Ai Will Replace All Of Us In Production - The clock is ticking...
- Thread starter puredrifting
- Start date
It is "borscht" and, since it's made of beets, it's always red. And Schumpeter and I only discussed the proper amount of sour cream that ought to be added into it. Sour cream will leave white streaks, naturally.
Either way, it's quite delish.
puredrifting
Major Contributor
It's California. The gig economy may have been the main target but it was a wide swath of occupations it is actually affecting. I seriouly doubt that the educated legislators and policy makers are so
stupid as to not have forecasted and projected how their bill would affect every area of ICs in the state. They could have put in specific carve outs that would have protected media production and they purposely did not.
They only gave a carve out to truckers because they knew without truckers, California would cease to exist. And I believe they gave certain musicians, but only in certain, very specific settings a carve out.
Other than those, AB-5 has basically put every Independent Contractor in the state of California out of businessor at least out of business legally. Translators, musicians, photographers, journalists, strippers and
exotic dancers, massage therapists, nail technicians, cosmotologists, the list of those affected, we are discovering, extends into the hundreds, if not thousands of occupations and jobs.
If you were here, as a wedding shooter and you wanted to hire a hair and makeup artist friend for $100.00 to touch up your bride for
15 minutes for the wedding prep stuff, you would be required by law to hire her as an employee of your company, pay her workers comp, tax
withholding, insurance, all through a payroll service that will add a minimum of 30% to your bottom line costs, often more. Often the payroll
services have a minimum, requiring a large workrs comp deposit that would be many times what you are even paying to your friend. Oh, and don't forget, it
would also be illegal for your bride and groom to hire you as an IC, they have to hire you as an employee too. Your company, if you have one (an LLC or Corp)
will likely not meet the criteria set up to operate as an IC.
As I said, the end game for the politicians and the state that are pushing this insanity is total and complete control of all labor and business dealings, the state is obviously complicit in order to increase
tax revenues because of the perception that under the current tax system, so many cheat and undereport income and fail to pay taxes on it. Ironically, what they are putting forward is going to increase
non-compliance, I am already hearing from dozens of colleagues who are pushing toward converting their businesses to cash only as you would experience in third world countries, which is will decrease
tax revenues because these whole economic sectors will be driven underground as cash only businesses, just like they are now in China, Russia, India and hundreds of other places.
Organized crime controls the unions and often even runs them so this is nothing but increasing their slice of this racket so of course, they are paying to have
people like AB-5 author Lorena Gonzalez put into office to continually bang on about "protecting the workers, union strong" and all of that other BS. Nevermind that legislation
like this is causing a harmful economic domino effect as the pieces of the economy that relied heavily on ICs are crumbling before everyone's eyes.
In production, if you are in the union, working on high budget union projects, AB-5 has zero affect on you because you've been in that payroll model for a long time.
The studios, networks and streamers just build in that extra 32% as the cost of doing business. But that's big buck stuff. A corporation hiring someone for a $10k
corporate video isn't going to hire the company on payroll and they aren't going to magically be ok with paying $13k for the same job. They'll not do the video,
do the video out of state or have the internal staff do it. That small production company is simply hosed.
If you examine the overall business of media production, only a tiny percentage of the overall business is union with payroll where we are hired as
employees. I'd be willing to bet the number of DVXers in the States who are in the union and only work as employees on payroll is miniscule compared to the
number of people like you and me who exist outside of that model and work as ICs with our own LLCs and corporations or just as DBA freelancers.
As far as Biden, do you think will hold true if the Dems turn the Senate? They already have the house and they will likely have the White House.
The "balance of power" nationally may shift duirng this election. Like every other horrible public policy, it may take a few years but if the momentum is there,
they will eventually ram it through nationally.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/patric...WbyYwIdBTXV0QjkIFbhWU0ZI95rj0mU0#1240220e4c74
Last edited:
ahalpert
Major Contributor
Does that mean you're Polish? Any chance you speak it? You could read Stanislaw Lem in the original
ahalpert
Major Contributor
You need 60 votes to get anything done in the senate. And like the GOP, the Dem party is not a monolith. I sincerely doubt the Doug Joneses of the party would be on board. I dont see it happening nationally. And if it did, they would have a very brief time in the majority
.Re: unions, I think that they push up my earnings in NY even though I've never belonged to one. Then you have a host of labor protections won over the years by unions, starting with the weekend. From wikipedia:
Amazon doesn't want unions so it can keep crushing its employees with impunity.
I think America would be a hellscape if we had never had any unions.
Saying that we should get rid of them because they're corrupt is like saying we should dissolve the government because politicians are corrupt. Wouldn't it be better to institute reforms?
And although they really screwed a lot of people with the bill, I am sympathetic to the case that a lot of the "magical savings" from the gig economy come from misclassifying employees and skipping their benefits, giving an unfair competitive advantage against legacy companies with a traditional workforce, so many of whom have been put out of business by silicon valley upstarts.
There are borscht scholars?
If there were, AB-5 would surely ban them.
PS. There will be a run around AB-5. They'll likely involve people joining limited partnerships and then subcontracting to each other. Still a mess though.
puredrifting
Major Contributor
You need 60 votes to get anything done in the senate. And like the GOP, the Dem party is not a monolith. I sincerely doubt the Doug Joneses of the party would be on board. I dont see it happening nationally. And if it did, they would have a very brief time in the majority
Re: unions, I think that they push up my earnings in NY even though I've never belonged to one. Then you have a host of labor protections won over the years by unions, starting with the weekend. From wikipedia:
Amazon doesn't want unions so it can keep crushing its employees with impunity.
I think America would be a hellscape if we had never had any unions.
Saying that we should get rid of them because they're corrupt is like saying we should dissolve the government because politicians are corrupt. Wouldn't it be better to institute reforms?
And although they really screwed a lot of people with the bill, I am sympathetic to the case that a lot of the "magical savings" from the gig economy come from misclassifying employees and skipping their benefits, giving an unfair competitive advantage against legacy companies with a traditional workforce, so many of whom have been put out of business by silicon valley upstarts.
How many unions have you belonged to? I've been in three, plus my wife is a teacher and is involutarily indoctrinated into the union because she doesn't have a choice. My dad was a union construction worker his entire life. I worked on union contruction sites for four Summers as a paid in cash "gofer" as the union reps were
encouraged to look the other way. I've personally been physically assaulted and had threats against my life and my family made by SAG and ICG600 union reps/enforcers on two occasions when I dared to cross a shut down line. In the same situation, I was offered bribes to shut down the production I was on. The local union at that time when they shut down on our non-union
low budget shoot used their connections at Variety and the Hollywood Reporter to print blatant 100% lies about the actions of the production company I worked for on their front pages. Not to mention the 60 or so union members we had hired at greater than union scale for a guaranteed 6 weeks of continuous
work they had to give up thanks to their union reps who threatened to take their union pensions and to cut off their union healthcare if they didn't walk. Out loud, in front of all of us. It was like something from a movie, except it was real.
I can also tell about all of the delightful union reps I've dealt with over the years as one of our largest clients for a time was LA Metro. I've interviewed the Los Angeles heads of several of the transportation workers unions. These people were 100% straight from the set of the Sopranos, except they weren't actors
and the stuff they did was real and their victims are real people in real life. The guys were clearing between $300k and $600k per years as "reps" with nothing more than a 6th grade education. I'm sure Lorena Gonzalez probably associates with people like this on a daily basis as her union "collaborators".
Unions did just enough good for exploited workers during the Upton Sinclair "The Jungle" days through about the 1950s. They were just as corrupt back then but access to information and news was incredibly limited then too as far as the American public
learning about union tactics and execution and the involvement with organized crime. I'm not saying that no union ever did anything worthwhile for American workers or that there wasn't a time when
unions were needed by a majority of American workers. I posit that in the era of SJWs and social media, unions know that their time is past. Union membership has declined 50% since 1983. They know they are quickly going to become 100% irrelevant
so they are going all in to leverage their relevancy in modern America. They really aren't needed anymore but you can bet than the mob bosses who have financed generations with union graft and corruption aren't eager to give that cash cow up.
I'm not saying nothing is needed anymore to protect workers interests, but perhap organized crime is not the best candidate to act as the American workforce's social liberator? For people who have not dealt with union corruption and violence as well as
their lies and slander first hand, it all probably sound pretty appealing. Once you've experienced and or witnessed union corruption first hand, you pretty have your mind made up for you by reality, not theory.
Last edited:
ahalpert
Major Contributor
Yeah that sounds horrible. But also blatantly illegal. How the hell do they get away with intimidation and assault?
I feel like the organized part is good and it's the crime part that should go.
The decline of union membership has not necessarily been a natural process. There has been plenty of concerted efforts to undermine them on the part of big businesses and their hired guns in government.
Some people also think that it's not a coincidence that the decline in unions mirrors the decline of the middle class in this country:
And I think that union auto workers make much better wages than non-union.
But you're right, I've never dealt with one.
PS SJW mean social justice warrior? What's the tie-in? They call out worker abuse?
puredrifting
Major Contributor
Yes, of course it's illegal. But when you have systematic corruption in place, it's easy to happen. You live in NY. The NYPD, as a law enforcement agency, is statsistically the most corrupt in the nation. Guess who holds
positions number two and three? The LAPD and LA Co Sheriff. I am not anti-law enforcement at all, I am friends with several law enforcement agencies, I 100% am against defunding law enforcement,
but as agencies, those three have repeated patterns of widespread, systematic corruption over decades and decades and dozens and dozens of huge scandals. So it's no surprise to me that unions can
get away with all kinds of illegal acts, repeatedly, systematically. The FBI, at least in LA, is kept very busy just trying to make all of the players we are discussing here behave and not be too blatant
in their corruption and crime.
Yes, SJW = social justice warrior. You know, those self-appointed guardians of all of society's perceived wrong doing in the name of the oppressed ;-) Large organizations and governments are still
petrfied of bad press, being exposed and called out. Social media and SJWs are the cheap and free alternative to government watchdogs.
ahalpert
Major Contributor
I know - I saw Serpico
I'm a huge believer in reform. Yes, that's a vague term. But basically I'm a believer in "good government" (which could apply to unions too), but it can only really happen with enough civic engagement. Keeping citizens out of politics is the best way to bamboozle them.
I think the mother of all reforms is campaign finance reform. Because of the vast sums required to run a campaign (which are basically legal bribes, in my view), politicians are beholden more to their donors than their voters. And so it's not a simple matter of voters choosing the best politician or platform for their personal interests. Well-funded campaigns can reach many more people than poor campaigns.
Obviously, the political and donor classes don't want campaign finance reform. It would require a herculean and very popular effort to push that through. But I think that getting money out of politics is really the first step in addressing corruption in government, the police, unions, etc...
As for SJWs - maybe they can shine a light on abuse. But I don't think they can raise wages. Plus, workers would need to hope that their story gets picked up by the right influencers
ahalpert
Major Contributor
I'm a little hazy on if no-politics means no political topics or just no partisan politics. I sort of got the impression it meant no partisan politics. But you're probably right that it would be smart to return the discussion to skynet...
ahalpert
Major Contributor
Maybe he's just such a good writer that he doesn't need to edit?
The same format that the AlaskaCameraDude uses. I just think it's the DVXUser page with a narrower field, so one just presses the return key more often to separate sentences and paragraphs.
I try to reformat the whole thing back
if
I quote.
