The explicit, stated purpose of copyright was to encourage sharing of ideas. When it lasted originally 14 years, it worked. Before that, you might have had a great idea and kept it to yourself because why take years of your life researching a subject and writing a book when a publisher’s going to immediately copy it and pay you nothing? 14 years is plenty of time to get a return on your investment and most importantly, after that, it didn’t belong to you anymore. It belonged to everyone.

For example, that would mean District 9 and Hunger Games would be in the public domain right now.

I don’t understand. Facebook can get data from an open system whenever they feel like it.

I like the judge, but 20 hours a week wouldn’t teach anyone how hard it is to work in the service industry.

will have to work there 20 hours a week

I’m a really great person. I’m good at everything. My friends are all tools and won’t ever be as amazing as me.

Congratulations. I bet those friends are absolutely real.

As someone who maintained an API, 80% to 90% of my time was discovering that hackers were attempting an exploit, blocking it, adding monitoring, building abuse prevention. After we shut our API off, we could turn services back on, especially free services that we only took away because hackers.

Not to mention the support volume. More than half of our support calls were, “Why did you suspend my account? I’m a poor old grandpa. I want to appeal.” Okay, yep we looked into activity and you sent 50000 requests in less than a minute and that’s all you ever did with this account. Did you know hackers lie and will spend hours getting tech support? You go to school to be an engineer to build cool stuff and instead field bullshit support requests all day from people trying to destroy the thing you want to build so they can maybe make thirty bucks and cost you tens of thousands. It sucked the life out of me and turned me eternally cynical.

From the article

Prepandemic, Fleetcor workers in their 20s and 30s took one or two sick days a year, she says. Now, it’s more like three to five.

So pandemic taught people how viruses spread and how not to spread them and coming to work sick is shameful, not a badge of honor. Still, 4 days a year isn’t enough.

I worked with a guy, Clint, who had been at the company his whole life, worked his way from the factory floor to head of accounting. The thing Clint chose to brag regularly about was that he was 60-something and had never taken a sick day. Instead, he’d roll in obviously sick, sneeze on everyone, everyone he saw that day would get sick, a few of them followed his stellar example and got more people sick. During those times, no actual work got done except Clint lamenting about how everyone was getting sick. “Must be the weather.”

I’ve pirated content and don’t have any issues with it. What has worn me out

• Sites being pirated don’t give a shit that pirates aren’t going to use them anymore. That’s literally why they blocked them.
• Want to consume content without paying? Do it and maybe share with others how you did it, but don’t make the millionth post bragging about how you’re sticking it to the man. Go rob a Tiffany’s and brag about sticking it to that company. And when they install new security measures, post about how unfair it is and you’ll never take stuff from them again. Or don’t. Really. Don’t. I want to see that post about as much as the post about what you had for breakfast this morning.

I heard an anonymous interview with someone who was sickened by their own attraction to children. Hearing that person speak changed my perspective. This person had already decided never to marry or have kids and chose a career to that same end, low likelihood that kids would be around. Clearly, since the alternative was giving up on love and family forever, the attraction wasn’t a choice. Child porn that wasn’t made with children, comics I guess, was used to fantasize to prevent carrying through on those desires in real life.

I don’t get it, why anyone would be attracted to kids. It’s gross and hurtful and stupid. If people suffering from this problem have an outlet, though, maybe fewer kids will be hurt.

As someone who has worked on free Internet services, it used to be easier to make money from ads. A video ad view was worth nearly a dollar US. Audio ads were maybe 7 or 8 cents a listen. Now, a video ad view makes a few cents and audio ads are worthless. They likely did the math about how many audio ads they’d have to play on the phone in your pocket to break even and decided you’d hate it more than they would. Since content owners get just over half of what YouTube makes, they’d probably be pissed about seeing the drop in income too.

Feel free to hate YT. This was an economic decision at around the time when ad revenue had just fallen off of a cliff.

Censorship is terrible. Except when I want to do it and pretend like I’m the best politician. Then it’s great.

I’ve been reading On the Origin of Species and was surprised that even Darwin had noted that species that evolved in segregated environments like New Zealand had less competition, so weren’t as fit. It’s amazing to see how much progress has been made to undo damage done by humans and create environments were species like this can thrive again.