Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Mega Strange, in reply to kiwicmc,
If you search filestube.com for “lee child free download” as per the twitter image, the first page that comes back has 7 links to mega.co.nz. Top two links point to 4shared.com. No links for “eleanor catton free download” though…
Right you are – oddly, I thought that’s what I’d done.
Tried six links. They all resulted in this message on the Mega site:
The file you are trying to download is no longer available.
This could be due to the following reasons:
The file has been removed because of a ToS/AUP violation.
Invalid URL – the link you are trying to access does not exist
The file has been deleted by the user. -
Hard News: Mega Strange, in reply to Dylan Reeve,
This seems to be his best evidence for that:
https://twitter.com/samelworthy/status/393467230882525184Ah – not Google, then: FilesTube.
But I still couldn’t replicate that search, even when I narrowed it down to Mega files only. The first few pages of a general search for ebook on Mega were fairly obscure results – an .rar containing a few dozen crappy, actually-free ebooks, some Polish-translation comics, etc. No Luminaries, no Lee Child.
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Hard News: Mega Strange, in reply to Rob Stowell,
Yeah? I’m not sure it is legal. Making a copy is making a copy. The latest (2009) law allows for some specific format shifting, but general copying, even for backup? Been a while since I actually read the legislation, but I wouldn’t assume that’s covered…
Nah, Dylan’s in the clear on that one:
Are there any restrictions on what I can do with copies of shows?
We only ask that you do not redistribute or sell the material. Once you download a show, it's yours to keep forever, and yours to use for any reasonable personal use.
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Hard News: Movie Disaster, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
My question is more about why we’re subsidising movies/TV production rather than anything else. Why are we picking the winner of making movies over the winner of making computer games, software, phones, solar panels, planes, boats, cars, pogo sticks, music, custard squares or fancy children’s toys.
Fair question. But as I noted earlier, by far our biggest industrial subsidy lies in the way we’re allowing the dairy industry to destroy our natural environment. Then, I’m guessing, the decades of cheap power, massive emissions freebie and, most recently, the $30 million in cash we’ve handed to Rio Tinto.
Compared to those, the LBSPG looks pretty good.
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Hard News: Movie Disaster, in reply to Chris Waugh,
I think this was the thread in which the game industry was mentioned as an example. Here’s an example of how well it’s going for them.
Which is awesome. And that $36 million amounts to slightly over 1% of what the screen production industry was last year. There are about 450 game developers in NZ. The screen production workforce is nearer 40,000.
This is absolutely not to minimise what the local games industry is doing, or the leadership provided by people like Stephen. But it's ambitious, to put it mildly, to talk about the two in the same breath.
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Hard News: Movie Disaster, in reply to Rob Stowell,
But it’s clearly far more ‘cultural capital’ than local production can support. That’s the rub. There were skilled folk working on local production before the current wave of subsidies. While local producers do benefit from the surplus- the breadth of skills, and the gear- on occasion, it’s wrong to imply local production wouldn’t exist without it- or even that it’d be significantly impaired.
It's not as if they were working in a neutral environment before the LBSPG was introduced in 2003. The grants scheme replaced various tax breaks dating back to the early 1980s -- when it enabled a bunch of mostly shitty one-off feature films. Pacific Renaissance and then Jackson used the tax breaks in the 1990s, but the system had always been far too easy to game.
Philosophically, you could just dispense with the LBSPG et al altogether, but that would leave you without any screen production incentives for the first time in 30 years, at a time when NZ On Air's funding has been frozen for the last six years. The Film Commission's input to what has been a multi-billion dollar sector has been about $145 million in the last 20 years. I'd be concerned if we were to find ourselves talking about how things ought to be while an entire sector went off a cliff.
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Hard News: Mega Strange, in reply to Dylan Reeve,
Elworthy claims that a Google search for any book and “free download” will see “mega.co.nz in the top results” – I can’t see anything remotely like that with any search I do.
No, me neither, even when I include "mega" in the search string.
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Hard News: Movie Disaster, in reply to Tom Semmens,
But I have read nothing here that persuades me that thirty million dollars of subsidies and tax breaks to a foreign owned movie making business is a better use of taxpayers money than giving thirty million dollars in tax breaks and subsidies to a local manufacturing company that actually makes and exports things from here and that is screaming for a break.
I guess the difference would be this: "Between 2004 and 2011, around 35 major productions have received a grant, and these productions have spent more than $1.9 billion in qualifying expenditure."
It's rebating part of two billion dollars you wouldn't otherwise have had spent in the economy.
And a local manufacturing company, once it gets going, almost certainly won’t come back year after year asking for a bigger and bigger taxpayer handout.
And therein lies the rub, certainly. But if you look at it as the net cost of maintaining a skill and technical base, it's still a lot less than the necessary direct funding would cost you.
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Hard News: Movie Disaster, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
No more than if we gave 100 foreigners a subsidy to buy million dollar villas in Ponsonby. That’d be $100 million in “magic” foreign money.
That’s a very poor analogy. Feel free to calculate for me how much tax the hundred lucky vendors would pay on their capital gains. Now, how much tax would be paid on the 50% of of screen production costs that would go to labour. How much of the money going to the house-sellers would be spent on productive capital, vs the small equipment-hire vendors? What would be the overall benefit to creative industries capacity for the house sales vs the foreign screen production?
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Hard News: Movie Disaster, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
That’s the most convincing argument Russell – it’s only $36 million, it keeps lots of people occupied and it doesn’t fuck the planet up that much. So as corporate welfare goes, it has that advantage over Solid Energy’s somewhat larger indents to employ somewhat fewer people.
You're not really discussing this in good faith. It's evident my point was that the net -$36 million over seven years has an impact that could only be replicated by multiples of the direct screen funding that you're more philosophically comfortable with. Without looking it up, I think NZ On Air's screen budget over that time would have been in excess of half a billion.