Trump announces 100% tariffs on movies ‘produced in foreign lands’(theguardian.com) |
Trump announces 100% tariffs on movies ‘produced in foreign lands’(theguardian.com) |
I don't see a problem here, this is what tariffs are actually for. Broken clock is right twice a day yada yada
eta: one can not like the man and not think this is a bad idea. same as we don't need more dolls from china and it's weird for us to suddenly die on that hill. /shrug
Think of all the American jobs that are lost when a film studio chooses to shoot on-location in Paris instead of attempting to build a replica of Paris in Los Angeles. No one ever thinks about all of the construction workers who never get a chance to build a fake Eiffel Tower, or all of the struggling local actors whose attempts to fake French accents will never be heard by audiences, let alone the HVAC technicians who make sure the air conditioners work properly in the indoor studio sets that have to be used to film outdoor scenes in Paris so that the Champs-Élysées doesn't look like Wilshire Boulevard.
As an outsider it seems a lot like groups pulling the political levers in the US only ensure candidates that can be ‘handled’ are put forward and those that can’t will be rooted out.
That’s why the choice was between braindead Biden vs deranged Trump. And when it was clear Biden wasn’t an option, a belated shift to try sell Kamala to the electorate.
I don’t think we’ll see strong presidential candidates - those clearly motivated to better the country and its citizens - in the near future either. The process now seems to suit the corporate and lobby groups who jostle to get their share of influence.
I mean, there was one candidate who fawns over dictators, is a felon, always acts in his own personal interest, and had very public plans to try to dismantle democracy and seize ultimate power. Then there was another who would at worst continue the status quo and not try to overthrow the government.
It feels ridiculous to claim there was no appealing option. It’s like being given the option between losing both arms or being slapped in the face and shrugging that none of the options is appealing. At least try to pick the least unappealing.
That’s what you have spelled out but failed to appreciate the significance of. For a chunk of the electorate the status quo wasn’t working for them. I see from all the down votes people seem blind to this.
The ‘status quo’ may have been fine for you hence why you think that was better to continue…
Why would a political apparatus that only wants to offer candidates that can be 'handled' instead offer up a senile geriatric and a stubborn narcissist, both of whom are severely lacking in their capacity to take direction?
elbows up! Though i dont recommend continuing to antagonize trump even more because it's just triggering his ego and making him retaliate.
The de minimis revocation and decoupling level tariffs means china-usa trade is over. There was no standing up.
He did have to reverse on CUSMA protected trade to avoid lawsuits. He's now targeting non-cusma protected trade.
No doubt. But voting for someone who openly makes the worst parts of the status quo worse isn’t a solution either. If the current situation isn’t working for you, choosing to make it more difficult on yourself is nonsensical.
> The ‘status quo’ may have been fine for you hence why you think that was better to continue
I’m not American. But please do elucidate me on which groups exactly were being handed a bad hand by the status quo and are now better off. I think the answer will be quite enlightening.
This is 100% targeted at Canada, and trying to threaten destroying the Canadian film industry as another lever against Canada.
And it is laughably silly. Even in Canada alone, "Hollywood" nets far more than it ever spends here[1]. And of course worldwide media is something that the US has an enormous trade surplus. It's yet another harebrained bit of nonsense from the extremely smooth, simpleton mind of Trump and his greasy used-car salesman, carnival barker Howard Lutnick.
What Trump is really achieving in all of these declarations is making the rest of the world ask why do we accept Hollywood controlling the film or music industry, or Silicon Valley controlling the tech industry, or NYC the financial industry, etc? The end result of this is going to be massive decentralization and lowered importance of US industry leadership.
[1] Not to mention that the tax credits quite literally subsidizes the industry. And FWIW, I am wholly against tax credits for film productions, and much like paying a sports team to build a stadium, the accounting of the supposed benefit just doesn't make any sense.
One of the most amazing things about the Idiocracy administration in place in the US is this belief that everything is the domain of Americans, and if any other nation is doing it, clearly they're stealing it. Canada had an automotive industry as long as the US did. We used to have the AutoPact before NAFTA, and we need to bring it back. Canada has a robust film industry on its own.
So when Howard Nutlick does his embarrassing "why does Canada make our films" act, there is a point there -- zero US media should be allowed into Canada. None. All IP rights on US products should be abolished. All patents and other.
Seems like Trump is the best ally for all those who want to reduce US influence in the world.
Last time he let himself be surrounded by people with experience from other administrations. They frequently ran interference. This time he's doing it his way.
It's not as if this is unexpected. He said what he was going to do. This is what the voters voted for, and his constituents support him.
There’s a nugget of truth to Hollywood moving production overseas, but I’m not convinced a massive tariff will have the effect Trump wants. Just like all his other economic fuckery.
https://bsky.app/profile/garyalexander.bsky.social/post/3lof...
> This user has requested that their content only be shown to signed-in users.
Oh great, a Twitter replacement that implements worst of it's predecessor features.
The Trump admin seems to be hastening the day that foreign website are more popular than US websites.
Huge amounts of the top brass of hollywood are disgusting. Tom Cruise and the rest of Scientologies leadership should be in prison right now, and that's just one tiny example of the sea of shit found in hollywood.
It’s like saying that the entire tech industry should be destroyed and screw all the tech workers, they should all lose their jobs because Zuckerberg is an awful person.
I agree with you that Scientology is a criminal organization though.
I can't think of any country that the US imports more movies from than it exports?
Even if you believe in tariffs what industry in America does this protect that needs protection?
Of is he gambling on recipritoral tarrifs to 'punish' the liberal Hollywood???? Sounds conspiracy-like but I legit can't think of any other reason this makes sense.
Since Trump is relying on declarations of national emergencies for his tariffs, there's the question whether it's even legal given that Berman Amendments to the IEEPA[0] explicitly exempt "informational materials, including but not limited to, publications, *films*, posters, phonograph records, photographs, microfilms, microfiche, tapes, compact disks, CD ROMs, artworks, and news wire feeds" from the President's authority under IEEPA.[1]
Even if we set that aside and ignore the likely legal challenges, how would you actually implement them? It's not like a movie or TV episode "produced" overseas gets transmitted into the US each time somebody wants to watch it. It's a digital file, and you're really only sending it once. So when do you tariff the damn thing, how do you manage to actually do it since there's not exactly a literal port of entry for the internet, and what exactly do you value it at? The system isn't built to track and tariff info being uploaded to random servers, and making it work would require all sorts of new law.
Plus, what's the legal definition of "production" he wants to use? What constitutes foreign production? Can some of the producing just be done remotely? What if raw footage is uploaded instead and then it's edited here? Or a nearly finished copy that just needs something minor done to be considered ready? Hollywood accountants are in a league of their own. Put them in a room with lawyers and accountants whose focus is the creative eccentricities of tariff engineering--hello, chicken tax people[0]--and I shudder to imagine what they'd get up to.
We're only a few months in at this point, and I feel like I'm losing my mind.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Emergency_Econom...
1. https://www.congress.gov/bill/103rd-congress/house-bill/2333...
China has been stepping on a number fronts. They are working on trade deals that exclude the US, and I'm sure are excited about the soft power vacuum left when USAID shutdown.
Look at the list of films made at Pinewood Studios in England, there are plenty of films I'd consider American: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_productions_filmed_at_...
(I'm sure there are other examples, this is just the studio I'm familiar with.)
The world will adjust to this, it just takes longer than a few months...
Not sure how that looks - probably starts with not imposing tariffs.
The EU could do it; basically nobody else is in the ballpark to try. No chance though.
Everyone is looking at Nigeria. More than doubling their population by the end of the century. Extremely healthy population pyramid.
India is soon to be the new Asian superpower. Which sure is wrecking their neighbours with their slower urbanization that is avoiding the WW2 blight.
These 2 are the likely next world order candidates; if they play their cards right.
Queen Victoria would like a word.
Anyways, here's a more direct source that should be publicly accessible, the prior was my first encounter with it.
https://bsky.app/profile/robertandrewp.bsky.social/post/3log...
Then there's Africa which China has been actively engaging and the USA has all but left at this point.
The global south will be interesting to see who engages there.
In other words there is only profit/loss and strength/weakness, not right/wrong when it comes to global politics. There might be some exception cases like material support for Ukraine, but that is limited. Even in that case, there is a bit of selfishness - countries like Poland know Ukraine is acting as a buffer, if they don't help the Ukrainians, they themselves will be next on Russia's list
It’s the cultural equivalent of being the world’s reserve currency, it’s a massive free advantage in almost any situation. Stupid stupid stupid to threaten it.
I know the US better than many parts of Germany.
I read an article years ago from a lawyer (might have been a judge) complaining that, thanks to US TV and movies, people in Sweden know more about how the US justice system works than the Swedish system. Far too many people just fall back on their US TV knowledge of how they think courts work and that they keep having to explain to the people that, no that's not how things works in Sweden.
- Isolationism
- Increase US influence worldwide
- Exploit US influence worldwide
Each one will have a negative effect on the other two.
If you aren't aware, they've shipped most IATSE jobs to Serbia since 2023.
They used to shoot most Disney and Netflix shows in LA and Atlanta. Now they're happening in Eastern Europe. They fly the cast out and film with crews that don't have labor laws or unions and that are an order of magnitude cheaper.
IATSE members have been forced to leave the industry, sell their homes, and move out of California. There are a few holdouts, but it's likely they'll have to exit the industry too.
Once that capacity goes, it'll never come back.
Studios are sitting vacant. CBRE is going to come in and turn them all into office parks and mixed use.
Thats it. The attack is the strategy. Burn some stuff down and move on.
I think it's more pernicious than that. The whole MAGA movement has a rather obvious accelerationist agenda, which leads to self-destructive policies like dismantling basic social safety nets and eliminating basic state institutions. Their policies don't make sense to anyone outside of their cult because we presume the goal is to build upon the state institutions and improve upon what's already there, whereas the MAGA crowd applauds destroying everything down to fundamental rights such as the right to a fair trial. They want to see te world burn hoping they'll be able to rebuild it to their liking. The only members of the MAGA that so far voiced regrets are those who faced the fact that they themselves were being left behind.
> that doesn’t change the fact that Hollywood projects American culture around the world in a way that the government could never do itself
I'll all for the "soft power" of the US, including cultural influence. Just wanted to point out that things have been changing slowly. More and more people started to be more credulous about Hollywood's values. Case in point, Blank Panther won Oscar, yet it was widely criticized in China and its box office in China was miserable. Below is the translation of a popular criticism of Black Panther:
Imagine you made a movie about China, kind of like Black Panther. In it, China is this isolated country with crazy-advanced technology, way ahead of the rest of the world. But instead of a modern government, it's run by tribal warlords—each one basically a dictator. To choose their top leader, they fight each other with knives and spears on top of the Forbidden City.
In your story, Chinese people still do foot binding like it’s totally normal. The elite chieftains live in ridiculous luxury inside the imperial palace. Their medicine is so advanced it’s basically magic—people come back from the dead—and they’ve got levitating trains that look like they’re from another planet.
But regular folks? They live in grass huts, spend their days feeding rhinos (or maybe pandas), and there are barely any roads in the whole country.
Then you take this movie to China and tell everyone it’s a tribute to Chinese culture? People would be so insulted, they might actually beat you up.
If you haven't been following what's happening with film production, basically production has moved from LA, Atlanta, New York, etc. to cheap countries in Eastern Europe and Asia.
A vast majority of IATSE film crew productions have now vacated the US. It's decimated the local film crew workforce and forced many to leave the industry entirely.
I wrote more about it here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43893915
The film crew folks post a lot about it on Reddit, especially in the /r/film industry(city) subreddits:
https://www.reddit.com/r/FilmIndustryLA/comments/1k39cod/the...
It wasn't.
He's going to flip-flop on this 15 times in the next three months while studios (and other industries) go into hibernation waiting until something (or anything) stabilizes.
Does it, though? I mean, the Trump administration is only making it more expensive for theaters to screen non-US movies. Are you going to even bother going to a cinema if the movie you wanted to see isn't made available? And how dominant are non-US productions in US cinemas?
It sounds like more tarrif bullshit,where the only output is lose-lose.
Since the first Trump administration, young people in Western Europe have increasingly lost their idealization of the United States. I'm 43 and moved to the US ten years ago and I feel like I'm part of the last generation that still wanted to move here. Highly qualified people I know in Europe no longer even consider coming here.
This is 1000% pro-union.
IATSE workers have been decimated by the move of productions to Serbia since 2023.
LA and Atlanta film productions have all but collapsed since the offshoring of production. Serbian crews work without unions for much cheaper than local IATSE members.
This is designed to save IATSE and domestic American production.
Cutting off Hollywood from its funding sources is part of the plan. MAGA controlled states cancelled tax breaks and subsidies for film/tv production years ago, in some cases torpedoing billions in investment in new studios. This isn't a new strategy, this is the amplification of an existing strategy.
But I presume that the major effect of this tariff will be to force large media conglomerates (aka news agencies) to think very carefully about how their news divisions cover Trump.
Isn't it the other way around? American culture was dictated by Hollywood, and the rest of the world mistook it for real American culture?
They're not stupid (well they might be, but that's beside the point), they're just in such fundamental disagreement with you that it's possible to squint and assess the situation as "yup, they're stupid" (and frankly that's a lot more comforting of an assessment).
Film production has been moving steadily overseas chasing cheap labor. By forcing some of it back or forcing it to stay put it makes that industry and the people in it a little more dependent upon government, a little more dependent upon isolationist economic policy, a little more inclined to stay in the government's good graces (i.e. less likely to create stuff the .gov doesn't like), etc, etc, even if it kneecaps the ability of the overall industry to perform globally.
Edit: I shouldn't have to say this but none of the above should be construed as an endorsement of a) high tariffs or b) increased government control of media)
Media with so-called "leftist" themes tend to do well commercially than "rightist" themes, so Hollywood just follows the money?
It doesn’t matter whether Trump understands $thing. Pretending that he’s acting in good faith to make things better, but is somehow failing because he doesn’t get X, Y, or Z falls right into the trap. He’s trying to destroy American “soft power”. It doesn’t interest him.
Neither does a good economy, schools, NATO, etc. All of these things are being destroyed or mangled on purpose.
Local US film industry is dying because it's all offshored.
I live in a country that is leeching off the US film industry with subsidies. Our country benefits at the expense of American jobs.
IMO the other shoe here is stronger content restrictions and more government control of what gets made. Easier to do that with US productions, hence the attempt to make everything distributed in the US a US production.
Protect Hollywood from who, exactly? IIUC, an increasing number of "American" movies (i.e., those produced/financed by American studios) are being filmed outside the US.
This isn't a bunch of foreign film makers ganging up on poor, beleaguered film companies like Disney, Paramount and Neflix.
They, of course, are going to go out of business any minute now because those evil foreigners are taking away their movies. /s
No. Those very profitable studios are choosing to make movies outside the US to bolster those high profits by reducing labor, physical plant and safety expenditures.
As such, how is charging Hollywood studios 100% tariffs to import the movies those same studios paid to make "protecting" Hollywood?
Don't mistake the above for my support of Hollywood studios. They are the OG rapacious scumbags that the SV tech bros are trying (and sometimes succeeding) in emulating.
Still nobody putting up a meaningful fight. Your window is closing.
Biggest real action movie last year was “Deadpool & Wolverine”, a Disney movie which was shot in UK and made a bit over 50% of its revenue overseas[1]. Its main stars were Canadian and Australian. Does this mean that you’ll have to pay double to go watch it to cinemas in the US? Will that make Disney to focus on the international market?
[1] https://the-numbers.com/movie/Deadpool-and-Wolverine-(2024)
What did he mean when he said this? Who knows - he probably doesn't even remember himself.
What will the resulting policy, if any, actually be? His advisors were probably hearing it for the first time just like the rest of us.
But it probaby counts that it was shot in the UK. The reason why Disney does that is because they get tax breaks from the UK government, which I think it's what Trump is referring to.
Amazing.
Or the new Lord of The Rings in the Grand Canyon... :)
Why would it be more expensive to produce it in the US, then? I thought one of the reasons for making the movie "abroad" was to get some subsidies from other countries "if you film it here", kind of.
You could construct a variety of accounting methods to calculate a tax on the 'foreign content' of movies, but how do you actually impose this tax?
A tariff on physical goods is easy. A country requires that goods enter the country through customs facilities, and then the nice customs official doesn't release the thing until the tax is paid. The legal and physical ability to impose these taxes is long, long established.
How do you physically impose a tariff on a movie? If the master is transported physically, what is its value? The value of the fixed copy/master doesn't necessarily include the value of the IP involved, in the same way that a DVD of a $500 million movie might have a retail value of $20. What about movies transferred digitally, since there are no customs checkpoints on fiber-optic lines?
What legal apparatus would be used to impose this tax? Trump is currently getting away with the physical-goods tariffs because the legal infrastructure to collect the taxes is already in place, and remaining legal disputes are just about whether the President can unilaterally set or change tariff rates. If you'd need new law to "tariff movies," then the chance of this whim turning into a real tax drops sharply.
Apparently, here's the data:
California is losing its grip on the film industry as Canada, the UK, and Australia outspend the U.S. on production subsidies.
LA’s soundstage occupancy dropped to 90% pre-strikes, while Warner Brothers and Netflix ramp up overseas filming.
Even a $3.75 billion tax credit boost might not be enough to keep Hollywood on top.
Meanwhile, Vancouver is adding 20 new soundstages, and UK productions hit a record $7 billion.
Here's Ben Affleck talking about this: https://nypost.com/2025/04/18/entertainment/ben-affleck-crit..., https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/1913449981643456612
Here's Adam Scott and Rob Lowe talking about it: https://x.com/medx0/status/1919178518031896903
Basically it seems that movie production and jobs created by it moved outside of US in a massive way.
Hence the leftist tarrifs meant to reverse that and bring movie production back in US
It'd be clearly unconstitutional to ban them outright; so, where and how's that line drawn?
late edit: I just want to note the text of POTUS' announcement includes this: "It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda!" The overtly expressed motive here is animus towards the content of the speech (not some content-neutral factor like trade balances).
The EU has been struggling with base evasion and profit shifting (BEPS) from US companies because it was all about IP and they never dared to tax it in fear of upsetting the US government. But if the move comes from the US first, then they will follow suite with a lot of enthusiasm.
A government can apply tariffs to any exchange it chooses, but movies are explicitly excluded from the law on which Trump has relied for tariffs, so short of getting a new law passed to authorize movie tariffs, there is no legal authority.
My point is that it can apply taxes equivalent to tariffs (well, like you said, only Congress can), but since it's not going to be defined by the same law or be regulated by the same international conventions and isn't going to be collected by the same administration nor from the same people (the tax will be raised on the retailer directly, unlike tariffs), I think it's fair not to call that “tariffs” since it's really going to be a very different type of tax.
To me this move seems more a kind of cultural censorship. Similar to how many foreign movies can't be shown in Russia or China.
Most American movies are shot outside of the US these days because among other factors Hollywood unions have made it way more expensive to shoot in the US.
Of course. It's clearly about the fentanyl emergency.
“This is a concerted effort by other Nations and, therefore, a National Security threat,” Trump said in the Truth Social post. “It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda!”
To me this seems to motivate the tariffs as a battle against foreign propaganda.
Apparently, the president has had the power to change the price of anything at anytime.
If you want to change that, i.e. make people aware of it, don’t just name the section; link to it and briefly explain what it is and why people should be against it. Even doing just one of those three would help your cause.
Letting party members rather than party elites choose the head of party always sounds good in practice but often ends up badly (Truss, Corbyn, etc)
There is EU regulation requiring that 30% of content available on streaming services for European customers are "European works". The definition is a bit complicated, but this is definitely a big part of why plenty of production has moved to Europe and the UK.
If this goes through it could bring some problems for Netflix et al. They can always artificially restrict the low-value content content from customers in EU countries though. As if the arcane licensing and availability landscape wasn't crazy enough for media...
(See the "Audiovisual Media Services Directive")
Anyway, as usual other countries will retaliate. American movies will become both more expensive to make and taxed abroad. Meanwhile, we can expect more people will turn to piracy to cope with rising inflation. I can't imagine any scenario where this isn't backfiring.
Because I would love to read the National Security justification for imposing a tariff on foreign movies.
In fact I'm sure some US companies are gonna be hit by this such as Netflix ? Disney ?
1. Media spin or early reporting, it is nothing in stone yet. This should be the understanding for any "new policy" announced m-f for this admin.
2. Even if it is to be set in stone, likely will be rescinded.
3. It is vague on purpose ^
4. Assuming it becomes set in ston, it is a direct pander to Disney, Universal etc. from the current admin. Chinese film making (animation in particular) is now outperforming Disney in every metric in every market.
5. Disney et all. stand to lose either way. This is capitalism at work and american film studios will see costs skyrocket as local and foreign competitors silo resources.
And the dialogs not inspired from the book are as expected, but that's modern cinema, not Hollywood in particular. That noone took the torch from Audiard or Prevert is a shame.
> The authority granted to the President by this section does not include the authority to regulate or prohibit, directly or indirectly [...] the importation from any country, or the exportation to any country, whether commercial or otherwise, regardless of format or medium of transmission, of any information or informational materials, including but not limited to, publications, films, posters, phonograph records, photographs, microfilms, microfiche, tapes, compact disks, CD ROMs, artworks, and news wire feeds.
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1144521171432...
What is going on there? Why don't they fix the likes for him? :-D
It ended up with 11 deaths, thousands of injured, thousands of people were arrested hundreds went to jail. Look at Serbia, Greece, damn even Turkey seems to put a better fight lol
https://www.ledauphine.com/france-monde/2018/12/13/gilets-ja...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Quebec_student_protests
And giving away the money? You’d lose all amenities of a school, the building, its land, the social benefits of school interactions, etc. Most importantly, you lose classroom management of a teacher, and the kids lose out big time.
A PhD tutor stood in front of determinedly mischevious children, most couldn’t last two weeks.
If the sky is falling on everything he does, and you're wrong some of the time, then people will stop listening. There's plenty that this administration has done that is objectively horrible.
It made watching TV shows like Stargate SG1 additionally amusing though -- every planet they visited was basically some location near Vancouver. Me and friends used to joke about how much like carcinisation is a thing in evolution, in the Stargate universe all planets eventually ended up looking like British Columbia.
Work for IATSE crew union members has declined precipitously.
During the pandemic, there was so much demand for content that the studios spent a lot of money teaching foreign crews how to produce films. They sent a lot of staff to Eastern Europe and Asia to train local crews. Serbia, etc., where the crews are making well below union wages and can work long hours without regulation.
Since 2023, 60% or so of productions have vacated LA, Atlanta, and New York in favor of being shot overseas. They just fly the cast out. It's significantly cheaper than filming at home.
IATSE membership is being decimated. Lots of folks have moved out of California because the jobs just aren't there anymore.
Have you ever tried to watch Korean movies from the last 20 years? It's all melodramatic romance-crime-poverty slop, with the rare Kim Ki-duk or Bong Joon Ho in there to balance it out. And that's a country with a wonderful reputation for quality film-making.
I mean you get zombies on a train and that's a fun popcorn flick, but it's forgettable. It's no Tremors, Twister, or Independence Day.
In Indonesia for every The Raid there's 999 poorly acted, poorly shot melodramas with a thin well-trodden story.
And don't get me started on "let's yell at each other for 120 minutes" Russian cinema.
American movies are by far the most watchable, especially when you don't feel like going on a heart-wrenching journey of despair, which is all international cinema excels at.
Having lived in other countries since, this appears to be a common syndrome. You can't judge a country by its tourists, and you certainly can't judge it by the small number of movies that get past its border control.
So many things that hollywood produces are remakes of foreign movies, except with an order of magnitude more money poured in and palate-switched for american audiences. (which, due to the sheer volume of content that comes out of hollywood- becomes the default international palate).
The entertainment industry in Sweden (girl with the dragon tattoo, a man called Otto) and the UK (the countries I have lived in) is undoubtedly very strong, even comparatively poor (not intended as a slur here) India is quite famous for its bombastic action movies.
Russia too, has some of the most thought provoking movies that I've ever seen. Leviathan and Durak- they even have your "fun" action style movies (Brat and Brat 2 for fantastic examples).
To say that Hollywood produces more and thus sometimes better, and that other counties make slop betrays two things:
1) Hollywood steals vigorously from other countries.
2) Other countries produce works that do not translate well for american audiences.
Yes, the US is a wealthy country, with a big population, a healthy movie industries and a lot of consumer. It does mean that the US produce a lot of movies, from auteur movie to holywood blockbuster. Disproportionally more than any other country in the world. But dismissing every non-US movie industry just show your ignorance about cinema in general.
"It's just temporary pain"
"We need to consume less"
"I don't understand tariffs"
MAGA reminds me of That One Guy we all knew in High School who just wanted to cause trouble, start fights, insult people, light fires in the bathroom, destroy things, and basically grief anyone who encountered him. There's no good intentions here--no aim to make things better for everyone. It was just ABCD with that guy: anger, belligerence, cruelty, and defiance. Fast forward to today, and we've got 70M+ of these guys voting.
I knew one of those guys. Obviously I thought he was dangerous but figured he was too crude to get far in life.
he's now a maga congressman from Texas
For instance, one goal was that "The United States must regain its role as the 'Arsenal of Democracy'... the United States built its reputation as a reliable partner with a strong defense industrial base that could supply military articles and goods in a timely manner."
But as explained in the video below, "The last three months have seen the worst damage to that reputation since the post-WWII order came into force."
The video is worth watching: it does bring out a lot of what you're talking about (different parts w/ different concerns), and does actually make sense of a lot of what Trump is saying and doing wrt Ukraine and NATO. I do find it preferable that the administration has rational goals which are simply not compatible with each other, than that they're behaving completely randomly.
None of them expected the "I" bit to be used? Ever?
It'll help thousands of Americans that used to be employed by said studios but were fired not because they couldn't do the job but because the greed of studio execs made them move production outside of the US, playing financial arbitrage games against the interest of the US.
Trump is trying to reverse this by making movies outside of the US, especially by US companies, more expensive. The goal here is not some statement about Hollywood but to bring movie production jobs back to US. The extras, the people who build sets, people who make food for actors etc. And jobs bring tax revenue and grow GDP, which helps every american.
I assume there are very few locations like the UK that are going to be significantly hit by the tarifs and might react with countermeasures that will affect only a small part of the overseas revenue.
You can build bigger sets for the same money in a country in eastern Europe.
Now Disney will have to bow down and kiss the ring or their us incomes will fail. Make it too expensive to not bow down.
That's how this works. I'll make doing business too painful for you unless you cater to my will. So surrender.
Well......... Let's see if the gambit will pay off.
I swear he has a set of 6 tiny books just the right size for his hands, each with 6 pages and on each page there are 6 categories of things.
He's rolls a dice 3 times to pick a category then a final one to pick from the list of 6 tariff levels to be applied.
Then when somone wakes up to see whatever unhinged shit he posted "this time" and realises how abjectly stupid it is, the whole things gets unwound. If any journalist dares mention it again then it was just "trolling the fake news media" and was never meant seriously.
I'm not sure why this (Section 174(c)(3)) [0] is relevant to our discussion in any way, but here it is for everyone's perusal:
>(3) Software development
>
>For purposes of this section, any amount paid or incurred
>in connection with >the development of any software shall
>be treated as a research or experimental >expenditure.
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/174
Edit: Fixed quote formatting.
I mean:
Next up is propaganda and filling Americans' minds with only what he wants you to know
No. "Propaganda and filling Americans' minds with only what he wants you to know" is what happened first using the internet to radicalize those without the wisdom to have seen this outcome.
And Idiocracy may not be so much an optimistic look at our future as the conservatives continue to implement their policies, as it is a cynical look at the results that conservatives implementing their policies have had on our present.
And things can get so much worse.
[1] “Deadpool and Wolverine”, “Wicked” and “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” in London, “Dune part 2” in Budapest and Italy, “Godzilla x Kong” in Australia. Only “Twisters” was filmed in the US.
The movies you listed as examples are Hollywood productions (aka Hollywod movies, aka American movies).
From the first paragraph of the article:
Donald Trump on Sunday announced on his Truth Social platform a 100% tariff on all movies “produced in Foreign Lands”, saying the US film industry was dying a “very fast death” due to the incentives that other countries were offering to draw American film-makers.
That is correct. Other countries are gutting Hollywood because Hollywood has become a hard place to make things. To pick a random example, the TV show Silo by Apple TV is made in the UK, not America, and the lead actress is Swedish. It's set in the USA, based on a story by an American author and produced by Apple but it's not made there.
This move is bad news for the UK and other countries that have built up a successful film industry but don't have the capital depth to fund big budget films, even with access to the US market. Now they lose access to US funding and can't easily export their films to the US either, assuming it goes through.
I kinda see how you got there, but man.
This is the same guy behind Office Space and Bevis and Butthead. He's poking fun at out of touch intellectuals and consumption. Calling it pro-eugenics though...
It's going to be a long slow process of firstly making sure that all Democrats are actually anti-Trump through primary challenges, then trying to ensure a D sweep in the mid-term elections. I don't think there's much chance of anything before then.
We need more angrier people.
France: 3M/70M ~ 4%
US: 2M/350M ~ .5%
The US needs roughly a tenfold increase in numbers to match France.
We had a booming, absolutely thriving industry for nearly two decades. People moved from LA to be here. We built hundreds of studios and sound stages. Now they're sitting empty.
Everyone is going to Serbia now. IATSE folks are having to leave the industry entirely.
Here's a quote for you:
--- start quote ---
“Labour unions contend that between 35 and 50 percent of feature films turned out by American producers are made abroad,” the New York Times reported on October 4 1959 as the volume of what were then called “runaway productions” began to soar.
--- end quote ---
Notice the year.
Hollywood has been running away from California for over 70 years. Your obsession with Serbia completely ignores that all of Europe is used for movie and TV productions, and Serbia is just the latest addition: https://issuu.com/thelatesteditionishereandfreetoview/docs/c...
And stop repeating the Serbia line in every comment. You've done it multiple times. What productions are in Serbia? How many out of how many?
Did you lose your job to one in Serbia and now it's sour grapes all along?
In general, all of Europe is bursting at the seams with movie and TV productions, many of them American: https://issuu.com/thelatesteditionishereandfreetoview/docs/c...
If american producers wanted to produce in america, they always could. They never had to move. It would just be more expensive. It will still be more expensive even after tariffs. Tariffs don't make labor cheaper. Cheaper choice will just not exist for americans.
Modern tech is all about disruption. You get paid way too much because you’re squeezing costs (ie labor) out of business operations.
There was an action movie that filmed car chases in my city about 15 years ago. A bunch of the crew was at a bar I hung out with and we were trading stories. There was a dude who was making alot of money to essentially wet down the streets from a fire hydrant. There’s reasons for that — hydrants require some training to safely operate.
But end of the day, the money guys at Netflix, Amazon or whatever would rather just pay some rando a few bucks and let insurance deal with the damage. Or build a fake street in Serbia.
It is a US phone.
> No, it's made in China.
It doesn't make it any less of a US phone. If you go to Newegg, order a bunch of PC parts from CPU to case, and put them together in your room, how much of the PC was made in your neighborhood?
> The movies aforementioned are not made in the US either.
Ninsense. Do you think that gophers and local caterers are the ones producing and profiting from a movie production?
I can't believe these words have been said on HN.
The easy way to see this is to reverse your lens. We've been the beneficiary of soft power from Hollywood for a century. It'd be ridiculous to lose that power without at least trying to preserve it.
Have you watched British television or movies sometimes? They're not exactly sparing their country from criticism .. E.g. (the original) House of Cards, Not the Nine O'Clock News, etc.
The other country you mention, China, is a better match. But is that the kind of society that the USA wants to be?
Actually, ironically, you end up being wrong here, though in less of an Idiocracy way and more of a Orwellian "news propaganda machine tricked you" way.
You are missing something. If you're this confused about a topic, you should at a bare minimum read the Wikipedia page.
So rather than have them suffer with a lifetime of oral health problems, you can intervene in a transparent and cheap way to prevent these issues altogether.
The introduction of fluoride dramatically improved oral health. NYC has been doing it since the 1960s, so one would think we’d see evidence of the supposed negative effects.
Unless the new edict excludes farming out VFX. The VFX industry has been on its knees for years now, in a race to the bottom that has made r/vfx a pretty depressing place.
(Source: Spent the last few years working for a well-known VFX company)
* Narrow scope of Section 230.
* Stop U.S. companies from "feeding, training, and improving" AI datasets belonging to Chinese companies.
* Expedite work to support low-earth orbit satellites like StarLink.
VAT is bad for US because a car made in US is 22% more expensive when sold in UK than a car made in UK sold in US. VAT makes it harder for US car company to sell in UK. It reduces number of US jobs making cars.
UK giving tax breaks to US companies also reduces number of US jobs because a catering business in Los Angeles loses a job to a catering business in London. So does a carpenter, an extra etc.
It's all simple to understand, consistent and frankly very leftist.
that makes no sense.
Assuming the same amount of cars sold, with or without VAT the amount of US jobs making cars would stay the same. VAT is applied to any car regardless of origin it's not harder or easier for anyone.
But a UK car sold in the UK is also 22% more expensive than a UK car sold in the US (I'm going to overlook that you've completely overlooked sales taxes in the US).
"I say Los Angeles WAS the best, because I don't think it's true any more. For many decades, film tax incentives have sucked production from Hollywood (and New York). Also, due to technological advancements, it's a lot easier to shoot away from a production center." [0]
Some hard numbers:
"Lockdowns, strikes, and exploding production costs have pushed many productions overseas, especially for streaming services with global ambitions. Hollywood production volumes have declined steeply since the second quarter of 2023. Stateside production is down 40% in the second quarter of 2024 compared to peak television levels of filming during the same period in 2022." [1]
[0] https://x.com/RamboVanHalen/status/1918378975417532675
[1] https://www.filmtake.com/production/streamers-shift-focus-ov...
To me I think it's possible for Netflix and Amazon and whoever to exist and make a lot of money, but also not have nation-state level power. The latter is something we haven't decided we want yet, but I think we'll come around. If there were even just very small controls (that worked) on the size of a company, or how many industries it can go into, then things would look differently. But when we let so few companies consolidate so much power through money, the status quo is a pretty natural outcome. Imagine a world where there were regional amazon.com's, because we just decided at some point they got too big. Same for google. We'd have actual competition. Tech enables market consolidation in ways we didn't expect and we have to do some actual work to fix it.
Let’s be real, these giant tech companies are becoming big stagnant bureaucracies. They can’t adapt anymore and want to build a moat to let them lumber along for a few decades.
The core assumption of the policy makers and business people was the idea that the Chinese are a bunch of dumb peasants working for scraps and unable to produce. They seem to be holding their own with AI, cars, trains, aircraft, etc. They may have a credible competitor for the B737/A320 — that’s a pretty big leap.
I wholeheartedly agree with you.
https://teamster.org/2025/05/teamsters-statement-on-presiden...
IATSE statement:
https://iatse.net/iatse-on-president-trump-movie-tariff-anno...
tl;dr - the Teamsters love this. IATSE likes it, but wants to make sure their Canadian membership isn't hurt.
The studios are dying. I go to the movies every week when there are movies. Other than Minecraft, the biggest crowd I’ve seen was the Star Wars re-release.
Thats the general line of reasoning. Rs are walking a line with union courting since a chunk of their base is anti union, just as dems were walking a line with globalization.
This is my current understanding of the undercurrents.
Or are countries like Canada or the UK also seen as part of "a concerted effort by other Nations"?
Just like others are free to make movies the way they see fit.
it's completely stupid and shortsighted to birth this monster, of course. we need MORE international cooperation not less to solve the vast environmental and social problems the world faces.
think about why people migrate and war is high on the list, and not addressing the root causes of human migration but merely each nation closing its doors to the world= bad dumb and wrong.
the people are to blame, of course. in one of the wealthiest nations on earth it's not hardship or suffering that drove the common man to vote for Trump, it's schadenfreude for strawmen they were programmed to hate.
Jodorowski's famous art film "holy mountain" shows our current trajectory since 40 plus years and depicts the brainwashing that allows one to dehumanize other human beings.
i am not sure if trump or vance is the antichrist, but they certainly head a religion dedicated to eradicating the values Jesus taught.
Whether this is a successful strategy is debatable.
I don't have stats for that either, so these things might well still support your claim, but that's what you have to look at.
And the current administration does at least purport to follow free market principles. It's just all principles can go out the window for them because <insert word salad>, for whatever advances their own power.
For decades gays were not allowed and their presence caused blowbacks. It was called free market, despite there being literal rules preventing their presence. Likewise, non whites or women in leading roles - they were not in them, because Hollywood was conservative business in this sense. It took a lot of advocacy for the change to happen.
Right wing hates them, most people just watch those movies and are not weirded out anymore about women having lead action role or whatever. And right wing hopes to revert it back.
That said, American movies pass border control to other countries all the time because of their broad appeal.
Also, none of them are of the same 'appeal' as the American movies you cited, which are mostly action movies. The general populace wants to see big stunts and explosions, which require budget, local movies don't gross because they rely on local audiences, repeat ad infinitum. Most European movies that try to _look American_ in that sense fail horribly imo.
However, the ones I can name all have something in common: they wouldn't appeal to an international audience because there is something inherently 'local' to them. Not only language barriers (imagine reading subtitles) but also a certain 'European film aesthetic/tone' just like American blockbusters have theirs. American movies don't have the same 'local barrier' for Europeans because they are the norm and we're getting them force-fed by the 100bio Hollywood industrial complex: it's a movie, or it's a local movie.
Most non-American movies are melodramatic slop, vaudeville slapstick or heart-wrenching soul-destroyers.
Oh really? Well I found one in China that isn't. And here's one from 1970s France that isn't.
Most movie everywhere are not masterpiece, incredible contribution to the art, tasteful and original. They are easy, made to profit, amateurish, etc. That is true for every art form.
Again, yes the US being the wealthiest country in the world means that they can afford to produce more, and therefore, in your own word "can afford to swing at more pitches and consequently get more hits.". That much is true. The rest of your message is just dismissive of non-US movie in general, and again just show your ignorance and unwillingness to engage with different movie.
> And don't get me started on "let's yell at each other for 120 minutes" Russian cinema.
Just because you don't like it does not make it slop.
> American movies are by far the most watchable, especially when you don't feel like going on a heart-wrenching journey of despair, which is all international cinema excels at.
If you were to look at US movies that win awards, they tend to be "heart-wrenching journey of despair". That is just a bias of the perception of "awardable" cinema. Good light-heated comedy rarely wins award (altough stories of hope also often do). That is not specific to "international" cinema. You want some fun slapstick comedy from hong-kong, watch Stephen Chow movies. Some light hearted romance from France ? Jacques Demy might tickle your fancy. A more action horiented movie, Wong Ching-po wight interest you.
Just because you don't know them doesn't mean they don't exist.
Vaudeville slapstick
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kq9wIQ243f8
Melodramatic poorly acted, over-choreographed, stunt wire work. Might as well be a dance or a cartoon. At least in the Matrix homage to this genre, there was some diegetic explanation for why the characters appeared to be throwing each other around on wires.
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4z0XBq74c0w
A 1964 film where every line is sung? You got me there. Chalk one up for the appeal of international cinema over Hollywood.
you can simply say that you were wrong to make such a sweeping judgement and have no actual notion of the entire worlds cinematic output, nor speak anything besides english to properly understand anyone elses films, but yey, feel free to dig in your heels and be wronger.
There's a universe in which one nation is a cinematic powerhouse that dwarfs not just the average quantity but also the average quality of the cinematic output of any other nation.
My argument is this is the case. Less so every year, since Hollywood is broken now, but still.
IANAL but have taken some intro level course (that usually starts with don't think anything from American shows applies).
1: It's rooted in civil law so the written laws(and their precursor political discussions) are first considered, laws are thus fairly broadly written with specifications where needed. So precedents are mostly only used to disambiguate gray areas in terms of applicability or conflicts between laws. (but precedents rulings are in turn are meant to rely on the precursor political discussions before courts can take their own authority on any subject).
2: Intent is given significance, so 2 parties can enter into fairly "sloppily written" contracts that will be legally binding as long as the intent of the contract is clear, they're signed and doesn't violate any laws (there is law specifically targets obviously unfair contracts, but also other laws that regulate specific areas).
3: Criminal prosecution at the primary level is in front of 3 judges, one professional head judge with law degree that knows laws and 2 "laymen" to represent people in general (usually politically appointed to reflect the people via elections), no juries as the role those serve is handled by the laymen judges.
This means evidence such as hearsay or illegally obtained evidence is given the same consideration as real evidence. Resulting many times that the court can sentence an accused that everybody "knows" is guilty, and other times resulting in mind bogglingly insane verdicts.
Another big difference: No plea deals. Which is something very strange about the American justice system.
As for the mind-boggling verdicts those seem to more often stem from the politically appointed judges from the media reporting.
The plea deals part is interesting since it's been more frequently bought up to become legal in relation to combating the rising organized crime (but the perverse incentive problem seems to have kept those discussions from going further so far).
One serious question is how much precedent research is grounded in possible reality? The "unexpeced-precedent-that-throws-off-the-opposition" and "old-or-savant-legal-expert-who-knows-them-all" tropes in media seems to hinge on them being important, and reading legal rulings on business cases (like those historic ones regarding Nintendo and Sega copy protections or EFF ones) does seem to put some weight on them?
I’m just going to leave this random link here: https://www.imdb.com/list/ls003889355/
1. Once Upon a Time in America
2. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
3. The Great Dictator
4. Lord of the Rings
5. Chinatown
If there's one thing you can't associate Charlie Chaplin or Jack Nicholson with, it's Hollywood.
Number 9 on your list is famous non-Hollywood filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock.
American movies are popular globally not because they're American but because they're so damn watchable/enjoyable/varied.
Granted that becomes less true every year, since Hollywood appears to be broken. Other countries haven't figured out how to pick up the slack though. 1994 Hollywood will likely never come again.
The bottom line for me is that we shouldn't simply accept that films should all be filmed in Canada, Australia, the UK, or elsewhere. Hollywood has been the epicenter of creative jobs in this country for a century, and we should try to preserve it.
Honest question: what does "fair" mean in this context?
Name one.
This is what is so ridiculous about unions in 2025: there are people in dozens of other tier 2 countries that will work harder than you for less pay.
The solution is not to try to artificially inflate wages.
If the "terrified" camp is sufficiently large, their terror can be overridden with a sufficiently large swing in public opinion. They're potentially movable.
The true believers...not sure if anything can move them. If the "on board" camp is (nearly) all Republican legislators, then there is no path to impeachment.
It will be interesting to see how things evolve as the economic impacts of Trump's policies develop. That's probably the most direct path to the level of public opinion shift needed to make impeachment possible.
Edit: I'd be interested to hear why the downvotes. I'm genuinely curious about this, because a lot of people seem to think that a) Congress is useless, and b) half the population of America is stupid, and so I'm just curious how you see America moving forward, or even if you do at all?
There is no current checks mor balances, a king runs America and Republicans smile because they are wearing the same color jersey and seem to think their longtime agenda is being implemented, when, no, a mafia is riding their agenda and party to absolute power.
Considering that even in a big and highly competitive environment such as Silicon Valley they managed to establish illegal hiring cartels between the big companies (Apple etc), I'd be sceptical to dish out free market arguments.
Hollywood is not loosing relevance due to inflated wages, they stopped making movies people want to see. The reason for that is quite obvious, but a totally different discussion.
The standard work week for a union film crew in Los Angeles is 12 hours a day, 5 days a week. Often those days can stretch into 14-16 hour days. Crews regularly find themselves having to work a 6 or 7 day week and even holidays while on a project.
Without a union, crews would likely be working close to minimum wage for highly skilled and often physical and dangerous high pressure work. These jobs have almost no work life balance. The power imbalance between studios and their employees is massive, especially in regard to below the line crew.
The film crew’s union (IATSE) in one of its most recent contract negotiations, had to seriously fight to get workers a ten hour turn around- meaning that productions are now obligated to give film crews 10 hours off before having to be at work the next day. Studios and filming locations are often a 40min-1hr drive each way with LA traffic, so crews sometimes only get about 8 hours at home before they need to be at work the next day. That’s 8 hours to let the dog out, eat, shower and sleep before having to go to work the next day. And that’s only just a recent union win.
The union frequently has to fight the studios from clawing back healthcare and the members regularly accept very modest pay raises (3%) even during the last almost decade of high inflation. Only in the last contract was the crew able to get any sort of raise the reflected the rate of inflation but barely made up for decades of stagnant raises negotiated in the past.
To top that off, crews rarely actually get to see that full rate that is negotiated because studios have negotiated to exclude certain productions from the base rate. Instead, those exclusions get a discounted rate for below the line crew which many productions fall under (called roll back rates, which covers several tiers of movies, season 1 & 2, and it resets if the crew is replaced, streaming pays less into healthcare, etc, etc.)
Film crews in general (american and international) tend to be very hard workers. International crews don’t work any harder than American crews (I’m sure they work just as hard though), however their cost of living is much lower and the studios don’t have to pay healthcare because most countries that studios are filming in have low healthcare costs or some form of socialized healthcare. These countries that studios are bringing production to tend to have cheaper locations and often have huge tax incentives to draw in productions which overall has had a pretty big effect on the American film industry.
Crews make a very middle class salary in America but have to live in HCOL cities where the studios and filming hubs are. Many crew members really end up making a poor or lower middle class living because it’s an incredibly competitive industry and not always very stable work since crews are constantly needing to find the next job after their project has wrapped.
There are many reasons that productions are moving over seas. The union or the workers aren’t the problem here.
Assuming there will be a free and fair election in which the Democrats win, it would be a sensible move to repeal the Hague Invasion Act, ratify the Rome Statute and refer all of the 47th's admin's key figures there - that avoids any possible issues with the Supreme Court.
Additionally, it would restore a bit of global confidence in the ICC and America's credibility on the global stage as well... something sorely needed after not even a few months of this administration.
For US movies, the list goes on. And you can debate which ones should make the top-100.
But here's a pivotal soviet comedy about a guy who goes to the future... okay, here's Bob Zemeckis's Back to the Future. Compare the quality of any aspect: story, acting, props, costumes, cinematography, special fx, attention to detail, MUSIC... 1:1 US cinema destroys on every level.
Bollywood action movies? They're parodies of themselves- Adam Sandler's You Don't Mess with the Zohan, except they take themselves seriously.
> But here's a pivotal soviet comedy about a guy who goes to the future... okay, here's Bob Zemeckis's Back to the Future. Compare the quality of any aspect: story, acting, props, costumes, cinematography, special fx, attention to detail, MUSIC... 1:1 US cinema destroys on every level.
Non-modest Soviet productions of the era, such as the 1970 "Waterloo", are spectacular by any standard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyytd8HhuME
To be fair, it looks just like any other Soviet movie from that era ("The Diamond Arm", "Afonya", "Shurik's Adventures", etc.), with the exception of the few that were considered "mega projects' by the government ("War and Peace").
But the overarching point is that even shows where at least one of the actors (RDA) were given an award by the US Air Force for their depiction of the branch, were largely filmed outside the US.
Said another way - brush yo teeth, brush yo GD teeth: https://youtu.be/GlKL_EpnSp8?si=NeKJWKNlcHxtDUYD&t=112
Also, we don't have anywhere close to the sugar consumption the US has, which keeps both our diabetes and dental health issues at rates far below the US.
The Wikipedia page you mentioned reading also points out that it's not only a US thing. Or even a water-only thing.
You don't have an argument yourself, you just wanted to share that you are pro some position.
That’s not a list of non-American films, it’s a list of non-American directors.
To answer what I assume is your every so snarkily delivered point: Yes, about a third of the directors on that list ended up successful in Hollywood. Does that mean international films are bad? Probably not! Does it maybe mean even Hollywood recognizes that there is a lot of international talent, and very good international films being made? Probably yes?
Nicole Kidman and Chris Hemsworth, say, are as Hollywood as it gets.
Heck so is Salma Hayek.
The point is that intl can’t compete with Hollywood because Hollywood is widely appealing and relatively very good.
It doesn’t matter that Alfred Hitchcock became a naturalized US citizen.
This snarky remark ridicules you more than it does the film. "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" is widely considered one of the finest romantic movies ever made. Its use of color and lead performances are legendary. I'll let Patton Oswalt explain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nuprpehbaok
As siblings have commented, 112 and 911 are in the GSM standard. On landlines, only 112 will work in most EU countries (and even that is an EU achievement; e.g. in Switzerland 112 is inconsistent)
Besides, anytime the other two are involved the police need to respond too - when there is a fire or medical emergency whoever can get that first can often be very helpful even if they are mostly for a different job. As such this separation seems wrong.
This is not the US, the police does not show up to a fire or an emergency, why would they? They show up to an accident, and when you need an ambulance they will bring one.
The will also not stop and interrogate you when you walk to the side of the road. People usually have no interaction with the police outside of speeding tickets.
"get that first can often be very helpful"
Germany is not full of police patrolling the streets. Gladly we are no longer a police state. Usually I don't see any police for days, often not for weeks. Again, this is not the US. The only time you'll probably see police is going to train stations, airports or big tourist spots (and sometimes at parties that are too loud). In large cities, like Berlin, you might hear a siren and see a police car from time to time, depending on where you are. In smaller <1M people cities, not so.
Germany also has a proper health system and invests in ambulances and health instead of militarizing the police. So I can see your point, but it is irrelevant here.
Police responding to everything whether or not there is an indication that they are necessary, and even (especially) when the indications are that they would be counterproductive is a US quirk with very high costs, not some kind of universal rule.
No. When your partner has an urgent medical issue, you call the ambulance, not the police.
I've witnessed a lady falling down the stairs banging her head hard, blood everywhere. Called 112 in my country, a guy answered, and I calmly explained what happened, and I wanted someone coming there stat. "Nah" he says, he needs to ask me some questions first. One of the questions was: "is it serious?". This is no joke, I said "yeah, its fucking serious". "Okay" he says, "You should have called emergency services directly, but he'll do me one and connect me anyways(!)".
Then I had to repeat everything again and they've then reluctantly sent a team which by the way arrived in double the time it would take me to get there from their place.
Reminds me of those endless accountability sinks. Nobody gives a shit about anything as there is no accountability.
OK, even if true, that's only one movie :) I mean, ask any person from that era and they'll tell you it's their favorite. Kind of unfair to compare the only shining example to the "Hollywood average".
Diamond Hand too.
It would be ridiculous if the same were true about Hollywood.
A Russian asks an American what movies to watch, and 8 out of 10 people go back to 1969 to recommend the same one? Impossible.
You’d get everything from Citizen Kane to Hitchcock to Rocky, etc. But you’d also get about 150 great picks from the 80s and 90s, and another dozen from after 2000.
And forget the greats. You’d get Zoolander, Demolition Man, Total Recall, Gremlins, Scream, John Wick, Legally Blonde even… there’s such a wide pool of fun iconic popcorn movies for any person.
Not to mention your Star Wars/Trek/Gate.
These movies aren’t “good” in the sense of being art. They’re good in the sense of people wanting to watch them.
Every n years I rewatch Commando, Con-Air, The Last Starfighter, etc just for kicks. It’s not pure nostalgia- they’re fun movies.
With int’l movies from any given country the list of recommendations is extremely shallow. It’s always one or two iconic revelations from a given decade. Or a couple auteur directors who won all the awards for their think-pieces about the human condition.
That list includes everything from the Wes Anderson-esque "Beware of the Car" to the gritty Western-in-the-East "White Sun of the Desert", to "Come and See", a truly disturbing war drama. Lots to choose from, and many notable omissions still remain, like the wonderful 1977 comedy "Mimino" about a rural helicopter pilot who dreams of flying large airliners, and the "Peculiarities of the National Hunt" from 1995 depicting a Finn with overly romanticized expectations coming to Russia to learn about the traditional hunting customs.
And by your metric, should we also pump in vitamins and other substances that our bodies crave? Maybe the Fed gov't could just skip that and force drip IV everyone a compliance cocktail after their breakfast of USDA approved and SNAP subsidized Captain Crunch?
Something like 30% of people report not brushing their teeth at least once a day. Unclear if that means most of them brush every other day or some even lower frequency, but I’d assume if you report not brushing at least once a day then you likely aren’t brushing consistently every other day or something.
> And by your metric, should we also pump in vitamins and other substances that our bodies crave? Maybe the Fed gov't could just skip that and force drip IV everyone a compliance cocktail after their breakfast of USDA approved and SNAP subsidized Captain Crunch?
We already do this, all the time! Vitamin and mineral fortified foods are everywhere. Iodine is in a lot of salt. It’s a good thing, not something to be mocked. Most vitamins and minerals have minimal cost, no issues with taking “too much” of them, and have significant health benefits if you are deficit on that particular thing.
Gross, but that's their problem, not mine. There's a multitude of bad health habits, if we were actually serious, there'd be no soda or cereal on the shelves. But big ag and big health activity oppose that because they financially benefit from SNAP. Your fortified foods mention is an example of exactly how insane it all is (we subsidize the corn syrup farmers to produce garbage food and then give poor people money to buy it, instead of you know - real food).
You’re looking for facts to stuff a straw man. There is clear, obvious correlation between fluoridation and improved oral health. They discovered this decades ago where it was observed that oral health was better in regions where groundwater was used and fluoride occurred naturally.
By my metric, we should take reasonable measures to improve public health. I don’t suppose you’re in favor of making dental care affordable to those who can’t afford it?
If you choose to align yourself with the pseudo intellectual descendants of the John Birch society to protect your “precious bodily fluids”, I’m sorry for you.
Not once have I argued against fluoride for oral care. But I don't want it in my DRINKING water.
> We add vitamin A & D to milk and bread.
Right, and our (American) "bread" and milk is not just bad, it's total garbage. I mean really really bad vs civilized countries.
Here's another solution: Just eat real food and brush your teeth with proper toothpaste. I know, shocking!
google is free - it's not anyone's responsibility to educate you and answer your naive questions. and if did google and you're still not convinced, well then i'm glad you're not an elected official wherever it is you live (though if you live in the US i guess you probably voted for the current admin)
2.Even if it did pass, retroactively referring 47 there doesn't scream "law and order" to me, especially when there are actual laws being broken.
That was the case in 2002, back when the Supreme Court still worked and was reasonably respected, and Congress at least did lip service to follow its duties.
Now, the circumstances have shifted - the Supreme Court is seen as compromised as a result of the Trump appointments plus the corruption scandals surrounding Roberts. Therefore I'm not so sure that the Hague Invasion Act would remain if it were pushed to a vote in a future Democrat-controlled Congress.
> Even if it did pass, retroactively referring 47 there doesn't scream "law and order" to me, especially when there are actual laws being broken.
I agree, the normal course of action should be to put 47th and his goon(er)s through the regular American court system - but I am afraid that the legal system has degraded way too much over the last years from all the political appointments. That's why in Croatia and Serbia we had the ICTY established, there was no trust of fair trials.
Assuming that we continue to elect presidents, you need one to appoint an effective Attorney General (ie not Garland) and use these new king like powers of the executive to smash. The president was convicted of dozens of crimes, but nobody had the balls to throw him in jail.
You have to think about 2025 solutions. The die is cast, it isn’t 1995 anymore. Nobody is clutching their pearls because POTUS made a mess on an intern anymore. It’s a different environment and you’re going to have to have fistfights on the Senate floor if the congress is functioning.
A lot of what the 47th and people in his administration did are already punishable by law - alone the Signal affair or other violations of the Public Records Act.
It would not be a ex post facto prosecution, it would simply be a prosecution by a court of law that is reasonably free from corruption.
It’s all fantasy anyway.
Well, whoever succeeds Trump will have to go for drastic measures to restore global trust in the US. No way around that, the system is fundamentally broken and needs a complete and utter overhaul. If the Democrats have an ounce of interest in self-preservation, they have no alternative than to bring down all the hammers they can on the MAGA part of the GOP.
A kid these days in most urban parts would tend to say "911 I have an emergency" while roleplaying because we hear it so much in popular culture.
911 has enough mindshare that it'd be silly to use it for anything else. And if you're not going to use it for anything, a redirect seems like a very productive way to park it.
That's what, 10% of world population? 112 has India going for it…
If you require the police to respond to all medical emergencies, then you have to fund the police at a level which allows them to do that, often at the expense of funding the people who actually should be responding to a medical emergency.
Taking the attitude that the police must respond to all emergency calls even if the only indication of what capacities are needed are fire and/or ambulance services results in a distortion of local funding which makes emergency response worse (it also results in the police presence itself making the response to other things worse in cases where they were not needed, even considering the resources actually available at the time, without considering the effect of response policy on resource allocation -- police are not always neutral-to-beneficial.)
The fact that it is a common rule in the US does not make it right. The US is very bad, compared to other developed countries, at lots of things.
In non-police states, you spend your money on a working health system instead.
Because they're trained first-responders, who have medical first aid training, vehicles with lights and sirens to move quickly through traffic, knowledge of the local area to navigate around road closures or ambiguous location descriptions, etc.
There are many situations where multiple sub-specialties of first-responders (police, firefighters, EMT, etc) are useful. The police aren't just showing up to arrest or shoot people, in a functioning society they can and do provide valuable service in assisting injured people, controlling traffic around car accidents, etc.
> Because they're trained first-responders, who have medical first aid training
In many parts of the US they are only trained to EMR level (if that) which isn't particularly useful. Most fire departments require everyone to be EMT and will often have a paramedic on board. Where I am, police are all EMR and will rarely be dispatched to a medical call (unless there's a threat of violence). They will be dispatched to vehicle accidents for traffic control.
Yes the ambulance and fire department is better trained for these things. However basic first aid (CPR) and an AED in the hands of someone with basic first aid training often beats the most trained professional who is arrives just a minute later. So dispatches will get whoever can get to the scene first there, as well as the right people.
Yes the police often are in the way in a fire real scene - but that is a lot better than all the bystanders watching the fire in the way instead. However it is hard to see how bad it could be, while easy to see how bad things are.
I'm not getting the argument, you say a paramedic + doctor is worse than a paramedic + doctor + police when I have a heart attack?
This absolutist mindset is not helpful for making progress. People want tasty, potentially bad for them foods. You can have bad food that’s made up of “real food” just fine. Fortifying bad foods to make them marginally less bad is a good thing. Don’t let great be the enemy of good. Nobody is looking at a bag of chips and saying “well because it’s got added Vitamin A, it’s good for me now!” Instead, it’s just a silent benefit.
Again, you’re asking for behavioral change in humans by fiat. Fortification extends well beyond just adding vitamins to chips or junk food. It’s added in many basic building blocks (milk, and most flours and rice) because it literally is solving nutritional deficiencies caused by poverty. Nobody is somehow making purchasing decisions on junk food based on fortification content.
> Get the shit like food coloring and corn syrup out of our food.
Irrelevant to nutritional content, unless you mean overly sugary foods relating to corn syrup. Which, you can have the exact same health outcomes and hyper palatability by just using regular old sugar.
> Other nations do just fine with their food situation without all this made up nonsense and excuses like "fortified" food.
Other nations fortify their food too, including many “first world” countries. I don’t know why you think this is somehow a uniquely American thing.
What’s your answer when the same idiots campaigning against fluoride decide that toothpaste is a problem? Or that the ADA is a scam and there is no proof that toothbrushing has any effect?
And what’s real food? That is a question that doesn’t have an answer.
Their teeth will rot out.
> And what’s real food? That is a question that doesn’t have an answer.
It's not fortified Captain Crunch.
If someone came in with a curious mindset, that'd be one thing. But this is someone walking into a room with an agenda (get rid of fluoride) and a shocking lack of knowledge about that agenda.
But since "Internet People Lie About Fluoride,"[0] why are you surprised? And that's nothing new.
Why? I have no idea. Perhaps cpursley[1] could enlighten us?
They absolutely are. Food marketing and other tricks work, even on edjamahcated people. Think terms like “150% more antioxidants” and “100% natural fruit gummies!”
…but even then 911 would only be an emergency phone number if n ≥ 3; first two places being taken by 112 and 110 (because China).
However, this completely ignores facts like people from China being far less likely to travel to e.g. the US… it's more of a "of the people who'd make emergency calls in XYZ, what numbers would they use" consideration…
…it's really not an easy question. GSM went with 112 and 911 and I guess that's as good as an answer this'll get.
It's funny you should mention that because now the Texas AG is staring to come after fluoridated toothpastes.
Because you're the "Internet people lie about fluoride" guy to a tee.
Have a good day!