Since the global financial crisis in 2008, people have loved to dogpile on the Greeks. “They are lazy and don’t work enough! or “They just borrow and borrow and borrow!” is what people say. It’s the same rhetoric used against people who were upside down in their homes in the USA. The argument goes that if the Greeks were just a bit more industrious, they would have avoided their debt crisis. “Look at how the hard working Germans avoided those problems!”
Except that, thanks to the good work of the guys at creditwritedowns.com, we havenice data using OECD statistics showing that, in fact, the Greeks work 48% more hours in a year than the Germans. Not only that, but they are one of the only European countries where the number of hours worked increased between 1998 and 2008.
So if that part of the Greek debt narrative is wrong, what else might we not have been hearing the truth about?
Mark Evanier linked to this classic clip show from 1979. He goes into a lot of the programming choices that the networks made while crafting their fall lineups. As always, it’s a great read.
While watching it, though, I thought about my own experience working on clip shows. In 2007, I had the pleasure of working with the team that crafted the get-you-up-to-speed-for-our-last-episodes clip show for Desperate Housewives. I worked on the clearance logs. Those are the list of all the actors, how long their appeared for, which episode the clip was from, etc. That list was used to calculate how much the actors would get paid.
For stars of the show, it was built into their contracts, so the presented no problems. Some of the actors who appeared presented no problems as they were satisfied to receive the Screen Actors Guild minimum (at the time about $750). The problems arose when a higher profile guest star felt they deserved more than the minimum.
Depending on the scene, the episode and its relevance to the over-arching plot of the show, network executives might decide to pay them SAG minimum plus 10%, for example. Or they might simply agree to pay a set fee of $1200. I think it depended first on how good the role was for the show, and almost as importantly, how good their agent was.
The real headaches came when an actor was deemed by the network to be asking for too much. They’d send word to the editors to cut that scene. That meant at best, fresh edits and updates to my clearance log, and at worst, a rewriting of that whole section of the program. Sometimes someone who was edited out would lower their fee and be back in. Sometimes the show’s producers would successfully make the case to keep an actor in despite their high fee. This back-and-forth process took weeks. In the end, it paid off, I think, as the show won its timeslot the Sunday it aired.
To apply all this to the internet, when I watched that clip show, I started thinking about how much each person who appeared would make. If an actor didn’t speak, they didn’t have to be paid. That means Fonzie’s belly dancer is clear. But the two kids that Mork is marrying do, so that would have been $750 each based on the 2007 contract. Now extrapolate that out for the rest of the show. Then extrapolate that out for all the video clips of shows on the internet. And every person who isn’t paid is able to pursue legal action against the network.
Now you can begin to see why the internet has made the networks so crazy.
Over the holidays, I built up a number of credits for Amazon’s streaming video site. I was browsing and noticed that FX’s American Horror Story was available. I had enough to cover what had been aired already, but there were two more episodes to go at the time. I opted to buy in. Since I was home on metered internet, I had to wait until now to watch them.
The show was rather good, especially for genre material. The story arc of the Harmon family drew me in. The husband, Ben, had cheated on his wife, Vivian. They, with their daughter Violet, relocate to the City of Angles for a fresh start. Unfortunately that start begins (and ends) in a house that has a severe case of hauntings. There are literally layers upon layers of ghosts in the house, all with their own tragic story.
In a show so filled with death, they manage to find a happy medium for the ending. There were a couple of plot threads left dangling. For example, neighbor Constance mentions that she had four children, but only three are ever shown in the show. Given that they’ve announced that the next season will feature a whole new story, I wonder if that won’t be a threat that ties the two series together.
The LA Times has published a look at retirees who relocated to the Sierra Nevada foothills. Most of those profiled relocated in the 90s and had the bottom fall out of their home investment. A huge number of them rely on church-run food pantries to survive.
I think these things will be more common going forward. As the baby boom generation continues to retire, they will cripple the current infrastructure in place to aid senior citizens. Government has shown that it’s completely incapable of doing anything because the other side might get credit for solving something if it works, or they might get the blame if it fails.
I’m glad the Times published the article. Unfortunately it feels like too few people are paying attention to notice the alarm bell being sounded.
