999900000999 17 hours ago [-]
Every thing is safe.
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.
hobo123 9 hours ago [-]
As if there was somehow a lack of LGBT representation on TV these days. At least on German TV is seems like every show, quiz show, whatever has these "quota" characters.
I don't mind too much, I just miss overall quality and don't care who tf is "represented" or not.
6 hours ago [-]
krior 9 hours ago [-]
Don't bring german TV into a discussion about media quality, its embarassing.
herbst 8 hours ago [-]
You haven't tried Austrian TV then.
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.
hobo123 9 hours ago [-]
Why, do you think it's that much worse than American TV, or that much better? In absolute terms it is embarrassing, but I would say so is US TV.
ajkjk 2 hours ago [-]
This isn't the problem I'm talking about at all. I think there's just basic skill issues everywhere. Maybe there are also issues with this, but it's a separate thing.
asdff 14 hours ago [-]
They write now for an audience with no media literacy skills beyond good guy good, bad guy bad, and the HR department box check that you have every creed and color represented in the cast.
LPisGood 17 hours ago [-]
I feel like this comment contrasted with the incredible movie releases this since ~May is just not holding water.
kaseijin 16 hours ago [-]
Hollywood movie industry is starting to come around and fix the problem which more "bad writing" than anything but it takes awhile and they've still got a lot of stinkers still in the pipe. But that's always true.
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
atentaten 17 hours ago [-]
Which of these movies would you say are good? I haven't been following up with releases but would like to watch something worthwhile.
Marsymars 15 hours ago [-]
Depends on what you like. I quite enjoyed Project Hail Mary, The Invite, and Tony. I'm excited for Wildwood and Ray Gunn.
DangitBobby 16 hours ago [-]
You Can See Everything is definitely worth watching.
tayo42 17 hours ago [-]
It felt like there were years where good movies like stopped being made. Or just contrasted with years filled with good movies.
What came out this year that you think you'll watch again in 10 years?
Timon3 14 hours ago [-]
Project Hail Mary! I loved it, will definitely be a yearly rewatch for me.
SoftTalker 17 hours ago [-]
Well it's shot on a phone, lit with bad LED lighting and edited on a laptop. It all shows in the final product.
seb1204 9 hours ago [-]
If it sucks the conclusion is to turn it off for me. Stopped most subscriptions.
MiroslavPokorny 17 hours ago [-]
It feels like all media, from tv shows to movies are all following a certain formula, with a goal to drive a certain social perspective about people and society.
ajkjk 6 hours ago [-]
I don't think it's a goal. I think it's that the corporate machine which makes media can't really do otherwise for structural reasons.
_heimdall 17 hours ago [-]
I believe its called South America now.
so-gala-massey 17 hours ago [-]
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I stopped watching broadcast/cable TV 20 years ago. I had Netflix until they switched to their own content and started raising rates, so I dropped it. I now rent DVDs from a place about 15 minutes from me. I also have Kanopy for free. Here’s the opinion: stop watching. That’s the only way to send a message. Read a book. Rent a dvd. Or play a game. Or draw. Or visit friends and play board games. Or learn to play an instrument. Or find a game store near you and go to game nights. Or bowl. Find something else to do than drool at a screen watching content product that doesn’t give a shit about. Right now I’m doing advent of code from 2019 in LISP. Haven’t programmed lisp since college and I’m having a blast. Get a hobby. Screw the media machine.
hobo123 9 hours ago [-]
<3
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...
robswc 16 hours ago [-]
> Paramount Plus has nothing else.
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."
Terr_ 15 hours ago [-]
That is a real reason I can't summon the interest to subscribe to any of them: Whatever I pick, I'll be dissatisfied, so I put it off for another day...
andyferris 14 hours ago [-]
Apple was correct in the beginning here - the only way to make a service satisfactory to users is to have streaming aggregators (hosting all content) fed by different producers/studios. The "Spotify model", if you would.
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!
blankwire 4 hours ago [-]
> I'd prefer to go get DVDs from Blockbuster at this point - it'd be more convenient!
Having fun isn't hard when you've got a library card!
lotsofpulp 8 hours ago [-]
What is the difference between Apple paying another business to make something and Netflix paying a W-2 employee to make something? Both businesses can choose to end paying for media before the story is finished.
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.
asdff 14 hours ago [-]
This is the biggest thing with streaming vs cable. Say what you will about the commercials, it solved the intertia issue of figuring out what to watch with curated content. What to watch? MTV of course. Done.
sokoloff 6 hours ago [-]
It’s confirmation bias; you notice and remember the misses while mostly overlooking the hits.
robswc 3 hours ago [-]
Probably. However, I've mostly been trying to watch older movies and I think paramount has some sort of monopoly on them.
AnodicElegy 15 hours ago [-]
For South Park, I just wait for a full season to be out and watch it over a month, then cancel. $15 for a season isn't too bad.
rr808 16 hours ago [-]
If only there was a service where you paid a fixed price for a bundle and you had a set top box that had all these channels together in one package. Of course you'd have a lot of channels you never looked at but overall it would be more efficient.
senordevnyc 17 hours ago [-]
Without even looking at the data, I bet both of your hypotheses here are wrong.
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.
WarmWash 17 hours ago [-]
I think we are still in a hangover from the financial cocaine the governments were handing out during the pandemic (and even long after it was a problem).
qurren 18 hours ago [-]
Also, nobody has any time for entertainment. Office workers all working 80 hours a week fearing stack ranking, PIPs, layoffs, needing to scramble to get a new H1B job or risk getting kicked out of the country and having to uproot kids. Service workers are working 120 hours a week across 3 jobs. Single people are working 100+ hours a week studying and interviewing and not getting jobs.
cjpearson 17 hours ago [-]
While this may be true for some people, overall this is not backed up by the data.
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.
How dare you bring facts and data to a fight based on vibes!
_heimdall 17 hours ago [-]
Interesting, I have seen people be stretched thin and more stretched but I haven't seen people working 80-120 hour weeks. Different circles maybe?
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.
tokioyoyo 15 hours ago [-]
Not true. If you look at any “cheap entertainment” dashboard, you’ll see usage has been going up.
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.
hobo123 9 hours ago [-]
Outside of work I think many people only have energy for TV and Insta/tok. Which is a huge problem.
FranOntanaya 8 hours ago [-]
Captioning and subtitling has taken a direct hit from AI tools, but about half of it is from clients severely reducing their quality standards.
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.
masfuerte 5 hours ago [-]
I've been watching quite a few old BBC series on iPlayer and something they did a lot back then was paraphrase the dialogue to reduce the length of the subtitles. They tended not to have spelling mistakes or comprehension errors, but they weren't accurate.
OgsyedIE 18 hours ago [-]
"You're going to begin to see demand destruction based on the pricing environment." - Bob Jordan, CEO of Southwest Airlines, April 23rd
combobyte 17 hours ago [-]
"We've finally gone too far on pricing" is a wild thing to hear a CEO say out loud in 2026.
redwood 17 hours ago [-]
It's not that the prices are up to milk the consumer. Look at Southwest's thin profit margin. Costs are up
OgsyedIE 17 hours ago [-]
Costs aren't just up on the shocks of this year. The daily production of all diesel and jet fuel per capita has been declining month on month since 2008.
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.
80fj0348i 9 minutes ago [-]
> The daily production of all diesel and jet fuel per capita has been declining month on month since 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?
redwood 13 hours ago [-]
I'm not following
seb1204 4 hours ago [-]
I think parent is trying to say that while it may seem that prices are high underneath the big wave of secondary effects can be seen coming already.
big_hacker 8 hours ago [-]
According to the commenter, price up while production per capita down makes the product unaffordable or less interesting to a lot of people. It is implied by the commenter that fuel producers should produce more and aim for lower prices.
SoftTalker 17 hours ago [-]
Jet fuel has more than doubled in cost just this year. That wasn't in anyone's plans.
gib444 8 hours ago [-]
It was definitely someone's plan though
Seattle3503 14 hours ago [-]
The full quote implies more uncertainty
> 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.
Interest rates and inflation have vastly more impact than AI.
mkotlikov 17 hours ago [-]
This 100%. All the layoffs started before AI. High interest rates means businesses can't afford to take risks. Our entire economy is based on easy money from cheap debt. The tech layoffs are about being able to pay for AI whether that's paying for data centers or tokens.
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!
jeffbee 17 hours ago [-]
That doesn't explain anything in this article. All the time series go back to 1990 when interest rates were significantly higher any way you look at them.
bananamogul 16 hours ago [-]
Not factored in is the fact that there is just so much media now.
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.
Timon3 14 hours ago [-]
> 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 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.
margorczynski 2 hours ago [-]
I would add to that for sure games - a big reason new games, especially AAA, have such a rough time now.
SamuelAdams 14 hours ago [-]
Maybe. As a contrast, look at the book industry. We have access to 500+ years of books digitally, and yet most people prefer to read books written in the last 50 years.
NorthSouthNorth 6 hours ago [-]
It's hard to read old books sometimes. Unless you grew up doing it you just simply don't understand character intentions. Reading a Dostoyevsky book it's hard to relate to characters or even understand the outrage in a lot of scenes.
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).
conductr 13 hours ago [-]
The point stands, the over supply is a huge factor. There’s so much content available that serves as a competitive/substitute for traditional film and tv that it changes the entire consumer behavior and economy around the industry, which translates to jobs.
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.
Gigachad 14 hours ago [-]
The last 50 years of books is still more books in the genre you like than you could read in a lifetime.
sunjester 29 minutes ago [-]
i didnt read this article. i dont need to. if you lost your job to "ai" you shouldnt have had a job in the first place. sorry man, IS has spoken.
karmickoala 26 minutes ago [-]
First they came for the artists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not an artist
gwd 4 hours ago [-]
"Media firms are decidedly coy about their AI use, both to protect against public backlash and, more financially important, to preserve the legal basis for their copyrights."
Well since AI-generated content has no copyright, this should read, "..., to hide the prejury of asserting copyright over un-copyright-able material."
80fj0348i 4 hours ago [-]
> Well since AI-generated content has no copyright
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.
jjmaxwell4 14 hours ago [-]
The article missed the massive increase in work for creatives that's happened over the last 10 years. Being a influencer. 3.2M people earned more than $100,000 last year being a influencer, the combined earnings are between probably $25-50B in the US.
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.
sokoloff 6 hours ago [-]
Taking the low end of “more than $100K” as being exactly $100K, 3.2M people earning $100K/yr each is $320B/yr and many earn way more than $100K, obviously.
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?
HWR_14 4 hours ago [-]
> many earn way more than $100K, obviously.
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.
Edman274 13 hours ago [-]
How did you arrive at the 3.2 million people + 100K figure?
devsda 13 hours ago [-]
Don't we primarily rely on trickle down economics.
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.
pgisapedo 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
jalev 18 hours ago [-]
Some of these graphs don't support the hypothesis. The movie one for example shows that employment is just slightly below what it was just after the financial crisis of 2008, and shows record job loss after the covid bump which we all know resulted in massive hiring sprees in a lot of sectors followed by massive layoffs. Is the movie and movie production sector really experiencing an apocalyptic downturn where the line will reach zero, or just returning to its median?
Apparently the amount of movies actually being produced has barely recovered to post 2008 levels.
Why should we expect the economy of 2026 (not 2020) be comparable to 2008? Am I missing something? Economy was awful i 2008 and we are currently in boom time markets, so boomy for so long that people have been saying it must be a bubble for years now.
alephnerd 17 hours ago [-]
> record job loss after the covid bump which we all know resulted in massive hiring sprees in a lot of sectors followed by massive layoffs. Is the movie and movie production sector really experiencing an apocalyptic downturn where the line will reach zero, or just returning to its median?
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.
vasco 18 hours ago [-]
Yeah but the total hours of content produced are way up. Most video content that needs to be produced and is consumed nowadays isn't movies.
redwood 17 hours ago [-]
That's part of the point. If anyone can create cheap garbage, flood it on socials, and get people to click see what goes viral the old attention economy is just totally disrupted
Alex13192 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
commiepatrol 18 hours ago [-]
Have you seen media, arts and film that America produces recently? It's garbage.
sickcodebruh 16 hours ago [-]
Media, arts, film, and America: things that are not monolithic and cannot be evaluated with blanket statements.
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!
WhompingWindows 5 hours ago [-]
Check out Dropout.TV. Best comedy network in years, absolutely brilliant content.
cute_boi 18 hours ago [-]
I can't watch youtube due to all these garbage. Youtube should allow me to blanket ban on publisher who use full AI for full video.
WarmWash 17 hours ago [-]
Ironically I find that YouTube has the absolute best content. It's the only one with authentic people making quality stuff for exactly your niche.
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.
Gigachad 17 hours ago [-]
It's got good content but also a massive amount of slop. You don't see much straight up AI generated video, but it's incredibly common to see youtubers just sitting there reading a ChatGPT script.
ninkendo 4 hours ago [-]
If you think the AI problem on YouTube is getting bad you should see what kinda stuff they put on there for kids.
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.
sokoloff 6 hours ago [-]
I see tons of straight-up fully AI videos being offered, whether it’s NotebookLM discussions of some topic, some nonsense reading of “accepted answers” to a tech query, or the maddening “here’s three ways old money acts”, I assume based on being interested in tech topics and retirement saving topics.
rockskon 17 hours ago [-]
"In this video I'm going to..."
"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.
carlosjobim 6 hours ago [-]
Use the dislike button. Every supermarket has a massive amount of slop in the front and high quality stuff in the back.
vconnor 11 hours ago [-]
99% of everything is shit. There is a lot of good content on Youtube, which means the vast majority of videos on the platform is dreadful slop.
lotsofpulp 8 hours ago [-]
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0c3ca83 18 hours ago [-]
They can't, as far as organizational politics goes. Tech is all in on AI.
ion_trapper 17 hours ago [-]
Being all in on AI doesnt mean they have to be all in on bottom of the barrel slop videos. Youtube actually does a great job of not serving you slop if it gets to know you well enough. And it does notify you if it detects the video is AI generated. I would hope tech companies are awake to the fact that people’s feeds being deluged by the absolute uncanniest and disturbing visuals you’ve ever seen is feeding into anti-AI sentiment, and they probably shouldn’t be further enabling that.
0c3ca83 13 hours ago [-]
Bets that some VPs are getting bonuses for supporting AI, and the number of AI videos is a metric that's going into their promo packet?
ssl-3 12 hours ago [-]
I'd rather bet that YouTube wants the greatest number of people watching as many videos with as many ads as possible, and that they don't give a fuck how the content was produced as long as it acquires and retains eyeballs.
loloquwowndueo 18 hours ago [-]
I just stopped using YouTube for entertainment years ago. Try it!
(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.
bubblemoth 17 hours ago [-]
Where do you find entertainment now?
dylan604 17 hours ago [-]
I just listen to one of many of the voices in my head and see what they have to suggest. Things get interesting
Dove 17 hours ago [-]
I'm not who you're replying to, but I tuned out big movies and TV long ago, and just recently, YouTube became a hostile enough environment for me to start limiting it. When I do go there, it's to watch specific channels I already know. Clickbait titles and slop suggestions just aren't worth the psycholigical hassle when I want to relax.
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.
malnourish 15 hours ago [-]
I read
loloquwowndueo 16 hours ago [-]
You’re being sarcastic, right?
biophysboy 15 hours ago [-]
Let’s go back to the good ol days when half of movies were about cowboys.
asdff 14 hours ago [-]
Go ahead and watch one of those cowboy movies like Once Upon a Time in the West. We've definitely lost some skills as a species over time.
throwawaytodey 7 hours ago [-]
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wellthisisgreat 18 hours ago [-]
There is some resurgence in quality here and there but then there is Avengers, MCU, Star Wars and idk how you can balance that with any amount of quality indie products
Arubis 18 hours ago [-]
This might be (unintentionally?) part of the reason for the original subject: how many jobs does the Avengers IP pipeline support? How about for a single artifact output by it--one TV show, for example?
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.)
Ekaros 7 hours ago [-]
Sometimes I wonder about efficiency part. How efficient these big budget titles are? How much many man hours spend of them are actually waste? It does get to back to whole broken window thing. Demand was generate but was it usefully spend? Indie is most likely doing whole thing in much more efficient way. With slightly different product but still often something acceptable.
Is more jobs better than less jobs? Or does this apply to only certain things?
asdff 14 hours ago [-]
Another issue is that the avengers is just sucking up money that would have been invested in different IP than Stan Lee's comic books. All that money would have been spent either way, just a question of if we wanted to see one of the most sophisticated rendering farms ever constructed grind on Thanos's chin wrinkles or maybe some other projects.
drivers99 17 hours ago [-]
The last Avengers movie was 7.5 years ago. The last Star Wars episode was 7 years ago. (The Mandalorian one is the only standalone one since then.) Avengers are included in the MCU btw. There have only been about 1 to 3 MCU movies per year for the last few years. (2022: 3; 2023: 3; 2024: 1; 2025: 3; 2026: 2). There are tons of other, really good movies to watch. Not just indies either: Did you happen to see Project Hail Mary this year? The Odyssey? I missed Spider-man: Brand New Day (the MCU movie that came out this year so far), but it has 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, so I don't think that drags down the average in terms of quality either.
Carrok 17 hours ago [-]
“Only” 1 to 3 MCU movies a year? This is an absurd amount of junk.
add-sub-mul-div 18 hours ago [-]
Vague takes like this scream Facebook boomer. There's lots of great media and lots of bad media. It's the nature of trying to monetize creativity.
talon8635 17 hours ago [-]
What does this mean “to monetize creativity”?
Are you suggesting creatives just give their work away for free?
TacticalCoder 16 hours ago [-]
Apparently you need a 10 K+ karma account to say the following (which another account, a new one and not mine btw, posted). Some I'm just reusing the other dude's words:
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.
46283737292 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Stitch4223 17 hours ago [-]
Please don’t sign up with burner accounts for one snarky reply: take responsibility for your words. You could also respond with something nice that inspires the author and other readers.
Provide food for critical thinking instead of accusing people of not being critical thinkers.
For example, tell us what new media from the US is actually great today. What do the arts offer that is next level and worth watching? Is there a rise in arts in other counties that we are missing? What could Facebook boomers need that leads to more and higher quality arts and movies?
martinky24 17 hours ago [-]
Tell me more, 5 hour old account
kethyk23 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
alberth 15 hours ago [-]
> The streaming era has proven an extremely difficult transition, with traditional films and TV shows losing watch time to user-generated and increasingly AI-assisted or AI-generated content flows.
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.
conductr 14 hours ago [-]
I think you’re both talking about the same issue though. They’re saying traditional film and tv is in competition with free media, UGC and whatnot. You said the same thing but using numbers.
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.
mehdizare 4 hours ago [-]
Media jobs were already shrinking with ad budgets before image models showed up, so I'd want to see the trend break, not just continue.
beedeebeedee 17 hours ago [-]
The only thing I’ve been watching lately are Soviet films on youtube. Mosfilms and Gorky films have their full catalogs on there. Sergei Bondarchuk’s films are deeply moving. Seventeen Moments from Spring is incredible as well- the Soviet answer to James Bond. For some reason it feels deeply refreshing to watch these films instead of what the US has been producing.
redwood 17 hours ago [-]
When art offers one of the only limited pressure valves for totalitarianism out gets embued with deeper meaning I suppose?
SoftTalker 17 hours ago [-]
All art in the Soviet Union was state-manipulated propaganda. At least all of it that was in public venues such as theatre and television.
beedeebeedee 15 hours ago [-]
That is true to an extent, but Soviet films are not all the same. Great artists like Bondarchuk were able to still tell compelling stories despite the political constraints of his time. Even Seventeen Moments of Spring, which was commissioned to influence the Soviet public to have a more positive view of the KGB, managed to tell a meaningful and very human story. Tarkovsky’s Sci-Fi films are also great and can hardly be said to be state propaganda even if they were considered acceptable enough to be made public. Many Soviet films are heavy handed and wooden propaganda movies (like the ones by Ozerov), but not all.
Mikhail_Edoshin 10 hours ago [-]
You do not know what you are talking about.
Soviet Union was one of last countries with true art. Art requires seriousness. Western art has turned into entertainment long ago. All movies are made so that you can accompany them with popcorn.
There were topis with sort of a prescribed understanding, mostly related to early history of the Soviets. There were opportunistic authors who produced politically correct slop. These fellas quickly changed course in 90s and now have mostly left for Israel. But there was also massive live stream of true art alongside all that, realistic, serious and even Christian: Russian classical culture is so deeply Christian that you pick it even in an atheistic setting.
dang 2 hours ago [-]
> You do not know what you are talking about.
It breaks the site guidelines to attack others like this, regardless of how wrong they are are you feel they are. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. If you could please review them and stick to the rules when posting, we'd appreciate it.
DonHopkins 8 hours ago [-]
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gorgoiler 12 hours ago [-]
It’s lways worth considering the impact of AI through two lenses.
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!
harrisonjackson 13 hours ago [-]
Jobs might be down but the amount of money going to produce media, film, and "the arts" has never been higher. A lot of it is centralized but possibly these jobs have just shifted around to other roles and specialities.
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.
bentt 13 hours ago [-]
There's so much talent overseas and it's so much cheaper. The entire reason for this change is the growth of remote work since COVID + economics.
nomilk 11 hours ago [-]
The framing of job "loses" is irrationally pessimistic.
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.
WA 11 hours ago [-]
Way too simplistic view.
> increase supply
Not necessarily. Supply could stay the same.
> drives down prices
Not necessarily, if raw materials got more expensive.
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.
nomilk 11 hours ago [-]
But layoffs only occur if firms can produce output at a lower cost by using AI rather than humans. Those humans go and work elsewhere and total output increases.
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.
joedwin 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
hermannj314 11 hours ago [-]
I do think certain tax incentives to create jobs, contractual obligations between employer and employee and legal restrictions on termination of employment can create a condition where someone is responsible for employing you.
imposter 11 hours ago [-]
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marcyb5st 11 hours ago [-]
I was wondering about this recently. I visited my parents in Italy and got to watch some TV with them (at home we don't have the TV even connected to the Antenna as it is only for YT or through the media center).
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.
seb1204 4 hours ago [-]
I feel a lot of tv program is shallow and I consider it not worth watching. Same for streaming.
I think as LLM make it easy to produce content the internet will see less content that is deep, complex and stimulating.
dankle 2 hours ago [-]
So in conclusion, it’s not because of AI(?).
enzoaguado 10 hours ago [-]
The article is well-written and well-informed, but it's hard to really see the impact of AI just by looking at the data. Even the author attributes most of the job losses to factors other than AI, and even when AI use in the industry is clearly discussed, it's hard to draw any clear connection to job losses.
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.
kikdij 8 hours ago [-]
The comparison with the music industry sounds a bit forced (in order to draw parallel with the switch to live as solution, I imagine). In the case of music and piracy, the demand collapsed, thus the bottom line of industry was directly hit. In the case of current creative fall, there's no sign there might be less demand. The lost jobs are, presumably, productivity gains.
robswc 16 hours ago [-]
Honestly I think it's because everything sucks these days. I know there is a lot of survivorship bias going on but _something_ has changed. I have recently been on a 1980-2010's movie binge. It seemed like movies before were raw and real. Now everything feels like it's plastic and made in a lab, dumbed down to the lowest common denominator.
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
tokioyoyo 15 hours ago [-]
There’s a very specific South Park episode that relates to this comment - “ You're Getting Old" (Season 15, Episode 7).
robswc 3 hours ago [-]
There's a lot of nostalgic things that do in fact suck, I have no problem admitting that. Subjectively, I will die on the hill that movies overall are getting worse though. They are all starting to feel over-produced and sanitized. Objectively, the time between seasons of hit TV shows is increasing, we can measure that as a fact. Not rose-tinted glasses.
rightbyte 9 hours ago [-]
If I remember correctly Stan realized that the old things he liked were shit in that episode. Anti-nostalgia. OP describes the opposite.
robswc 3 hours ago [-]
I haven't seen the episode but I can imagine the critique is pretty valid. However, sometimes it goes too far in the opposite direction. Sometimes things _are_ actually worse now :)
MisterMunchkin 7 hours ago [-]
It was happening before AI. The quality of everything had been going down. They realised instead of mixing sound properly, you could just bodge it. Instead of doing proper lighting, bodge it. Instead of building a set, use a big TV screen behind you.
dubeye 9 hours ago [-]
Without knowing where these workers went, it's hard to take this sectioned data too seriously
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
herbst 8 hours ago [-]
Thanks to netflix, YouTube and everything else in that spectrum the world had a choice to NOT watch heavily americanized weirdly moralized movies and series and now prefers to not do so.
American media dying is a natural effect that was ongoing even before AI
londons_explore 10 hours ago [-]
> Take the unexpected resurgence in book sales
At least some of this will be AI companies buying and scanning every book available...
travisgriggs 14 hours ago [-]
My media diet has dropped steadily for 15 years now. I don’t know how much of it is just aging, and how much truly is tired/fatigue for the products offered. And the burden/complexity of streaming has basically just led me to throw my hands in the air and find other things to do. I already spend too much time tapping on my phone, much less watch yet another screen.
geraneum 17 hours ago [-]
How does one consider, depression, inflation, interest rates and investments, purchasing power, and other impactful economic downturns for such analysis? During this window a consequential war in Europe, another one in Iran leading to an energy crisis, has happened as well which could accelerate the existing trends in one way or the other. I think any serious comparison should control for these factors.
RomanPushkin 12 hours ago [-]
> overall job turnover rates remain extremely low
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.
pythonRon 8 hours ago [-]
The same thing happened in Canada in the 1930's, but the force behind it was neither artificial nor intelligent, just greedy.
not2b 11 hours ago [-]
Mergers are also a huge factor, and the recent Warner/Paramount merger is going to cost a lot of jobs (even more so because the merged company will be so deeply in debt that it will have to aggressively cut expenses).
dubeye 6 hours ago [-]
i'm not really seeing anything new or dramatic in the data. Industries adapt to technology over time, as we see in publishing since the 60s, and i'm not seeing anything to suggest 2026 is much different
tracerbulletx 17 hours ago [-]
Very little. It's that America's tax incentives are not competitive. They fly crews to make game shows from LA to london because its cheaper to shoot a show there. There's strong momentum to change that at the moment, there's a bill that might actually get passed that will make the tax environment competitive again in the states that stack theirs on it.
genxy 10 hours ago [-]
911 an the internet killed high culture. The first big inflection is 2001 and continues on a glide slope, with a drop for covid and then AI, but it was already looking dire.
socalgal2 14 hours ago [-]
I’d just guess it’s close to none of the layoffs are AI. rather, in a world of anyone can broadcast to the world on YouTube the number of creators that can reach an audience has grown 10000x. The glut of content means far far less market to support the old media
arjie 17 hours ago [-]
Based on the rise of short form video content, this seems like amateurs are just outcompeting professionals for eyeballs.
geophph 17 hours ago [-]
Not even short form. I found myself watching an hour and a half long YT video of a dude jet skiing from WA state to Alaska and can’t even hype myself up to watch a feature film.
buzzerbetrayed 17 hours ago [-]
The other night I watched a team of 4 dudes row from America to Europe. In a row boat. No sails. Makes me think of the Tom Hanks quote:
> 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.
talon8635 17 hours ago [-]
While true, it’s almost like saying crack dealers are outcompeting Michelin chefs for appetites.
They are totally different content, and one inarguably more addictive and shallow than the other
But you’re right.
asdff 14 hours ago [-]
Seems things are starting to reverse and movies are picking back up again in various statistics. People want to see the movie everyone is talking about online and all over social media. Plus they make money directly through ticket sales not from the dubious assumptions behind social media ad conversions.
17 hours ago [-]
Lerc 17 hours ago [-]
Before I dive into a relatively long article here, can someone tell me if it does, in fact, say how much is AI?
rapatel0 15 hours ago [-]
Most of the jobloss seems to be due to the movie industry. The movie industry has been a flop machine over the last decade out side a handful of successes. That probably has more to do with jobloss than anything ai related.
ortusdux 16 hours ago [-]
It's purely anecdotal, but the word I've heard from the industry is that the number of sfx and animation jobs had stayed the same, but the bids are coming in much much lower. The example was $500k jobs were now coming in around $50k.
fx1994 2 hours ago [-]
I would dare to say it is not related to AI, but just bad acting, scripting, music, wokeism and neverending remakes.
ViktorRay 18 hours ago [-]
I think some of it may be demand side.
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.
dodger-dog 17 hours ago [-]
This is my thinking. TikTok is very entertaining. I can’t do hours, but 30 minutes to an hour is great. Compare it to an unswipable hours long sporting event, 30 minutes looking for the right movie you quit 30 minutes in or have to pause till another day because something comes up, or tv shows with unresolved endings that leave you feeling like you are in a toxic relationship-hating the commitment but afraid of the sense of loss.
forgotusername6 17 hours ago [-]
Habitual use of shorter and shorter form content trains you to expect gratification faster and faster. There is most certainly a better reward for delaying gratification. A really good movie can leave you on a complete high or completely devastated. I'm pretty certain tiktok cannot. It's cheap quick entertainment but if you get used to that fast shallow enjoyment you can't hold on long enough for the good stuff.
SoftTalker 17 hours ago [-]
Something I realized recently was that when I watch videos in any form (feature film, documentary, dramatic or comedy series, or short) I have this nagging feeling I'm wasting time. I think it's because watching is such a passive activity.
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.
hirako2000 12 hours ago [-]
AI is the perfect scapegoat.
Barclays laying off thousands in the UK obviously puts the decision on AI productivity gain.
dodger-dog 18 hours ago [-]
How much is TikTok?
dylan604 17 hours ago [-]
More than you can afford if you have any scruples
dodger-dog 17 hours ago [-]
Scruples likely has something to do with it, but not in the way you suggest. My feed is full of dancing and singing. Seeing a dance trend go viral and with 48 hours people all over the world are posting their rendition of it is remarkable.
Carrok 17 hours ago [-]
Remarkable in what way? Sounds completely unremarkable to me.
Oh wow, someone did a dance, and then someone copied it, and then someone copied it, and then someone copied it, and then..
dylan604 16 hours ago [-]
It's remarkable in how hive mind works I guess. It's mindless pablum to the nth degree. The thing I find remarkable is how it shows how easy it is to influence someone. The psychology PhDs that the Chinese hired earned their money to be sure. TikTok has to be the most well funded psychology study ever implemented to the point that the users don't even know they are test subjects
dodger-dog 13 hours ago [-]
I see it. In a discussion about entertainment sources loosing market share, I suggested that TikTok was a likely reason. When someone's "scruples" were inferred to be poor by merely using the TikTok platform, I pointed out that "scruples" have more to do with what shows up in your feed (suggesting the user bears responsibility) and described my experience as humanizing, entertaining, less of a demand on my time, and provided a sense of global community through dancing and singing. It was then that you introduced the "hive mind" concept.
One tell of a hive minded thinker is when they have knee jerk reactions to things and shoot from the lip.
intended 11 hours ago [-]
Personal responsibility when sitting in front of a box of candy in your own house and choosing to eat it or not is a reasonable expectation.
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.
dodger-dog 11 hours ago [-]
In the alternative: you do it to yourself, lack the emotional maturity, responsibility, and fortitude to even begin to do anything about it, and to protect your fragile sense of self worth and self-deceptive identity from the cognitive dissonance, blame evil scientists, engineers, and researchers for controlling you beyond what any human agency could possibly be expected to resist. Poor fellow.
intended 10 hours ago [-]
Individual responsibility != behavior at scale.
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.
dodger-dog 5 minutes ago [-]
You are distinguishing between my one example of an almost entirely pleasant, life-affirming TikTok feed and a model of a large-scale TikTok feed experience at a societal level. Ok, yes, those two things are not the same. Good luck in your vocation.
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.
SoftTalker 17 hours ago [-]
How much is your soul?
tayo42 17 hours ago [-]
The outsource comment was interesting. Gaming didn't come up in this article but seems similarly hit. I was recently surprised to see how much game dev work is done outside the US for American companies.
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
karmasimida 12 hours ago [-]
AI is decimating entertainment employment, just not in US, but in China.
Animats 15 hours ago [-]
Over on the entertainment side, video is getting really good. Yes, there's a huge amount of AI slop, but the good stuff is quite good.
- 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.
The easy avail of massive amounts of pre-existing "good enough" video shows to stream, music to play, games to play, books to read means we could prob stop producing anything new today and for the rest of our lives still have more to watch than we'd ever have the time to get through. I once had 5 to 7 distinct paid streaming services, at my peak, then realized that just Prime or HBO alone could keep me saturated, or say Prime plus YouTube. heck YT alone might be reaching that point for me, with free videos by indie/influencer/longtail channels.
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.
piro0919 10 hours ago [-]
Around 2010–2012, I made videos for Vocaloid producers' songs in Japan. It was almost entirely unpaid. What I got out of it was skills.
elzbardico 4 hours ago [-]
We have to many MBAs and business types on Hollywood that basically are masters of chasing local maxima, while stuck in a valley. They can only think on the short term, and for a while, by the only criteria they understand (number goes up) they were successful, but their formula was guaranteed to be short lived.
Who would know that optimizing for the next quarter would also not be a recipe for long term value creation in arts too?
adverbly 16 hours ago [-]
How much of this is globalization?
International media is much better than it used to be.
kazinator 15 hours ago [-]
> Media firms are decidedly coy about their AI use, both to protect against public backlash and, more financially important, to preserve the legal basis for their copyrights
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.
HWR_14 4 hours ago [-]
> Lying preserves the legal basis for copyright?
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.
jmyeet 16 hours ago [-]
I wish the article had split TV and movies because there are different factors at play.
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.
> This coincided with more general Hollywood cost-cutting to move productions out of LA to Canada (particularly Toronto but also Vancouver), Atlanta and elsewhere.
> 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.
redwood 17 hours ago [-]
I find it odd that this article ignores live theater when that is the natural parallel to "live shows" or "tours" for film and television.
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
DonHopkins 9 hours ago [-]
>It was the turn of the millennium, and Metallica had a problem.
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.
BrenBarn 12 hours ago [-]
> In other words, the primary impacts of AI art will be on culture and society rather than the macroeconomy.
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.
tom89999 12 hours ago [-]
I avoid everything that was made with AI. Every video on YT gets a downvote having an AI created preview picture.
I would not buy, watch such movies.
gnarlouse 17 hours ago [-]
Honestly: our media and film is largely pretty terrible. The arts may be worth a lament.
adeptima 14 hours ago [-]
the article is interestingly made think more about the recent timeline since covid, sequential money printing bonanza followed by historical sacking of VC and all kind of money current AI bubble accelerated with faster job transfer to low income locations like India and overall “productivity gains” by the least competent corporate plankton with huge expertise devaluation
j45 16 hours ago [-]
AI is a definite possibility, part of it makes me wonder how much it's about the new skills needed for film/media are tied to technology or 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.
returnInfinity 12 hours ago [-]
this is a terrible article, fire that writer
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.
metalman 6 hours ago [-]
The whole story is in the title and terms bieng used to subjectify the conversation, jobs?, creative class?, are you fucking kidding me?
And yes it's AI finnishing the job of making DECORTIVE, 1d and 2d choices truely trivial, nothing more than that,as that SHIT was never, and will never
be creative or in any sense if the word Art, and has now, ha!, been fully democratised.
The earliest and hardest pushing adopters of AI in the decorative field are almost certainly enjoying a massive boost in productivity and staying ahead of the general wave, but the mediocre are getting drowned by the undertow.
Those with actual physical skills with a real touch and drive can drum up work with a personal page and a phone, with endless offers of related real world projects that require some detail or embelishment, that comes along with all the real world interactions with every kind and class of human and the sinceer appreciation for doing the THING that fixed the irksome and often ugly problem.
Anybody clicking for there daily bread better look the fuck out right now.
iririririr 13 hours ago [-]
Ctrl+f, monopoly, zero results.
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.
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.
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.
[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/892970/Valheim/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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].
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/les1252881600Q
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/avhwpeusa065nrug
https://www.unitedforalice.org/essentials-index
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
Scroll down a bit and read the section: "Key Causes of Vacancies"
What's a healthy vacancy rate in your opinion, and what do you make of NYC having a lower rate than the average American city?
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+...
Please try again.
P.S. google "how many unoccupied apartments in nyc"
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
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
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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 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)
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 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.
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.
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.
https://nlihc.org/oor/about
And mortgage affordability:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/median-house-prices-vs-inco...
None of these are heading in the right direction.
Aside from technological and scientific progress in the medical field, it's generally been shown that people's lives have gotten worse.
“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.
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.
Not what real means!
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.
> Of course they do.
That level of certainty is not justified.
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.
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.
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.
Also, I chose weekly wages because annual wages are complicated by time off, which was the other item in question.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Hollywood got devalued because it is spending more money than before to get worse results than before.
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.
...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.
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?
tv and movies killed radio and opera. and now tiktok is killing tv and movies. it's not complicated.
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.
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.
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.
What a gross and completly apt terminology for the commoditization of art from the bureaucrats by the way.
If you have 0 standards.
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.
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.
Hang in there! It gets better!
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.
Anybody with a big imagination must feel trapped by mediocre content. Daydreams are often more enjoyable.
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.
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
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.)
Even if we're over-estimating "excellent" by a lot, that's still more games that anyone can reasonably play.
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.
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.
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.
https://steam250.com/30day
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 build a really good game, there is a market for it. Otherwise it will be lost in an ocean of not-interesting titles.
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.
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_...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.cbr.com/crunchyroll-chatgpt-sub-anime
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.
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.)
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.
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.
[1] https://pages.skybrian.com/2026/us-households-by-income-band...
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.
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
What came out this year that you think you'll watch again in 10 years?
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!
Having fun isn't hard when you've got a library card!
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.
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 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.
https://www.bls.gov/tus/tables.htm
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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).
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.
And I did not speak out
Because I was not an artist
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
"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.
(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.
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.
Provide food for critical thinking instead of accusing people of not being critical thinkers.
For example, tell us what new media from the US is actually great today. What do the arts offer that is next level and worth watching? Is there a rise in arts in other counties that we are missing? What could Facebook boomers need that leads to more and higher quality arts and movies?
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.
Soviet Union was one of last countries with true art. Art requires seriousness. Western art has turned into entertainment long ago. All movies are made so that you can accompany them with popcorn.
There were topis with sort of a prescribed understanding, mostly related to early history of the Soviets. There were opportunistic authors who produced politically correct slop. These fellas quickly changed course in 90s and now have mostly left for Israel. But there was also massive live stream of true art alongside all that, realistic, serious and even Christian: Russian classical culture is so deeply Christian that you pick it even in an atheistic setting.
It breaks the site guidelines to attack others like this, regardless of how wrong they are are you feel they are. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. If you could please review them and stick to the rules when posting, we'd appreciate it.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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
At least some of this will be AI companies buying and scanning every book available...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Barclays laying off thousands in the UK obviously puts the decision on AI productivity gain.
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.
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
- 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
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XklUIGp6jH0
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7b9xNEkhlc
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.
Who would know that optimizing for the next quarter would also not be a recipe for long term value creation in arts too?
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.
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.
[1]: https://streamable.com/pedvjq
> 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.
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.
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.
Technology has almost always been adopted in Hollywood.
Media grew to become social media, and skills of social media became relevant and new positions.
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.
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.