They don't automatically take a cut, they only take a cut when you want to sell to their captive audience, on their hardware, using their distribution system.
Wait until you hear about how the entire entertainment industry has always worked!
I'm sure they can find another sunny, coastal state with a friendly government, the infrastructure, the talent, their mansions, the lovely weather, and the sixth largest economy in the US. That should be trivial.
A tiny economy compared to Florida, a deeply right wing government and culture, it’s already fully built up with no room for newcomers, hurricanes and rising sea levels also make it an insane choice. Please be serious.
I was just on a ski-trip in Aspen. just about 75% of people I met there were “just in Miami” or “just in Key West” (mostly Miami) but “came up for Christmas and New Years” Billionaires have a “home State” as much as I have hair (you probably are guessing correctly now that I am bald…)
I don't believe that the whole billionaire-led VC industry in California is going to relocate to Florida, in part because of the weather, in part because of the cost, and many other factors. As far as "everyone leaving" California, I don't think that's true, but I'm on the other side of the country and it doesn't bother me either way.
Florida, Texas, Nashville - there are lot of better places to live outside of NYC and SF in 2025. Let's revisit in a year after the weather tax shakes out.
Looking at Tesla and that billionaire, Texas is that destination, and while we can easily find a list of reasons not to move to Texas, at the end of the day, as a business climate, you can build things and start businesses there with way less overhead. How's that Bay Area housing crisis in going? Build anything yet?
yea, that’s super hard… every government is friendly to billionaires (you should know this by now), the infrastructure is a weird one but unless they are moving to Zimbabwe they should be Ok, weather in California is weird one considering last few days but plenty of amazing weather elsewhere (billionaires - as you should probably know - have just like a few houses to enjoy whatever weather they want, just saw few last week in Aspen skiing)… so yea, I see how your comment makes a lot of sense :)
I do wish that just once our politicians (and the voters who are so easily spooked) thought through this issue a bit further than "Billionaires issue threat, we must surrender." There is a point at which taxation can be counterproductive, but we're so far in the other direction that it would take cultural and political changes of decades to get into dangerous territory.
Unfortunately many people are trained to respond along party lines with thinking.
Part of the issue is the search tech itself, but part of the issue is how the web has been warped by SEO. Search and what was being discovered weren’t always in such an adversarial relationship.
For me though the closest I can get to the good old days is Kagi. Not a sponsor.
It's also that Google brought Doubleclick and that completely flipped their incentives. Now they get money sending you to the content farms and what is good for their business isn't necessarily aligned with what is good for you...?
That's arguably what String Theory is good for, producing interesting, entertaining, and possibly even useful math. What it seems to fail at is making realistically testable predictions about nature that can't be matched or exceeded by simpler competing theories.
No Theory of Everything is going to make realistically testable predictions. That's a problem of the domain, not the theory. The unification energy between the graviton and quantum field theory is on the order of 10^19 GeV, over a dozen orders of magnitude beyond anything we can generate.
We might get lucky that some ToE would generate low-energy predictions different from GR and QFT, but there's no reason to think that it must.
It's not like there's some great low-energy predictions that we're just ignoring. The difficulty of a beyond-Standard-Model theory is inherent to the domain of the question, and that's going to plague any alternative to String Theory just as much.
The testable predictions would be at the places where QM and GR meet. Some examples:
1. interactions at the event horizon of a black hole -- could the theory describe Hawking radiation?
2. large elements -- these are where special relativity influences the electrons [1]
It's also possible (and worth checking) that a unified theory would provide explanations for phenomena and observed data we are ascribing to Dark Matter and Dark Energy.
I wonder if there are other phenomena such as effects on electronics (i.e. QM electrons) in GR environments (such as geostationary satellites). Or possibly things like testing the double slit experiment in those conditions.
re 2: special relativity is not general relativity - large elements will not provide testable predictions for a theory of everything that combines general relativity and quantum mechanics.
re: "GR environments (such as geostationary satellites)" - a geostationary orbit (or any orbit) is not an environment to test the interaction of GR and QM - it is a place to test GR on its own, as geostationary satellites have done. In order to test a theory of everything, the gravity needs to be strong enough to not be negligible in comparison to quantum effects, i.e. black holes, neutron stars etc. your example (1) is therefore a much better answer than (2)
Re 2 I was wondering if there may be some GR effect as well, as the element's nucleus would have some effect on spacetime curvature and the electrons would be close to that mass and moving very fast.
For geostationary orbits I was thinking of things like how you need to use both special and general relativity for GPS when accounting for the time dilation between the satellite and the Earth (ground). I was wondering if similar things would apply at a quantum level for something QM related so that you would have both QM and GR at play.
So it may be better to have e.g. entangled particles with them placed/interacting in a way that GR effects come into play and measuring that effect.
But yes, devising tests for this would be hard. However, Einstein thought that we wouldn't be able to detect gravitational waves, so who knows what would be possible.
You don't need a full fledged theory of quantum gravity to describe Hawking radiation. Quantization of the gravitational field isn't relevant for that phenomenon. Similarly you don't need quantum gravity to describe large elements. Special relativity is already integrated into quantum field theory.
In some ways saying that we don't have a theory of quantum gravity is overblown. It is perfectly possible to quantize gravity in QFT the same way we quantize the electromagnetic field. This approach is applicable in almost all circumstances. But unlike in the case of QED, the equations blow up at high energies which implies that the theory breaks down in that regime. But the only places we know of where the energies are high enough that the quantization of the gravitational field would be relevant would be near the singularity of a black hole or right at the beginning of the Big Bang.
Can't black holes explain Dark Energy? Supposedly there was an experiment showing Black Holes are growing faster than expected. If this is because they are tied to the expansion of the universe (univ. expands -> mass grows), and that tie goes both ways (mass grows -> universe expands), boom, dark energy. I also think that inside the black holes they have their own universes which are expanding (and that we're probably inside one too). If this expansion exerts a pressure on the event horizon which transfers out, it still lines up.
I'm far from an expert in this field--indeed, I can but barely grasp the gentle introductions to these topics--but my understanding is that calling string theory a "theory of everything" really flatters it. String theory isn't a theory; it's a framework for building theories. And no one (to my understanding) has been able to put forward a theory using string theory that can actually incorporate the Standard Model and General Relativity running in our universe to make any prediction in the first place, much less one that is testable.
Getting into the weeds about what is and is not "A Theory" is an armchair scientist activity, it's not a useful exercise. Nobody in the business of doing physics cares or grants "theory status" to a set of models or ideas.
Some physicists have been trying to build an updated model of the universe based on mathematical objects that can be described as little vibrating strings. They've not been successful in closing the loop and constructing a model that actually describes reality accurately, but they've done a lot of work that wasn't necessarily all to waste.
It's probably either just the wrong abstraction or missing some fundamental changes that would make it accurate.
It would also be tremendously helpful if we had some new physics where there was a significant difference between an experiment and either GR or the standard model. Unfortunately the standard model keeps being proven right.
I think that’s highly debatable. For example, dark matter particles with testable properties could be a prediction of a ToE. Or the ToE could resolve the quantum measurement problem (collapse of the wave function) in a testable way.
What's the "quantum measurement problem"? And why is it a problem? I get the wave function collapses when you measure bit. But which part of this do you want to resolve in a testable way?
It’s the question of how the wave function collapses during a measurement. What exactly constitutes a “measurement”? Does the collapse happen instantaneously? Is it a real physical phenomenon or a mathematical trick?
I thought that what constitutes a measurement is well understood; it's just the entanglement between the experiment and the observer, and the process is called decoherence - and the collapse itself is a probabilistic process as a result.
AFAIK an EoT is not required to design experiments to determine if it's a real physical phenomenon vs. a mathematical trick; people are trying to think up those experiments now (at least for hidden variable models of QM).
There's a more basic problem with string theory, which is that it's not a theory. It's a mathematical framework which is compatible with a very wide range of specific physical theories.
About tests of quantum gravity, there have been proposals for feasible tests using gravitationally-induced entanglement protocols:
I don't think that's quite the problem. In mathematics, the word "theory" is often used when referring to particular mathematical frameworks (e.g. Group Theory, Graph Theory, Morse Theory). In that sense I think String Theory is very much a theory. As you imply, in physics, the word "theory" is typically used in a different sense. I'm not a physicist but I presume a physical theory has to be verifiable, consistent with observations, able to predict the behavior of unexplained phenomena. If I understand correctly, the basic problem is that in some quarters string theory is being passed off as a physical theory. I know of pure mathematicians who are interested in string theory and who couldn't care less whether its a physical theory.
The word "theory" doesn't matter in the way you are portraying it as.
Like a book is a book because it's got pages with words on them glued to a spine with covers. It's not "not a book" because the plot makes no sense.
Scientists don't care about what "a theory" is, it's not philosophically important to them. It's just a vague term for a collection of ideas or a model or whatever.
I guess I'm not being clear. I don't care about the word "theory". The point is string theory makes no predictions. It's not just inaccessible energies which make it untestable, but the fact that, as a framework, string theory is compatible with a huge range of possible universes.
Eh, again you're just saying "it's not real because..." whether or not you attach the word theory. It is a space with lots of possible parameters being explored and is not one set of parameters with predictions because all of the sets that have been explored so far are either broken or don't represent reality. That in itself does not mean it doesn't have merit. It's simply incomplete, but given its history it's fair to doubt that it ever will close the loop and have a final form that models our reality.
I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with tbh. If you look up the thread, my point is that the reason string theory is untestable is not simply that high energies are experimentally inaccessible. Rather, string theory doesn't make any definite predictions for those high energies either. It seems you agree with that?
i mean, a theory of everything should at least make retrodictions, which afaik string theory never got to. if someone wants to point me to where someone solved e.g. the hydrogen spectrum using a string theory, then I will be wrong but very happy
> The unification energy between the graviton and quantum field theory is on the order of 10^19 GeV, over a dozen orders of magnitude beyond anything we can generate.
I am not sure what you are refering to. You absolutely can break Lorentz Invariance in string theory[1]. There is a reason why even some string theory researchers call it the theory of anything.
Wellllll. Despite the title, the paper does not make a claim about string theory. The starting point is the "Witten string field theory" which is a field theory engineered to have properties like string theory. Nothing guarantees that theory is exactly like string theory. In addition, the idea is perturbative in nature, there's no guarantee that perturbative effects are in fact realized in the full quantum theory - exoteric cancellations happen often in field theories with many symmetries. This is two degrees of questionable.
So A) the paper isn't actually about string theory and B) it's not clear that the claim it makes is actually correct for the field theory it supposedly applies to.
Well this is just an early example of the lorentz breaking string theory niche. You can find a lot more. In the short time frame where opera had this supposedly faster than light neutrinos, a lot of papers were published in that regard.
For example you can have string theories that lead to finsler spacetimes, which were used to explain the opera results.
I literally have no idea what our conversation has to do with opera results, or what you think that shows, but just lost all interest in continuing this conversation.
That’s just piggybacking on a prediction of special relativity itself. If string theory predicted something novel that’s testable, that would be a lot more noteworthy.
> That’s just piggybacking on a prediction of special relativity itself.
Let me stop you right now to inform you you don't understand how scientific theories are structured. Special relativity is not a prediction of special relativity. Likewise, 1+1=2 isn't a predict of arithmetic, it's the starting point.
If you are suggesting that string theory is somehow more fundamental or powerful than special relativity, and so SR is a mere consequence of ST, that’s a claim that probably requires more explanation or evidence.
No. Special relativity postulates that special relativity is preserved at all scales. It's an axiom. Comes from nowhere. It's assumed.
This is what a theory is: assume XYZ is true, and see how much of the world you can explain. Why is XYZ? That theory doesn't explain it.
Theoretical physics is: what is the smallest set of XYZ assumptions that can explain other theories. So if you can come up with a theory that's internally self-consistent that _predicts_ something which is postulated by another successful theory, that's a very convincing result.
Pardon, but, huh? I very much thought that Lorentz invariance was built into the assumptions of string theory.
Concluding from “A AND B” that “A”, while it does reach a conclusion that is distinct from the assumption, is not impressive.
If string theory does not bake SR into its assumptions, wouldn’t that make the way it is formulated, not manifestly Lorentz invariant? Don’t physicists typically prefer that their theories be, not just Lorentz invariant, but ideally formulated in a way that is manifestly Lorentz invariant?
Of course, not that it is a critical requirement, but it is very much something I thought string theory satisfied. Why wouldn’t it be?
Like, just don’t combine coordinates in ways that aren’t automatically compatible with Lorentz invariance, right?
If you formulate a theory in a way that is manifestly Lorentz invariant, claiming to have derived Lorentz invariance from it, seems to me a bit like saying you derived “A” from “A AND B”.
If string theory isn’t manifestly Lorentz invariant, then, I have to ask: why not??
Lorentz invariance is built into some descriptions of some stringy theories. For example chapter 1 of the Polchinski, you have the 26-dimensional bosonic string which is constructed to be Lorentz invariance. Obviously in this case it's not a "prediction", but then again, it's just a toy-model. Our Universe doesn't have 26 dimensions and doesn't have only bosons.
Ok, so I looked into it a bit, and here’s my understanding:
The Polyakov action is kinda by default manifestly Lorentz invariant, but in order to quantize it, one generally first picks the light cone gauge, where this gauge choice treats some of the coordinates differently, losing the manifest Lorentz invariance. The reason for making this gauge choice is in order to make unitarity clear (/sorta automatic).
An alternative route keeps manifest Lorentz invariance, but proceeding this way, unitarity is not clear.
And then, in the critical dimensions (26 or 10, as appropriate; We have fermions, so, presumably 10) it can be shown that a certain issue (chiral anomaly, I think it was) gets cancelled out, and therefore the two approaches agree.
But, I guess, if one imposes the light cone gauge, if not in a space of dimensionality the critical dimension, the issue doesn’t cancel out and Lorentz invariance is violated? (Previously I was under the impression that when the dimensionality is wrong, things just diverged, and I’m not particularly confident about the “actually it implies violations of Lorentz invariance” thing I just read.)
You understand that this have nothing to do with actual Lorentz invariance, yes? It sounds like you don't really understand the meaning of those terms you're using.
Do you understand what "manifest Lorentz invariance" means?
Of course. Did part of what I said suggest I thought otherwise?
I guess the part about the “when you quantize it after fixing the gauge in a way that loses the manifestness of the Lorentz invariance, if you aren’t in the critical dimension, supposedly you don’t keep the Lorentz invariance” part could imply otherwise? If that part is wrong, my mistake, I shouldn’t have trusted the source I was reading for that part.
I was viewing that part as being part of how you could be right about Lorentz invariance being something derived nontrivially from the theory.
Because, the Polyakov action (and the Nambu-Goto action) are, AIUI, typically initially(at the start of the definition of the theory) formulated in a way that is not just Lorentz invariant, but manifestly Lorentz invariant,
and if there is no step in the process of defining the theory that isn’t manifestly Lorentz invariant, I would think that Lorentz invariance wouldn’t be a nontrivial implication, but something baked into the definition throughout,
so, for it to be a nontrivial implication of the theory, at some point after the definition of the classical action, something has to be done that, while it doesn’t break Lorentz invariance, it “could” do so, in the sense that showing that it doesn’t is non-trivial.
And, I was thinking this would start with the choice of gauge making it no longer manifestly Lorentz invariant.
I trust you have much more knowledge of string theory than I do, so I would appreciate any correction you might have.
It does, but a number of alternative theories of quantum gravity do not. So, if Lorentz invariance is shown to be violated, this would favor those over string theory.
as i know really nothing about the subject, could someone explain why parent was downvoted ? is it for the tone, or the content ? Because, i , having viewed the youtubers in question, had the same opinion about string theory.
The word 'falsifiable' comes from Popper's criterion, which is central to scientific methodology. What it means: if theory predicts something, and later observations show that prediction doesn't hold, then the theory is incorrect.
String theory doesn't work this way, whatever was measured will be explained as an afterthought by free parameter tuning.
Do you mean that have been falsified? Of course, no standing theory delivers falsified predictions, when that happens you throw the theory in the garbage.
Do you mean that can be falsified in principle? In that case String Theory has falsifiable predictions, I gave you one. In principle, we can make experiment that would falsify special relativity. In fact, we've made such experiments in the past and those experiments have never seen special relativity being violated. The test of special relativity are the most precise tests existing in science.
I suspect what they mean is that there is no outcome of an experiment such that, prior to the experiment, people computed that string theory says that the experiment should have such a result, but our other theories in best standing would say something else would happen, and then upon doing the experiment, it was found that things happened the way string theory said (as far as measurements can tell).
But there are such experiments. String theory says that the result of such experiment is: Lorentz invariance not violated.
> but our other theories
This is not how scientific research is done. The way you do it is you a theory, the theory makes predictions, you make experiments, and the predictions fail, you reject that theory. The fact that you might have other theories saying other things doens't matter for that theory.
So string theories said "Lorentz invariance not violated", we've made the experiments, and the prediction wasn't wrong, so you don't reject the theory. The logic is not unlike that of p-testing. You don't prove a theory correct is the experiments agree with it. Instead you prove it false if the experiments disagree with it.
There are no such experimental results satisfying the criteria I laid out. You may be right in objecting to the criteria I laid out, but, the fact remains that it does not satisfy these (perhaps misguided) criteria.
In particular, predicting something different from our best other theories in good standing, was one of the criteria I listed.
And, I think it’s pretty clear that the criteria I described, whether good or not, were basically what the other person meant, and should have been what you interpreted them as saying, not as them complaining that it hadn’t been falsified.
Now, when we gain more evidence that Lorentz invariance is not violated, should the probability we assign to string theory being correct, increase? Yes, somewhat. But, the ratio that is the probability it is correct divided by the probability of another theory we have which also predicts Lorentz invariance, does not increase. It does not gain relative favor.
Now, you’ve mentioned a few times, youtubers giving bad arguments against string theory, and people copying those arguments. If you’re talking about Sabine, then yeah, I don’t care for her either.
However, while the “a theory is tested on its own, not in comparison to other theories” approach may be principled, I’m not sure it is really a totally accurate description of how people have evaluated theories historically.
> But there are such experiments. String theory says that the result of such experiment is: Lorentz invariance not violated.
This is not a new prediction... String theory makes no new predictions, I hear. I don't understand why you need to be told this.
To your point, there exist various reformulations of physics theories, like Lagrangian mechanics and Hamiltonian mechanics, which are both reformulations of Newtonian mechanics. But these don't make new predictions. They're just better for calculating or understanding certain things. That's quite different from proposing special relativity for the first time, or thermodynamics for the first time, which do make novel predictions compared to Newton.
It has delivered falsifiable postdictions though. Like, there are some measurable quantities which string theory says must be in a particular (though rather wide) finite range, and indeed the measured value is in that range. The value was measured to much greater precision than that range before it was shown that string theory implies the value being in that range though.
Uh, iirc . I don’t remember what value specifically. Some ratio of masses or something? Idr. And I certainly don’t know the calculation.
I think it's more than "little motivation" if we're being honest. Right now Valve is quietly targeting MS' attempt to create a walled garden for gaming on Windows and (probably) cut them out. Their very clever approach has been a full end-run around the OS by using Proton, which I'm sure genuinely thrilled Apple... as long as Valve is only doing that to MS.
Why would Apple ever invite Valve to potentially do the same to them?
Especially looking at Apples recent gaming history.
When Cyberpunk, AC, and a couple other AAA titles came to macOS, Apple made a big deal of them being in the mac app store, specifically. They didn't go out of their way to call out that they run on mac, you can get them from Steam, etc. The big deal was they are in the app store.
That's where Apple wants mac gaming to happen so they can get their 30% cut.
I wish that weren't the case, but Apple's gonna Apple.
App stores for desktop computers have pretty consistently failed except for Steam.
I don't think I've installed anything from the App store on my Mini, instead I have just dropped all kinds of images into my Applications folder.
The Windows store is about as marginal as it can get. My corporate desktop at work is locked down with the Windows store disabled, they made it so I can elevate and do almost anything I need to do as a developers but I can't touch Policy Editor stuff and can't unlock it. I miss WSL2 but that's the only thing I miss. I install all sorts of things for work and just install them the way we did before there was Windows 8.
In the Windows 8 era my home computer always got the metadata database corrupted fror the store pretty quickly even though I didn't use it very much. The only thing I really wanted from it was the application to use my scanner back when I had an HP printer. It was obvious that it was possible to rebuild that database because it got fixed temporarily whenever it did one of the 6 month updates but people I talked to in Microsoft Support said I should nuke my account and spend hours reconfiguring all the applications that I actually use just so I can use this one crapplet. Switched to Epson and they have their own installer/updater that works like a normal Windows application. [1] I don't think the machine I built that started on Win 10 has any problems with the store but all I really know or care about is that WSL2 works and it does.
Microsoft dreams that you might buy games from the Windows store but it has an air of unreality to it. If Microsoft tried pulling Activision games out of Steam you know it would just force them to write off the Activision acquisition earlier rather than later.
Not sure if that counts, but homebrews cask is some kind of appstore. Yes, command line based, but I can install closed-source software using "brew install --cask <software-name>"
Apples biggest weakness is games. But it has a pretty large install base when compared to Linux (not counting phones or servers here).Seems like a win/win. Apple gets to address their weaknesses and Valve gets a large target market.
I actually see it as the reverse. Valve might be going for the whole pie and want to carve out a niche for their Steam Box. Inviting Apple to the party might detract from that effort. Or at the very least distract from their main focus.
> Apple gets to address their weaknesses and Valve gets a large target market.
I don't think Apple wants any non-Apple store addressing their weaknesses, especially a solution as competent and well-funded as Steam.
If Valve gains Apple-user mindshare on Mac, what prevents them from expanding to iPhones and iPads in the EU, and likely elsewhere if anti-monopoly laws get entrenched? IIRC, Services is the fastest growing revenue source at Apple.
They don't need Apple for that. People who game already game elsewhere. Steam on Apple feels pointless. I wouldn't be surprised, if Valve will go for smartphones with their own at some point
This is really the endgame, I think. A modern smartphone with a controller attached is effectively the same as a Steam Deck or Switch 2, just with a different OS. Apple has been pushing higher-end games on phones lately (this year has seen iOS versions of Hitman 3, Sniper Elite 4, and Subnautica), and reports are that the new pro phones run them well (the limiting factor being thermal load).
A phone that can run my Steam library is super-compelling -- I travel a decent amount, so being able to chuck something smaller like a Backbone One in my bag vs. a Steam Deck would be a meaningful change.
Games are not a weakness for Apple. They have all the gaming revenue they seem to care about with mobile. They just don't have proper/immediate motivation to apply that effort to desktop. I'm not sure i even care anymore. I'm a valve fanboi at this point, until Gabe leaves and they go corporate.
Mobile overlapping consoles in revenue and Apple had a good way years of taking a 30% cut on top. They are indeed behind fine with sticking as a middleman for gambling simulators that make billions.
It may work out all the same because Apple's attempts such as with Game Porting Toolkit and Metal, boost Valve's attempts with Proton and we may see a convergence where Valve is able to make a majority of Steam games work on Mac without Apple explicitly wanting it.
But, I do think it might actually be a net positive for them on the Mac by expanding the audience of people who might buy a Mac.
Given that full PC-Game-style game sales via the Mac App Store are likely abysmal, at least compared to mobile game revenue, I don’t think they have that much to lose.
> Why would Apple ever invite Valve to potentially do the same to them?
apple on a desktop/laptop is not a primary gaming platform; edge cases, at best
mobile gaming is a different story, but at the end of the day apple is making money off of hardware sales first and foremost, esp. w/r/t laptops and phones.
Our military spending is enormous, but it's dwarfed by what we spend on healthcare. The problem with our healthcare system isn't that we have a military, it's the gross and intentional profit-seeking behavior of insurers and many others in the system. They see the government as a bottomless pit of money that they can tap with lobbying, and the result is that we pay stupid prices for absolutely everything, on the assumption that it will be negotiated down somewhat by private or public insurance.
If you look at how $1 of public spending on healthcare is used in the US vs countries with better healthcare, it becomes obvious where the problem is, and it isn't in the ocean. An anti-military ideological stance is one thing, but you don't need to inject it into this.
Yeah, while I mostly agree with the sentiment, I don't actually recognise any of the behaviours described in this article. It does sound like the behavioural traits of a certain subsection of certain generations, who's expectations and norms have been warped by overuse of social media. It all sounds incredibly exhausting and I genuinely feel sorry for those growing up in this climate.
I think you're hitting the nail on the head, but the corollary is that there's so much MORE now. More of everything, and since most things are crap the gems are proportionally harder to find. I look at reality tv and wince, but I also feel that way about soap operas, it's the same itch being scratched the same way for a different generation. But the nature of reality tv (dirt cheap) means that it's been made in vast quantities, dwarfing the reach that soap operas ever had.
Soap operas weren't choking out late night comedy, they were totally different products serving different needs, at different times. Reality tv changes that equation though, with the aforementioned cheapness, and perennial popularity. A lot of the old norms are gone too, around residuals, the "one for them, one for me" system, stars vs brand... and the result is often entertainment geared at cheap production and nothing else.
The other issue is that CGI, while it empowers amazing things, also empowers the creation of real trash. It's allowed Marvel movies to film without a complete script, figuring out the ending in AVR and CGI work... and it shows. A lot of old blockbusters were crap, but they were crap that at least had the requisite craftsmanship to be made and distributed to theaters around the world.
That barrier is gone, the gates are open and that means that hidden voices are emerging (hooray!) and also that a lot of people are so inundated by noise that they disengage.
Wait until you hear about how the entire entertainment industry has always worked!
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