hangsi

> I think a scenario lots of viewers can relate to is sitting on the couch on a Friday night, going through the streaming services, cycling through the movies and thinking to themselves "they're not making movies for me anymore". As somebody who's been intimately involved in movie making for 30 years, what are the macro Hollywood conditions behind that sentiment?

> Matt Damon:

> Well, so what happened was the DVD was a huge part of our business - of our revenue stream - and technology has just made that obsolete. And so, the movies that that we used to make: you could afford to not make all of your money when it played in the theater because you knew you had the DVD coming behind the release and 6 months later you'd get a whole other chunk - it would be like reopening the movie almost.

> And when that went away, that changed the type of movies that we could make. I did this movie "Behind the Candelabra" and I talked to a studio executive who explained: it was a $25 million movie. I would have to put that much into print and advertising to market it - what we call P&A - so now I'm in $50 million. I have to split everything I get with the exhibitor, the people who own the movie theaters, so I would have to make $100 million before I got into profit. The idea of making $100 million on a story about this love affair between these two people... Yeah, love everyone in the movie, but that's suddenly a massive gamble in a way that it wasn't in the 1990s when they were making all those kind of movies - the kind of movies that I loved and the kind of movies that were my bread and butter.

Comment · 1 year ago

There is a mechanism for this, internationally usually named some variant of a Law Commission [0]. The idea is to look for laws that are technically in effect but can rarely or never be applied. For example, the UK Law Commission boasts a repeal of 3000+ acts in its time [1], such as repealing rules for conducting slave trades that were made obsolete in the 1800s but not repealed at the time.

In addition to the sibling comment's mention of the Congressional Review Act for agency oversight, there is a US Office of the Law Revision Counsel [2]. It has an official website [3] which is beautifully old-fashioned, but looks to be purely a resource for accessing the letter of the law and doesn't recount its volume of repeals in the same way.

None of this matters if the insane or counterproductive regulations are deliberate and desirable for the current lawmakers, of course.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_commission [1] https://lawcom.gov.uk/repeals/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_the_Law_Revision_Cou... [3] https://uscode.house.gov/

Comment · 1 year ago

Divided we stand,

United we fall.

Comment · 1 year ago

The almost-wrong simplification is that a nonlinear medium changes the wavelength of the light that passes through it.

If you can control the nonlinearity, you can control the wavelength change and so change properties such as the angle of refraction to change where the light goes (like in a rainbow/a prism, where the red light refracts more).

Comment · 1 year ago

> can we not expect writers to just keep it brief?

In essentially every situation, you cannot expect readers to read.

Comment · 1 year ago

I recall from my own visit that the electrical transformers are supposedly original. So, the National Museum of Computing justifies calling its Colossus a rebuild rather than a replica, since it is made with some original parts.

Comment · 1 year ago

This is excellent. I wonder how deep the roots of pre-20th century computing systems go. Babbage, Lovelace and the Difference engine are well catalogued, and I have seen a Jaccard loom in a museum with my own eyes.

What comes before this that isn't a history of mathematics, aside from the abacus? If this search is broad enough to include the topic of this article and Luca Pacioli's briefly mentioned double-entry ledgers from Italy, then I can imagine systems from all over the world where commerce flowed or administration ruled: similar systems must have existed in China and India, and I have heard of the Quipu system in the Andes that functioned as a digital storage medium for thousands of years.

How many modern components of information systems are reinventions of past ideas, rather than upgrades?

Comment · 1 year ago

This seems untrue, especially for reddit?

Using the 1/9/90 split [0] for creators/commenters/readers, it seems farfetched to suggest that reddit accounts (which benefits readers making an account to curate subreddit subscriptions) can't follow this pattern where many legitimate human users do not comment often.

[0] "The 1% Rule", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

Comment · 1 year ago

You are right. The grandparent post ironically uses word this in a cheapened, shallow way when they can use it freely in their own writing.

You could argue this is the very sort of activity they were criticising when they posted! We are all vulnerable.

Comment · 1 year ago

Tell that to the Pierce-Arrow company: makers of the first official cars for the white house, but they didn't survive cash flow problems from the great depression. Meanwhile, Ford survives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierce-Arrow_Motor_Car_Company

hangsi

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