> Explicit (costly) patents can remain in place to secure industrial-grade research processes
I keep reading about big companies i) developing very similar drugs that are different enough to avoid patents, ii) using their size to prevent litigation.
That is a thing (though arguably there is still value in the reformulations). A good current example would be orally administered wegovy, which received an additional patent on top of semaglutide for combining the drug with an absorption enhancer. This is a genuine advancement, and did require clinical trials (not all patentable improvements do) but it is ultimately just a variation on an existing drug.
That being said, the patent on semaglutide still expires at the same time and biosimilars (or generics in other cases) can be produced at that time using the injectable formulation (or a new alternative). This seems reasonable to me
The "me too" drug still need to go through an R&D, clinical trail and approval process, so combined with patents the exclusivity period is at least several years. Abolishing patents would completely remove the exclusivity period
The government could always pay for results too, like $10B for something that does this. I don’t love it either and am not positive it is better than patents.
Careful, you're going to trigger all the Kiwi Farms trolls, who will insist on "Master", then they'll demonstrate their commitment to free speech by downvoting and flag brigading us.
Cooling is probably the easiest problem to solve, easier than power. And in both cases, the problem is solved by mass to orbit. All you need for cooling is a big f-ing radiator. Solar panels are chips, and not trivial to manufacture. But a radiator is just a hunk of metal with some pipes.
That's why the cost of mass to orbit is the most important thing. You can solve almost any space problem by just throwing more mass at it.
Any hardware that could be launched to orbit could also be put on a container ship in international waters. It makes zero sense to put these things in space.
You can't deploy enough solar panels on a container ship to feed the datacenter, and a nuclear reactor, while not impossible, is far more expensive than solar panels.
Solar panels are 4x more efficient in space. 2x because of lack of atmosphere and another 2x because there are 24 hours of sunlight in SSO.
Is it really that hard to just say, "I don't know if it will work or not"?
You can't deploy enough solar panels on a container ship to feed the datacenter
Ridiculous. Have you ever seen a container ship? One engine on a container ship puts out 80 megawatts, or around 80 orbital data centers' worth of power. So if there's not enough room for solar, which would surprise me greatly, then running a generator is not going to be a problem.
As for the lack of 24-hour operation, a ~50% duty cycle is a perfectly reasonable tradeoff for not having to launch something into LEO. You can easily deploy several times as many installations for the same money if they don't have to work in space. And they will be maintainable, to boot.
Okay, I admit I underestimated the container ship benefits. 80+ MW is a lot of power and you get easy cooling to boot. Fuel cost is a problem (relative to solar), and you can't do inference on it, but it might make sense for training.
Don't get me wrong, nobody is a bigger fan of economical and sustainable civilian access to space than I am. (Which means nobody is more disillusioned and resentful of Musk than I am.)
And I fully sympathize with the need to remove these things from local and even national sovereignty, having seen as an increasingly-horrified American just how destructive populist influence can be.
But putting millions of servers in orbit? That just doesn't seem like the way forward, for so many reasons.
you're all so clueless with these arguments. there's 5x the solar power in space. it's all about how many watts of compute you can bring online. in a sun synchronous orbit there is 24-hr solar power. there is no weather or maintenance.
I'm kinda tempted to do that to classic MacOS. But only kinda, because copyright and trademarks are things, and I don't want to risk incurring the wrath of any legal team, let alone a trillion dollar corporation's legal team.
I wonder if they already use LLMs in development. However, and maybe I'm misremembering, but they were doing clean room development so it may not even be possible (because of copyrighted stuff leaking through LLMs).
Hollywood accounting rules are regular accounting rules (GAAP). The only reason “Hollywood accounting” is a thing is because of a bunch of actors who didn’t know the difference between “gross” and “net” points got screwed over.
Everyone involved still pays their taxes, but the special purpose vehicle used to organize the production is essentially a passthrough entity.
If you’re not a name, you’re not getting gross points. There’s a wide swathe of participants (actors, writers, directors…) who need to demonstrate risk by taking net points to get signed, and they are routinely screwed by tactics like artificially inflated self-dealing distribution fees that cause the “production” itself to show a paper loss while the IP has generated hundreds of millions of dollars more than has been invested into it.
Movie Money
Understanding Hollywood's (creative) Accounting Practices
9781879505865
This is THE book on the subject.
There's a lot more to it than that. Sometimes productions get creatively charged by the studios costs that may not be directly related to shift losses. Sometimes contracts redefine common terms so your points structure is completely misleading.
I presume that what happens is if a movie is too profitable, other business expenses are shifted to the ledger to reduce the profits. This works because a movie is not a separate accounting entity.
There's also a separate LLC for the parent production company. The production company LLC can also send invoices to the individual movie LLC for services. People can get creative with production companies "overcharging" for various expenses back to the movie's LLC but whatever creative accounting they want to do still needs to ultimately satisfy IRS scrutiny if there's an audit. There are entertainment attorneys that specialize in movie LLCs.
> whatever creative accounting they want to do still needs to ultimately satisfy IRS scrutiny if there's an audit.
Well, yes, but avoiding taxes is not the point of "Hollywood Accounting", rather avoiding paying actors.
The IRS can collect taxes from whichever business entity makes a profit, but, critically, actors cannot. They signed a deal with one entity, and are only payed a share of net profits if that one particular entity makes a profit.
Hollywood Accounting, then, is the process of shifting costs around so that the legal entity responsible for paying the actors never makes a profit.
The SPVs never own anything and never have any expertise in anything. So they have to pay the parent company for a wide range of services, from advertising and marketing to distribution to prop and equipment rental. That makes it easy to shift costs into the SPV as necessary.
>Well, yes, but avoiding taxes is not the point of "Hollywood Accounting", rather avoiding paying actors.
I wasn't saying avoiding taxes was the purpose. Instead, I'm saying whatever "bogus" or "inflated" expenses that the production company LLC is charging to the movie LLC still has to be somewhat plausible. A simplistic example of what they can't do:
- Tom Cruise TC Productions LLC sends an invoice to MissionImpossible8 movie LLC with a single line item that says "script advisory service for $1 billion dollars" which then conveniently causes the movie's balance sheet to be negative $1 billion dollars and thus never make a profit.
The point is the production LLC, the distributor entities, etc all charging the movie LLC so that it shows zero profits ... still need to play their financial accounting games with more sophistication than that. Yes, go ahead and fabricate various costs to avoid paying actors on "net profit points" but it still needs a veneer of plausibility. Otherwise, the IRS comeback will be, "Is the $1 billion fee the real market rate for script advisory services? Do you have evidence of that amount ever being paid? etc etc"
Why would that matter if it's all still a subsidiary of Apple/Amazon/Disney/Comcast/Netflix/Sony?
The relevant taxing authorities would be concerned with the parent companies' financials, not the subsidiaries. Moving money from right hand to left hand doesn't change one's tax liabilities.
"Hollywood accounting" only refers to civil disputes due to insufficiently defined contracts between two businesses (usually actors and producers).
The benefit of “Hollywood accounting” isn’t necessarily tax avoidance; that’s what the tax credits are for. Rather, “Hollywood accounting” provides a way to avoid paying profit-based compensation.
That seems an incredibly generous description (or breathtakingly naive, but I'm giving the benefit of the doubt because hopefully most people aren't that credulous).
The point of Hollywood accounting is to intentionally create enough inflated expenses (billed from companies controlled by the studios or related parties of the producers etc.) to ensure that the net profit is zero or less, even when the film actually generated a lot of income.
It's true that tax gets paid eventually (and somewhere, maybe a tax haven) but it is intentionally creative accounting designed to minimise tax and screw people out of their royalties.
Those movies didn't lose money under GAAP. However, the specific legal entities that the talent made their profit deals with did not earn profits due to the way that revenues and expenses were allocated between the companies involved in making and distributing those films. For each of those films, at least one company was and is earning $$$, but the talent doesn't get to make a revenue sharing deal with those companies.
> For each of those films, at least one company was and is earning $$$, but the talent doesn't get to make a revenue sharing deal with those companies.
That doesn't sound right. Traditionally, and in particular in the case of Forrest Gump, the distinction is between people who contract for a percentage of net profit (always zero) and people who contract for a percentage of gross revenue. The revenue is measured at the same point either way; it's just about whether you got suckered or not.
The revenue hasn't been measured at the same point in our lifetimes. It was never just about net and gross but also which entity you had points with. A lot of talent had gross deals with the wrong entities.
Tax incentives these days include transferable tax credits. Even if your net tax rate was 0%, you can sell the credit to someone else, typically a bank. IOW, states and countries give you money, not simply give you a tax rate break.
I'm not sure of the exact history, but it may have been copied from how affordable housing projects are subsidized at the Federal and state levels: https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/RS22389.pdf
Affordable housing tax credits are contingent on a tremendous amount of regulations and stipulations, including who ends up holding equity in the property (it's not easy to use these as passthrough vehicles to get personally rich), so the private lenders tend to be repeat players, often banks, who understand how to navigate the process. Among other things, I guess it's a way to outsource oversight, so that the government doesn't need to maintain a huge bureaucracy to police each and every development project. OTOH, the financing complexity comes at a cost; a significant fraction of the value of the tax credits pays for lawyers and accountants, rather than to actual construction.
I don't know if filmmaking subsidies are more lax or easier to game.
Also, I think using tax credit schemes, instead of direct payments, might be a way to obfuscate the cost of these programs from a legislative and political perspective; not unlike the Earned Income tax credit. Nominally speaking, tax credits reduce government revenues rather contribute to expenditures; the latter draws far more attention.
I keep reading about big companies i) developing very similar drugs that are different enough to avoid patents, ii) using their size to prevent litigation.
So would keeping patents help?
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