I know the US better than many parts of Germany.
I read an article years ago from a lawyer (might have been a judge) complaining that, thanks to US TV and movies, people in Sweden know more about how the US justice system works than the Swedish system. Far too many people just fall back on their US TV knowledge of how they think courts work and that they keep having to explain to the people that, no that's not how things works in Sweden.
IANAL but have taken some intro level course (that usually starts with don't think anything from American shows applies).
1: It's rooted in civil law so the written laws(and their precursor political discussions) are first considered, laws are thus fairly broadly written with specifications where needed. So precedents are mostly only used to disambiguate gray areas in terms of applicability or conflicts between laws. (but precedents rulings are in turn are meant to rely on the precursor political discussions before courts can take their own authority on any subject).
2: Intent is given significance, so 2 parties can enter into fairly "sloppily written" contracts that will be legally binding as long as the intent of the contract is clear, they're signed and doesn't violate any laws (there is law specifically targets obviously unfair contracts, but also other laws that regulate specific areas).
3: Criminal prosecution at the primary level is in front of 3 judges, one professional head judge with law degree that knows laws and 2 "laymen" to represent people in general (usually politically appointed to reflect the people via elections), no juries as the role those serve is handled by the laymen judges.
One serious question is how much precedent research is grounded in possible reality? The "unexpeced-precedent-that-throws-off-the-opposition" and "old-or-savant-legal-expert-who-knows-them-all" tropes in media seems to hinge on them being important, and reading legal rulings on business cases (like those historic ones regarding Nintendo and Sega copy protections or EFF ones) does seem to put some weight on them?
This means evidence such as hearsay or illegally obtained evidence is given the same consideration as real evidence. Resulting many times that the court can sentence an accused that everybody "knows" is guilty, and other times resulting in mind bogglingly insane verdicts.
Another big difference: No plea deals. Which is something very strange about the American justice system.
As for the mind-boggling verdicts those seem to more often stem from the politically appointed judges from the media reporting.
The plea deals part is interesting since it's been more frequently bought up to become legal in relation to combating the rising organized crime (but the perverse incentive problem seems to have kept those discussions from going further so far).
As siblings have commented, 112 and 911 are in the GSM standard. On landlines, only 112 will work in most EU countries (and even that is an EU achievement; e.g. in Switzerland 112 is inconsistent)
A kid these days in most urban parts would tend to say "911 I have an emergency" while roleplaying because we hear it so much in popular culture.
911 has enough mindshare that it'd be silly to use it for anything else. And if you're not going to use it for anything, a redirect seems like a very productive way to park it.
That's what, 10% of world population? 112 has India going for it…
…but even then 911 would only be an emergency phone number if n ≥ 3; first two places being taken by 112 and 110 (because China).
However, this completely ignores facts like people from China being far less likely to travel to e.g. the US… it's more of a "of the people who'd make emergency calls in XYZ, what numbers would they use" consideration…
…it's really not an easy question. GSM went with 112 and 911 and I guess that's as good as an answer this'll get.
Besides, anytime the other two are involved the police need to respond too - when there is a fire or medical emergency whoever can get that first can often be very helpful even if they are mostly for a different job. As such this separation seems wrong.
This is not the US, the police does not show up to a fire or an emergency, why would they? They show up to an accident, and when you need an ambulance they will bring one.
The will also not stop and interrogate you when you walk to the side of the road. People usually have no interaction with the police outside of speeding tickets.
"get that first can often be very helpful"
Germany is not full of police patrolling the streets. Gladly we are no longer a police state. Usually I don't see any police for days, often not for weeks. Again, this is not the US. The only time you'll probably see police is going to train stations, airports or big tourist spots (and sometimes at parties that are too loud). In large cities, like Berlin, you might hear a siren and see a police car from time to time, depending on where you are. In smaller <1M people cities, not so.
Germany also has a proper health system and invests in ambulances and health instead of militarizing the police. So I can see your point, but it is irrelevant here.
Because they're trained first-responders, who have medical first aid training, vehicles with lights and sirens to move quickly through traffic, knowledge of the local area to navigate around road closures or ambiguous location descriptions, etc.
There are many situations where multiple sub-specialties of first-responders (police, firefighters, EMT, etc) are useful. The police aren't just showing up to arrest or shoot people, in a functioning society they can and do provide valuable service in assisting injured people, controlling traffic around car accidents, etc.
> Because they're trained first-responders, who have medical first aid training
In many parts of the US they are only trained to EMR level (if that) which isn't particularly useful. Most fire departments require everyone to be EMT and will often have a paramedic on board. Where I am, police are all EMR and will rarely be dispatched to a medical call (unless there's a threat of violence). They will be dispatched to vehicle accidents for traffic control.
Yes the ambulance and fire department is better trained for these things. However basic first aid (CPR) and an AED in the hands of someone with basic first aid training often beats the most trained professional who is arrives just a minute later. So dispatches will get whoever can get to the scene first there, as well as the right people.
Yes the police often are in the way in a fire real scene - but that is a lot better than all the bystanders watching the fire in the way instead. However it is hard to see how bad it could be, while easy to see how bad things are.
I'm not getting the argument, you say a paramedic + doctor is worse than a paramedic + doctor + police when I have a heart attack?
I've witnessed a lady falling down the stairs banging her head hard, blood everywhere. Called 112 in my country, a guy answered, and I calmly explained what happened, and I wanted someone coming there stat. "Nah" he says, he needs to ask me some questions first. One of the questions was: "is it serious?". This is no joke, I said "yeah, its fucking serious". "Okay" he says, "You should have called emergency services directly, but he'll do me one and connect me anyways(!)".
Then I had to repeat everything again and they've then reluctantly sent a team which by the way arrived in double the time it would take me to get there from their place.
Reminds me of those endless accountability sinks. Nobody gives a shit about anything as there is no accountability.
No. When your partner has an urgent medical issue, you call the ambulance, not the police.
If you require the police to respond to all medical emergencies, then you have to fund the police at a level which allows them to do that, often at the expense of funding the people who actually should be responding to a medical emergency.
Taking the attitude that the police must respond to all emergency calls even if the only indication of what capacities are needed are fire and/or ambulance services results in a distortion of local funding which makes emergency response worse (it also results in the police presence itself making the response to other things worse in cases where they were not needed, even considering the resources actually available at the time, without considering the effect of response policy on resource allocation -- police are not always neutral-to-beneficial.)
The fact that it is a common rule in the US does not make it right. The US is very bad, compared to other developed countries, at lots of things.
In non-police states, you spend your money on a working health system instead.
Police responding to everything whether or not there is an indication that they are necessary, and even (especially) when the indications are that they would be counterproductive is a US quirk with very high costs, not some kind of universal rule.
- Isolationism
- Increase US influence worldwide
- Exploit US influence worldwide
Each one will have a negative effect on the other two.
For instance, one goal was that "The United States must regain its role as the 'Arsenal of Democracy'... the United States built its reputation as a reliable partner with a strong defense industrial base that could supply military articles and goods in a timely manner."
But as explained in the video below, "The last three months have seen the worst damage to that reputation since the post-WWII order came into force."
The video is worth watching: it does bring out a lot of what you're talking about (different parts w/ different concerns), and does actually make sense of a lot of what Trump is saying and doing wrt Ukraine and NATO. I do find it preferable that the administration has rational goals which are simply not compatible with each other, than that they're behaving completely randomly.
If you aren't aware, they've shipped most IATSE jobs to Serbia since 2023.
They used to shoot most Disney and Netflix shows in LA and Atlanta. Now they're happening in Eastern Europe. They fly the cast out and film with crews that don't have labor laws or unions and that are an order of magnitude cheaper.
IATSE members have been forced to leave the industry, sell their homes, and move out of California. There are a few holdouts, but it's likely they'll have to exit the industry too.
Once that capacity goes, it'll never come back.
Studios are sitting vacant. CBRE is going to come in and turn them all into office parks and mixed use.
None of them expected the "I" bit to be used? Ever?
Name one.
The bottom line for me is that we shouldn't simply accept that films should all be filmed in Canada, Australia, the UK, or elsewhere. Hollywood has been the epicenter of creative jobs in this country for a century, and we should try to preserve it.
Honest question: what does "fair" mean in this context?
Does it, though? I mean, the Trump administration is only making it more expensive for theaters to screen non-US movies. Are you going to even bother going to a cinema if the movie you wanted to see isn't made available? And how dominant are non-US productions in US cinemas?
It sounds like more tarrif bullshit,where the only output is lose-lose.
[1] “Deadpool and Wolverine”, “Wicked” and “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” in London, “Dune part 2” in Budapest and Italy, “Godzilla x Kong” in Australia. Only “Twisters” was filmed in the US.
The movies you listed as examples are Hollywood productions (aka Hollywod movies, aka American movies).
It is a US phone.
> No, it's made in China.
It doesn't make it any less of a US phone. If you go to Newegg, order a bunch of PC parts from CPU to case, and put them together in your room, how much of the PC was made in your neighborhood?
> The movies aforementioned are not made in the US either.
Ninsense. Do you think that gophers and local caterers are the ones producing and profiting from a movie production?
From the first paragraph of the article:
Donald Trump on Sunday announced on his Truth Social platform a 100% tariff on all movies “produced in Foreign Lands”, saying the US film industry was dying a “very fast death” due to the incentives that other countries were offering to draw American film-makers.
That is correct. Other countries are gutting Hollywood because Hollywood has become a hard place to make things. To pick a random example, the TV show Silo by Apple TV is made in the UK, not America, and the lead actress is Swedish. It's set in the USA, based on a story by an American author and produced by Apple but it's not made there.
This move is bad news for the UK and other countries that have built up a successful film industry but don't have the capital depth to fund big budget films, even with access to the US market. Now they lose access to US funding and can't easily export their films to the US either, assuming it goes through.
Since the first Trump administration, young people in Western Europe have increasingly lost their idealization of the United States. I'm 43 and moved to the US ten years ago and I feel like I'm part of the last generation that still wanted to move here. Highly qualified people I know in Europe no longer even consider coming here.
This is 1000% pro-union.
IATSE workers have been decimated by the move of productions to Serbia since 2023.
LA and Atlanta film productions have all but collapsed since the offshoring of production. Serbian crews work without unions for much cheaper than local IATSE members.
This is designed to save IATSE and domestic American production.
The studios are dying. I go to the movies every week when there are movies. Other than Minecraft, the biggest crowd I’ve seen was the Star Wars re-release.
Thats the general line of reasoning. Rs are walking a line with union courting since a chunk of their base is anti union, just as dems were walking a line with globalization.
This is my current understanding of the undercurrents.
https://teamster.org/2025/05/teamsters-statement-on-presiden...
IATSE statement:
https://iatse.net/iatse-on-president-trump-movie-tariff-anno...
tl;dr - the Teamsters love this. IATSE likes it, but wants to make sure their Canadian membership isn't hurt.
If you haven't been following what's happening with film production, basically production has moved from LA, Atlanta, New York, etc. to cheap countries in Eastern Europe and Asia.
A vast majority of IATSE film crew productions have now vacated the US. It's decimated the local film crew workforce and forced many to leave the industry entirely.
I wrote more about it here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43893915
The film crew folks post a lot about it on Reddit, especially in the /r/film industry(city) subreddits:
https://www.reddit.com/r/FilmIndustryLA/comments/1k39cod/the...
We had a booming, absolutely thriving industry for nearly two decades. People moved from LA to be here. We built hundreds of studios and sound stages. Now they're sitting empty.
Everyone is going to Serbia now. IATSE folks are having to leave the industry entirely.
Modern tech is all about disruption. You get paid way too much because you’re squeezing costs (ie labor) out of business operations.
There was an action movie that filmed car chases in my city about 15 years ago. A bunch of the crew was at a bar I hung out with and we were trading stories. There was a dude who was making alot of money to essentially wet down the streets from a fire hydrant. There’s reasons for that — hydrants require some training to safely operate.
But end of the day, the money guys at Netflix, Amazon or whatever would rather just pay some rando a few bucks and let insurance deal with the damage. Or build a fake street in Serbia.
To me I think it's possible for Netflix and Amazon and whoever to exist and make a lot of money, but also not have nation-state level power. The latter is something we haven't decided we want yet, but I think we'll come around. If there were even just very small controls (that worked) on the size of a company, or how many industries it can go into, then things would look differently. But when we let so few companies consolidate so much power through money, the status quo is a pretty natural outcome. Imagine a world where there were regional amazon.com's, because we just decided at some point they got too big. Same for google. We'd have actual competition. Tech enables market consolidation in ways we didn't expect and we have to do some actual work to fix it.
Let’s be real, these giant tech companies are becoming big stagnant bureaucracies. They can’t adapt anymore and want to build a moat to let them lumber along for a few decades.
The core assumption of the policy makers and business people was the idea that the Chinese are a bunch of dumb peasants working for scraps and unable to produce. They seem to be holding their own with AI, cars, trains, aircraft, etc. They may have a credible competitor for the B737/A320 — that’s a pretty big leap.
I wholeheartedly agree with you.
If american producers wanted to produce in america, they always could. They never had to move. It would just be more expensive. It will still be more expensive even after tariffs. Tariffs don't make labor cheaper. Cheaper choice will just not exist for americans.
And stop repeating the Serbia line in every comment. You've done it multiple times. What productions are in Serbia? How many out of how many?
Did you lose your job to one in Serbia and now it's sour grapes all along?
In general, all of Europe is bursting at the seams with movie and TV productions, many of them American: https://issuu.com/thelatesteditionishereandfreetoview/docs/c...
Here's a quote for you:
--- start quote ---
“Labour unions contend that between 35 and 50 percent of feature films turned out by American producers are made abroad,” the New York Times reported on October 4 1959 as the volume of what were then called “runaway productions” began to soar.
--- end quote ---
Notice the year.
Hollywood has been running away from California for over 70 years. Your obsession with Serbia completely ignores that all of Europe is used for movie and TV productions, and Serbia is just the latest addition: https://issuu.com/thelatesteditionishereandfreetoview/docs/c...
It wasn't.
He's going to flip-flop on this 15 times in the next three months while studios (and other industries) go into hibernation waiting until something (or anything) stabilizes.
Media with so-called "leftist" themes tend to do well commercially than "rightist" themes, so Hollywood just follows the money?
it's completely stupid and shortsighted to birth this monster, of course. we need MORE international cooperation not less to solve the vast environmental and social problems the world faces.
think about why people migrate and war is high on the list, and not addressing the root causes of human migration but merely each nation closing its doors to the world= bad dumb and wrong.
the people are to blame, of course. in one of the wealthiest nations on earth it's not hardship or suffering that drove the common man to vote for Trump, it's schadenfreude for strawmen they were programmed to hate.
Jodorowski's famous art film "holy mountain" shows our current trajectory since 40 plus years and depicts the brainwashing that allows one to dehumanize other human beings.
i am not sure if trump or vance is the antichrist, but they certainly head a religion dedicated to eradicating the values Jesus taught.
Whether this is a successful strategy is debatable.
I don't have stats for that either, so these things might well still support your claim, but that's what you have to look at.
And the current administration does at least purport to follow free market principles. It's just all principles can go out the window for them because <insert word salad>, for whatever advances their own power.
For decades gays were not allowed and their presence caused blowbacks. It was called free market, despite there being literal rules preventing their presence. Likewise, non whites or women in leading roles - they were not in them, because Hollywood was conservative business in this sense. It took a lot of advocacy for the change to happen.
Right wing hates them, most people just watch those movies and are not weirded out anymore about women having lead action role or whatever. And right wing hopes to revert it back.
It doesn’t matter whether Trump understands $thing. Pretending that he’s acting in good faith to make things better, but is somehow failing because he doesn’t get X, Y, or Z falls right into the trap. He’s trying to destroy American “soft power”. It doesn’t interest him.
Neither does a good economy, schools, NATO, etc. All of these things are being destroyed or mangled on purpose.
"It's just temporary pain"
"We need to consume less"
"I don't understand tariffs"
IMO the other shoe here is stronger content restrictions and more government control of what gets made. Easier to do that with US productions, hence the attempt to make everything distributed in the US a US production.
Unless the new edict excludes farming out VFX. The VFX industry has been on its knees for years now, in a race to the bottom that has made r/vfx a pretty depressing place.
(Source: Spent the last few years working for a well-known VFX company)
It'll help thousands of Americans that used to be employed by said studios but were fired not because they couldn't do the job but because the greed of studio execs made them move production outside of the US, playing financial arbitrage games against the interest of the US.
Trump is trying to reverse this by making movies outside of the US, especially by US companies, more expensive. The goal here is not some statement about Hollywood but to bring movie production jobs back to US. The extras, the people who build sets, people who make food for actors etc. And jobs bring tax revenue and grow GDP, which helps every american.
Protect Hollywood from who, exactly? IIUC, an increasing number of "American" movies (i.e., those produced/financed by American studios) are being filmed outside the US.
This isn't a bunch of foreign film makers ganging up on poor, beleaguered film companies like Disney, Paramount and Neflix.
They, of course, are going to go out of business any minute now because those evil foreigners are taking away their movies. /s
No. Those very profitable studios are choosing to make movies outside the US to bolster those high profits by reducing labor, physical plant and safety expenditures.
As such, how is charging Hollywood studios 100% tariffs to import the movies those same studios paid to make "protecting" Hollywood?
Don't mistake the above for my support of Hollywood studios. They are the OG rapacious scumbags that the SV tech bros are trying (and sometimes succeeding) in emulating.
They're not stupid (well they might be, but that's beside the point), they're just in such fundamental disagreement with you that it's possible to squint and assess the situation as "yup, they're stupid" (and frankly that's a lot more comforting of an assessment).
Film production has been moving steadily overseas chasing cheap labor. By forcing some of it back or forcing it to stay put it makes that industry and the people in it a little more dependent upon government, a little more dependent upon isolationist economic policy, a little more inclined to stay in the government's good graces (i.e. less likely to create stuff the .gov doesn't like), etc, etc, even if it kneecaps the ability of the overall industry to perform globally.
Edit: I shouldn't have to say this but none of the above should be construed as an endorsement of a) high tariffs or b) increased government control of media)
Thats it. The attack is the strategy. Burn some stuff down and move on.
I think it's more pernicious than that. The whole MAGA movement has a rather obvious accelerationist agenda, which leads to self-destructive policies like dismantling basic social safety nets and eliminating basic state institutions. Their policies don't make sense to anyone outside of their cult because we presume the goal is to build upon the state institutions and improve upon what's already there, whereas the MAGA crowd applauds destroying everything down to fundamental rights such as the right to a fair trial. They want to see te world burn hoping they'll be able to rebuild it to their liking. The only members of the MAGA that so far voiced regrets are those who faced the fact that they themselves were being left behind.
MAGA reminds me of That One Guy we all knew in High School who just wanted to cause trouble, start fights, insult people, light fires in the bathroom, destroy things, and basically grief anyone who encountered him. There's no good intentions here--no aim to make things better for everyone. It was just ABCD with that guy: anger, belligerence, cruelty, and defiance. Fast forward to today, and we've got 70M+ of these guys voting.
I knew one of those guys. Obviously I thought he was dangerous but figured he was too crude to get far in life.
he's now a maga congressman from Texas
But I presume that the major effect of this tariff will be to force large media conglomerates (aka news agencies) to think very carefully about how their news divisions cover Trump.
Cutting off Hollywood from its funding sources is part of the plan. MAGA controlled states cancelled tax breaks and subsidies for film/tv production years ago, in some cases torpedoing billions in investment in new studios. This isn't a new strategy, this is the amplification of an existing strategy.
> that doesn’t change the fact that Hollywood projects American culture around the world in a way that the government could never do itself
I'll all for the "soft power" of the US, including cultural influence. Just wanted to point out that things have been changing slowly. More and more people started to be more credulous about Hollywood's values. Case in point, Blank Panther won Oscar, yet it was widely criticized in China and its box office in China was miserable. Below is the translation of a popular criticism of Black Panther:
Imagine you made a movie about China, kind of like Black Panther. In it, China is this isolated country with crazy-advanced technology, way ahead of the rest of the world. But instead of a modern government, it's run by tribal warlords—each one basically a dictator. To choose their top leader, they fight each other with knives and spears on top of the Forbidden City.
In your story, Chinese people still do foot binding like it’s totally normal. The elite chieftains live in ridiculous luxury inside the imperial palace. Their medicine is so advanced it’s basically magic—people come back from the dead—and they’ve got levitating trains that look like they’re from another planet.
But regular folks? They live in grass huts, spend their days feeding rhinos (or maybe pandas), and there are barely any roads in the whole country.
Then you take this movie to China and tell everyone it’s a tribute to Chinese culture? People would be so insulted, they might actually beat you up.
Isn't it the other way around? American culture was dictated by Hollywood, and the rest of the world mistook it for real American culture?
Local US film industry is dying because it's all offshored.
I live in a country that is leeching off the US film industry with subsidies. Our country benefits at the expense of American jobs.
It’s the cultural equivalent of being the world’s reserve currency, it’s a massive free advantage in almost any situation. Stupid stupid stupid to threaten it.