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Comment by advael | Hacker News Reader

Again, eliminating a perverse tax incentive doesn't "force" anyone to do anything. Why is it self-evident that we should subsidize failure at the level of a corporation to prevent balance sheets going negative, especially when we are so against doing the same for an individual to prevent them from becoming homeless?

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Don’t think it’s self-evident. My point was only that if I were to accept OPs argument I’d have to accept them larger argument to abolish the existing subsidies, and the article didn’t persuade me that to do so is the best way to go.

I’d like to read an argument against subsidizing development.

One argument is that that particular kind of subsidy is incredibly easy to game, and so you tend to create more reward-hacking than actual benefit

They're turning $10 into $3 except at the scale of millions of dollars.

What hack or gaming did they perform?

In this case, refusing offers to sell in favor of a strategy that simply wastes the time and effort of everyone involved in the production with no recourse. This should at the very least not allow them to write it off their taxes. Admittedly, a lot of the problems that enable this situation are more about how IP and ownership work as well as the consolidation of the entertainment industry (and every other industry for that matter), but I think the fact that there's a monetary incentive for this kind of thing which directly exhibits the exact kind of anti-productivity incentives at scale that people use to argue against social programs warrants special consideration in its own right

> wastes the time and effort of everyone involved in the production with no recourse

Those people were already paid for their work.

And the vast overwhelming majority of them are not being paid comparably to jobs that require similar workloads and levels of education, due to the "vocational awe" of working on a movie. This is so pervasive in the arts that it's been talked about for decades, but it's not a problem our economy seems equipped to solve: Since people like working on art projects, people will often line up to do so even when conditions and pay don't economically square with their effort. To benefit from this vocational awe and then scrap the project is itself a moral injury to those workers

> but it's not a problem our economy seems equipped to solve

It's not a problem at all in my opinion.

> Since people like working on art projects, people will often line up to do so even when conditions and pay don't economically square with their effort.

The pay has only to be accepted to be fair. You're free to start your own production company that pays more "fairly" but you'll find yourself with fewer opportunities to give people this "awe" than the company that can finance more projects.

> To benefit from this vocational awe

Warner Bros. is losing money by scrapping the movie, how are they benefiting in this case?

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