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Deleting and destroying finished movies

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Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#241

Post by s1artibartfast »

imgabe wrote: post #228
s1artibartfast wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fundamental to the whole premise of taxes is that they are applied to net profit. If a company spends $1 to make $10, they get taxed on $9. If they spend $8 to make $10, they get taxed on $2. Nobody is giving warner bros money. They arent getting a cash tax refund. They just spent more money and made less profit. If they wanted to make zero profit, and pay zero taxes, that is their choice! If a commpany wants to sell…

> Fundamental to the whole premise of taxes is that they are applied to net profit. If a company spends $1 to make $10, they get taxed on $9. If they spend $8 to make $10, they get taxed on $2. Yes, the key word there is net profit, and the ways to calculate net profit for tax purposes are prescribed by law. Not every single penny a company spends is automatically a deductible business expense. Some things are, some…

So there is a moral argument for what an ideal world should be like, and legal argument for what the rules are.

From the moral perspective, it is clear that WB clearly had real expenses. They spent money, bought rights, and tons of workers were paid good money.

Now you pivot to the legal argument. The current law clearly supports what Warner Bros is doing, so that doesnt help you either.

like I said before. It seems like this entire thing boils down to a control issue. you dont like how WB is running their company and doing with their property.

It isnt you business, both figuratively and literally.

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#242

Post by jb1991 »

littlestymaar wrote: post #229
jb1991 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is much less than “almost an order of magnitude.“

Had it been 105 year it would have been an order of magnitude. Being only 5 years off an order of magnitude justified the “almost an order of magnitude”.

> Had it been 105 year it would have been an order of magnitude

That’s not true. How are you getting that number? That’s not how you calculate an order of magnitude.

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#243

Post by TuringTest »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #209
pradn wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does someone have to demarcate exactly where "the line" is to make a judgement on this situation? You can simply ask yourself "do I want to live in a world where this happens" - and any decent person would say "no". The presence of a "slippery slope" is not enough to prevent going down a path, even somewhat. A film takes hundreds of people to create - how does it feel for them to just have years of their lives fa…

> You can simply ask yourself "do I want to live in a world where this happens" - and any decent person would say "no". I think any decent person would say yes. I'm sure it is a bummer for those people, but they were paid to do a job, and don't own the film.

> I'm sure it is a bummer for those people, but they were paid to do a job, and don't own the film

That's a really sad viewpoint, believing that being paid to do a job is the only thing that matters, and that it compensates everything about what that job means and how it impacts the world. It's the same thinking justifying "if I don't do this terrible thing at work, someone else will do it for the same money", which is anything but decent.

There's such thing as pride in what one does; double so in artistic endeavours, where the only value is in being seen by spectators.

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#244

Post by interroboink »

LoganDark wrote: post #187
interroboink wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like that just moves the goalposts. Instead of deciding what should be law or not, now we are deciding what constitutes "mere dislike" vs "something worse." It's ultimately the same issue, no?

I once fell and hit my head, sliced it right open. It was traumatic. Not any of the aftermath like having to go to the hospital or so on. Just my head being hit. I could have died. I could have died. It took me days to process this. There was something in my head for days preventing me from thinking properly, from feeling emotions properly. There was no concussion, no actual cranial damage. It was all psychological t…

I didn't mean to say there's nowhere to draw a line.

I meant to say that the question of where to draw the line is open to discussion, in both cases.

To be honest, I don't entirely understand your example, since in the first case you're talking about an accident, and we can't exactly pass a law saying "accidents are not allowed." But in the second case, you can pass a law against SA and such. So in my mind, the difference there is in realistic enforcement options, not on the merits themselves.

If we could somehow magically pass a meaningful law against accidents, then maybe we'd consider it. Accidents are things that just about everybody dislikes, after all. Of course, we can't meaningfully make that law, but only for mere technical reasons, not because it's undesirable.

In that imagined world, I could see people saying: "no one should have to suffer accidents" and using that as rationale for supporting the law. You may not agree with them, and I may not either. But that was my point — where to draw the line is up for discussion.

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#245

Post by djur »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #224
imgabe wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is stopping them from wasting their time and resources. They are free to waste them as much as they want. It's just not a tax-deductible business expense to do so. There is a difference between "we won't allow you to do something" vs. "we won't subsidize you to do something". It's one thing to want to waste your resources, it's another thing to demand that everyone else pay you to do so. What's to stop the CEO…

Fundamental to the whole premise of taxes is that they are applied to net profit. If a company spends $1 to make $10, they get taxed on $9. If they spend $8 to make $10, they get taxed on $2. Nobody is giving warner bros money. They arent getting a cash tax refund. They just spent more money and made less profit. If they wanted to make zero profit, and pay zero taxes, that is their choice! If a commpany wants to sell…

Individuals certainly aren't taxed on their net profit, so I don't see how that could be "fundamental to the whole premise". If the tax code has effects that are noxious to the public, it's a public matter to revise the tax code.

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#246

Post by djur »

sahila wrote: post #235
SoftTalker wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't deliberately set fire to the money in my bank account and then write that off as a loss. The movie is an asset, it has some value, the way to determine that value is to make a good faith effort to sell it (auction or broker of some sort) and if it sells for less than you have spent making it, then you can write off the difference as a loss. Deliberately destroying the asset and then writing off the entire amo…

If ycombinator hires 3 engineers to rewrite hacker news 2.0, pays them for a year, writes off their salary as an expense, and then later decides that actually 2.0 is way worse than what’s currently out and trashes it, should ycombinator not be allowed to write off the investment?

No.

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#247

Post by imgabe »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #241
imgabe wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fundamental to the whole premise of taxes is that they are applied to net profit. If a company spends $1 to make $10, they get taxed on $9. If they spend $8 to make $10, they get taxed on $2. Yes, the key word there is net profit, and the ways to calculate net profit for tax purposes are prescribed by law. Not every single penny a company spends is automatically a deductible business expense. Some things are, some…

So there is a moral argument for what an ideal world should be like, and legal argument for what the rules are. From the moral perspective, it is clear that WB clearly had real expenses. They spent money, bought rights, and tons of workers were paid good money. Now you pivot to the legal argument. The current law clearly supports what Warner Bros is doing, so that doesnt help you either. like I said before. It seems…

> From the moral perspective, it is clear that WB clearly had real expenses. They spent money, bought rights, and tons of workers were paid good money.

Yes, they had expenses. You seem to have a very very rudimentary understanding of accounting and have conflated expenses with losses. An expense is not a loss. If you buy a factory for $1 million, you didn't lose $1 million dollars. You now have an asset, a factory, that is worth approximately $1 million. You don't get to go to the IRS and say "I lost $1 million dollars this year because I bought a factory". The IRS will tell you, no you didn't. You still have your $1 million, it's just now in the form of a factory instead of cash.

Likewise, WB spent money and created an asset, a film. That film has a market value. Maybe they don't like the film, but that doesn't change the reality that it's worth something. We know approximately how much it's worth because several other companies made offers to buy it.

Instead WB wants to lie and say it isn't worth anything. So, no I don't like how they are running their company when they want to lie and cheat to get out of paying the taxes they owe. You can't buy a factory for $1 million and then turn around and say "yeah, it's not worth anything anymore", and you shouldn't be able to say a movie isn't worth anything when it very clearly is. We do not gain anything by enabling companies or anyone to deny reality.

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#248

Post by BLKNSLVR »

lbarrow wrote: post #54

Without commenting on the larger issue the article brings up, this specific point doesn't survive scrutiny to me: Some of the company’s tactics post-merger were garden-variety ruthless, like eliminating 87 series from its streaming platform Max, so that they won’t have to pay union-mandated residuals to the talent that created already-existing programs or pony up funds to produce more seasons of existing ones (such a…

Residuals feel analogous to copyright in some way.

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#249

Post by BLKNSLVR »

bongodongobob wrote: post #185
philsnow wrote: post #81

Criminal fraud issues aside, I would think that all of the artists had a reasonable expectation that the work they were doing would be released, and would then become part of their resume. Since it didn't get released, they collectively and/or individually might very well bring a civil suit against the company for lost compensation (where compensation is defined as some combination of cash and reputational gains, and…

I worked for a month on a server migration project that ended up getting axed. I have 0 expectation of any sort of retribution because I don't get to put the migration on my resume. That's an insane expectation.

Depends on expectations and contractual agreements on how someone gets paid for their work. Entertainment can be a wildly different beast to that which us regular paycheck folks deal with.

Re: Deleting and destroying finished movies

#250

Post by arpa »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #217
imgabe wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not real losses. They could sell the movie. They could release it. They're deliberately forgoing those options and deleting it. You don't have a loss until you attempt to generate revenue and find that the revenue is less than your expenses. If you just throw your product away, that's not a loss. Ultimately we write tax policy for the benefit of society, not for Warner Bros. In theory, we could write tax law…

>They're deliberately forgoing those options and deleting it. You don't have a loss until you attempt to generate revenue and find that the revenue is less than your expenses. If you just throw your product away, that's not a loss. That is exactly how it works. You already spent X on an asset. If you throw the asset away, then you just have deductible expenses. Same for the widget factory. You can deduct the material…

Maybe at some size corporations _should_ become public entities to avoid dragon disease and only those corporations having the means of production. After all, they did grow enormously big by consuming public resources and labor.
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