LWN is one of the, if not the single, highest signal tech publications around. I hope they're able to maintain a stable subscription service. Being user funded, and avoiding having to maintain allegiance to advertisers, is likely part of why their quality is so high.
Not only that but lwn is one of the main sites that gets submitted to HN all year round (not daily, but maybe nearish to daily). So the audience here on HN has been exposed to it over the years. I'm not sure what more they could do to get new subscribers, I certainly hope they figure that out or how to get new ways to earn revenue without having to go the ad route.
They lock down new articles for about a week I think, so subscribers get the first one, though if you're a subscriber I think they let you SHARE the article with others, so here on HN sometimes a brand new article will be shared by a subscriber with a code so anyone without a subscription can see it.
That's the thing though. You can get all the value from LWN through here. Even if it wasn't for them tolerating subscriber links being posted on HN, the week-long delay isn't nearly enough an incentive to actually subscribe, rationally speaking.
Rationally-speaking, maybe not. I’ve been a long-time subscriber. When I first subscribed, my day-to-day involved embedded Linux and getting the “breaking news” was pretty valuable. These days I still do that somewhat but I’m stuck on a crusty vendor kernel and anything I read about a kernel newer than 5.15 is going to land on my desk in approximately 2028… but I still subscribe, mostly with a patronage mindset: I don’t acutely get value from the subscription every week, but I think it’s a community service and I’m happy to pitch in a few bucks to keep it alive.
Same as me. I started subscribing LWN when I was a Linux enthusiast from my early college days, because the content was so good and interesting. Nowadays I barely read it but I still keep my subscription alive, just because I think the content is worth it.
not saying parent feels this way but the target class of this website often does not separate the two. we're still sloughing off the goofballery of objectivism, i guess.
Agree. I don't read it every week, but I greatly appreciate the quality (both of the technical content and the lack of advertising/sensationalism/clickbait) when I do read an article. Happy to pay to support this style of tech reporting and journalism.
This is pretty close to "I shall stand under this tree during the storm to stay dry, and if this tree starts to drip on me I'll just run over to that other tree and stay dry there" thinking. If LWN goes away, that value leaves HN too. Rationally speaking.
You’d think, but in practice their entire policy prescription seems to come down to “well if they didn’t want me to have it, they should’ve bolted it down, this is really an incentives problem, if you look at it.”
Super happy subscriber for years... One of those magazines that I open on a Sunday morning with a good cup of coffee and sleeping cats next to me before the family wakes up.
If you enjoy well-written technical content, please subscribe and support them. I hope they continue making the great articles.
You're absolutely correct that history helps you see that none of this is new. However, is it better to be the person who sees the waterfall their boat is inevitably going to go over, or the person completely ignorant of it until it happens?
I dont want to go through ANY of that crazy shit. And I dont want my kids to go through it either. And based on hostory, violent, cruel, oppressive shit can take looong time a hit huge amounts of people.
If you're in the traditional West, you did get a choice. And many actively voted for violent, cruel, oppressive predator shit. And I don't just mean MAGA, that's equally true for AfD, FN, FdI, SSZ, Spartans, ReformUK, Likud, etc.
On the contrary: we've fall off waterfalls every few decades or so. Humanity simply survives and moves on, taking maybe 2% more caution for the next waterfalll
But this is. This sort of violent partisanship that self ensconces around identity versus issues is exactly what tears apart democracies and republics.
This isn't new either. The tools and technology are new. The strategies and psychologies aren't.
Even the identity part isn't new; even among Caucasian males only, see how many times society's woes will be blamed on whatever convinient immigrant there is in that period.
Message unclear. You're saying the USA is an old hand at civil wars now and could do another one any time, no problem? Or perhaps I shouldn't look for a message.
> However, is it better to be the person who sees the waterfall their boat is inevitably going to go over, or the person completely ignorant of it until it happens?
Neither, it's better to be the person who realizes we're in for a bright future no matter what doomers think.
I tend to agree. The quote "It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society" embodies it well.
I don't think cynicism is the correct approach though. It's possible to accept that circumstances are unhealthy without internalizing general negativity. It's just hard. I suspect you and I, and OP, are all agreeing with each other on this point.
This is the fastest growing software company in history. They probably did more work in the last year than most companies do in their entire existence.
There's a famous Pascal quote, "I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter."
Communicating an idea concisely is difficult. Most people struggle to get ideas across at all, asking them to do it well with fewer words is often out of reach.
The article repeatedly mentions how production moved to Atlanta due to tax incentives. Even that is a race to the bottom, as Disney moved production of Marvel movies out of Atlanta last year to the UK where they got better tax incentives. Even the undercutting cities are being undercut.
The whole tax incentive business is a big race to the bottom. Sports teams also abandon their taxpayer funded stadiums once somebody else offers a better deal.
Sports teams are an interesting one because often times these things go on the ballot and people vote for that. So it looks like people and municipalities have varying reasons for keeping a team. That said sometimes it just doesn’t make business sense for a team to stay and other times a municipality decides it’s not worth the cost to keep a pro team.
In the case of the Chiefs, Jackson Co., MO voters voted not to fund a new stadium.
The reasoning was pretty simple: the Hunt family is worth $25 billion [0]. They could likely pay for any sort of improvements to Arrowhead, or to replace it altogether, without taxpayer funds, which comes from people in a metro area where the average income is on the lower side of things in a time when costs for everything keep going up.
On the other side of the state line, Kansas lawmakers specifically targeted the goal of moving two professional sports teams to the state using public funds called STAR bonds.
The end result is that the Kansas City metropolitan area will be spending, in total, about $3-4 billion to give the Hunt family a new place for their sports team to play, likely far away from the city center, and that Arrowhead needs to be torn down, which will cost at least tens of millions of dollars, once again, at taxpayer expense.
$3 billion could probably build out a real public transit system for the KC metro.
The crazy thing is that the best case is that the city will hopefully break even i all the promised benefits materialize. In most cases they don't. I bet if they hired a good VC to invest the same money into maybe 50 startups they would have a much higher change of a good ROI. But then the same people who accept sales tax increases for the sports team would probably be complaining about the tax burden.
I also don’t like subsidizing sports teams. To me it doesn’t make too much sense. Yes I know fans can be pretty loyal and sometimes that team is sort of like a pet dog. They love it through highs and lows. It’s something that can provide some identity to some as well as live vicariously through them. I get it but I feel sometimes you gotta let boyhood ideas and dreams go.
But hey sometimes people vote for their teams to stay despite the negative monetary ROI.
We have funny examples a little bit like "imagine FC Barça moving to Madrid" in the US. Used for comedy (but these are all real examples) from the opening monologue of the film BASEketball
> The Minneapolis Lakers moved to Los Angeles, where there are no lakes; the [Houston] Oilers moved to Tennessee, where there is no oil. The [New Orleans] Jazz moved to Salt Lake City, where they don't allow music.
Other names like that are
- the Baltimore Colts (named for Maryland's thoroughbred racing tradition) moving to Indianapolis (more known for open wheel auto racing),
- the Vancouver Grizzlies moving to Memphis, Tennessee (which never had Grizzlies even in the post-glacial period)
- the Brooklyn (Streetcar) Dodgers moving to Los Angeles in 1958 right when the LAMTA took over the few remaining street car lines before replacing them with buses in 1963.
The closest thing I can think of in European sports, and it's a stretch, is cycling teams. I picked this teams as the first example I could think of, not because it's some egregious example:
The parallel is that the name changes make tracking that team a real ship of Theseus problem: if the name, sponsors, riders, and staff turn over, is it worth calling it the same team? Similarly, if a football team changes cities, names, personnel, and owners, is it worth calling it the same team (Houston Oilers, Tennessee Oilers, Tennessee Titans)?
It's a little weird but the teams and the sports leagues are basically just corporations that engage in show business. They have no real connection to where they are located.
Happened once in English football: Wimbledon moved from south west london to the soulless new town of Milton Keynes.
It was radioactively controversial at the time, most fans never made the switch.
Eventually Wimbledon fans created a new club AFC Wimbledon who have since got promoted all the way to League One (the same league as MK Dons).
So the MK Dons owners ended up with nothing for all the trouble and they may as well have just made a new team. Nobody else has been stupid enough to try it since
Wimbledon FC moved from Wimbledon to Milton Keynes in the early 00's and quickly changed names to Milton Keynes Dons and AFC Wimbledon was created in it's place back in Wimbledon at their old stadium.
What has yet to be mentioned is why Hollywood, in the first place?
Out of the many reasons, one is quite simple: daylight. This used to be really important with film.
Historically, this was why efforts to move filming to somewhere like 'Scunthorpe, UK' didn't really work, despite tax fiddles, because you need light and some places just don't have it.
But this doesn't matter now, because film has moved on, there is no need to have a massive glowing unshielded nuclear fusion reactor, 93 million miles directly overhead, just to get some lens focused on some bits of silver halide.
My understanding is that an important consideration at the time was that it is very far from New Jersey.
Edison had a lot of early patents for film, and wanted to monopolize the industry.
Film makers in California were far enough away that it was inconvenient for Edison to sue them, both because it required sending people there in person, and because the district courts were favorable.
The irony here being that Netflix is currently in a massive layout to build a studio in NJ (like, 20 minutes from the old Bell Labs). Almost feels like giving that troll the finger!
I just saw the new Spider-Man movie and there were a ton of notices about Canada-based film credits and from various provinces, too. I'm not sure how these credits work, but maybe spreading the work out to various tax incentivized areas is the current play.
I mean, the VFX part of the Film industry (and actual location shooting to some degree) has been chasing subsidies / tax credits since around 2002 with the Harry Potter movies that mostly were shot and produced (and more specifically the VFX were done in London, rather than in California) in the UK.
Since then Canada and the UK in particular (and NZ and Australia) have had various different fluctuations in subsidies for various parts of filming / doing post-production of movies over the intervening years.
Much of the VFX and CGI industry is already in India.
Movies and shows like Inception, Interstellar, Ex Machina, Tenet, Dune 1&2, Odyssey, Chernobyl, Foundation, and The Last of Us were VFXed in large part by Indian companies like Prime Focus, Makuta, Phanton, and their subsidiaries.
A number of these overlap with HPC and Distributed Systems with a number of major players in the space coming out of the GPU design space like Raja Koduri (AMD, Apple, Intel). Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Apple, and others having dedicated GPU design teams in India since the early 2000s also helped.
Hollywood accounting rules are regular accounting rules (GAAP). The only reason “Hollywood accounting” is a thing is because of a bunch of actors who didn’t know the difference between “gross” and “net” points got screwed over.
Everyone involved still pays their taxes, but the special purpose vehicle used to organize the production is essentially a passthrough entity.
If you’re not a name, you’re not getting gross points. There’s a wide swathe of participants (actors, writers, directors…) who need to demonstrate risk by taking net points to get signed, and they are routinely screwed by tactics like artificially inflated self-dealing distribution fees that cause the “production” itself to show a paper loss while the IP has generated hundreds of millions of dollars more than has been invested into it.
Movie Money
Understanding Hollywood's (creative) Accounting Practices
9781879505865
This is THE book on the subject.
There's a lot more to it than that. Sometimes productions get creatively charged by the studios costs that may not be directly related to shift losses. Sometimes contracts redefine common terms so your points structure is completely misleading.
I presume that what happens is if a movie is too profitable, other business expenses are shifted to the ledger to reduce the profits. This works because a movie is not a separate accounting entity.
There's also a separate LLC for the parent production company. The production company LLC can also send invoices to the individual movie LLC for services. People can get creative with production companies "overcharging" for various expenses back to the movie's LLC but whatever creative accounting they want to do still needs to ultimately satisfy IRS scrutiny if there's an audit. There are entertainment attorneys that specialize in movie LLCs.
> whatever creative accounting they want to do still needs to ultimately satisfy IRS scrutiny if there's an audit.
Well, yes, but avoiding taxes is not the point of "Hollywood Accounting", rather avoiding paying actors.
The IRS can collect taxes from whichever business entity makes a profit, but, critically, actors cannot. They signed a deal with one entity, and are only payed a share of net profits if that one particular entity makes a profit.
Hollywood Accounting, then, is the process of shifting costs around so that the legal entity responsible for paying the actors never makes a profit.
The SPVs never own anything and never have any expertise in anything. So they have to pay the parent company for a wide range of services, from advertising and marketing to distribution to prop and equipment rental. That makes it easy to shift costs into the SPV as necessary.
>Well, yes, but avoiding taxes is not the point of "Hollywood Accounting", rather avoiding paying actors.
I wasn't saying avoiding taxes was the purpose. Instead, I'm saying whatever "bogus" or "inflated" expenses that the production company LLC is charging to the movie LLC still has to be somewhat plausible. A simplistic example of what they can't do:
- Tom Cruise TC Productions LLC sends an invoice to MissionImpossible8 movie LLC with a single line item that says "script advisory service for $1 billion dollars" which then conveniently causes the movie's balance sheet to be negative $1 billion dollars and thus never make a profit.
The point is the production LLC, the distributor entities, etc all charging the movie LLC so that it shows zero profits ... still need to play their financial accounting games with more sophistication than that. Yes, go ahead and fabricate various costs to avoid paying actors on "net profit points" but it still needs a veneer of plausibility. Otherwise, the IRS comeback will be, "Is the $1 billion fee the real market rate for script advisory services? Do you have evidence of that amount ever being paid? etc etc"
Why would that matter if it's all still a subsidiary of Apple/Amazon/Disney/Comcast/Netflix/Sony?
The relevant taxing authorities would be concerned with the parent companies' financials, not the subsidiaries. Moving money from right hand to left hand doesn't change one's tax liabilities.
"Hollywood accounting" only refers to civil disputes due to insufficiently defined contracts between two businesses (usually actors and producers).
The benefit of “Hollywood accounting” isn’t necessarily tax avoidance; that’s what the tax credits are for. Rather, “Hollywood accounting” provides a way to avoid paying profit-based compensation.
That seems an incredibly generous description (or breathtakingly naive, but I'm giving the benefit of the doubt because hopefully most people aren't that credulous).
The point of Hollywood accounting is to intentionally create enough inflated expenses (billed from companies controlled by the studios or related parties of the producers etc.) to ensure that the net profit is zero or less, even when the film actually generated a lot of income.
It's true that tax gets paid eventually (and somewhere, maybe a tax haven) but it is intentionally creative accounting designed to minimise tax and screw people out of their royalties.
Those movies didn't lose money under GAAP. However, the specific legal entities that the talent made their profit deals with did not earn profits due to the way that revenues and expenses were allocated between the companies involved in making and distributing those films. For each of those films, at least one company was and is earning $$$, but the talent doesn't get to make a revenue sharing deal with those companies.
> For each of those films, at least one company was and is earning $$$, but the talent doesn't get to make a revenue sharing deal with those companies.
That doesn't sound right. Traditionally, and in particular in the case of Forrest Gump, the distinction is between people who contract for a percentage of net profit (always zero) and people who contract for a percentage of gross revenue. The revenue is measured at the same point either way; it's just about whether you got suckered or not.
The revenue hasn't been measured at the same point in our lifetimes. It was never just about net and gross but also which entity you had points with. A lot of talent had gross deals with the wrong entities.
Tax incentives these days include transferable tax credits. Even if your net tax rate was 0%, you can sell the credit to someone else, typically a bank. IOW, states and countries give you money, not simply give you a tax rate break.
I'm not sure of the exact history, but it may have been copied from how affordable housing projects are subsidized at the Federal and state levels: https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/RS22389.pdf
Affordable housing tax credits are contingent on a tremendous amount of regulations and stipulations, including who ends up holding equity in the property (it's not easy to use these as passthrough vehicles to get personally rich), so the private lenders tend to be repeat players, often banks, who understand how to navigate the process. Among other things, I guess it's a way to outsource oversight, so that the government doesn't need to maintain a huge bureaucracy to police each and every development project. OTOH, the financing complexity comes at a cost; a significant fraction of the value of the tax credits pays for lawyers and accountants, rather than to actual construction.
I don't know if filmmaking subsidies are more lax or easier to game.
Also, I think using tax credit schemes, instead of direct payments, might be a way to obfuscate the cost of these programs from a legislative and political perspective; not unlike the Earned Income tax credit. Nominally speaking, tax credits reduce government revenues rather contribute to expenditures; the latter draws far more attention.
I would bet that they have inference setup for internal use on a separate system from the customer-facing production environment. The same way telemetry infrastructure needs to be run separate from normal production systems, so you aren't "blind" when you need it most.
