“no response from NYC, in violation of New York State’s Freedom of Information Law, which requires a response within 5 business days (we’re way beyond that). “

I’m a bit caught up on the above statement…. If i break the law, I get fined or go to jail.. what happens when the people that are supposed to be upholding the law start breaking it…. does that mean I’m off the hook? Or is this a do as I say not as I do situation?

The latter. Just look at the IRS.

That doesn’t explain people being misquoted by interviews they never even gave 🙂

The real answer is, for corporations, such as NBC, and the real answer is there is absolutely nothing we can do about it.

The government has entire body deticated to doing exactly what Goldman Sack’s tells them to do. It intentionally doesn’t tell the people what’s going on, and hides all information they can from us to ensure that we don’t figure out the con: It’s called the FEDERAL RESERVE.

While this is appalling, this is nothing new. It’s been happening since 1913.

If people really want to get out from under the thumb of corporations, they should look at giving the government less power, not more.

I am all for that!

“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul this unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of statesmanship.”
~Theodore Roosevelt

Maybe we should elect someone named “Roosevelt” in 2012. Just a thought.

Because that’s how partnerships work.

Because Beck isn’t the type do himself any favors, methinks. Any coherent message gets lost in his penchant for histrionics.

Try to find something newsworthy for a change rather than conjuring up these desperate conspiracy theories to whip up your fellow tin foil hat wearers.

So, Mike just conjured this story up, eh? Me thinks your corpocracy colors are showing. Which do yo work for, the gov’t or one of it’s corporate partners? Never mind answering, it’s practically the same either way.

We can stop watching NBC. (I already did a long time ago, but I did for all media that contains commercial messages.)

And then tell our friends, coworkers, and family why we stopped.

We can stop buying products advertised on NBC. Because if we really want to impact NBC we impact their bottom line: advertising. And tell our friends, coworkers, and family why we stopped.

I have a list of ~20 companies I no longer do *any business with. They have either stolen my money, pissed me off, spammed me, or generally did not make a wrong right. They will *never* see a dime of my money ever again.

I am a technology purchaser/implementer where I work, with an annual budget in the 6 figures. There are large and small companies alike that, over the course of 10 years have lost out on hundreds of thousands of dollars due to *just pissing me off once.* Now add that by all the advice I give to friends and family. Add all that cessation of product use for generations.

People CAN make a difference.

Surely I can’t be alone?

While enjoying a circle jerk of their own…

NYC was pitched concepts by the production company and signed off. That’s how these things work. No one jammed it down their throats. ICE asked to use an edited version. Again, no one “made” ICE do anything. The actual company who produced the content was a NY-based commercial producer. Is that relevant? I don’t think so. The entities who display the message “own” (as in are responsible for) the message. The city of New York is responsible for it’s version of the ad. ICE is similarly responsible for theirs. NBC/U may have paid for it (though from the look of it, not a lot) and it is probably consistent with NBC/U’s point of view. But it is a point of view of many companies and workers in the entertainment industry. So what? If you think NBC/U bought off NYC or ICE with a $10k commercial, you are really deluding yourself.

Actually GE still owns a large minority stake in NBC U.

Actually, what you don’t realize is that GE’s tentacles reach far deeper into the world. They are deeply ingrained in the U.S. economy powering, running, supplying infrastructure for nuclear power plants, dams, steam/gas turbine based power plants, wind turbines, locomotive engines, oil and gas drilling/platforms/sub-sea, vehicle/fleet services appliances, lighting, HUGE in healthcare devices, backing private label credit cards (think retail and home improvement big box chains), capital and financial services (as big or bigger than the ‘Too Big to Fail’ financial firms like Goldman Sachs, etc.), massive real estate holdings, owners of fleets of airplanes rented back to the airlines, defense contracts for every branch of the U.S. military, Homeland Security, government agencies, security and surveillance programs for the FBI, research partnerships with almost every major U.S. university, you name it. The scope of GE is so massive the general public truly has no idea how much of the U.S. GE has their hand in.

Its been at least fifty years since the US govenrment began its undeclared war on its citizenry.

Your habitual insistance that the US govenrment is responsive to, or cares about “the will of the people” makes me wonder just how many times you ‘accidently’ fell as a child.

Follow the money, and you will see the truth.

hsa doesn’t work for us or nbc. it works for the almighty dollar.

Heard this silly and disingenuous “PSA” at Brooklyn’s screening of Wayne’s World tonight and it had me yelling at the screen (apologies to anyone who had to listen to that…), and has me still quite annoyed now. Anyway, I only skimmed the comments above, and hence may have missed some comments on the economics, but wanted to add a couple of points. In general, the “PSA” is probably bad economics. The following is probably obvious, trite, and dull.

1) Who is affected by file sharing? Mostly Hollywood studios (hence NBC making this video). So they will be our object of analysis. Profits for the owners of the Hollywood studios might be cut into by piracy, but even that is ambiguous: ignore the # of downloads – and totally reject any calculation made by industry about their ‘losses’ – and look instead at the marginal effect of piracy on demand for Hollywood stuff: if the down-loader is unlikely to go to a movie anyway, then *no* revenue is lost… And lets also keep in mind here that the big entertainment industry has already been found guilty of collusion on the price of CDs (http://www.stereophile.com/news/10744/), and then been accused of doing the same on digital content too (http://www.stereophile.com/news/10744/), so it’s not like these guys are victims. Actually, the consumer has been the victim here (that same mic boom operator is also a consumer of entertainment products, after all…)

2) Either way, clawing away at those profits likely will have no effect on the boom mic operator so manipulatively presented in the add; she is likely getting paid her marginal product (or so says classical economic theory), so even if the executives take home more or less money, she’s basically the same…

3) … unless the entire sector shrinks. But even if that is the case (fewer big Hollywood movies getting made) the effects are still ambiguous: filesharing (along with the internet and the digital camera) has democratized the sector, breaking the H monopoly, and this has *positive* effects for that boom mic operator, as a larger but less top-heavy sector may distribute resources more equitably: there are fewer barriers to entry, capital up front is less important therefore rewarded at a lower rate, and people with skills (like boom mic operators) are relatively speaking *better* remunerated. Indeed, as Hollywood makes consistently worse and worse product (partially because it is out of ideas, partially a lame attempt at ‘cost recovery’ from file sharing – what economists would call the General Equilibrium effect), a gap is being filled by TV stations, freelance folks, etc making quality product(or at least trying). All those people need boom-mic operators.
(Can we isolate the effect of piracy from the internet and digital camera issues? Not empirically, and so we have to rely on theory. Lets posit that the number of dollars spent on entertainment is generally constant (maybe a big assumption?); there is an exogenous shock (piracy) which hurts H, decreasing its market share as H makes worse products in response; those dollars flow into other sectors (like independent film) which consumers are willing to pay for because (a) they feel like it’s art, not mass entertainment, and are willing to pay for it / are guilted into it?; 2) don’t feel like this sector is, I dunno, gonna make propaganda and pass it off as PSA in order to capture more rents?; 3) it’s harder to download them; 4) or they flow into online content, which is downloadable by definition, and merely embeds the adverts (Hulu model)?

4) People are consumers of an array of entertainment options; they aren’t forced to watch movies. Hence if movies get to the point where they aren’t worth the expense, people will migrate to other forms of entertainment. Punitive or aggressive cutting policing of piracy may have General Equilibrium effects that hurt the film industry; counter intuitively, the sector may actually *benefit* from file sharing: what if file-sharing actually *generates* demand for box office viewing, perhaps not for the person downloading, but indirectly through externalities created by the pirate and captured by the general sector: In other words, I download Die Hard IV, talk about what an amazing and silly movie it is on my hypothetical blog, and you read it, and the comments of the 50 other people who think it’s a fun analysis (it will be, that much I can promise you), and then as a result of this being conversation worthy, and that you want to be a part of it, you go out and see it.

5) On a smaller scale, I have smart friends who have hustled their way through film and video production in NYC for the past decade or so, and their biggest desire seems to me to be to generate demand for their art. They have run the boom, and been behind the camera. They are dying for people to steal their stuff. In other words, the boom mic operator as presented in the PSA (as only a boom mic operator) may exist, but for the most part most of the folks involved in this sector are artists rather than wage ‘workers’ narrowly defined, and if we actually cared about the artists and the art, we would decouple the profit-stream side from it. So what would this look like? Lets imagine that all films were available for download for free, how would this change the structure of the business? First, there probably would be fewer Michael Bay movies. With apologies to the cast of the Rock, this in general is a sacrifice we could probably be willing to make, for the sake of not being subject to the generally shitty art that he and his ilk produce (and his might survive: there would still be demand to see his stuff on a big screen; same with the rom-com: dinner and a movie would acquire a price premium – becoming more expensive relative to what it is now when you could stay home and eat kraft macaroni – but as such it will probably survive). Cost recovery would take the form of advertising embedded in or around content. [This all deserves more discussion and thought than i can give it right now, but I think a better equilibrium would be found…]

6) So what the hell is city of NYC doing involved with this? Why did our guy have to FOIA them to get the truth? Weirdness. I doubt this is a purely economic argument: they might think that piracy generates revenues that are un-taxable, whereas movie theaters pay taxes? And that Nigerians sell the pirated copies and repatriate their dollars at high rates, rather than putting them back into the economy? Doubtful that this is considered. My only thought is that the city is embarrassed by so much fairly blatant flouting of the law, but it is not worth the resources expended and the opportunity cost to have policemen actually round up those selling DVDs on the street. Better to pursue a top-down ‘behavior change’ campaign to dampen demand, putting the pirates out of business naturally? I dunno.

Coda: what perhaps is most telling is that when I told my girlfriend that the “PSA” we watched this evening wasn’t made by some benign agency of the government, but was actually owned by NBC, she said “Well, of course”… and her look, full of sweetness and sympathy, was as if to say, “silly boy, you actually think there’s a difference? Between the state and corporate interests? Between propaganda and truth?”