Larry Ellison's son had to scale down his media and TV empire ambitions when Oracle stock crashed. That's one thing to celebrate, because we don't want CNN to be controlled by the Ellisons.
https://www.cbr.com/paramount-dismantling-star-trek-9-year-s...
Personally I didn't hate the gimmick episodes, but enjoying them sort of requires no longer taking the show seriously at all.
> A transporter malfunction turns most of the crew into puppets while Spock fights to reclaim the ship.
At least the TNG duds attempted some kind of sci fi technobabble explanation for whatever hijinks were occurring. With this season of SNW, we're getting plot devices like "missing resistance leader just happened to look identical to Enterprise's first officer by complete coincidence!" and "spooky derelict ship is haunted, no explanation even attempted!" ... there are worse ones I could reference but they're spoilers. I'm genuinely starting to wonder if an LLM is writing these scripts.
As for taking the show seriously, I don't take any of it seriously. It's a telenovela, or maybe we should say Stellanovela. Most episodes build a fairly cohesive story, then break loose, and those old scientists have fun with the Star Trek universe. It's not like they're acting in a Chekhov play.
I know it's been a long time...
Fans: "The last series was the worst ever!"
Star Trek producers: "Hold my beer..."
Fans: "You know, the old series weren't so bad in retrospect."
You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think "oh, the lawnmower hates me" – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle."
— Bryan Cantrill
But think of it this way. If Ellison’s acquisition of Warner Bros falls through Ellison must pay Warner Bros a $7 Billion breakup fee. That’s on top of the $2.8 Billion they paid Netflix to abandon its pursuit of Warner Bros.
So Ellison would have wasted $9.8 Billion and years of his life for absolutely nothing. And I think we can all agree that the world would be better off.
Years of his life, perhaps, though a large part of that will be banks and lawyers, not him grinding it out.
He won't even notice the money being gone, not even close.
Years of his life and 5-10% of his net worth. That’s the kind of thing people notice.
I will give you the time though, or the motivations (however appalling they are) for his exertion of energy on these.
People seem to be focusing more on individual reporters, subscribing directly to good journalists who have gone out on their own. We are also seeing a thing that pleases me ver much: Reporters focusing on the subjects they are experts in and not doing a jack of all trades master of none. Its made me accept that I wont get top tier news in every subject so I have to pick what really matters to me(Tech, Food, entertainment, geopolitics of specific regions of the world etc.).
On the low end though its more bleak. TikTok slop, Youtuber "commentators" etc.
Makes me think of Neil Gaiman's American Gods
That resembles, to me, how newspapers used to be - except instead of a small fraction of people being willing to pay for quality news, roughly two thirds were (62 million subscribers out of 92 million American households in 1989 [1]). Like Bloomberg today, their incentives were to provide information for serious people and to cultivate a trustworthy reputation, rather than to enrage people into commenting and sharing articles.
The decline of newspapers is of course too much of a tangent, but I think it's interesting how the math kind of illustrates why most 'news' has to be trash now.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/newspapers...
and https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/families... (Table HH4)
The real problem with that one, though, is it would utterly destroy the American movie industry, which is a crucial part of our economy and culture.
I don't understand, if Oracle etc. has financial problems, why would movie-making bits be destroyed as opposed to sold to new owners?
If the American movie industry got "destroyed", what would that look like, and how would it lead to long-term malaise? Offhand, I can't imagine the same kind of supply-chain/infrastructure rot-problem as, say, the "destruction" of the automotive industry.
Consolidation into one company with a huge amount of market power ruins the market, destroys innovation, and destroys infrastructure and capacity within the vertical.
Yeah, America is way overdue for some trust-busting.