...no real evidence either way.

Most of the opponents are unions. Their interests will be ignored unless a Democratic government is somehow put into office before the merger completes, which is doubtful.

Paramount opposes it, but every argument they give would also apply to the Paramount takeover of WBD they are arguing for, so... I don't even know why their lawyers submitted this brief.

This year there have been multiple mergers, all heavily against the public interest, where it became clear the deciding point was whether adequate fealty was paid to Trump. Two massive TV station operators were involved in seperate mergers that are only going ahead because they opposed ABC showing a comedian critical of Trump and because ABC "settled" a bogus lawsuit filed by Trump. CBS is going ahead because it cancelled a major Trump critic, also settled a bogus lawsuit with Trump, and the new owner is run by a right wing nutjob relation to Licence Ellison. T-Mobile bought US Cellular after dropping anti-discrimination policies, paying towards Trump's inauguration fund, and funding the "ballroom", despite DOJ objections. And, so on.

The merger will go ahead just as long as Netflix keeps up its steady stream of crappy right wing action movies and right wing comedy specials. And, of course, makes "donations" to Trump "causes".

2024 Corollas aren't like 1997 Corolla's, they're pretty much the size Camrys were back then. The fact it has grown in size, and the fact that there isn't a lot of competition (does Ford even make sedans any more? Best I can find is the Mustang - a quick look at this page shows that "alternatives to the Corolla" are mostly crossovers, the Jetta, Forte, Impreza, Elantra and Civic (of course) being the only similar vehicles considered competition), suggests that the entire market segment is poorly supported by both manufacturers and consumers alike.

While have you seen the amount of SUVs and pick-up trucks on the roads? It's absurd, especially given the vast majority are owned by people who'll never use the things that make them expensive and fuel inefficient.

So one Ford pick-up truck, out of a selection of Ford vehicles that makes up top selling pick-ups and SUVs, outsells the Corolla 4:1? That's a sign Toyota might eventually phase out the Corolla in the US, not a sign the Corolla's market segment is popular.

It sucks, but there you have it. Hopefully things will change, but with this administration in charge, it's going to take a while.

Are you claiming that inflation was the fault of Biden? You do know what happened the year before Biden took office, right? That continued for two more years and caused supply chain issues that wreaked havoc on the entire economy?

Also throughout 2021-2024, despite all of this, we had full employment. I'll take temporary inflation over unemployment thank you, even if it's not been US policy since Carter decided to adopt monetarism.

Even the summary gives some context to this, which is that it's about lowering fuel emissions standards in the supposed belief that this will somehow make small cars legal (uh, what?) So, it's still dumb.

And I'm not praising Trump for some slightly positive thing he might have said any more than I'm going to praise a certain German dictator of the 1930s for building an interstate highway system, improving the trains, and starting a company to make small affordable wagons for the volks.

Look, in the end, we know what Trump's doing. It's a grift. It's not even a smart, well hidden, one by a smart person, it's just dumb shit that takes advantage of marks who'll buy anything. Trump accepts bribes, he sells things with his name on it at ridiculous prices, he's in it for one thing only. In the meantime he hides, as his ilk always does, his gross incompetence by pointing a finger at minorities with no power, claiming they're responsible for everything wrong, and making public displays of "cracking down" on them, where the cracking down is intentionally cruel and rotten so nobody can claim he isn't "doing anything".

So he promoted small cars? So what? You think he's doing that because he cares about global warming or intracity congestion or sky high car prices? You think that him promoting them will in any way make America a better place, even if that's not the intent?

Think that's still going on. We had to replace our minivan recently, and I got a three year old Odyssey for only slightly less than what it cost new three years ago. And that was very much market price, we couldn't find anything much cheaper. Of course a new Odyssey would have cost 25% more.

The situation is insane right now though, with a lot of people completely priced out of the market. And then there's people who shouldn't be spending $70K on a pick-up (for example) who are doing so anyway because they think they have to.

Another reason to hope that $25K electric pick-up will be a success. If nothing else, it might smack some sense into an industry that's gone insane.

> the testimony of children damaged by the invasiveness of transitioning and paying dearly for the results of surgery and injection of powerful chemicals

Stop. Fucking. Lying.

This blood libel against trans people needs to be recognized for what it is. A step towards the agenda of ultimately committing the mass murder of trans people - just as Project 2025 argued for.

(For those confused, no surgeon would perform a sex change operation on a kid, even if they wanted to, they would lose liability insurance, their hospital would refuse to give them the facilities, their hospital would also lose its liability insurance if it didn't even assuming it was OK with it which it wouldn't be, and we'd hear non-stop about lawsuits from these kids once they reach the age of 18. As for "chemically transitioning", hormone therapy is safe and reversible, and not generally given until pubity, and pubity blockers may have minor long term consequences, but if you're truly in favor of making sure people make the decision when they're old enough, then they're the only thing on the table. You literally have to be in favor of them or opposed to letting them make a decision when they're old enough, you can't have both positions simultaneously.

Also note that these are only given to kids that have attempted suicide. That's why they got in front of a psychiatrist in the first place.)

I am not entirely sure why I failed to notice you went on to cover those drugs. I saw the denial and assumed the rest was on that, which was dumb of me. I apologize!

There are Alzheimers drugs that can slow the deterioration through, which is almost certainly what was being referred to.

Source: personal experience, I have a close relative on it. Also https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mayoclinic.org%2Fdis...

(Disclaimer: I have no evidence that Trump actually does have Alzheimers beyond the rather weird behavior he shows regularly, but I'm not sure they'd let him out in public if his symptoms were severe at this point. My relative started showing signs ten years ago, but we didn't realize because it wasn't memory loss at that stage, it was more crazy behavior. Based on that it's possible Trump has it and is in early onset Alzheimers, and the evidence the GP mentions maybe raises that to a probable, but it's far from proven.

And before any Trump and Reagan supporter mentions Biden, I've had two close family members suffer from Dementia, the other not being Alzheimers, and Biden's behavior wasn't consistent with either. It was consistent though with an old man who's suffered a life long stutter. Especially reading the transcript of the debate everyone threw a fit about, it's obvious to me he's not got dementia in any form. So... can we actually wait for medical confirmation before just assuming? I'm not happy with the GP over that either. It might be better to just say Trump shows signs of being out of touch with reality, because that is legitimately something you can say, there's no need to armchair diagnose here.)

I don't think Trump has vetoed a single merger yet. And given this is a right wing institution buying a largely non-political content maker, I don't see why he'd oppose it.

He didn't say ESPN. He said Disney+ and Hulu. Disney+ and Hulu do, very much, cover a massively overlapping market segment.

That said, the prices aren't that far off. Ad-free versions of both were about $6 for Disney+ and $12 for Hulu 4 years ago. Today you can get them bundled together for $21 a month (without ads) So... with inflation, arguably it's the same price - as long as you buy them together. What it isn't is $12 a month, which is what people with the same mentality as Going_Digital seem to think it would cost.

Also it's worth mentioning that "essentially serving two different market segments" is a very poor argument. Are you saying they'd be able to cut costs if they served the same segment? If so... how would they do that outside of no longer making as much content?

Simple reality is that if two studios are making content and then merge, either they're going to reduce the amount of content they make to less than the two were making, which is a net loss for us, or they're going to increase prices to cover the fact they still have the same costs, but now slightly less competition, which is also a net loss for us.

It's a bad situation. Disney can have this one because Disney partially owned Hulu anyway from the beginning, and it's only because Fox was merged (which arguably it shouldn't have been) into Disney that gave them 100% control. But merging HBO Max into Netflix? That just means eliminating a streaming option, of the options that was competing for viewers and competing for content makers to produce content. It's not a good thing.

You right wingers live in an alternate reality. Seriously.

1. Biden wasn't fascist.

2. Netflix never supported Biden in any meaningful way. Netflix in the meantime has promoted almost exclusively right wing content, from brainless action flicks to "comedy specials" that are dumb culture war bullshit and almost always promote the idea that cancellation culture is a thing. I watched an unfunny Gabriel Iglesias special on it and even he decided to spend five minutes on a presumably mandated "cancelled" section where he tried to argue he was "cancelled" (really? He's still getting gigs last I checked) because someone criticized him on Twitter. Yes, really. No boycott. No "I couldn't get gigs or had to have them in secret". Purely "I promoted an organization that funds lobbying campaigns to get the death penalty imposed on gay people, and someone I've never heard of said I was a jerk!" And he was serious. And that's about the most left wing you'll find comedy on Netflix.

3. The left has no media. The best we might sort of have is MS Fucking Now which is a joke and still has a morning show run by an ex-Republican Congressman, and while, technically, yes he's against the Republicans today, that's not because he's a Democrat any more than Dick Cheney was a fucking Democrat. Meanwhile the right has, on the extreme end, OANN, Fox, and Newsmax, all three of which regularly make shit up - the recent "Actor who plays former member of Antifa and who also played former member of Mexican mafia" nonsense on Fox being a would be hilarious example if (1) right wing nutbags didn't believe it and (2) it didn't show Fox was actively trying to fan hatred and misinformation. Meanwhile CNN is owned by a right wing lunatic, NBC is run by Trump sycophants. CBS is being bought by Larry Fucking Ellison, ABC is running scared and bribing Trump and suspending TV shows in an effort to stay on his good side - and was never left wing, just pro-corporate.

4. Soros is barely consequential. You've hyped him up for decades as some kind of left wing bogeyman and pretended he's in charge of numerous things, but the reality is that he's one person, and he barely funds anything compared to the avalanche of right wing money the last 3 decades.

5. Nobody is supporting "illegals". And the only party that's come out intentionally in favor of destroying America is the Republican party. Project 2025 is a blueprint for destroying America. SCOTUS's P25 supporters have made it clear they believe the President is above the law, which is as un-American as you can get. Trump has taken full advantage, which is as Un-American as you can get. Trump's goons are invading peaceful cities and attacking ordinary Americans, which is as un-American as you can get.

And you know what? Whenever this happens, he can count on un-Americans like yourself to cheerlead and support, because you literally hate America. You hate the idea of a democratically accountable government that has to operated under the law. You hate Americans who aren't white, male, and supportive of the hateful thing you call Christianity that no real Christian would recognize in a million years. You want to impose the shitty version of your religion that you believe in on everyone else like some crazed Iranian cleric.

So you have some gall criticizing everyone else for wanting to destroy America. What next? Gonna claim that you're the ones that "support the troops" when you're supporting having them invade American cities, pointing guns at American citizens, and simultaneously supporting removing veteran's benefits and destroying VA hospitals?

You fuckers make every real American sick. Nazi fuck-ups, every one of you.

Do you think that HBO Max + Netflix will cost the same as Netflix does now?

I swear people who insist there's something terrible about multiple streaming services can't see the wood for the trees. HBO Max and Disney+ and Hulu and Netflix and Paramount+ and Peacock and Prime all merging into one service doesn't mean a single service for $10 a month, it means a single service for $150 a month.

I would rather just continue the status quo. Have them compete with one another, and let me switch subscriptions every few months to get the content I didn't get with the others.

They also didn't start delving into DEI madness in 2010...neglecting the engineering to chase the "diversity" ghost

> They're supposed to watch every video before airing it?

Uhm, yes. Why are you implying otherwise? I'm not aware of the TV industry ever having a time where it was considered normal to just take footage and broadcast it without some sort of review. At best, live performances are often actually live, though sometimes on a 10 second delay. But prerecorded content is ALWAYS reviewed first.

This is 100% HBO Max's fault. It's not even 1% Liongate's fault - they may have passed on the video, but they had no reason to believe HBO Max would be this incompetent, and it may well have been what Liongate assumed HBO was asking for. This is what you get when you let a sociopathic money man who knows more about how to commit accounting fraud legally than how to run a content empire like Zazlav run your business.

Yep, I had writeups from those flame wars. They *REALLY* did not want it discussed. Governors Brown and Kotek continued the pay-to-play system, which is what lost Oregon the Ohio CHIPs foundry campus (before they realized that Biden wasn't going to pay out CHIPs act at all).