Tag Archives: responsibilities

Speculation and So What

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The Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger that California’s Progressive-Democrat AG Rob Bonta, along with some dozen of other Progressive-Democrat-led States and a union, have gone into court to block may be entering “settlement” talks. The situation as it stands, from Paramount:

Paramount has warned it is prepared to move the company out of California if it can’t reach a deal with the states, with a potential move starting as soon as October 1. Tennessee is seen as a likely potential landing spot for Paramount.

October because that’s when Paramount starts owing fees to Warner Bros. Discovery related to delayed signing of the deal. Tennessee is the most likely gaining State, although there are a number of States with much more congenial business environments than those Progressive-Democrat-run States.

From Bonta:

As it stands today, the proposed Warner Bros./Paramount merger will mean higher costs, less competition, lower wages, job cuts, and fewer movies and TV shows[.]

That’s pure speculation based on nothing other than ephemeral economic studies that try to predict the future, here in an environment very much changed from the environment in which those studies were conducted. Speculation should form no basis, even in the Ninth Circuit’s region (the first stop for the inevitable appeals), for blocking a business deal.

From the union:

The Writers Guild of America also sued over the merger, saying that the deal would eliminate jobs and career opportunities for Hollywood screenwriters.

That may or may not be true, and it’ll be influenced largely by the willingness of those Hollywood screenwriters to relocate and become Tennessee screenwriters. At bottom, though, while any job loss would be too bad for those terminated, the WGA‘s plaint is a big so what. Nobody, not even Hollywood screenwriters, have an intrinsic right to any job, not even screenwriting.

Paramount, in the absence of a deal with the States that’s entirely satisfactory to Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery by COB 30 September, should make its move out of California on 1 October and conclude the merger. There’s no need for Paramount or Warner Bros. Discovery to delay past that date.

The Tennessees of our nation will greatly benefit from the revenue gains that making movies, ancillary businesses associated with movie-making, businesses supporting ancillary businesses, and further business rippling will bring to the gaining State (and in the case of Tennessee, the rippling will flow into Kentucky, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South and North Carolina). Los Angeles and California can take up that loss of revenue with Bonta, et al.

An Alternative Solution

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The lede lays out the foolishness and government union disingenuousness simultaneously. A twofer.

Do government unions have a vested interest in saddling students with more debt? So they argue in a new and revealing lawsuit against new graduate loan limits.

The situation:

One of the biggest achievements in the 2025 tax bill was limiting the amount of federal loans that students could borrow to a total of $100,000 ($20,500 a year) for most graduate degrees and $200,000 ($50,000 a year) for professional ones. ….
Graduate programs have become cash cows for universities, and the caps could impel them to reduce prices and spending. … The caps are forcing some universities to reduce their bloated workforces. Hence, the union lawsuit….

Never mind how generous those limits remain, even for university incomes. Of course the government unions are objecting; those loans—uncapped—are cash cows for the unions, also, washed as they are through those bloat employees’ union dues.

Still, there is a solution, and it even serves the useful purpose of getting government out of the business of making loans. A tangential beneficial side effect is that what government gives away, here in the form of those loans, it must first take, here in the form of government borrowing.

One way to cap Federal student loans, a way which would render the question of caps irrelevant (and which would eliminate that small tangential vicious circle), would be to stop doing Federal student loans altogether. No loans, no caps.

Easy peasy.

Exposing Truth in Belgian Universities is a Punishable Offense

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Nathan Cofnas, a post-doc at Ghent University in Ghent Belgium, has been suspended by the school’s Rector, Petra De Sutter. Cofnas expects to be fired, and he may well be by the time you read this. He was, you may recall, the man who exposed (former, now deceased) Cambridge Professor Jason Arday’s fraudulent activities, activities that were primarily broad based plagiarism.

Calling out an academician’s dishonesty, though, is strickly verboten in Belgium.

University Rector Petra De Sutter:

[T]he University takes the recent public statements made by a postdoctoral researcher [Cofnas] at Ghent University regarding this matter very seriously. Ghent University has decided to take appropriate action within its powers and the applicable framework.

Never call out an academic. That’s the Ghent message to academia.

Responsibility

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A letter writer to The Moneyist wrote that

…political issues came up, and our daughter-in-law wanted to discuss and debate them with me. I calmly reminded them of our previous agreement [that there would be no political discussions among them].
Since January, our son and his wife have stopped communicating with my wife and me. They have refused to return our phone calls or respond to our texts. We have been told that our daughter-in-law does not wish to have contact with our family.

The letter writer added that we have also tried to respect the boundaries they have established.

First, it’s not just the daughter-in-law who has broken off contact. So has the son, who plainly has gone along with his wife, perhaps actively sides with her for the same reasons she has for refusing contact. It’s not inappropriate for a husband to support his wife over his parents, so there’s nothing to be read into that aspect. Both son and daughter-in-law are affirmatively not wanting further contact with the parent; that’s the boundary they’ve set.

Against that, the letter writer wonders if he and his wife should cut the two out of their will(s). A potential complication is that the letter writer has another son, only mentioned for his existence, so I assume (yes, yes) that this son is on good terms with the letter writer.

My position is this, because I tend to be a bit black and white on such things. The son and daughter-in-law have taken themselves out of the letter writer’s family. The only tie, such as it is, remaining is the accident of birth involving the son. Their removal of themselves—as the letter writer notes, they were not driven out—also took them out of any familial-related connections and obligations.

The parents would be well-served to acknowledge their son’s decision, not impose themselves on him—honor the boundaries they have established—and rewrite their wills (each parent should have his/her own will), and allocate their estate elsewhere. That’ll be hard to do, emotionally, but it’s necessary according to the son’s and his wife’s boundaries. That reallocation might also lead to friction between the son and daughter-in-law and the other son, but that’s among those three; it’s irrelevant to the fact of the two having decided to leave the family altogether.

Overly Optimistic

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Meghan Cox Gordon likes the idea of typos in finished products.

If there’s a goof, you know the author is human. Writers who compose using their own eyes and brains (and fingers) are going to err. Machines that collate and disgorge synthetic blocks of text, or that comb through human-generated text for usage mistakes, are not.

Not so. AI will learn to introduce typos and mistaken phrases entirely separately from its “ordinary” hallucinations. Dishonest writers and plagiarists will inject typos and mistaken phrases in attempts to disguise their own dishonesty.