“When the golden age of television started in the late 1990s, all you needed to keep on top of good TV was a premium cable package that included HBO. When streaming entered the game in the early 2010s, you could get by with a basic Netflix subscription for $8 a month, maybe a Hulu subscription if you were a true TV buff. Now, there’s still cable and there’s still Netflix and Hulu — but there’s also Prime and Paramount+ and Disney+ and Apple TV+ and Peacock and Max. Oh, and if you want to keep your Netflix subscription fee low, you have to watch ads now.
It’s all a lot, way more than most people can keep track of. A 2023 Nielsen report found audiences now spend an average of 10.5 minutes searching for something to watch every time they sit down. At least one in five audience members have been so overwhelmed with all the choices the post-streaming world has for them that they’ve chosen to forgo TV to do something else instead.
Under these circumstances, it takes a lot for any one individual show to cut through the noise and find a critical mass of people waiting to watch it, much less discuss it. When they do decide to discuss it, they’re going to different places than they used to.”
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“One of the sticking points for the Writer’s Guild in 2023 was the rise of so-called “mini rooms” as an increasingly standard practice over the last 10 or so years as the streaming platforms began to build their libraries. A classic TV writer’s room can include seven or eight writers, but mini rooms include only two or three writers plus a showrunner.
Mini rooms typically emerged when a show was in limbo waiting to be greenlit, either for production or for a new season. The idea was that the showrunner could take on a few extra writers and a few weeks to plan the season they were pitching, which executives would then evaluate before they committed to filming episodes. The writers for a mini room were hired as freelancers and paid to scale, and there was no guarantee they would stick around if the show continued on to regular production. One of the biggest issues with this practice, the WGA argued, was that mini rooms cut young writers off from the classic apprenticeship system of TV writing.
Young writers were by and large not attractive to showrunners who needed to staff up a mini room to churn out a season’s worth of scripts fast. If young writers did get hired, they didn’t get mentorship from the older and more experienced writers they were working with, because those writers didn’t have time for it. By the time the episodes they wrote went into production, they were no longer working for the show and had no chance to come to the set, see how their script worked in practice, and adjust their practices for the future based on the new information.
The new WGA contract essentially killed off mini rooms, but for the next few years, we’ll be living in the creative ecosystem they birthed. That’s a world where upcoming talent had limited opportunities to learn the craft of their medium, and it has started to show.”
“In Korea, sunscreens are regulated as functional cosmetics versus the US where they’re regulated as over-the-counter drugs. The Korean Ministry of Food & Drug Safety (MFDS) is the regulatory authority, similar to the FDA, that’s responsible for creating and overseeing the sunscreen approval process. The approval process includes submitting clinical safety and efficacy documentation to the MFDS, which is far simpler than what the US requires. The testing and documentation is similar to what’s required in other global regions but the process is more efficient and can be done quickly.
In contrast, because the FDA treats sunscreen like a drug (and not a cosmetic), they have some of the most stringent requirements in the world, which requires extensive testing. As a result, the FDA in the United States has not greenlit any new UV filters since 1999. Notably, the FDA has recently mandated supplementary safety data for all previously approved chemical UV filters to uphold their market presence in the US.”
“In a recent paper titled “Industrial Headwinds: Reducing the Burden of Regulations on U.S. Manufacturers,” published in the May 2024 Club for Growth Policy Handbook, economist Daniel Ikenson writes, “For manufacturing firms, the cost of federal regulations in 2022 was roughly $350 billion, or 13.5% of the sector’s GDP—a burden 26% greater than the inflation-adjusted cost of regulatory compliance in 2012.”
He adds that while the average U.S. company pays a regulatory compliance price of $13,000 per employee, large manufacturers shoulder a cost more than twice as much—$29,100. However, even some small-sized manufacturers face annual compliance costs of $50,100 per employee. This helps explain why manufacturing automation is so popular and why our fastest-growing companies are in service-sector tech, not manufacturing.”
“As Corn-Revere points out, “adopted in 1996, Section 230 was proposed as a way to counter efforts to censor internet speech.” Prior to its passage, online platforms were treated as publishers of material posted on their sites if they made any attempt at moderation. They were incentivized to allow free-for-alls, or else scrutinize all content for legal liability—or not allow third parties to post anything at all.
Included in the Communications Decency Act, Section 230’s important provisions survived the voiding of most of that law on constitutional grounds. It reads, in part: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” Those are the 26 words credited as creating the internet by Jeff Kosseff’s 2019 book. They also take the blame for what so many politicians hate about the online world.”
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“”For the biggest players, more carefully policing content would probably mean bolstering the ranks of thousands of hired moderators and facing down far more lawsuits,” added Shields and Brody. “For smaller players, the tech industry argues, it could prove ruinous.””
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“”The law is not a shield for Big Tech,” point out the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) Aaron Mackey and Joe Mullin in defending Section 230. “Critically, the law benefits the millions of users who don’t have the resources to build and host their own blogs, email services, or social media sites, and instead rely on services to host that speech.””