As a place to park some cash, sure. But if I were running Disney there would be no character deal and I would need some kind of proprietary technology license that keeps certain AI improvements out of the hands of my competitors.
That has been something I've wondered about since seeing frame comparisons of (probably) telecine'ed prints of The Matrix vs. the myriad home video releases.
I'm a colorist and it absolutely does effect color. Every telecine is different and will create a different looking scan. Telecine operators will do a one light pass to try and compensate but any scan needs to be adjusted to achieve what the artist's original vision was.
> Every telecine is different and will create a different looking scan.
I mean they should be calibrated, so they have a different feel, but they shouldn't be wildly different like the screen shots.
I know the spirit operators did magic, but they were in the advertising team, and I was in film so I was never allowed to visit the sexy telecine room.
TL;DW, different physical rolls of film sent to different movie theaters can have slightly different coloring, if they were done by different people or different companies or even if someone just did their job differently that day. Film color was not an exact science and not always perfectly repeatable, and depended on chemistry.
This all seemed very clever until I read the bio and learned that the author works for Microsoft -- the last company that has any business being flip about security. Bro needs to STFU and get on with the security drudgery, because his customer's opposition very definitely is the Mossad.
Maybe a curl Patreon for would-be H1 contributors? Just need to figure out a donation amount that is trivial for legitimate security researchers, but too rich for spammers.
I imagine the selection seems random because these are films that WB has the most favorable contracts for -- So there is no need for them to track number of streams so they can send some director or production company penny checks every month, etc.
The article never hints at a business or regulatory angle. The author repeatedly has no answer for the sudden (and often long-term) closures.
After the first anecdote about the couple getting evicted shortly after spending weeks of 12-16 hour days cleaning a derelict property I thought it was just some asshole miser stealing sweat equity from would-be proprietors, but the larger picture seems more like mental illness than pure avarice.
A break even business sitting on high value property is just as valuable closed as it is open, and it appreciates in value the more restrictions are piled on development of scarce local real estate.
The mental health theory aside, this may be why these... Eclectic... Business decisions end up being tolerable. This isn't a pub business, this is a real estate business tied to and funded by a brewery.
Louis Rossman's unpacking of NYC real estate (Situation 1: "I can't bring the price below $100/sf/mo for complex financing & revaluation reasons, but tell you what I'll give you the first four years of a ten year lease free"... Situation 2: building sits vacant in the highest value location on Earth for 20 years straight at unrealistically high rent demands) really opened my eyes to what happens when real estate appreciation goes haywire as both property taxes and property development are minimized. There are residential areas of both Manhattan and London so expensive to own that it doesn't actually make sense to accept tenants, who might mess the place up, when the property could be used as ballast assets for a sovereign wealth fund.
London's Centre Point, when it was built one of the tallest buildings in the country, and in one of the most central locations possible, stood empty for 6 years after it was finished because the owner would rather keep it empty while waiting for the market to match his price rather than drop his asking price, due to the long leases.
More recently, large parts of prime real estate rates that next to my local station, which is one of the busiest in the UK, has remained undeveloped for 20+ years because it's better for the developers to wait for the land to appreciate and slowly build out bit by bit to release capital than develop it all at once.
As long as you expect prices to keep going up, it's great leverage: You take investment only to acquire the land, and then when you sell your first take much shorter term finance to construct buildings and get returns on a multiple on the land value, while simultaneously artificially constraining the supply
In a democracy, you would do something like tax this real estate, heavily, for the benefit of the people living in this locale. Hand it back out to these locals ("biological human voters") as free services, goods, or cash as you prefer.
In inhabited buildings, that gets passed on to the residents. In uninhabited buildings, it comes straight out of the investors ("land-hoarders").
It’s really not. Landlord can’t cut the rent because commercial real estate values are based on cap rate. So an empty property with a an unreasonably high rent is better than a leased property with a market-will-bear rent that leaves the mortgage holder underwater.
If you're not embedded in finance, though? To the rest of us? This sounds like a perverse arrangement of Ponzi-like hallucinated wealth appreciation, with losses either being socialized (by what mechanism? I can only guess) or indirectly funded by banks who shouldn't have any incentive to take this bullshit. Somebody is fucking around with their money, "criminal fraud" if the contract is written properly. It shouldn't work.
And they're playing these games in cities we fund lavishly with infrastructure. Cities that are allowed to set their own property taxes as needed. Cities full of voters that are not investors.
Most of these pubs in dying rural villages are hardly high value property. Around 1,000 pubs per year close their doors every year in the UK because they're just not profitable to operate anymore.
Dying rural villages in the UK are not NYC. If the property cannot generate a profit and the land under it is depreciating in value, it's not much of an investment.
> Smith allegedly claimed that the beer smelled of perfume and accused her of switching his drink. “It was like he was putting on an act, or a circus show. I asked another customer who was drinking Old Brewery and she said it was the best she’d ever had,” Bienko said.
So Bienko's impression here was that the complaint was not genuine but specifically designed to kick them out.
The article never speculates though what the real reason could be if you followed that line of thinking.
I have long considered the relationship of OD&D to historical medievalism as equivalent to the vaporwave genre vs. music actually produced in the 80's.
Yes, the wife could be trying to set herself up to claim that she was mislead/mistaken about the substance she was "supplementing" her husband's diet with.
Initially I was inclined to disagree ("these things should always fail safe") however with more and more stuff being pushed into the kernel it's hard to say that you're wrong or exactly where a line needs to be drawn between "minimally functional system" and "dangerously out of control system".
I think until we discover a technology that forces commercial software vendors to employ functioning QA departments none of this will really solve anything.
Disney really giving away the store here.