- brainwadThere are little link icons at the end of each paragraph. They open a list of sources.
- How old are you? Most millennials grew up with unfettered access to the internet, including porn, because our non-digital-native parents were easily outsmarted. We were fine. This seems like the same helicopter parenting fallacy that has already destroyed kids' in-person lives.
- I think it actually is a radical totalitarian demand, if the only accepted form of age verification is government ID scans or selfie face capture. People should have a right to serve content without having to deal with the SPII of their clients.
- > Why would they have customers in the first place if all they offer is reruns
You can ask the same question for cable TV, but it's not dead. Netflix also started as purely "reruns" and was still quite popular.
> Creating and streaming audio is not a comparable business to creating and streaming video, due to the vastly different sums of money, and hence risk, involved.
If anything that extra risk should make studios more shy of investing in new content vs just serving up old hits. It's noticeable that film leans way more heavily on franchises and remakes already, which agrees with this hypothesis?
> That means there is less money available for new audio creators. And this holds true for all rent seeking. If it weren’t for excessive copyright, there could be much more variety in audio streaming.
You assume this, but I really don't think it's true! Most people don't seek out new music; their tastes are set in their youths and then they happily listen to the same music for the rest of their lives. The choice is to make them pay to listen, generating at least some stream of royalties, or let them listen for free, in which case they will be happy to.
- I am generally anti-copyright; but it's not really a pro-creator policy to curtail copyright; it's pro-consumer.
> If everything older than, say, 35 years were suddenly in the public domain, available to be distributed by any of the distribution companies, and Hypothetical Media Corp had half the back catalogue that they used to, then surely that would make big conglomerates less interested in buying up Hypothetical Media Corp?
Doesn't your first point contradict this? If almost all the value of copyrighted works comes in the first few years, then no, curtailing copyright terms doesn't discourage buyouts, because the buyout is going to be mostly justified on the recent works held by the purchased company, not the residual value of its old works.
- > I don’t see how this can be true. Reduced copyright terms mean price for old stuff goes down (to however much hosting and bandwidth costs). This means more funds are available for new content.
Because this syllogism doesn't hold. There's not a fixed pot of money that must be spent on content. If now every streaming service has access to a bigger pool of old hits, then they don't need to buy as much new content to satisfy their customers, and total spending on content will go down.
> If everyone can sell the popular reruns and holiday movies, then they stop being exclusive to Disney and Comcast and Warner Bros and so the only thing they can compete with is new stuff, forcing then to invest in new stuff.
Each service will just become sameier and compete more on their UX than their exclusive content. You can see this in music, for instance, where the big streamers already have more or less identical catalogues. Nobody is picking Spotify over Apple Music or Youtube Music due to exclusives, because there are none; so putting the content into the public domain is hardly going to change things.
- I mean, it's pretty generous. In most other domains, if you sell something of yours, it's gone and you have no right to claw it back later.
- Shortening copyright terms would reduce the power of any given media company; but I think it might disadvantage creators of new works overall. Right now each company has a smaller back-catalogue than they would under a shorter term regime, and so the relative value to them of new content is higher.
Also, shorter terms would presumably lead to more consolidation between media companies (as there would be less differentiation via exclusive content), which would then reduce the number of buyers for new content, increasing the monopsony effects.
- Pay day loans are generally good _for the borrower_ - they aren't just window breaking. The consequences of missing an important payment can be way worse than the high interest on the pay day loan, e.g. if you don't pay for a course in time, they disenroll you and you no longer get to take the course; if you don't pay rent in time, you might get eviction proceedings filed against you; if you don't pay for your car repairs the garage will not return your car and you will lose time every day taking public transport.
- Eastman Kodak tried your implied proposed strategy, of ignoring technological developments that undermine their core product. It didn't go so well. Naturally technology companies have learned from this and other past mistakes.
- Alphabet at least returns capital via huge buybacks that effectively act as dividends, but with more tax efficiency.
- As an Aussie:
* some kind of proportional representation in lower houses or parliament (see e.g. New Zealand for a Westminster-compatible solution, or Switzerland for something more radical while still working with seats allocated by state populations).
* referendums on laws/treaties, and popular initiatives to propose constitutional changes and/or new laws (like in Switzerland or various western US states).
* reinvigoration of the federal principle that things that can be done by the states (or the local governments) should be done at that level, rather than the feds sticking their nose in everything (see, again, Switzerland).
- That's far from obvious. The UK is 3x the population of Australia, which manages fine without deep economic integrations. The problem of Brexit is not that it is impossible to go it alone as a middle power; it's just an unnecessary handicap when you border a 450m head market but want to ignore them and act like you are an island at the arse end of the world.
- They know the density of holeless cheese, and can compare to the sample. If it's underweight it probably has holes?
- > The instability of Rust would not affect users in any way.
Sure it would. Suppose a rust-based package has a security bug. Upstream has fixed it, but that fix depends on some new rust language feature that the frozen version of rust in Debian doesn't have yet.
- They can't go twice as far if the ride is up a defined climb. One you do the distance, that's it, you reached the pass, you can now only coast back down to the base.
In my experience, those on e-bikes are older and less fit in general, so it's not a matter of them making up for the work in volume; it's more that they couldn't do the climb at all without the assistance.
Also, your assumption about them providing half the work is surely wrong. Even basic ebikes provide 250W; some models provide double or triple that still. The rider provides probably 125W at most, so a third or less of the total power.
- I don't think this is really true in general. When you climb a pass, the distance and elevation are fixed; the ebike riders buzzing by at twice your speed are not doing more work than you - they are avoiding some of the work inherent in the climb.
- Plenty of Australian suburbs have no footpaths either. The footpath appearing and disappearing thing also happens.
- No, on average people in 1600s England (who were overwhelmingly peasants) worked almost all daylight hours, 6 days a week - perhaps 3000 hours a year. It's simply not possible for the hours worked to have increased a further 80% from that baseline.
Also most labour was not wage labour in the 17th century, so you need to be careful looking at wages. Especially comparing the the 19th century since there was a vast expansion of wage labour.