thebradbain

Scripts are already a dime a dozen! The stereotype you see in tv shows of unemployed writers writing screenplays in coffee shops is because writers of those tv shows are making fun of themselves.

An experienced writer could (and does) make an entire first draft of a script for a tv show in less than a day. Before your first job out of college you likely have 10+ scripts for movies or shows written for a portfolio. 99% of scripts written already will never see the light of day— and that includes the ones that get bought!

Hollywood does have genuine shortcomings, but I can guarantee you one is not the lack of scripts, nor even the lack of good scripts.

Well, an important distinction in Hollywood versus my understanding of most other unions is that being a part of a guild does not guarantee you a job (though it is a prerequisite for many of them):

You still need to be hired by a production, who chooses to work with you and sets your rate.

The guild just provides a guarantee of pay floor, hours, conditions, healthcare, etc across and transcending individual companies.

So the guilds could theoretically let in as many people as they wanted without diluting supply and demand, because membership does not mean actively working.

The Guild system is unique because its as much as a credentialing system as a union, which is why I think it works.

It’s a fine line, but I don’t see anyone saying the members of the Hollywood guild aren’t talented— it’s a (perhaps already too hard) battle just to get in it.

However, just because you’re in the guild does not mean you have a job. Productions still have to hire and choose to work with you. Generally, if you don’t get work within sometime between 1-2 years you lose membership.

If you’re not “skilled enough” for the minimum floor pay, then the studio or show has no obligation to hire you. Don’t see why that model can’t work for tech?

Do you know how much more there is to Hollywood than… wide release studio movies. Those are the most corporate of creative jobs. I won’t write a thinkpiece here, but if your only exposure to Hollywood is big box office movies that are released in every city in the US, you’re seeing just one slice of that industry. It’s like if you said tech as industry was SOLELY defined by FAANG, which also had a terrible year.

Nonetheless, Netflix is as much claimed by Hollywood as it is Tech. Apple too is thought as Hollywood-adjacent, as aside from Apple TV they’re also historically responsible for Pixar. Important to realize that working in tech does not mean every successful company is purely a tech company.

> You don’t even need a college edification to do most of the work in our industry

You don’t in entertainment either, I can assure you that unless you’re working at an agency or a studio salaryman, no one will ask. But those are more corporate than creative jobs, anyways.

And at least from person experience, a lot of Hollywood TV writers rooms are still remote or hybrid (they found it works better!)

…do you know how much Hollywood is worth? Not just financially but socially, historically, and politically on the global stage? And has been for almost a century?

I could not think of any industry less “hobbled” than Hollywood. They have a sign worshipping itself sprawling across some of the most expensive hillside real estate in the country.

Regardless, as another commentator pointed out— VFX artists are the largest group of non-union workers in Hollywood. They’re also the most overworked and lowest paid— I’m talking about near minimum wage working on a movie with as a high a budget as Marvel. Oftentimes entry-level assistants to assistants to cameramen make more than them.

Know your worth, and charge for it.

Oh I agree! I think the guilds are great to its membership in general, but breaking in is itself a battle.

Tech doesn’t need to copy Hollywood exactly (nor should it), but there’s a lot that can be learned from it.

Oh I agree— certain things with Hollywood Guilds are exclusive for the point of being exclusive. Tech doesn’t need to, nor should it, strive to copy Hollywood exactly. We’re a completely different industry, after all

WGA is just one of many unions, but you’re right— getting into the “best” guilds is itself a process; but ostensibly, it’s to ensure that the guild keeps its prestige as a genuine body of talent. It’s a balancing act for sure, and I don’t know if tech wants to emulate everything exactly with the Hollywood guild system, but it’s worth taking inspiration from.

For another perspective on high-skill labor organization, also based in California, for an industry that dominates the industry of its biggest city and is also one of our nation’s most lucrative industries, let’s look to Hollywood.

The Hollywood guilds should be held up as a model for high skilled labor. It’s also something tech and (and especially the gaming industry) can learn from.

The WGA, for example, allows the lowest-rung writers of tv shows to make $70-80k/year as a minimum floor for 6-8 months of work, twice that if it’s the full year, and guarantees you healthcare for when you’re unemployed between shows/gigs. That helps push up the wage ladder for everyone else, too— many established, but not famous, writers on regular shows that have decent size followings but are not phenomenons are able to earn $400/500k year base salaries this way, and provide a ladder to a really fortunate life for them and their families. And it likely comes as no surprise that very successful workers (celebrities, but also writers and directors that you may not have even heard of) can easily make 10-100x that— it clearly hasn’t affected the top of the ladder’s pay. It’s not unheard of for 20 year olds to make millions right out of college on their first movie, either— https://www.forbes.com/sites/dbloom/2022/01/28/apple-tv-plus...

There’s many different guilds, from writing, to acting, to production, to lighting, to animation/vfx, to crew, to assistants, but they all more or less provide a baseline coverage to their members. IATSE, which is the guild that represents assistants and crew, went on strike last year and secured a minimum $25/hr wage and mandatory breaks last year. The guilds explicitly foster creativity, because it allows even entry-level members to jump from company to company and project to project without worrying about day-to-day logistics.

Imagine the boon to taking risks on smaller companies and projects if software engineers could easily transfer from large companies to smaller projects and teams they were interested in, without worrying about who was processing payroll or transferring retirement benefits or healthcare?

Look, I have plenty of close friends of many years who I see every single day. My home is essentially a community gathering spot at this point. My social calendar is as packed, if not more packed, than my work calendar. And for me personally there’s no overlap between the two. I am friendly with all of my colleagues, but I would not call them friends.

Forcing me to come into an office would not change that; I completely understand that those in a new city without a strong group of friends would benefit from going to the office— and at most jobs they’re already free to go in if they choose, to work alongside people who also _choose_ to go into the office. Choose is the key word here. Work for me is a job first, and I’m not looking to make a best friend at work, so don’t force me to come in for that reason alone.

This is reactionary. Not even Los Angeles, the biggest city in California, is anywhere near being a dense metropolis.

That is not at all what Hollywood guilds are like, though.

As someone who lives in LA, and is very close with people who work in the industry, the unions should be held up as a model for high skilled labor. It’s also something tech and (and especially the gaming industry) can learn from

The WGA, for example, allows the lowest-rung writers of tv shows to make $70-80k/year as a minimum floor for 6-8 months of work, twice that if it’s the full year, and guarantees you healthcare for when you’re unemployed between shows/gigs. That helps push up the wage ladder for everyone else, too— many established, but not famous, writers on regular shows that have decent size followings but are not phenomenons are able to earn $400/500k year base salaries this way, and provide a ladder to a really fortunate life for them and their families.

There’s many different guilds, from writing, to acting, to production, to lighting, to animation/vfx, to crew, to assistants, but they all more or less provide a baseline coverage to their members. IATSE, which is the guild that represents assistants and crew, went on strike last year and secured a minimum $25/hr wage and mandatory breaks last year.

The guilds explicitly foster creativity, because it allows even entry-level members to jump from company to company and project to project without worrying about day-to-day logistics.

Imagine if software engineers could hop from project to project at different companies working on just things they were interested in?

Ah, the classic game of “Does this mistake get me free tax preparation or jail time”

Apparently Twitter has specifically deactivated api access to certain apps, like Tweetdeck. That’s probably sparked uncertainty around the future of the twitter API

https://twitter.com/theinformation/status/161439876957066854...

In demographic and vibe, sure, but the built environment is very much the same. The city was even _downzoned_ in 1978 [1] to keep single family homes at the end of their life from being demolished and rebuilt into denser apartments: 76% of the city would be rezoned as single family home only.

https://sbuss.substack.com/p/when-did-things-go-wrong-in-san...

> 400 million instances of user data in the second alleged breach could not be correlated with the previously reported incident, nor with any new incident.

Genuinely curious – What does this mean? It seems like they're saying this data is not from/overlapping with the old/known leak of 5.4 million accounts, but also not that it's a new incident. So where is this data coming from?

> The data is likely a collection of data already publicly available online through different sources.

How would another source have collected 400 million twitter handle + email + phone number combos, without leveraging twitter's own data to make that pairing?

No one in San Francisco today built it to what it is. That city hasn’t changed in any substantial way since before 1960.

It’s long been coasting off its past success.

Convincing the electorate of most things is just a matter of marketing, for better or worse. You’d be surprised how many former PR and marketing execs now work in DC think tanks and as lobbyists and political consultants.

Coca Cola has made and kept its fortune by successfully associating a syrup that is bad for you with Pure Happiness.

Marketing, media exposure, and subliminal messaging both turned Americans completely against weed from the 70s-2000s and then also now completely in support of weed legalization in the past decade.

Similarly, as we’re seeing play out today, the right has found success marketing the “danger” of drag queens to turn political opinion against the LGBTQ community, which itself gained overwhelmingly acceptance in the face of once-overwhelming disapproval by powerful self-determination and taking control of how they were portrayed in the media.

The same forces that convince people en masse to buy a certain brand can just as easily be used to affect how we view any political issue.

Oh, I completely agree that nationwide general-knowledge placement tests are likely not the best way to measure achievement -- especially the SAT/ACTs. Within US high school education, I expect the grade system to continue to exist for a while.

But when it comes to higher education, I think specialized placement tests applicable to a program are definitely useful. The LSAT and MCAT clearly have some value, at least, though they should not be considered the end-all-be-all by any means, either.

Well, unfortunately the major VFX houses today are not unionized. There used to be some, but Marvel opened the floodgates to contracting out major VFK work to non-union companies.

I imagine this will be added to the list of grievances animators historically have had with the lack of union protections in recent years, and used as a negotiation chip in the next round of strikes. After all, union films and tv shows cannot use non-union actors or crews in most cases. I imagine there will be a similar rule made that union productions cannot work with non-union vfx agencies, eventually.

I live in Los Angeles, surrounded by people who work in entertainment. There's also a very heavy gaming company presence here. A lot of the companies will cross-hire, in fact, because there's a lot of overlap (voice-work, art, cgi+vfx, post-production, editing, etc).

Every time, if someone in gaming has the opportunity to take a gig in entertainment, they will choose the entertainment gig.

The industries are very similar, but due to how they evolved they are each a mirror image of the other had each taken a different path to labor organizing. Hollywood was (and in many ways still is) THE most exploitative industry when it came to profit sharing, dangerous+stressful+long working conditions, etc. But at least the unions guarantee certain things like breaks and time off, healthy pay floors (e.g. an entry level writer on a tv show will make $120k that year if they work 8 months, $70k if they work 6 months, etc), health insurance between gigs, a pension, etc, even to their minimum wage workers. Gaming workers can have this too if they realize the profitable game studios literally cannot make a profit without their labor, and organize en masse accordingly.

I think the premise of this article is flawed — aside from the (imo very valid) “who cares!” argument with regards to grades not actually mattering for really anything anymore except when it comes to some grad programs, the implicit assumption of this analysis is that the grade system will exist in its current form in the future.

I think it’s more likely Harvard does away with the traditional letter system altogether. Aside from the fact Harvard operated just fine without it for the first 2-3 centuries it operated, let’s take a step back and try to remember what the grades were to track in the first place: students’ absorption of the material (i.e. “learning”). This type of grade system is better for measuring things that have right/wrong answers— math, memorization of dates, anything mechanical, etc. Yet with calculators and the internet making things like historical timelines and formulas etc accessible even to payment, graders’ job of even grading these “objective” becomes more subjective— if you arrive to the wrong math question, but did all the right high level steps and made a small but cascading error in the beginning, I’d posit that student likely knows the material well and would avoid that error were it pointed out. But from a grading perspective, what is that? 7/10? Same situation to a history student laying out the historical context leading up to some event and mixing up some dates. Things get even more muddled when it comes to humanities.

In fact, off the top of my head, Pomona College and Brown University, both well-regarded schools within academia (and Pomona with I believe the highest undergrad acceptance rate into Harvard grad programs), have the option for every class to be taken as Pass/Fail, except when it comes to later-stage major requirements. Graduation accolades are awarded by professor recommendation, which fosters getting to know your professors out of the classroom better than grades. Anything that needs to be GPA-gated could instead be (likely better) gated by a placement test.

Knowledge is not a 0 sum game. Maybe instead of trying to adapt our current education circumstances to to an old grading system, it’s time to think of a new system altogether.

The existing flight booking software that they use (Sabre) can and does do that, but Southwest’s issue is likely their insistence on using a homegrown management system on top of that. Southwest only switched to Sabre in 2021, so it’s likely still being implemented, and their homegrown approach has likely evolved with them from their founding, so it’s not something the company itself is likely organizationally prepared for.

At least, I feel confident in that analysis, since this exact same issue happened to Southwest in 2016, before they were using Sabre. Which would point to a chronic organizational failure

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2016/07/2...

GDS — there’s really only 3 centralized stores of real-time flight/hotel/booking information in the entire world (Sabre/SABRE, Amadeus, and Travelport). Almost every American airline uses Sabre (American Airlines is an interesting case in that it does not technically in a legal sense, but actually it spun off and sold Sabre in 2000, so a lot of their core systems are forks of each other)

Complexity — Fundamentally you’re looking at a logistics software, except unlike packages you’re dealing with people who aside from expected destinations have travel lengths and time-in-air calculated down to the minute. Also unlike a package, a surprise multi-day trip, unexpected multi-leg journey, one day delay is not something passengers (and crew members) will accept or be at all ok with. And if any one thing goes wrong there’s going to be cascading failures down the line— so much that it may break your company’s entire operating workflow (e.g. Southwest) entirely, and no software can overcome that kind of organizational gap.

Airlines - There’s not many commercial passenger airlines left in the US, especially that fly nationwide. Good luck trying to convince one of these giant behemoths to move to a non-battle-tested system for core operations, especially when decades-old industry software and practices around that software exist.

Entrenched - Sabre is entrenched in airlines around the world. They don’t just provide the booking services, they do the flight tracking, the ticket handling, the upgrading, the in-flight upgrades, missed connection handling, the flight scheduling algorithms, the pricing algorithms, the pilot and flight attendant time tracking, ground crew management, even the terminal software at each gate. To replace SABRE, you would physically need to rip out and then replace software around the world. And because agents don’t work from an office usually, but at the airport, you’re going to need to conduct trainings and provide support around the entire service area, which for the largest airlines is the entire world

Scale — A lot of Sabre’s revenue comes from passengers boarded. It depends on the airline, but I believe the average is that each airline pays 10cents/customer boarded with their software (though with increases in passenger volume each year, it may be less now). Because Sabre is so prevalent, and so many flights use them, they can afford such a price. A company servicing just one regional passenger airline would absolutely not be able to compete on price, at least starting out

Also— Sabre’s software itself is actually reliable! As a corporation it is slow clunky and bureaucratic, but the actual functionality it provides is stable, battle-tested, can handle any travel edge case you can think of, and fast and efficient for those who know how to use it, while also good enough at day to day operations that it doesn’t take too much time to train new agents on how to use it for routine tasks.

They actually have a GUI interface over it now with the ability for power/legacy users to drop into the raw shell, if they wish. From feedback, many of the older agents actually prefer the command line, because it’s muscle memory and an experienced agent can perform routine tasks that would take multiple screens in the UI with one hand in the way we’re comfortable with our text editors.

Granted, the rollout across airlines is probably glacial

Source: I used to work there

Honestly, yeah. Have you read their reporting?

> And yet, regulators across the world (US, Europe, Canada, China, Japan) allow its continued sale and use.

I wouldn't be so sure, with more and more agencies signaling their intent to escalate...

> So to be clear, you are saying my tax money should be used to house the homeless, at exorbitant rates

Yes.

> While I cannot afford to buy a house myself

Affordable housing should be a right to everyone. Anyone, including you, should have the option to live in affordable housing that is nice, ideally with amenities and gardens and common areas if they cannot afford to pay for that on their own. Public housing, like it is in some other countries, should be not a stigmatized fallback but the normalized default. And that’s what the property taxes on the home I currently own should be paying for, so if — for whatever reason — I can no longer afford it or no longer want it, I can move into a dignified public housing accommodation too.

> Not sure if you have lived near homeless encampments before

I have. And my conclusion doesn’t change— they should have housing. Nice housing and the help they need to get back on their feet. We all should.

We haven’t really moved the needle on anything in regards to lowering the COL (except, maybe and in only some circumstances, healthcare, but look at how far we have to go and how bad the political backlash was) in… at least two decades? Maybe three?

Federal minimum wage hasn’t even increased from $7.25 since 2009. In 1997 it was $5.15 (or $9.55 in 2022 dollars, so even 25 years ago we paid workers more than we do today)

Maybe it’s time to start putting those crazy ideas out there, because the status quo is proving more and more unsustainable