@DataSpook

Semi-professional intel apparition.
🇨🇦🇺🇸

[@DataSpook @OSINTDOMINIC]

https://t.co/xix9VJOtFT

[@DataSpook @OSINTDOMINIC]

Just having the basic integrity to pay it forward costs you, in the grand scheme of things, very little.
But it provides huge benefits. Movies aren't like novels — crew more often than not provide a ton of what actually ends up on screen.
It's a team sport. You wouldn't seriously argue that it's pointless to pay any of your coaching staff because, really, how much financial risk are they taking on? There's a thousand athletic trainers out there to do the same job.
Obviously that's a fucking idiotic way to think about shit. A good crew protects your investment and lowers your risk profile. A highly motivated crew will almost always work faster, harder and better — which lowers your risk.

[@DataSpook @OSINTDOMINIC]

This is a baby's view of the film business. Yes, obviously crew take on substantially less economic risk than anyone above the line. But this isn't like a corporate job — you're an independent contractor. Every time you take a job you're potentially losing higher-quality work. Especially in any sort of key position, you can't really just bail and head to a different production.

[Red Headed Steppeson @RdHdSteppeson]

This is the epitome of how folks who do not understand economics act and why they destroy everything.

Socialize the gains, privatize the risk. Had the film done as most indie films do it’d have made almost nothing. The film had a $750k budget, and Focus Features paid $15m for distrubution rights.

The layered risk here was in fronting the money, and then in distribution. Initial projections pointed at like a $10m opening weekend, only bumped to $14m after it hit $7m on the opening day. No one was projecting this to hit the numbers it did. They either were going for a hail mary or moonshot, but this film could easily have just performed at or below expectations, and then the chick would have nothing to say. It would have been just another random production she worked on, got a pay day (and not a bad one for a month of work!) and maybe remembered loosely. She had zero risk exposure. That was utterly privatized to the investors, the funders, the producers, and later distributors.

But now she wants to pretend that the success should be socialized, she wants a ‘fair share’ of the risk she didn’t take. It’s passive aggressive in its wording, pure social terrorism. And it’s the platonic ideal of the impulses that have destroyed societies.

[@DataSpook @OSINTDOMINIC]

The film industry is considerably smaller than most people understand. The list of actually competent crew is extraordinarily small. If you're good at your job, you're an absolute fucking asset to a production. It is in your direct interest as a production to bring on people you've already worked with — it makes everything faster and smoother. Being forced to parachute in a totally new crew can totally fuck up the opening days of your shoot. Hiring people who aren't good at their job will unequivocally cost you money.

[@DataSpook @OSINTDOMINIC]

Russia and Ukraine have both suffered immense damage to key infrastructure. I think you are vastly underestimating how easy it is to damage infrastructure.
The problem is not being able to damage these targets; it's that by their very nature key infrastructure has to be repairable. Therefore, unless you can keep up an operational tempo that isn't sustainable for either side, you can't really remove pieces from the board.

That being said, the drain on resources and the local economy required to rebuild this stuff is more often than not extremely difficult to quantify, so it can give the appearance that these strikes have no effect. The Ukrainian power grid can be hanging on by a thread, and Ukraine can still have power.

Iran can probably rebuild much of its key infrastructure, but it would cost them pretty significantly. This is one of the major challenges in extracting effectiveness from strategic bombing campaigns. More often than not, you aren't necessarily destroying current capacity; rather, you are limiting growth and forcing a redistribution of resources away from other key areas.

[@DataSpook @OSINTDOMINIC]

Reports of a ceasefire have been greatly exaggerated

[OSINTdefender @sentdefender]

Explosions now in the Iranian capital of Tehran.

[@DataSpook @OSINTDOMINIC]

@chengeling It’s free PR genuinely kind of stupid not to do it.

[@DataSpook @OSINTDOMINIC]

I feel like there's a whole bunch of misunderstandings around the Obsession art director's post spreading online. Even today, the film industry remains fairly insulated from the rest of the world. The way audiences interface with how the sausage gets made is largely through the obfuscations of press tours and director interviews. Very few people understand both the how and the why of moviemaking.

[Josh Raby @JoshRaby]

Read:

[@DataSpook @OSINTDOMINIC]

The truth is there's no real right answer. This person is totally justified in feeling bitter that a movie they worked their ass off for made hundreds of millions and they see none of it. In a perfect world it'd be far more normalized — and written into contracts — that a % deferment of rate should be protected and unable to be hot-potatoed out of existence through creative accounting. At the same time, suggesting indie movies like Obsession are somehow unethical or a poor reflection on the producers/director is entirely false.

We want a flourishing indie scene. One of the great tragedies of the late 2010s streamer era has been the total evaporation of wide-release indie movies. The top of the industry needs the kick in the ass of competition, or else we'll be watching Marvel slop until the heat death of the universe.

[@DataSpook @OSINTDOMINIC]

It sucks that this person feels they didn't get compensated for their time — and if I were the director or a producer on this movie, I'd be handing out bonuses like crazy, because the crew clearly earned it. In a perfect world we could make scrappy indie movies with zero crew exploitation, but being pragmatic, that's unlikely to ever be fully possible. That said, it's not a one-way street. Crew on these films get huge opportunities for their future in the much better paid section of the industry. Yes, some producers do it purely to exploit people's passions — but equally there are great directors and producers who don't have the capital but have a vision, and we shouldn't be gatekeeping that part of the industry in the name of equity.

[@DataSpook @OSINTDOMINIC]

I have refrained from talking about the Iran-US war for the last few weeks, mostly because there's not actually anything to talk about.

Speculating about whether or not the talks are actually serious is, at least IMO, entirely pointless. There's absolutely no way to predict how these talks will go; all the stuff we hear is being filtered through three or four layers of obfuscation, most of that being through mouthpieces that toe an unknowable diplomatic line or are designed entirely to sell a story to the public.

Strategically, this ceasefire is by far the most insane blunder you could have ever conceived of. Allowing the IRGC to resupply and reshore the political and military chain of command means that if there was any realistic upside to the first stage of the operation for the US forces, it's now been eroded.

The strait is still closed, and at this rate it looks like it will remain closed until a resumption of hostilities, which at this stage is likely inevitable. Iranians know their leverage now, and the longer this drags out, the more confident they can be that Trump is too spooked to actually escalate things militarily. That means the US has lost the initiative.

Yes, you can blockade the blockade and try to starve them out, but that comes at the cost of the US kamikaze-ing the world economy — which, let's be honest, is not an outcome that the western world has any interest in.

The fact is that the US has no leverage. The only deal they are going to be able to get at this stage is a bad one. They did damage, arguably even made strategic gains in certain areas, but these have almost certainly been erased or dulled by the ceasefire.

You've given the Iranians, who were pretty seriously on the back foot, some much-needed breathing room. The IRGC are now aware that they can survive even the most powerful air campaign on planet earth. Why the hell would they settle for a deal that is not directly in their interest?

Therein lies the problem for the US negotiating position. Trump clearly wants a deal — he would probably even accept a mildly humiliating one — but the Iranians aren't going to give him one, because they are aware that their leverage really only exists when they hold the strait hostage.

If they give it up and allow for the reshoring of the global oil supply, they lose most of their leverage. It's not in their interest to make a deal that isn't basically a sweetheart deal. Normally this would be fine for the US; however, they aren't the only party in this conflict.

The Israelis are never going to accept a deal that they perceive as empowering the Mullahs. For the US to be able to make this deal, they have to be able to convince the least sensible country on the planet to do something that they don't want to do. If this was 2020 or 2021 you could maybe do this, but post-2022, there's just no way that a psycho like Bibi is going to turn around and see sense.

This leaves two options: either keep kicking the can down the road, or a resumption of military strikes. Both of these are bad for different reasons. These faux ceasefires are giving the Iranians time to recover, making the chances of any actual military resumption less and less effective, and realistically it is just delaying the inevitable.

New strikes are equally pointless, because if you can't destroy a regime once with airpower, you probably can't do it twice.

The only winning hands here were either to commit to full regime change and escalation and not allow the Iranians to play possum, or simply to not play.

The most dangerous thing for any military operation is not having the will to carry your stated goals through to their conclusion. The price for indecision in peacetime is small, but in wartime it is ever-compounding. Every hedge and half measure only ensures that you will feel the pain of that indecision down the road.

[@DataSpook @OSINTDOMINIC]

Every once and awhile there's like a moment of lucidity from Trump, that makes you wonder.

[@DataSpook @OSINTDOMINIC]

shockingly based

[Faytuks Network @FaytuksNetwork]

Trump told Netanyahu that bombing Beirut would further isolate Israel globally. Trump also reminded Netanyahu he’d helped keep him out of prison during his corruption trial, telling him: “You’re fucking crazy. You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.” A second source said Trump was “pissed” and at one point yelled: “What the fuck are you doing?” - Axios