Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Anime is a $25B industry that pays its animators pennies

hitregbroke.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 365 posts

Re: Anime is a $25B industry that pays its animators pennies

#241

Post by kmeisthax »

jstarks wrote: post #169
kmeisthax wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vocational awe is a curse. If you have an endless supply of people willing to work pennies then the industry will build itself around paying them pennies. This does not mean that this is the only way you can build an animation industry - just that this is the path Toei and Sunrise took. The amount of money that goes into the industry is not static. The original linked article specifically cites cases in which members…

> As for animators having to find new work... good? Isn’t this a paternalistic point of view? Why do you know better than the animators who are accepting these jobs? Who are you to tell them that their career choice is wrong?

The animators themselves are saying they hate their working conditions and their dream job has become a nightmare.

Re: Anime is a $25B industry that pays its animators pennies

#242

Post by oatmeal1 »

kelnos wrote: post #27
oatmeal1 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the alternative is starving, they do. The problem isn't children being allowed to work in mines. The problem is the lack of superior alternatives available to them.

Right, and in this case, the superior alternative should be an animator who makes a decent living. Sometimes, unfortunately, we have to legislate the superior alternative into existence. I'm not certain that's a good or necessary move in this particular case (I doubt there are many if any animators where their choice is to be an animator for low wages, or starve and live on the streets), but it's an option. I always…

> Sometimes, unfortunately, we have to legislate the superior alternative into existence.

There is nothing we have to do. And are there no animators currently making a decent living? Legislating a minimum wage does not give the animators extra leverage. The higher it is, the more employers will invest into technology to replace them. There are all kinds of ways to improve the lot of the disadvantaged. The minimum wage is one of the worst ways to do so.

Re: Anime is a $25B industry that pays its animators pennies

#243

Post by HALtheWise »

Anime is a $25B industry in terms of revenue, but that doesn't actually imply anything in particular about whether there's any profit in it. I see people make this sort of mistake all the time, and it bugs me. In this particular case, I think the appropriate reaction is very different if the anime industry is wildly profitable vs losing money as a whole, but the article is happy to throw revenue numbers around in the headline without engaging with that distinction.

Re: Anime is a $25B industry that pays its animators pennies

#244

Post by sillysaurusx »

awesomeMilou wrote: post #236
sillysaurusx wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d be interested to learn. If there aren’t harmful effects to outliers (I.e. exceptional people can still earn a great deal) then that does give me pause. Possibly enough to change my mind. Thanks. If you have any references on where specifically to start reading, feel free to drop them here. Otherwise I’ll start at the acronyms you mentioned.

Most union contracts still allow for KPI's and bonuses, which can be customized and based on personal goals you set with your employer. So not sure what you mean?

My question is: what are the downsides to unionizing? Whenever someone presents something as having no downside, it’s particularly important to try to examine that.

Comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39074679 are making me think twice, but there must be some catch with unions, or else everyone would do it.

Re: Anime is a $25B industry that pays its animators pennies

#246

Post by lotsofpulp »

tomcam wrote: post #143
lotsofpulp wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why tax income? Wealth should be taxed. The problem is hoarding, not doing valuable work. For example, owning land that is empty or an empty building for years just so it appreciates deprives the community. Tax the shit out of it so it forces the owner to use it productively or sell it so someone else can figure out how to use it productively.

If you use your car only couple of days a week, should you be taxed more on your car than someone who uses theirs every day of the week? What about a piano you haven’t practiced on for a few years? The expensive ski boots you haven’t touched since high school?

Maybe, but we can at least start with the more fundamental resources that have to be shared amongst people and are in limited quantities, such as land.

Driving giant pickup trucks for no productive reason also uses up a societal resource, and increases societal risks, so I would not mind seeing extra taxes on those compared to more reasonable methods of transport, and a case could be easily made that all personal vehicles should be taxed much higher to incentivize public transit construction and use.

Society is not losing out much if you don’t use your ski boots since college, but maybe society does benefit if you consume less throwaway things, so a generally increased tax on consumption, perhaps based on mass and distance (since more mass moved further distances takes more energy to move) might work. Easiest way to do this is simply 10x tax on fossil fuels, it will flow down to everything.

Tax things you don’t want. Taxing the result of productive work (income) is disincentivizing something we do want. We want people working hard and striving to do the difficult tasks that are in short supply of expertise (and higher income).

Re: Anime is a $25B industry that pays its animators pennies

#247

Post by nemothekid »

charcircuit wrote: post #160
astrange wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You learned nonsense right-wing propaganda.

Even so, it is true and does happen. Though I suspect it is less about pushing an ideology and more for trying to appeal to an audience of the localizer's peers. Either way the end result is that it repulsed a demographic of the distribution platform's target audience. Beyond that official translations often don't come with honorific, don't bother explaining puns, are not literal translations, try to replace a Japane…

>but since non Japanese streaming platforms want to constantly expand their business no matter what

This exact same conversation was happening on anime forum boards 20-30 years ago before Japanese streaming platforms knew they were people interested in watching their content overseas. There are gigabytes of forum posts of_fan produced content_ arguing over whether honorifics should be included, if puns should be explained with a "TL note", references to japanese history, etc.

Fansubs ultimately ended up on coalescing on what official subs do today (before official subs even existed), so I don't believe they are doing it because of corporate greed. People prefer somewhat localized content. Fan subs killed most honorifics and translation notes before anyone made a dime doing so.

Re: Anime is a $25B industry that pays its animators pennies

#248

Post by Der_Einzige »

astrange wrote: post #202
Der_Einzige wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, all western animation looks bad? Such sweeping generalizations, and so wrong. Exhibit A. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_NIMH Exhibit B. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prince_of_Egypt Exhibit C. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider-Man:_Into_the_Spider-Ve...

Two of those three are over 30 years old and the other is a movie with a $90M budget. I was talking about TV shows. Though I've heard things like Castlevania are good, haven't seen it though.

We are not living in 2028. Only one is "over 30 years old".

Re: Anime is a $25B industry that pays its animators pennies

#249

Post by dymk »

oatmeal1 wrote: post #17
dymk wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

When the alternative is starving, they do. The problem isn't children being allowed to work in mines. The problem is the lack of superior alternatives available to them.

I promise you children do not yearn for mines even when they're starving. At most, they'll begrudgingly enter the mines, and some might not come back.

Re: Anime is a $25B industry that pays its animators pennies

#250

Post by Retric »

chii wrote: post #162
Retric wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worlds economy isn’t underpinned by an underpaid underclass. Every major commodity cobalt, shoes, cellphones etc has large scale automated production. What’s going on is essentially a parallel system where people making almost nothing can barely out complete automation. However, because both are occurring at the same time consumers wouldn’t notice a significant change if 100% of that production was automated. Gra…

> Every major commodity ... etc has large scale automated production. the automate-able industries have done it, leaving behind the ones that aren't as automatable. This is why there's still many developing countries that export cheap labour. You can think of those as the "underpaid" class. Not necessarily bad, since i believe they are not being forced under lock and chain in slavery. They are merely economically inc…

I don’t think there are low value non automate-able industries right now. Try and name some.

That’s not to say nobody is making subsistence wages making shoes, just that there’s robots making shoes in another factory. It may not be 1:1 in every niche as a train isn’t a drop in replacement for a long haul trucker, but they are still in competition.

Post reply on HN