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Comment by dabockster | Hacker News Reader

The failed merger and similar clawback clause between Kroger and Albertsons is currently destroying a significant part of the supply chain for food in the Pacific Northwest. Grocery stores that have been open for 50-75 years - stores where whole neighborhoods and towns were built around - are closing forever, leaving those areas as food deserts.

Either way, this entertainment merger is going to get ugly. Consumers are absolutely going to get harmed either way with that clawback clause.

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I don't understand how that kind of clause can be legal. Its existence puts anti-trust enforcement in a catch-22, either they allow the merger, which reduces competition, or they reject it, and the acquiree is decimated, also reducing competition.

8.3(b) on pg. 79 says that "Regulatory Termination Fee" is $5,800,000,000 from Netflix to WB. (IANAL)

> I don't understand how that kind of clause can be legal.

Arguably they promote a chilling effect around acquisitions, which does help competition: "don't try to buy something unless you're prepared to deal with a possible fallout" should result in fewer attempts at consolidating dominant positions.

I'd almost be tempted to posit that such a clause should become mandatory for deals over a certain threshold (e.g. $1bn), with amounts determined according to certain parameters.

> don't try to buy something unless you're prepared to deal with a possible fallout

The kroger Albertsons deal was the other way around, the seller had to pay the buyer if the deal didn't go through.

yeah, that sounds like a bit of blackmail...

It's not like we aren't drowning in entertainment options.

Food on the other hand, that's a real problem.

12 Fast and the Furious, 42 X-Men movies… yeah - drowning

Not to mention franchises like Star Wars, Marvel, Alien, Predator, Jurassic Park etc.

Speaking of anti-trust, all of those franchises save Jurassic Park are owned by Disney through mergers.

I'm still waiting for the "Alien vs Jurasic park". It must be a very entertaining movie. /s

Best you can get is Aliens vs Predator vs Terminator comic book (if you are 10 years old you can like it, it is betterr than most AvP stuff but that is a low hanging bar)

I mean the franchise didnt get anything top tier apart from Aliens labirynth and the vP 2 game from.. 2001?

Look back, not forward my dude. Plenty of good material from previous years. With the benefit of hindsight having filtered the crap out

I’m not sure it’s a fair comparison, groceries that sell food on one hand and a brainwashing and propaganda delivery system (see History of criminal, industry/advertiser, FBI, CIA, Pentagon, and foreign nation direct ties to the industry) masquerading as “entertainment” on the other.

You don’t have to be “harmed”, just do not pay them your money. Problem solved. If the prospect of not being “entertained” fills you with anxiety and frustration, maybe that’s something to reflect on.

The machine works in the aggregate, and so does the harm. Lets not pretend that all will be well if I just avoid the propoganda myself.

That makes no logical sense. So if I give up my “entertainment” subscriptions because the execs need their bonuses and drive the prices up to compensate for the penalty, causing me to think about how to spend quality time with my family paying games, reading books, and doing activities; is equally harmful as if I can’t but groceries in my town because the grocery store was closed?

I most certainly did not imply that cancelling subscriptions is harmful; I think you read something I did not write.

I live a couple blocks down from one that was open for 40+ years. I use Amazon now for my groceries. I was gonna use Safeway but their prices are high.

Sounds like an opportunity to open grocery stores.

I suspect in a lot of those places there is only the one supply chain.

UNfI is the big distriubor, Kehei is second. Both serve essentially all grocery stores.

So when it's not happening as readily as we expect what do we do next?

We just sit back and watch as the invisible hands of capitalism cleanse themselves of our existence.

Aldi is always looking for property

Forever seems pretty definitive

Except you need food to live and tv shows are an artificially scarce resource that's actually free to distribute in unlimited quantities, so the harm is very different.

Real people work in this industry, though. A merger of this size is bound to come with some layoffs and canceled projects.

It's not as bad as food scarcity, of course. But it can do some collateral damage.

That, plus fewer studios mean less creativity goes to the mainstream. If you thought AI slop was bad, go re-watch Star Wars Episode 8.

You will still have Amazon, Apple, Paramount, Disney, and NetMax spending billions each on content and streaming and Sony being the mercenary creating content for the highest bidder.

WB under Discovery was already becoming an also ran and more financial engineering than a real company.

Seems like a bad example. The problem with Episode 8 was not lack of creativity. Episode 7 was a complete retread of "A New Hope" and a bigger offender. At least blue Jedi milk is new.

Episode 8 was a retread of Empire Strikes Back (ships chase through empty space while the main character trains with the old master on a wild planet). It seemed subversive just because ESB was subversive relative to ANH.

Complete with "this guy will help us" to "oh no, they betrayed us!"

Episode 8 was subversive because it had self aware moments "trolling" the audience throughout like Luke mocking the idea Rey (and the audience) thought he would pick up a lightsaber again.

It also has weird "subversive" dialogue about sacrifice being bad that doesn't really fit what's happening in the movie itself where sacrifice of two characters saves the day. Which is "subversive" in the sense that a movie with dialogue saying "this is a shitty movie plot" is subversive.

It also rips off the ending of Return of the Jedi by killing the main bad guy so is "subversive" in that it trolls whoever was stuck making episode 9 without a functional villain.

I mean, 8 was easily the most functional of the new trilogy, if a somewhat overly ambitious muddle, so that's a bad example.

There is a real problem with too many sequels and adaptations though.

If 8 had followed through on its narrative promises, it would have had a chance. But unfortunately, much like a modern LLM that exceeds its context window, it lost its way in the final act.

As for sequels, we are at a weird time in history. Due maybe in part just how prevalent media is and how easy (relatively) it is to create, we've been super-saturated in "like X but with Y" stories. We have dedicated websites mapping tropes. It's hard to come up with anything that hasn't been done a few million times. AI will probably accelerate that, and I can't say I know what comes next.

8 is at least the fourth best Star Wars movie.

Maybe 3rd. Jedi is gorgeous but the script for everything past Jabba’s Palace is a mess. Doesn’t know what to do with all its characters, feels the need to have them all around anyway.

Me and my wife were Star Wars fans. The last Star Wars media we watched was episode 8. I almost walked out the theater.

I've watched and enjoyed Andor since, but yeah other than that zero star wars movies and TV shows since episode 8. I hear 9 was also hilariously bad, but I'll not ever bother seeing it.

Episode 9 is better overall if you can power through retconning Palpatine's death in Episode 6. Which I feel JJ Abrams did only because Episode 8 made the mistake of killing off Snoke. But either way, Episode 9 does have largely better writing and direction.

But also, yeah Episode 8 is the worst movie in the main film series. It makes Episode 2 look good.

Star Wars is synonymous with Andor at this point. The original trilogy is second, but it isn't a close second.

Oh really? What’s Andor?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9253284/

my biggest problem with episode 8 was that they freed the camels but not the camel jockey slave children

Does that mean the DCU Movies might get delayed or canceled?

One can only hope.

That's the only thing most people are looking forward to from WB!

Instead they’re a 20 part serial with about 5 mins of actual content per episode. Enjoy!

money is just this construct that we invented to distribute limited resources. why are we doing this?

The Invisible Hand demands its tribute. It’s giving us the Invisible Middle Finger again.

Too many people are too obsessed in making some number in a database be as large as possible...

Maybe they should just play that paperclip game.

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