The writer... but, way, way, way less moving parts in that example. It's one writer, maybe two (like Stephen King has done to wrap things up). My only issue with writers striking is there are usually many of them -- most of which aren't all delivering equally -- and then you start to go down the rabbit hole of who else should be compensated with residuals, why wasn't your payment in the first place good enough, what if your product sucks, etc, etc.

And spainlinx0, your comment is totally out of line. I don't "simp for corpos".. quite the opposite. I've been working since I was 16, made my way up a corporate ladder and experienced ALL the political and social bullshit along the way. I see decisions get made at the highest level even against all the advice & data provided and wonder how that person can make 10x what I do. That said, I feel like I do understand the corporate side - maybe because I've seen it for so long. I don't agree with it, but I understand it. If you're going to make a polarizing comment like that, at least have considered both sides; whether you agree or not.

I apologize that you took the comment in your direction. I was mostly referring to some recent posts that annoyed me, but I don't think you have been misrepresenting the union position unfairly in your comments from what I have seen.

What's the ability to solidarity strike (I honestly don't know)?

Also for the "simping for corps" thing, I think it's pretty obvious if someone is trying to (or does) understand the position of the union but is just against it, as opposed to someone who it's clear is completely against unionization of any kind and wants them to "learn to code" or get another job (or accept whatever they're given because they should just be grateful) instead of use their power to strike (without offering an alternative). Sometimes it's naivete that somehow capitilism and companies under it will just do what's best for the worker over time, sometimes it's just ingrained in them, I dunno.

Im just enjoying to Pro Union folks who continually push this narrative while a single guild put hundreds of thousands of people out of jobs so they can make a bit more money off their Murphy Brown episodes they wrote decades ago.

WGA wants to go on strike if SAG or other Hollywood union goes on strike, even while WGA still has a contract. It's somewhat akin to refusing to cross a picket line that some teamsters and such have done during the strike.

It's a negotiating point, but there's a difference between putting in a demand that you want, but maybe don't need, at the beginning of negotiation, and refusing to budge or even provide counteroffers for certain demands, like AMPTP. I'm guessing WGA will be willing to drop that particular demand if others are met at least partway.

The reports from Tuesday meetings cover a number of negotiating points, none of them about strike solidarity:
https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/n...ike-continues/

Did you forget that SAG-AFTRA is also on strike?

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/bu...es-1235568435/

Screw these guys! Keep losing your homes, cars, and eat that ramen. Those writers need MORE MONEY

Nope. That will end whenever the WGA signs their shitty deal.

It sounds like you're arguing for even larger wage increases, especially minimum wage.

Based on studies, minimum wage increases don't eliminate people on food stamps, but it does reduce their numbers:
https://www.povertycenter.columbia.e...wage-increases
Like, you even later state "every bit helps." in terms of increased wages, so you undercut your whole "propaganda" argument.

Um, they already get streaming residuals, and they're too little. This time is the "work out the kinks" negotiation.

You realize that the reason for the strike is because the AMPTP did say "take it or leave it," and the WGA left it? Also, they did "live with" the last contract for the term of the contract, and are now trying to negotiate better terms, because the last contract terms were not adequate.

Ah, so you don't know how the guilds and their strikes work, like at all.

I guess you forgot how the DGA was able to negotiate a better deal and avoid a strike, all while the WGA was on strike. There's a solid chance the SAG-AFTRA strike could end before the WGA strike does, or it could go on longer after the WGA reaches a deal. The WGA doesn't dictate what SAG-AFTRA does, anymore then they could dictate what the DGA did.

Keep on being wrong though. Although you may never make it as a writer, you at least show a proficiency for generating pure fiction.

What? The WGA will likely get a deal before SAG does, as SAG isn't even talking (or if they are, they don't make it public like the WGA feels the need to do for sympathy). Once one gets a deal, the other will follow real fast as they won't "strike alone". Writers can start getting scripts ready while SAG keeps going.

But thanks Jay. I appreciate how hard you simp for the Unions. You should head over to Deadline and tell all those people what's what as they wonder how they will feed their kids this week.

Shouldn't you be condemning them too, since they're probably in IATSE: a...::gulp!:: union and threatened a strike less than two years ago? Or if not IATSE, likely one of the Basic Crafts unions.

The bookseller actually gets the lion's share of the cover price of a book. The bookseller generally pays about 50% of the cover price for a book, though the actual numbers probably vary depending on the size of the bookseller. Walmart, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble will get a better deal than the little independently-owned bookstore on the corner of the street.

The author gets a percentage of the cover price, which is about ten percent, give or take. I think it usually runs between 5 (at the low) and 15 (at the upper end). But there's sort of a catch there. The author is paid an advance for the book, which is an advance against royalties. So an author might get paid a $5,000 or $100,000 advance for the book. But the publisher doesn't pay the author any royalties until the royalties the book earns go over the advance. And a lot of books don't hit that threshold, so, in theory the author earns a higher percentage than the contracted royalty rate, but they don't earn anything more than the advance from the book unless it's in print for a long time and ends up paying out or is a surprise hit.

So consider...

An author receives a $20,000 advance for a novel.

It has a cover price of $30.00, and it's a hardcover so it gets a 15% royalty rate, which works out to $4.50 per copy sold.

The book ends up selling 3,000 copies. Which translates to $13,500. But the publisher keeps that $13,500 to pay themselves back for the advance. Which, taking the sales into account, gives the author an effective royalty rate of 22%, but they never see another penny from the sales of that edition of the book after the advance because the publisher will remainder it. The author doesn't have to pay back any of the advance.

Now, if the book is a runaway hit and sells 200,000 copies, the author will get a royalty check for $880,000 ($900,000 in royalties less the $20,000 advance). And, if they were only contracted for one book, they'll have a lot of leverage to get a better advance on their next one.

Unsurprisingly, most novelists have a day job.

Which will likely try and strike next year as well, but with a lot less members since many are leaving the industry because of this strike. Don't worry, they'll be a lot less shows being produced so it won't matter much,

Hi Adam. Welcome back! At least this time you are not personally attacking me, so that's nice change of pace.

I didn't personally attack you. It's not an attack to say that you never (or essentially never) express a positive opinion about anything, nor is it an attack to relate my impression of your changing posting behavior after the failure of HD DVD. My perception, rightly or wrongly, is that you took the failure of the format incredibly hard and, at least as a DVD Talk poster, have not been the same person since.

And really, the main point of me bringing that up was to say that this strike has evoked more passion in you than I’ve seen in a long while, which isn’t an attack. I'm glad there's something that inspires that in you.

Note the booksellter only get that "lion's share" if they sell it at MSRP (cover price). Any discount the bookseller is offering is eating into their profits.

Note that the standard advance/royalty arrangement means the publisher can be making a profit off the book before the advance has been "paid back": Neil Gaiman describes it here:
https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/...nd-purple.html

Why wouldn't SAG-AFTRA strike alone? WGA was doing that at first, and it was shutting down a lot of productions. If writers start working again before SAG-AFTRA does, there's only so much they can do before they'll have to halt again, since studios aren't going to pay for, say, another season of a show when the last season's scripts still haven't been shot.

But I'm welcome to waiting for time to show you wrong, like how you were wrong about studios mass cancelling writing deals after 90 days. Remember this nonsense you were spewing a few weeks ago?
Where's all those cancelled writing deals you were so certain was going to happen? We're on day 109, the studios are over 2 weeks late on those deal cancellations.

(This may sound paradoxical).

If I was a hardcore right-leaning type (whether nationalist or not), I would wholeheartedly support ALL hollywood guilds / unions going on strike for the longest time possible. Especially if it lasts continuously for many years with nobody going back to work.



Then there would be no more left-leaning scripted tv shows + movies to contaminate the minds of kids, teenagers and young adults. The "video media" landscape will become a wasteland of tiktok and youtube, with scripted tv / movies becoming a distant memory.

I hope the writers get what they want / deserve. I know the money is better served in their pockets than in some execs trust fund. And, at the end of the day, I selfishly want more content. In about 6-9 months, when the well is dry, this is going to really hit home. We'll be watching season after season of Big Brother and The Bachelor.

In more recent times, the only cases I'm aware of where this has been documented, is in cryptography.

Back in the mid 1970s, IBM and the NSA first discovered the technique of "differential cryptanalysis" which became a design criteria for the data encryption standard (DES) algorithm. (DES became an american government standard algorithm for encrypting sensitive unclassifed data over 1977 to 2002). At the time, the discovery was kept secret and not published.

Differential cryptanalysis was later re-discovered in the late 1980s by two Israeli cryptographers, where the NSA and american government had no easy ways of preventing publication in civilian academic journals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differ..._cryptanalysis


In recent times in a "vice versa" manner, the NSA attempted to sneak a deliberately weak algorithm (dual EC DRBG) into an official NIST standard. It was later discovered by civilian independent cryptographers that this weakness backdoor existed in this covert-NSA algorithm. Eventually the Snowden leaks revealed that this sneaky backdoor was done entirely deliberately and officially by the NSA.

https://blog.cryptographyengineering...of-dualecdrbg/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG
https://arstechnica.com/information-...s-regrettable/

This is assuming reality tv performers don't go on strike. (Unless you're referring to reruns).

Sure guy. It was your first post in TV Talk in almost a year and you specifically came to this thread and attacked me, instead of debating the subject, but it's OK, cause you're a Moderator.

There isn't much passion left on a website devoted to physical media that hasn't updated their main page in a year

For me, in six months I may have my watch queues finally trimmed down. There's still new content being released, but I have a massive back-catalog of shows to watch. I got around to watching The Wire during the pandemic, but there's still The Expanse, among many others. I still have to watch the new season of Good Omens, Dark Winds looks interesting, etc.

Again, 599 scripted TV shows were released last year. Even if the average was only, say, 6 hours of content per show, that's like near 3600 hours of content, divided by like 3 hours of TV a night would be 1200 days, or 3.2 years worth of content to watch. Now, granted, I'm likely not going to me interested in a lot of that content, but even if I was only interest in 1/3rd of it, that's a year's worth of TV viewing, from just one year of TV production.

Not to mention that Youtube creators are still producing content. Some More News is a decent stand-in for political comedy shows like Last Week Tonight, and there's lots of other interesting Youtube channels. And documentaries are still being made.

That said, if you're still watching linear TV, pickings are going to become slim, but that's happened before, like with the last writers's strike, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Edit: Oh, and there's still foreign TV production, if you don't mind reading subtitles, or at least hearing a different accent (British, Irish, Australian, etc. )

Most of this won't publicly be announced, just expect some shows to not come back and others to be heavily gutted. Once this strike is over, it'll be more clear. Remember, this is the shit your friends at the WGA was discussing over and over and over how they studios wanted to do "force majeure" by making the strike last 90 days. If it didn't happen, shouldn't we be celebrating the studios for not being dicks?

Meanwhile, again, hundreds of thousands of BTL workers and others are out of jobs, but as usual, fuck them, Writers need more!

Gizmo is just trying to distract from the fact that he doesn't actually care about any Hollywood workers, and would throw the crew under the bus in a minute if they dared to strike and halt production as well.

It's just one of a half dozen tired, unimaginative, arguments that have already been refuted that he cycles through, since he's unable to actually defend any of them or hold a serious conversation.