All posts tagged: Bros

‘Will the PM side with parents or tech bros?’: Labour peer demands action on children’s smartphone safety | Politics News

‘Will the PM side with parents or tech bros?’: Labour peer demands action on children’s smartphone safety | Politics News

Published by skeptic

Sir Keir Starmer needs to choose between parents who want stronger action to tackle harmful content on children’s phones, or the “tech bros” who are resisting changes to their platforms, Baroness Harriet Harman has said. Speaking to Beth Rigby on Sky News’ Electoral Dysfunction podcast, the Labour peer noted that the prime minister met with the creators of hit Netflix drama Adolescence to discuss safety on social media, but she questioned if he is going to take action to “stop the tech companies allowing this sort of stuff” on their platforms where children can access it. Sir Keir hosted a roundtable on Monday with Adolescence co-writer Jack Thorne and producer Jo Johnson to discuss issues raised in the series, which centres on a 13-year-old boy arrested for the murder of a young girl, and the rise of incel culture. Politics latest: Could the UK retaliate against Trump? The aim was to discuss how to prevent young boys being dragged into a “whirlpool of hatred and misogyny”, and the prime minister said the four-part series raises …

Warner Bros. Lets You Watch 31 Films Free Online: David Byrne’s True Stories, Christopher Guest’s Waiting for Guffman, Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep & More

Warner Bros. Lets You Watch 31 Films Free Online: David Byrne’s True Stories, Christopher Guest’s Waiting for Guffman, Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep & More

Published by José

It’s Fri­day, which means that tonight, many of us will sit down to watch a movie with our fam­i­ly, our friends, our sig­nif­i­cant oth­er, or — for some cinephiles, best of all — by our­selves. If you haven’t yet lined up any home-cin­e­mat­ic expe­ri­ence in par­tic­u­lar, con­sid­er tak­ing a look at this playlist of 31 fea­ture films just made avail­able to stream by Warn­er Bros. You’ll know the name of that august Hol­ly­wood stu­dio, of course, but did you know that it put out True Sto­ries, the musi­cal plunge into tabloid Amer­i­ca direct­ed by Talk­ing Heads’ David Byrne? Or Wait­ing for Guff­man, the first impro­vised movie by Christo­pher Guest and his troupe of crack comedic play­ers like Eugene Levy, Fred Willard, Cather­ine O’Hara, and Park­er Posey? That may already strike many Open Cul­ture read­ers as the mak­ings of a fine dou­ble fea­ture, though some may pre­fer to watch the ear­ly work of anoth­er kind of auteur: Michel Gondry’s The Sci­ence of Sleep, say, or Richard Lin­klater’s Sub­Ur­bia (a stage-play adap­ta­tion that could well be paired with …

Warner Bros. Discovery Names New U.S. Advertising Sales Chiefs

Warner Bros. Discovery Names New U.S. Advertising Sales Chiefs

Published by skeptic

Warner Bros. Discovery has promoted Ryan Gould and Robert “Bobby” Voltaggio to presidents of U.S. advertising sales. Gould joined the studio in 2012 when Turner Broadcasting bought Bleacher Report, and was most recently head of streaming, digital and advanced advertising sales and client partnerships at WBD since 2023. Voltaggio joined then Discovery in 2005 in ad sales and was promoted to head of revenue and operations in 2019, his most recent role until the current promotion. They replace Jon Steinlauf, the WBD head of advertising sales who announced his plans to leave the company in late 2024, prompting a search for his replacement. Gould and Voltaggio will oversee the studio’s sales portfolio for both networks and streaming, including sports, news, client partnerships and digital sales. They will report to WBD chief revenue and strategy officer Bruce Campbell, who in a statement said promoting from within the studio made sense “given the rapidly evolving advertising market.” “Ryan and Bobby have been instrumental leaders in driving our business since the merger, and are innovative, decisive, and team-oriented in all that they do. …

Chris Brown sues Warner Bros for 0m over ‘serial rapist’ claims

Chris Brown sues Warner Bros for $500m over ‘serial rapist’ claims

Published by skeptic

Sign up to Roisin O’Connor’s free weekly newsletter Now Hear This for the inside track on all things music Get our Now Hear This email for free Get our Now Hear This email for free Rapper Chris Brown has filed a $500m (£450m) lawsuit against Warner Bros after he was called a “serial rapist and a sexual abuser” in a new documentary. The lawsuit, which also requests a jury trial, alleges that the Investigation Discovery docuseries, Chris Brown: A History of Violence has been “detrimental” to the singer and is “full of lies”. “To put it simply, this case is about the media putting their own profits over the truth,” says the lawsuit. Brown, 35, has a series of allegations against his name, including assaulting his ex-girlfriend Rihanna in a car in 2009, attacking a nightclub photographer in 2017 and “brutally and severely beating” four men after a concert in Texas in 2024. The complaint continues: “Since the beginning of October of 2024, Ample LLC and Warner Brothers were put on notice that they were …

Taking on the Tyranny of the Tech Bros

Taking on the Tyranny of the Tech Bros

Published by skeptic

The glow of the tech bros’ halo is dimming and, in 2025, the computing industry’s sheen of glamor will continue to fade, too. While other STEM fields are making strides in broadening participation in their workforces, year after year, computing, a supposedly innovative field, fails to recruit, retain, and respect women and nonbinary workers. For example, precision questioning, abstraction, aggression, sexism and a disdain for altruism—serving the social good—are a few of the core values driving culture in computing worksites. These values and the ways they are policed via bias, discrimination, and harassment in high-tech companies form the “Bro Code.” The Bro Code perpetuates high tolerance of sexual harassment. It also contributes to the field’s failure to rectify its stark segregation. Only 21 percent of computer programming positions are held by women. Of that 21 percent, only 2 percent are African American, and only 1 percent are Latina. While sorely underrepresented in the field overall, women are disproportionately affected during industry’s downsizing. For example, nearly 70 percent of those laid off in the 2022 tech …

Tesla’s Oct 10 Robotaxi event will be at Warner Bros studio in LA

Tesla’s Oct 10 Robotaxi event will be at Warner Bros studio in LA

Published by skeptic

Tesla will unveil its Robotaxi product at Warner Bros. studio in Burbank, CA, on October 10th, according to a report by Bloomberg. Tesla has been using its Giga Texas facility for its unveilings in recent years, after many years of doing them in Calfornia, where the company was founded and where its design and engineering departments remain. Many of these happened in or around Hawthorne, California, where the Tesla Design Studio is – so it makes sense that nonpublic concepts would be housed in the same area. But Tesla will branch out to another company’s facility for it’s October 10th unveiling, choosing to stage it at a large movie set in nearby Burbank, on the north end of the LA area. Tesla may have chosen the location due to its simulation of a suburban neighborhood. There are several houses and a simulation of a small-town downtown area. The idea could be to demonstrate to attendees what it might be like to get picked up by a robotaxi outside your home, and taken downtown for a …

Bitcoin Bros Go Wild for Donald Trump

Bitcoin Bros Go Wild for Donald Trump

Published by skeptic

Trump’s speech is an hour behind. A half hour into the wait, restless attendees start chanting “Trump.” The woman sitting in front of me murmurs her own chant: “Bitcoin, bitcoin—that’s what they should be chanting.” She must have gotten the memo: It’s not a Trump rally; it’s a bitcoin rally. When Trump finally takes the stage to “God Bless the USA,” he basks in the glory of his standing ovation, “thrilled…to become the first American president ever to address a bitcoin event.” His next step is to pander to his supporters in the audience. “This is the kind of spirit that will help us make America great again. I stand before you today filled with respect and admiration,” for what he later calls all the “high IQ individuals” in the room. He reiterates past promises (freeing Ross on day one, never creating a Central Bank Digital Currency) and tacks on some new ones (the plan for a US strategic bitcoin reserve, which senator Lummis details in a brief speech after Trump’s; the firing of SEC …

Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery Announce That a Bundle of Disney Plus, Hulu and Max Is Coming

Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery Announce That a Bundle of Disney Plus, Hulu and Max Is Coming

Published by skeptic

Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery are already teaming up for a sports streaming joint venture, now the two companies have announced that they will be working together on a streaming bundle of Disney Plus, Hulu and Max for the US that is coming this summer.  The new bundle doesn’t yet have a price or an exact release date. The companies say that it will be available to purchase on any of the three streaming platforms’ respective websites and users can choose from ad-supported or ad-free options. When bundled together the companies tout that users will be able to access content from a host of brands including “ABC, CNN, DC, Discovery, Disney, Food Network, FX, HBO, HGTV, Hulu, Marvel, Pixar, Searchlight and Warner Bros.”  It wasn’t immediately clear if this new offer would also include Disney’s ESPN Plus or Warner Bros. Discovery’s Bleacher Report or TNT Sports. As part of the sports joint venture, which is set to arrive later this year, the companies previously announced that there would be bundles of that sports-focused service with …

Pivot podcast host Scott Galloway: ‘Tech bros conflate luck with talent’ | Science and nature books

Pivot podcast host Scott Galloway: ‘Tech bros conflate luck with talent’ | Science and nature books

Published by skeptic

Scott Galloway is an American professor of marketing at New York University Stern school of Business. He has founded and sold several tech firms, and served on the board of directors of companies such as the New York Times and Urban Outfitters. With tech journalist Kara Swisher he co-hosts the hugely popular tech and business podcast Pivot. He is a fierce critic of tech companies and their business models and he has written five books, the latest of which is The Algebra of Wealth: A Simple Formula for Economic Security. You spend a lot of time with wealthy and successful people. Do they have any common habits?Well, the most common attribute I’ve registered is they were born at the right place at the right time. What I’ve found is that the majority of people’s success is not their fault. And I think something that plagues people, especially tech bros, is they conflate luck with talent. But across those who excel, the thing I have found is that if you want to be successful, you need …

Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav’s 2023 Pay Package

Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav’s 2023 Pay Package

Published by Sam

Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav saw the value of his 2023 compensation package rise to $49.7 million, compared with $39.3 million in 2022 when the Discovery-WarnerMedia merger had closed. The entertainment conglomerate disclosed latest pay details for its top executives in a regulatory filing. Zaslav’s 2023 pay consisted of a $3 million salary, and more than $23 million in stock awards, as well as $22 million in non-equity incentive compensation and $1.6 million in other compensation, including security costs. The rise in compensation was due in part to a decision by WBD to change its executive compensation plan to focus on cash flow, rather than stock price. In 2023 WBD’s free cashflow rose in part due to the Hollywood strikes, which shut down productions for months. In 2021, then-Discovery CEO Zaslav had received a pay package worth $246.6 million, a big jump from $37.7 million in 2020 and $45.8 million in 2019. That was driven by a May 2021 employment agreement that was set to keep Zaslav at the company through the end of 2027. (Stock options that …