There’s already been 2 terrorist attacks in Europe and based on the evacuations of public spaces in France it seems like it’s only the start. I’m not sure if it’s all because of the war (the attack in Brussels seems to be more related to ISIS according to the news) but it sure seems like it’s gotten a lot more frequent since it really kicked off last week.

Except most governments. They also fund humanitarian aid for the Palestinians on the down-low but publically they’re supporting Israel. Just look at the US.

The family plan sadly isn’t an option for me, I don’t have anyone in my family that uses YouTube as much as I do so they wouldn’t be interested in it.

I wouldn’t mind paying a little bit of money every month to get YouTube ad free. However, it costs €12 a month. That’s a lot of money if you only care about getting rid of ads. I personally don’t need the other features (downloading videos, background play and YouTube music). If they added a 5 to 7 euro a month tier through which you could get rid of ads then that would be much more interesting to me. Now I just feel like I should keep looking for ways around their pop up shenanigans.

Nope, it feels like most people are too far gone for that and they’ll never accept it. All thanks to these dumb politicians that took bribes to cover it up for years and years. Thanks for making our futures so much worse…

This is my main problem with hydrogen cars. I think it’s a very cool concept that might eventually overtake pure electric cars but there’s almost no places to get hydrogen yet.

It’d be funny if he called him “Winnie the pooh” when he meets him to explain himself :)

I had a look and the current subscriber numbers for Disney+ are at 146 million, they haven’t been at 164 million since Q4 2022. So they’ve actually dropped 18 million subscribers in less than a year, which is more than 10% of their subs.

I do agree that CEOs earn way too much money, they could get by earning much less and it would be nice if this money went to the other employees instead. However, I don’t fully agree with the statement that writers can’t afford a roof over their heads. I did some googling and the average salary for a writer in Hollywood is almost $70,000 a year. Digging a bit deeper, I found this:

Variety also reports that for a WGA member in 2023, writer-producers earn a minimum of “$41,773 for each 60-minute script, or $28,403 for each 30-minute script.” However, staff writers are the lowest-level writers and are paid differently. In 2023, “[t]he median staff writer on a network show works 29 weeks for a wage of $131,834, while the median staff writer on a streaming show works 20 weeks for $90,920.” (source)

So if these numbers are correct, a writer for a streaming show makes on average $90,920 for a 20 week show. If they have 2 of those shows a year, that’s a yearly salary of more than $180,000 + 12 weeks of vacation at a minimum (don’t know if they need the full 20 weeks to write the show). I know they live in an expensive part of the country but come on, you can’t say that that’s a low wage, regardless of whether you think they deserve more or not. If you look at the average salary in the entire USA (~ $60,000) they make about triple that. Hell, they make even more than double the average salary in California ($73,000) (source)

Thanks for the explanation and additional context, that helps put things into perspective a bit more. I understand that they want a different kind of monetary reward from streaming, hopefully they can get their deal eventually.

Fair enough, I guess time will tell then. I’m just wondering if the Hollywood accounting that gets mentioned below also gets applied to their revenue, meaning that it’s in fact much lower than what they’re saying. But I guess that’s corporate accounting in a nutshell.

How do you know they’re able to? Looking at Disney as a specific case, they’ve lost over 1 billion on their movies in the past 2 years and are constantly bleeding subscribers. On top of that there’s also some persistent rumors that they got caught up in the whole FTX debacle and lost a bunch of money on that as well.

Also, as a quick aside: what would you consider to be fair to their workers? The wages I’ve heard being mentioned sounded pretty good to me already, especially compared to other jobs.

I’m really curious how these strikes will end. It feels like they’ve been going on for a long time and at a bad time for the studios as well, judging by how many movies are bombing at the moment + the streaming subscriber numbers. I’m just not sure if the studios will be able to ever meet the demands the strike is asking for, it feels like they’re stuck in a downward spiral…

Also, from what I’ve heard here and there it sounds like they have some pretty crazy demands (something about a minimum writers room size of 8 or 10?) which are going to make it hard to ever come to an agreement, especially if those writers also need to be paid in full.

Or, you know… get a job in IT as a programmer? There’s plenty of work out there in IT at the moment.

I still remember watching this in the news, it was heartbreaking. Luckily I didn’t know anyone on board but we lost a lot of Dutch people that day… There were many families on board that never made it home after leaving for a nice vacation.