I have been using PayPal increasingly for online payments. Not sure why. I have heard old stories about PayPal but Honey seems really bad. Its basically a given that any fintech company are going to be dodgy scammers but PayPal seemed almost grown up and respectable. Guess not.

There will always be the hoarders. You can’t collect everything on any sort of wage/salary and live. If you have a compulsion then piracy is a reasonably harmless past time. You aren’t depriving anyone of income for something no normal person could reasonable afford.

For regular content consumers it is simply free market economics working. Companies innovate and offer great products and value and they take people away from the black market. Then the companies get greedy, form loose deniable cartels and start fixing prices prices at higher levels and cutting quality and consumers go elsewhere. They want the profits from a free market but don’t want to play the game and compete on value and quality. Sucks for them. The government grants them a legal monopoly on monetizing their IP but it doesn’t give them a clue on how to build successful businesses.

Honestly I don’t think piracy is great. I would rather pay a fair price for easily discoverable content, own it forever on all mediums, and have the bulk of the money go to the creatives who made it so they can pay their bills and feed their families. I don’t watch a lot and the little I do should be affordable. I don’t feel compelled to collect it all.

But then I go to introduce one of my kids to all the age appropriate comics/graphic novels I bought on Comixology for an older sibling. But Comixology closed down and all the content moved into Kindle with a heap of all ages content, not all appropriate. And Amazon are too cheap to offer family sharing outside the US. So hundreds of dollars in Bezos pocket with no way to put it on a device for my kid. I could waste time breaking the DRM or pirate but I am leaning towards a return to dead trees.

Netflix is crap and getting worse, jumped ship ages ago. Disney is killing genre movies and tv with all their marvel/star wars IP. Both are driven by algorithms and greed and recycle IP instead of taking risks.

Digital licence is all I have used for about 7 years. Police here are careful never to reach for a phone as they can’t legally. You display the licence and give it a shake to animate it and they copy the number down in their notebook. If the police ever did illegally take a phone I would wipe it and replace it and lodge a complaint.

They may have similar protections in Europe. People often post opinions on social media without checking facts. I get why on commercial social media where everything is rage bait. But i don’t know why people can’t take a few minutes to check local laws before posting here.

The expense of tools, equipment and supplies can be a huge barrier to car maintenance but there is so much legitimately free software for computers (even ignoring the pirated stuff) that people never had so much opportunity.

If is like learning another language or a musical instrument, people have to be committed and practice to get good and few people can make the effort. Businesses have trained people to seek instant gratification from fast food, social media, tik tok, gambling, loot boxes, and consumerism in general because short lived and unfulfilling experiences produce an endless monetization opportunity. The rare people with the discipline and support to focus their efforts have massive advantages with access to information and tools which were very difficult in the past. There are some prodigies out there in a sea of mediocrity.

deleted by creator

True that copyright always existed to protect publishers and not creators. But in pre-digital times there were considerable barriers to publishing and distributing creative works at scale so while publishers in all media have often abused creators they were a necessary evil if you wanted to make a living.

The worst trick greedy capitalists have pulled recently it to bypass copyright and steal the entire digital record of human creative labor to incorporate into proprietary models and services for their own enrichment. I have no idea how society and our political representation has slept through that. The second worse is insanely destroying their own industry by fucking over both consumers and creatives with increasingly unsustainable greedy and dumb bullshit.

Access to education and other equitable causes really should be fair use. If everyone pirated, and the way things are going it will be the only sane way to get content, then new content is going to dry up unless people are happy with AI slop. We will still see indie self-published works but necessarily the creators won’t have access to the same resources we saw when they were part of an exploitative but productive industry. That sucks. A lot of people are happy to pay for convenient and affordable access to content under reasonable conditions and piracy is something they only resort to when that is denied.

They run Windows and all this third party software because they would rather pay subscriptions and give up control of their business than retain skilled staff. It has nothing todo with Linux vs Windows. Linux won’t stop doors falling off Boeing planes. It is the myopia of modern business culture.

I have been wanting to watch this since release but it isn’t showing anywhere near me or streaming or available to purchase and ironically I haven’t pirated because I figured everyone was in the same situation so good quality rips would be scarce. This movie is a spectacular example of all that is wrong with geographical distribution rights. I will probably still wait for a legit stream on this one because I want to send a positive signal if any service grabs the rights but I can’t blame people for making other choices. Copyright is supposed to protect the rights holders so they can profit from their work but in cases like this it just stops them connecting with their audience and they get nothing, neither money or exposure. I don’t think piracy is harming anyone in this situation.

deleted by creator

Growth of a few million subscribers is nothing for a company the size of Netflix and there could be all sorts of creative accounting going on.

Executives patting themselves in the back to justify bonuses is self serving bullshit. Quality and value build long term brand profitability but that is too hard for MBAs. Cost cutting and screwing customers is all they know. In a few years people will be asking what the fuck happened to Netflix.

I was a relatively early adopter of Netflix before it was available in my country and used it via VPN back when Netflix had more to gain by allowing that. They made some interesting shows that justified the very affordable price. Now there is more content and most is crap. I rotated subscriptions for the last year but I am hard out now. And ad supported tiers don’t fix it for me because I would rather eat shit than watch them.

Framework ship laptops to Australia and has a headphone socket. Great company. Great products. Great experience, highly recommend. I can’t recommend products that don’t sell and support in my market. I don’t have any loyalty to Fairphones or Steamdecks or any other product from low effort companies that don’t ship beyond NA or Europe.

I like repairable hardware and own a Framework laptop. It has a headphone socket that I use every day. If Framework made a phone I might be interested. If most fairphones end up paired to disposable wireless earbuds with limited battery life that end in landfill I don’t get how that is more sustainable than adding a socket for the declining but still sizeable number of people who cling to wired stuff that just works.

My rugged mid-range Nokia refuses to take damage. The thing is cursed. I have dropped it so many times it is ridiculous. It might be years before I replace it. Has a jack as well. Made me totally re-evaluate what I value in a phone. I realized I am not a feature/performance fetishist. I want solidly made gear that has regular updates.

Every day. Aux in on my car, wired headphones, aux in on old stereo. I could replace it all with bluetooth but it isn’t broken and I can still use bluetooth on other devices. I like choice and I hate waste and conspicuous consumption. Rechargeable wireless devices with limited battery life that can’t be serviced or repaired is peak consumption/pollution bullshit. The headphone jack may wear out before my phone’s usb, battery or something else but that hasn’t been my experience historically.

Long time family premium user (household of parents and kids). Anything Youtube do to preserve their revenue within reason doesn’t bother me too much as long as they don’t reduce the split with quality creators. If they were successful with all this bullshit perhaps they wouldn’t have needed to notify me that subs are almost doubling next year. My guess is all they are doing is fucking things up for everyone. It is only going to get worse if their premium subscription base reduces. They should be pricing premium as an alternative to ad-blockers but instead they are pushing people including premium subscribers towards ad-blockers.

I already have ad-blockers and apps for circumventing youtube ads. Not using them in favour of a fairly priced (to me) subscription was a choice but sadly one Google seems to be discouraging.

Not just the degoogled open source Android disros either. Amazon has a commercial fork of Android with its own app store. There was Oppo’s AOSP derived ColorOS which was not based on Google’s stock Android. I don’t think Google should control the core apps as tightly as they do on stock Android but on the other hand those apps sort of define stock android and the default user experience in the marketplace. Epic could roll their own fork if they wanted and substitute apps.

On the subject of Oppo, I think Tencent went after them and other Chinese manufacturers as well to get into their platforms. Tencent are the guys who push their own app store and one app to rule them that Musk has wet dreams about. I sometimes wonder if they are using Epic to wedge open US based app stores for a future WeChat/MyApp like approach. Not that the US government would allow that.

Valve created their own console and helped fund Wine development, presumably as a strategic move to counter Microsoft’s platform control. I might be missing something but I don’t see similar effort or innovation from Epic.

I believe Microsoft and Nvidia did deals with hardware manufacturers for years that helped exclude competition and those sorts of deals probably pose more difficulty in court. Google might have fallen into a trap and done something similar. Being vertically integrated Apple doesn’t have to do deals with other manufacturers but presumably they have some deals with developers. Obviously Sony, Nintendo have exclusives, agreements with developers and tight control of their platforms as well that go far beyond anything I can see with Google so I do find it a bit confusing.

Probably comes down to the unwillingness of US legislators to create clear laws. Too many compromises to satisfy lobbyists and avoid any negative campaign they might sponsor. Judges likely do the best they can trying to interpret the mess of case law they depend on in the absence of modern legislation. I have no idea why the US supreme court gets to decide on matters like abortion based on hand wavy interpretations of historical documents when in any normal democracy the politicians do the will of the people and enact legislation that reflects modern society.

My interpretation of the article is that it wasn’t Google’s app store but the deals Google did with other manufacturers and big studios that caused them problems. Unlike iOS Android has both open source and commercial forks. Amazon have their own app store for their own range of devices and you can load that app store on regular Android I believe if you want to access a shittier range of apps. There are degoogled versions of Android and many people including myself run f-droid or side load apks. It is much more open than Apple’s system which won.

All reddit did was unmask themselves a little but only for those with their eyes open. Social media is close enough to a cult operation utilizing addictive behaviors and conditioning to control people. People are scared to leave their church and be shunned. Reddit is just another exploitative techbro run business. It isn’t a social enterprise or open source community and it is weird that volunteers invested so much of their time and effort propping up shareholder value instead of contributing to real communities.

Plenty of independent thinkers left and found federated alternatives or walked away. The predatory and manipulative nature of social media was bad enough when it was all about controlling and manipulating the masses but now it is also a huge machine learning harvesting operation. The only people who really benefit are the ultra rich.

All our PCs run linux which is the most unloved, unsupported platform for commercial software and media distribution companies. Can’t watch most streaming video better than 720p so the streaming services can get fucked raising their prices and delivering a shit service. Gabe gave us Steam and Steam sales and made shit just work and he can take my money. There are overpriced games on Steam and there are games that are not available there but that still leaves a lot of good stuff so I can understand why more people are willing to pay than pirate reducing torrent availability and seeders. Also PC hardware can be very expensive and if you can afford a high end GPU you can probably afford to support game development.