In addition to not having practice as you said, my thoughts:
1. Camera phones and social media have trained all young people to be aware that anything they say or do could be reported on
2. A lot more overt moralizing about power, gender, and race dynamics by young people makes people hesitant to interact outside of their group
3. Racial and cultural diversity have increased, and people don't reach out across those barriers as freely and easily as within their own homogeneous culture(s)
Probably these too, but if I compare mu childhood (sixties) and society today, the experience kids got/have are in especially sharp contrast. When I was young I was often dumped into large family gatherings which lasted days (birthdays of (grand)grandparents, funerals, weddings etc). I had to practice handling cousins etc who might had very different family backgrounds than me since very early age. We had to find things we had in common and accept our differences. We learned that differences are manageable.
It's not common nowadays. Many people don't have relationships with relatives at all and kids don't meet another kids with different background until school. And even then distance is kept often because of overprotective parenting. If I look at my students (highschool and college level), most of them are absolutely terrified to interact with people very different than they themselves. A single difference is enough to keep distance, dump relationship at all. They are not used to it at all.
> Years later, this still seems far out of reach. If anything, it seems to have been settled that most non-technicals don't want a 3D printer.
They would if you could print things out of durable materials that had weight and structure. I haven't seen any 3D printers that do anything except for that light resin-plastic that feels like you could snap it easily. But if I could print a PVC section for my sink that would totally change the calculus.
You can, in fact, print perfectly well in any thermoplastic, including PVC (although it's unpopular due to toxic fumes). Nor is strength neccessarily an issue. In fact you can 3D print polycarbonate parts strong enough to scratch-build a drone - props and all.
No - the reason you wouldn't want to print parts for your kitchen sink isn't because you can't, it's because you rarely need such parts, and when you do you can simply buy off the shelf parts for next to nothing. A printer simply does not justify its overhead for most people. It's like having a lathe: useful if you're seriously into manufacturing or crafting, but not worth it if you want something pre-designed. There's just not much that it wouldn't be easier to just buy.
How much is a 3D printer that can print durable thermoplastics that I can use for replacement of trivial household items? I thought that would require an industrial setup to do. If you're telling me that I can just start replacing plastic crap in my house, including critical parts like plumbing, with a 3D printer that can sit in its own corner, I probably WILL buy a 3D printer.
A Bambu Lab P1S is $600, and then you gotta buy PET-CF filament, and there's shipping consider as well, so let's say ballpark $800 to start. They make more expensive printers too if you have the budget for it, but the underlying technology is mostly the same. Filament comes in 1kg rolls, and small stuff is like 50 grams, but a large piece of pipe including support structure could be as much as 500g, so if you end up printing a large amount of large items, eg https://makerworld.com/models/1441653 instead of https://makerworld.com/models/77668, which is 2g, and cheaper PLA, filament costs are going to add up.
> They would if you could print things out of durable materials that had weight and structure
You and I totally would, but we're nerds!
Think of how much coaxing it takes to get the average North American homeowner to replace a leaky shower head or a spark plug. A lot of normal happy folks will spend their lives not really learning to fix things much, and that's quite alright, IMO. We don't all need to be good at everything.
The majority of the "more housing = cheaper rent" success stories crowed about on the internet correspond with net population exodus. Austin, Minneapolis, now San Diego.
Edit: I think we should build several million more units of housing in the US. I'm salty because all the new housing I've seen is ugly shitboxes owned by national property firms that make everywhere feel like nowhere.
I hate it so much. Ah, your website/app/program is comprised of rounded-corner cards in four colors (color/pale color/white/grey), with a dark theme. Your clickable text isn't visually distinguishable from your non-clickable text. All of your logos are sans-serif SVGs. Your settings and action menus are split across four different primary hidden locations. Your scroll bars disappear even when there's text hidden offscreen. You try to guess what I want to click on by showing a series of competing horizontally-organized pills over the top of the content instead of just giving me a consistent set of action buttons.
AI companies: "good news, everyone! We've automated all those steps so they're even easier to generate!"
I think the same thing is happening in physical construction. Ah, I see you've designed a new box with four primary color tones and slightly offset vertical lines to break up the windows.
What's great is I can take what you just said now and use it as context when generating my new DESIGN.md system and making sure it doesn't look like any of the other stuff. Thank you! Superpowers will show me all the options in their built-in visual companion when brainstorming. :)
I don't know, I looked at their demo video and it was tile/cards all over the place. I haven't seen an old-fashioned user interface like the kind we saw before 2020 in ages.
There was a screenshot of Valve's front page back when Half Life 2 was released in the early 00s[0]. It was well laid out, straight to the point, and had design flourishes that would have been painful to put together at a time where CSS was new and not supported very well.
Obviously a product of its time and laid out similar to how it'd be printed in a magazine (the characters slightly overflowing the borders and such like). Accessibility wasn't a thing back then.
If a different company did that in 2018 you'd be seeing the G-man in corporate memphis, downloading about 500mb of assets, with 178 separate ad trackers in a consent popup, and then you'd be scrolling like mad to get through all sorts of animations that hijack the scrollbar, in order to get to any useful info.
It's a service problem. Every new service is a colossal headache to set up payment, remember to cancel payment if you only wanted to see the single event and have no need for the service the rest of the year, find what's playing on what when, deal with their bullshit when they add ads onto an ad-free plan that you bought only because it was ad-free, yadda yadda yadda. The suits could have had 10x as much money out of me if I could just pay one-time prices. "Sure, fork over $10 and you can have a temporary account to watch the US Open this year." I will do that. In a single month I'll pay twice the cost of a monthly NYT subscription to read online articles, maybe $0.50/pop.
But they don't offer that, they offer difficult-to-cancel ad-laden plans that don't even get you access to the content you want to see reliably (edit: and as another commenters, signs you up to in some cases multiple mailing lists--thanks, The Athletic, for having a separate mailing list for every one of your terrible sub-orgs, I deeply regret paying you a dime). I'll be sailing the seven seas as long as it's viable.
> Every new service is a colossal headache to set up payment, remember to cancel payment if you only wanted to see the single event and have no need for the service the rest of the year, find what's playing on what when
I just don't find these arguments convincing after watching my friend spend cumulative hours upon hours jumping between pirate streaming services trying to find a stable feed for every game.
This feels too much like a post-hoc rationalization. I know I'll never win this argument on Hacker News because every piracy conversation turns into an infinite game of moving goalposts, where there's always a new rationalization at every turn.
I don't think it's worth discussing until we can be honest and admit that a lot of people pirate because they want free stuff. Every HN piracy conversation has a lot of words written to try to avoid admitting that "free stuff" is a big motivator for a lot of people
> I don't think it's worth discussing until we can be honest and admit that a lot of people pirate because they want free stuff. Every HN piracy conversation has a lot of words written to try to avoid admitting that "free stuff" is a big motivator for a lot of people
Well, see, the thing is you're right, but the "service problem" quote actually addressed that. There's a percentage of people who will never pay, it's true - and by never pay, it means never pay. You can't get them to pay by blocking or adding DRM or whatever.
But of the actually relevant group, people who are willing to pay for stuff, then some percentage of them will stop paying if it isn't convenient enough. Now it's a service problem. The trick is getting the full market potential and preventing them from jumping ship. But the service bit only ever applied to potential customers - the other group don't enter the discussion in the first place because they're hopeless.
But yeah usually this argument is at least in part misrepresented.
However however, no amount of blocking will stop that free stuff group, no amount of hoops will be too much, there is simply no way to extract blood from a stone the way that some media companies keep telling themselves is possible. So all the original blocking and shutting down of half the internet is completely counterproductive regardless.
To the contrary, there is evidence that DRM increased sales. Researchers analyzed data on sales before and after cracks for video games shows up to 20% lost sales of a game is cracked quickly: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/10/the-true-cost-of-game...
It seems hard to take that interpretation at face value (20% seems to be an effect of a week 1 crack post-release with total revenue lost estimated at 25%; week 3 crack has estimated total losses at ~12%, and week 7 crack at less than 5% of total revenue loss..., ~0% for week 12+ cracks).
This is also based on extrapolation on top of extrapolation covering only 86 games with "majority" surviving without cracks into week 12 — how significant is the effect if there are only a few games with cracks in early weeks (if it's 43 games across the first 12 weeks, it's less than 4 games per week on average)? How big are their revenues and copies sold in absolute numbers? (I do not have access to the full paper, perhaps it's answered there)
But to be precise, even if all of the above is covered, this is not proof that DRM increases sales, but that crack availability for Denuvo-protected games decreases sales depending on the timing — it is a subtle distinction, but perhaps publicity of a crack availability motivates more people to take that route?
Finally, let's not forget that game companies care about the profit (and revenue is only a proxy): looking at lost sales does not show how much a studio can save by not investing in DRM protection and thus having a higher gross margin or cheaper price to entice more customers.
Most games are cracked within days. The number that survive for over a month without a crack is small, largely limited to Denuvo protected games.
> But to be precise, even if all of the above is covered, this is not proof that DRM increases sales, but that crack availability for Denuvo-protected games decreases sales depending on the timing — it is a subtle distinction, but perhaps publicity of a crack availability motivates more people to take that route?
The fact that crack availability leads people to pirate instead of buy is exactly the point. I guess it's more correct to say that DRM prevents lost sales rather than increasing sales, but that's effectively the same thing.
It is not the same until you test the effect of illegal copies of games not having any DRM protection at all (easy to copy/use illegally) on sales.
Specifically, the conditions this was tested under were always-DRM, always-Denuvo, crack-becomes-available, and conclusions cannot easily be extrapolated to other scenarios if we are trying to be really scientific.
If most games are cracked within days, that sounds like a much better sample set to draw conclusions from?
By definition, illegal copies of games don't have DRM protection. I'm not sure what you mean by this.
The analysis studies pre-crack and post-crack sales, and specifically observed the dip in sales after the crack. The dip was larger, the closer to release the game was cracked. A theoretical day 1 crack caused a 20% drop in sales.
I'm also not sure what you mean by games that are cracked almost immediately are a better sample. You can't measure sales before and after the crack was released because you only have the latter. Sure, if we could somehow measure how the game would have sold in an alternate universe where it wasn't cracked that would be a more robust finding. But obviously that's not possible.
The study focused on denuvo protected games because those are essentially the only games that go for extended periods of time without being cracked. They're the only games that actually offer any insight into how games sell without a crack available.
> By definition, illegal copies of games don't have DRM protection. I'm not sure what you mean by this.
Games released without DRM are less of an inconvenience to legitimate purchasers. They don't get negative sentiment from past customers complaining about the DRM causing problems for people who actually paid for it and thereby deter others from buying it.
This can even cause the effect you're seeing: The game comes out with onerous DRM, people buy it initially having not realized this yet. The DRM being more onerous to legitimate purchasers makes it both more likely to be cracked (people spend more effort to crack it so they can play the game without the DRM causing problems) and more likely to have sales decline as DRM problems for legitimate purchasers become known and sour customers on buying it, so you get a correlation between how fast the game gets cracked and how fast sales fall off.
In general it assumes there is no existing correlation between how quickly a game gets cracked and the rate at which would sales decline regardless, e.g. it assumes that more anticipated games don't both get cracked sooner and have more front-loaded sales, but relationships like that are pretty plausible.
In addition to that, once the crack is available, you're stuck with DRM if you pay but not if you use the cracked version, so then the cracked version is better. It outcompetes paying not just on price but also on utility, whereas if the paying got you no DRM to begin with then the cracked version would have only one advantage instead of two.
You also unconditionally lose 100% of the sales to people who simply never buy games with DRM.
Losing X% of sales to pissing off customers with DRM in order to avoid losing Y% of sales to pirates is only worth it if X is less than Y, but they're only even attempting to measure Y, and probably overestimating it.
> Losing X% of sales to pissing off customers with DRM in order to avoid losing Y% of sales to pirates is only worth it if X is less than Y, but they're only even attempting to measure Y, and probably overestimating it.
But releasing a game without DRM means it's impossible to measure the value of Y, since a crack is immediately available. This is why this is sort of a nonsensical complaint.
> In addition to that, once the crack is available, you're stuck with DRM if you pay but not if you use the cracked version, so then the cracked version is better. It outcompetes paying not just on price but also on utility, whereas if the paying got you no DRM to begin with then the cracked version would have only one advantage instead of two.
Many (most?) publishers release versions of games without DRM ounces cracks are available. What you describe here is not necessarily the case.
If there really were a pool of buyers who would purchase legal versions of games absent DRM, the we should see a bump in sales once DRM-free versions are released. But no such bump in sales materializes. If there is such a population of would-be buyers that are turned off by DRM, they are evidently smaller than the pool of buyers who would have chosen to pirate if given the opportunity.
Is it really that hard to believe that if given the choice to pay or receive a product for free more people choose the latter than if there is no free option?
> But releasing a game without DRM means it's impossible to measure the value of Y, since a crack is immediately available. This is why this is sort of a nonsensical complaint.
If you're trying to determine Z, which is X - Y, and then you get some indication that Y might be 20 under a specific set of assumptions, you still don't know anything about Z because X could still be 0 or 20 or 40. Measuring Y by itself is useless. It's looking for your keys under the streetlamp because that's where the light is even though you know that's not where you lost them.
> If there really were a pool of buyers who would purchase legal versions of games absent DRM, the we should see a bump in sales once DRM-free versions are released. But no such bump in sales materializes.
That's assuming the removal of the DRM is well-publicized like the initial release. Otherwise people hear about the initial release, don't buy it because it has DRM and then most of them forget the game even exists. And negative reviews from when the game had bad DRM are still there even after it's removed.
It could still be net positive to remove the DRM after it's cracked but the benefit is naturally going to be a lot smaller than if it had no DRM when people were paying more attention to it.
Also, has anyone actually studied that? Most of the resources to do studies on these things are from DRM purveyors who want to make their product look better than it is. They don't have the incentive to find results that make them look bad.
> Is it really that hard to believe that if given the choice to pay or receive a product for free more people choose the latter than if there is no free option?
To be clear, what is measured is the proportional change in sales following the release of a crack, relative to other released games that went uncracked for longer. I don't know what percentage of games removed DRM after the crack was released, but let's assume they do.
If there's Y amount of people who buy if there's no crack available and pirate if there is, and X amount of people and who refuse to buy the game with DRM but do purchase it after DRM is removed. The net shift in sales is the difference in sales is X-Y.
We're not measuring Y, we're measuring Z. And since Z is negative, we can conclude that the group of people who just want free games is larger than the group of people who buy after DRM is removed. We know that Y is larger than X.
> If there's Y amount of people who buy if there's no crack available and pirate if there is, and X amount of people and who refuse to buy the game with DRM but do purchase it after DRM is removed. The net shift in sales is the difference in sales is X-Y.
Now you're assuming that all games immediately remove DRM after they're cracked, which is definitely false. In a statistical study it would need to be all of them or any that don't would be skewing the average.
And again, removing the DRM doesn't fully undo the hit from having it to begin with. Existing negative reviews or forum posts panning the game don't disappear the instant you address the thing they were complaining about. The network effect and word of mouth in subcultures that don't buy games with DRM is already reduced.
So if a game launches with DRM it's forever tainted and that group of people who supposedly would have bought the game absent DRM won't buy it - even if the DRM is subsequently removed. But on the flip side, if a game doesn't launch with DRM then it's pirated immediately and there's no way to measure the sales in the period pre and post-crack, because there effectively is no pre-crack period.
By definition, illegal copies of games don't have DRM protection. I'm not sure what you mean by this.
A game can have DRM restrictions or not when published. I am referring to games that never had DRM restrictions but which you obtained illegally (eg. you copied it from a friend or downloaded it from internet).
Games that never had DRM restrictions to begin with are also pirated on day 1. There's no way to measure the sales before and after a crack is released, because the former period is basically zero.
> There's a percentage of people who will never pay, it's true - and by never pay, it means never pay. You can't get them to pay by blocking or adding DRM or whatever.
The point is DRM can get people to pay who would have otherwise not paid.
Jumping in with one persons anecdotal evidence but I loved when I can pay $10 a month for Netflix when it had everything or almost everything I could watch and I quit pirating. When the content from other networks got pulled and the prices starting getting jacked up I went back to the seven seas. A good service with good quality at a decent price is awesome but 10 different services all trying to gouge me for $15-$20 a month with no guarantee the content I like won’t be removed in a few months is ludicrous and led me right back to not paying anything.
I'm almost in the same boat, except I never stopped pirating. By the time I decided to consider Netflix to see if the added convenience was worth it, the enshittification had already begun, so I just continued as I was. I'm definitely not in the "won't pay no matter what" camp, but I am pretty price-sensitive and I have a fairly high bar of satisfaction, which Steam and GOG meet but music and video streaming do not. I definitely think Gaben is mistaken, and that for most people it's both service and price. Steam would not have been as successful in reducing piracy in the PC market without all the discounts, all else being equal.
How is that to the contrary at all? 20% and not 100% with a ton of people just not playing the game at all, presumably
For counter-evidence, GOG exists after all, the platform would not be viable if everyone just wanted free stuff.
The real question is whether GOG would sell more if they one day flipped on the DRM switch. I think that's too complicated a question to predict though - GOG has a lot of smaller games, while Denuvos data is skewed by the high-profile releases that had a ton of attention before release (and thus people wanting to pirate them)
Just to put some context into what _never_ means here:
If a website offers me the choice between "accept cookies" and "more options", I'll manually edit the DOM to remove the popup from the offending website. Some sites disable scrolling while such a "We value your privacy" popup is shown, so I wrote a js bookmarklet to work around most common means of scroll hijacking.
Google is currently waging a war against adblockers, especially on youtube. I currently have a way around that too but should they start baking ads in the video bytes, I'll stop using youtube altogether (though I am willing to look the other way for content creators shouting out their curated sponsors).
There is simply no universe in which I pay for certain types of digital content, and while I can't stop the data collection that ultimately pays for it, I can at least make damn sure that it's unlawful.
With respect to Spain and sports, stadiums are littered with ads, players wear ads, the commentator stream itself has ads baked in and people buy tickets and tapas to watch the game live. If that's not enough, go fuck yourselves!
> I just don't find these arguments convincing after watching my friend spend cumulative hours upon hours jumping between pirate streaming services trying to find a stable feed for every game.
Then you haven't been through enough cycles of subscribing to a service, using it for a while, then wanting to cancel and realising that the only way to do so is through some baroque direct interaction with someone whose job it is to stop you from doing so, instead of it just being a single "cancel" button. I still pay for things, but I 100% understand why some are unwilling to have to both pay, and then put in the same amount of effort they'd put otherwise, just to stop paying.
Not to mention the bundling. For example, if I only want to watch climbing competitions in the UK, the only legal way is through a £34 per month subscription to a service that offers every sport under the sun. Even though climbing-wise you might have 4 events that month (sometimes fewer). So yeah, f whoever devised the model :)
In my experience, people's reasons for piracy are a pretty even mix of all these issues (service problems, principles, and cost)
I'd certainly pirate less if I could afford it, but even if I could, I'd still pirate a lot of stuff because I don't want to worry about what streaming service it's on this week, or because I don't want to contribute to monopolization of some industry. And sure, I'd still pirate some things because I find they're overpriced.
> I know I'll never win this argument on Hacker News because every piracy conversation turns into an infinite game of moving goalposts, where there's always a new rationalization at every turn.
What argument are you referring to, out of curiosity? That some people pirate things 'cause they're poor and make nice-sounding rationalizations about it? Okay, that definitely happens, you win. But I don't think that really takes away from the other valid arguments for piracy?
What are these "valid arguments for piracy" you refer to? Content isn't food, shelter, or clothing. It's a "nice to have" in one's life. It's literally entertainment.
And digital media is similarly fungible, and media companies owning copyright can produce a single copy at insignificant cost — and illegal copies are usually produced at no cost to them too.
If you would rather not consume content than pay with time and money being asked of you, there is no real loss to anyone if you consume an illegal copy.
Convenience is not a valid reason to violate others' rights.
> there is no real loss to anyone if you consume an illegal copy.
There is a real loss: The owner isn’t getting paid when people consume their product for free and without their permission.
The entire point of copyright is to protect the time investment of and opportunity cost borne by the author when marginal reproduction cost is zero, or close to zero. This is because we as a society value intellectual labor. We want people to invent things and produce entertainment, and we incentivize it via the profit motive.
You can’t write software for a living and not understand this. It’s what puts food on your own table. Don’t try to rationalize it.
I've spent the bulk of my career being paid to write software that was published under open source licenses. I was paid to write exactly the software the business needed to be built, with software being the tool for the business to provide value to their customers and not a money extracting scheme.
I've also worked on complex web applications/systems, where operation of the web site is ultimately the cost that needs to be continuously borne to extract profit from software itself. Yes, someone else can optimize and do operation better than you (eg. see Amazon vs Elastic and numerous other cases of open-source companies being overtaken by their SW being run by well funded teams), but there is low risk of illegal use in this case.
Today I am paid to write software that the business believes will provide them profit that will pay for my services. The software I write is tied to a physical product being sold and is effectively the enabler and mostly useless without the physical product itself.
Other engineers at the company I am at are building software that requires a lot of support to operate as it manages critical infrastructure country-sized systems, and ultimately, even if someone could get this software without paying a license, they'd probably have no idea how to operate it effectively.
Most of the internet infrastructure works on open and free software, where at "worst", copyright protections are turned upside down to make them copyleft if software is not available under more permissive licenses like MIT, BSD or even put into public domain.
Companies that used to pay best SW engineering salaries like Google, Meta and Amazon would likely not face any significant business loss if all of their software (source code included) was publicly leaked: SW is a tool for them to provide an ad platform or cloud infrastructure service.
Well, most software engineers aren't fortunate enough to be insulated from the impact of copyright infringement. The reality is that a lot of us--maybe not you personally, but possibly even your friends and neighbors--put food on the table via our intellectual efforts, and that deserves respect. Try to have some empathy.
> Google, Meta and Amazon would likely not face any significant business loss if all of their software (source code included) was publicly leaked
You don't know that. Granted, there are other barriers to entry in some markets, but stealing others' control and data planes would go a long way towards building viable competitors without having to expend the same level of investment.
You're cherry-picking the relatively small number of companies that support your argument. Besides all the software they've built, each of these companies has filed for and been issued mountains of patents (though not copyright, it's another IP protection scheme) and will enforce them if necessary to protect their business. I bet yours might have some, too.
You missed my argument: sw engineers are largely being paid for the labour we put in, and I am saying that we still would be paid for the same labour even if someone did legally (open source) or illegally have access to the software we build.
My company has a ton of patents (which are public) and cares about copyright deeply, but that does not mean that it would be significantly affected financially (other than potentially in stock price, which is an entirely different social aspect).
To give you another example, Windows source code leaked 10 years ago or so. Did it slow down Windows?
Just like authors (owners of copyright) aren't negatively affected if someone creates a copy they would never have paid for.
> we still would be paid for the same labour even if someone...illegally have access to the software we build.
Where do you think that money comes from? It comes from the licensing of the software. If everyone is pirating the software, there’s no market for it, nobody’s going to buy it, and there will be no money to pay for your salary.
> that does not mean that it would be significantly affected financially (other than potentially in stock price, which is an entirely different social aspect).
Stock prices aren’t a “social aspect.” They are a financial instrument that reflects the expected future earnings of the company. Companies aren’t going to form and employ people if they can’t sell their stock because their product has no value in the marketplace.
> Windows source code leaked 10 years ago or so. Did it slow down Windows?
You’re asking the wrong question. That leak, in and of itself, didn’t impact the market for the software. Nevertheless, massive piracy of any software would harm the economy. The fact that most people respect others’ labor is what keeps the market functioning.
> authors (owners of copyright) aren't negatively affected if someone creates a copy they would never have paid for.
We don’t know who never would have paid for a copy of software at any price. And there is a difference between knowing that infringement exists and making excuses for it. The question isn’t whether some people do it and the market is still healthy; it’s whether or not we should condone it so that nobody should feel compelled to follow the law. Because, following your logic, nobody should pay for software. If that happens, tremendous economic harm will follow.
I guess there's some confusion in that I don't think anybody's saying everyone should pirate everything all the time. That would, indeed, be problematic.
But if companies keep pushing people to piracy... well, I'm not going to blame the people first, that's for sure. Especially when things like TFA happen.
No, I don't really see the slippery slope. If there were such a slope, I would imagine that decades into this piracy thing, we'd be sliding down it. Yet most people don't pirate. Strange?
So you really don't understand that it should be OK for everyone to pirate if it's OK for you? Would you ever tell someone it's not OK? If so, why? And what makes you special and different?
You've started with a retort to a point that some who would never pay for some copyrighted work are not a loss to copyright owner if they illegally use their work.
You've since expanded to everyone and SW development, and want to extend it to people who are willing to pay for the value a particular work provides them.
So let's go back to the beginning: can you please quantify how big is a loss to the copyright owner if one watches a movie they would skip if the only option was to pay for it?
No, I'm not going to do that. And here's why: because if you have an excuse, everyone has an excuse. And if everyone has an excuse, the entire system falls apart.
I'll reiterate what I said above: entertainment and software are not life's essentials. Nobody's going to be seriously harmed by being denied access to them.
> Nobody's going to be seriously harmed by us pirating them, either.
The logic here is quite simple: if you don't have to pay, nobody else has to pay, either, because you're not special. If nobody pays, then people who make media and software won't get paid, and production will slow to a crawl. You'll have destroyed the very thing you seem to desire enough to steal.
Maybe because I'm not so arrogant as to imply everyone has to have the same views and act the same way as me, nor to imply that my view is the only right one.
But nah, you're right. Nobody has to pay. Everybody should pirate.
Now, that's been true for decades, of course. So why hasn't the entire system fallen apart?
1. A copyright owner can test this easily by offering a discount.
2. Because they are getting significantly bigger value out of it. Because they know ahead of time they want more of this type of content to be produced. Because they have more disposable funds. Because it is available in their country legally. Because their streaming package already includes it. Because their cable package already includes it... Need I continue?
Again, you are conflating is it OK not to pay with any loss of profit: they are not the same even if there is correlation.
Nobody loses any money if you spill profanities at someone, but it's still not OK (even though it might not be illegal either).
Legallity and morality are not always in sync even if we try to keep one reflect the other. I am surprised this is even a discussion point.
> Because they are getting significantly bigger value out of it. Because they know ahead of time they want more of this type of content to be produced. Because they have more disposable funds.
Those are reasons that someone might choose to pay. These are also the same reasons why one might want to donate to charity or to non-profit/public media (PBS, NPR in the USA). In other words, they're a voluntary patron of the arts. And there's nothing wrong with that, when the organizations are non-profit/public or charitable. In fact, I think we'd all encourage it.
However, not every media organization is a non-profit/public operation or a charity. Those who are made a choice to be that. Those who didn't--well, they chose to remain for profit.
The point is that we, as individuals, do not get to override the choice of whether a publisher is for profit or non-profit by taking the law into our own hands--just like I don't get to turn your back yard into a public park when you're not using it. After all, you're not using it, right?
You and others keep saying, "no loss in revenue, no harm done." (Just like, "no loss of use of your back yard, no harm done.") But that's not the point. It's about infringing on others' rights.
> you are conflating is it OK not to pay with any loss of profit: they are not the same even if there is correlation.
This is just silly: Where does the profit come from if nobody pays? Again: if you don't have to pay, it must follow that nobody should have to pay. If you disagree with that, then who gets to choose who pays and who doesn't? You? No; that's for the law to decide. That's how democracy works.
I'd happily pay for DRM-free content, but it's rarely available in digital form in smaller markets like non-EU European country of Serbia: the only alternative is to look for BR or DVD or CD copies and then rip them myself, which is even more time consuming than finding a decent quality not-so-legal option.
Even for music, I do spend time looking for DRM free options (eg. Apple only offers iTunes streaming in Serbia and I had to resort to options running a much smaller catalog like 7digital). I always try going first party first (eg. band's site for music), but it's increasingly not an option.
And if I want local Serbian/Croatian/... content, no provider has it at all. As an example, one of local publishers recently started releasing "eBooks" readable only in their own mobile app for Android or iOS: none of my Kindle, Remarkable or Kobo can read them. I did let them know about my willingness to jump on their service if they actually made their books work on my eBook devices, but they did not even honour me with a reply :)
Before Netflix was a thing, I sometimes tried to have conversations with people about "gee, it's a bit annoying that my only options to watch a movie is to buy an expensive dvd that I will watch once, or to pirate it" and the most common response was complete befuddlement, they simply could not comprehend that someone might not want to pirate things if they could, they could not comprehend that besides being illegal it was also just... wrong. Not absolutely evil, for sure, but still something that maybe you might want to avoid doing. Now that you can just pay 10-20 euro for a streaming service, most of them have switched over, so, yeah, service does matter, but a lack of risk or consequences on the one hand and vague notions about actors and directors (and soccer players) already being rich enough as it is, were enough to convince very many people that piracy was a victimless crime.
> Now that you can just pay 10-20 euro for a streaming service,
The nice thing about piracy is that you can find what you want immediately. You don't have to go to an aggregator site to find out where it's available, and then log on to the streaming platform site to find that the aggregator site is lagging the real availability, or find that certain content isn't available in your country, or that the content is available but only on the special extra++ cost plan instead of the basic plan.
If you want to watch content legally, the workflow looks like this:
Search content -> go to aggregator site -> select streaming site -> enter electronic contact and payment info and physical address (for payment) -> confirm email account -> watch content -> dig around on site to find deliberately hidden unsubscribe workflow -> pass all the "are you sure you want to leave" screens -> monitor your card payment the next month to make sure you actually cancelled
The illegal workflow looks like this:
Search content -> click 1-3 sketchy sites, closing 15 pop up ads -> watch content -> forget about it
I strongly believe the fact that media companies struggle to accept payments worldwide and region-lock their content when you do pay is why their services ultimately suck for customers.
Eg. for my HBO GO subscription provided by my cable operator to continue working, I had to disable load balancing/failover between my other ISP for HBO addresses at home or it'd just stop working when it detects I've been switched to a different network. And then you travel and can't access it anymore either. It is completely bonkers.
As a sibling comment said, Netflix won (at that point) because they made service easy and converted a bunch of customers over.
My opinion is the original 99 cent app, then followed free apps and services caused a public devaluation of software costs.
Use Youtube as an example. It tickles me hearing people complain about the cost of a YouTube subscription. In my head, I’m well aware of the colossal amount of costs that go into the hardware and software that allows for such a service to exist in the first place. Yet it’s a bloody outrage to spend money on it to remove ads. Maybe someone could tell me what actually is a fair value of tapping into literally every single video uploaded in YouTube’s existence on demand? $16 a month seems reasonable to me.
Yes and no. Storage should cost in the ballpark of $200M/yr or less. Transcoding, networking, and delivery should be similar. Let's round up to $10B/yr just for fun.
YT makes $40B/yr (revenue IIRC) across its 3B customers, or $1.11/mo. $16/mo seems high by comparison. It's very high with reasonable costs of $0.28/mo. Nearly every other industry on the planet is jealous of margins like that.
A normal counter-argument here is that they should be allowed to reap those profits till competition forces them to do otherwise. That's a little at odds with our normal view toward monopolies, especially when the monopoly engages in anti-competitive acts to preserve that edge, but whatever; now you're at least having a real debate about real facts and things you care about.
Another is that YT's expenses in practice are way higher than that because they need to hire a bunch of ML people or whatever to extract even more ad money out of you, and that's a point I disagree with pretty firmly. I'm not sure why my subscription needs to subsidize a company's other predatory tendencies.
your argument is that one person puts up with the annoyance of switching tabs to avoid paying, ignoring the fact that many people these days actually pay for the pirated sports packages to avoid that annoyance, it's a huge business.
sure those who refuse to pay anything will likely always do so but there is a big part of the market who are priced out/fed up with needing multiple sports packages
it's shocking to me that you refuse to see that the "awful experience" your friend has is not better than what they give people who pay. are you a billionaire literally out of touch with reality and the cost of living?
I pay for a ton of sports content across a ton of platforms. I used to pirate a ton of sports across a ton of platforms.
I don’t seem to have nearly the same difficulty as you. I wanted to watch the Olympics so I reactivated my Peacock account, paid for a month, then immediately canceled it. I’ve never had consistent issues finding where I could watch a particular game. It is aggravating that my MLBTV subscription doesn’t work when my team plays on an Apple TV broadcast but that’s 1-2 times a year.
Maybe I was not good at piracy but it took just about the same effort to find the right links, deal with constant buffering, etc. But I find it pretty phenomenal that I can easily watch just about any sporting event now with little difficulty
> I don’t seem to have nearly the same difficulty as you.
Wait til you hear of this concept called "Dead Zones". The NBA has them.
What's that? It's where you live in the streaming blackout zone and get a nice message saying "watch this on your regional sporting affiliate", but you don't live in the TV zone for that team, so "your regional sporting affiliate" doesn't cover the game. So you get to watch... national games... and you can watch your team's games, on 24 or 72 hour delay.
And the NBA will tell you they can't refund your League Pass subscription because of that - you can watch the game, just not when it's happening. You can watch it after you've almost certainly heard the results. "But you'll get to see it with no breaks because we clip the commercial breaks!" Yayyyyy.
This made me give up on league pass. How hard is it for them to just provide every single game for one price? It's insane. It's honestly a big reason I don't follow NBA any more.
People are willing to tolerate worse service to avoid paying. And people still private even when the legitimate service is extremely convenient.
Take Steam, for instance. You get fast downloads, cloud saves, mod support, etc. Yet games released on steam are still pirated. Because people are willing to forego good service in order to avoid paying.
I'm sure for some people piracy is a service problem. The example Gabe Newell gave when he said that quote is Russian localization. If the only way to get a Russian localization of a game is to pirate it, then sure that lack of service incentivizes piracy.
But there will always people who want to consume media without paying, regardless of the convenience of legitimate options.
I feel your frustration however the charge per episode/song/article etc plans I believe all failed.
Early on Apple sold individual songs and leaned hard into selling individual TV episodes for a $2 (if I remember correctly). It was unpopular and people flocked to the lines of Netflix and Spotify instead.
You dont understand that there are other mentalities / mindsets than yours. Well they are, and they can be rotten pretty badly.
What OP describes is still very prevalent in eastern EU/Europe too, people pirate and do stupid stuff just to save few bucks. But then if you earn <1000€ monthly you start looking at prices in very different optics. Mindset comes from the past and doesnt feel the need to change for 2026.
I come from such an environment, partially still affected by it. I would blame it on communism and russian influence but then Spain never had one so there goes my cheap and usual way to push blame.
Currently on vacation in Dominican republic and I can see hints of same mentality here and there... maybe its just 'undeveloped societies', for the lack of better term.
As Spaniards, we have not gone through communism but we have gone through a dictatorship where we went through a lot of misery. Maybe that mentality will come there.
In any case, in Spain the level of penetration of streaming services seems high. Although you will always find people who pirate (it was very common when Canal+ existed, etc., then it decreased with the arrival of Netflix, HBO, Spotify and Prime) and now with prices continuously rising I hear a lot about IPTV and pirate decoders.
Although I believe that in the specific case of LaLiga, much of the fault lies with the prices imposed. The dominant and more traditional operator (also the most trillero) only offers you the service through convergent Megapacks with attractive prices when hiring and crazy when renewing. The arrival of DAZN has softened it but I don't think it will improve the situation in the medium term. It is very curious that they then reach agreements in emerging markets to offer the price-drawn product (China) and in no case the income is reflected in a more competitive League.
Radically changing area, in the field of software there is the culture of paying the minimum. If it can be zero better, even if it means visiting dubious sites and risking your data and credit cards.
The frustrating thing about the empire collapse is that it doesn't need to happen. There are still tons of highly energized and ostensibly disciplined and competitive people here. It's just that the production base was sold off to foreign lands and the aesthetic and moral project of "America" was effectively discontinued, for reasons unclear.
I would argue the empire already collapsed, about a year ago when DOGE was tasked with killing every form of soft power that were put in place to present the country in the best possible light across the world.
Even with tons of talented and well-intentioned people and everyone fully aligned to re-build everything broken, it'd take decades to rebuild that trust that was lost in a matter of weeks.
Take a drive on an interstate highways. Whenever I take an Uber/Lyft to the airport I ask the usually (more like 100%) foreign born driver to compare the highway (I5) and the airport (SeaTac) with the same from his country. The comparison is bad for the US.
US is a third world country, but Americans do no want to admit that.
> I ask the usually (more like 100%) foreign born driver to compare the highway (I5) and the airport (SeaTac) with the same from his country. The comparison is bad for the US.
> US is a third world country, but Americans do no want to admit that.
So why do so many people want to keep coming here?
It's a financial accident. After World War 2, the USA was the least damaged country on the winning side, so it got to own the western world's financial system. It used that [exorbitant privilege](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege) - possibly unintentionally - to import money and export inflation for decades, keeping the exchange rate skewed in its favor.
People aren't coming for the scenic canyons, they're coming to get some of that USA money, so they can be on the benefitting side of the skewed exchange rate, instead of the losing side. Many of them exchange part of their salary for their home currency and send it home, in quantities that would be impossible to accrue if you did the same work in that country.
Still better than the third world. For instance, UK is seen as a vassal state of US, and it lost its old glory. Still people want to migrate to UK. Many French speaking folks from Africa want to migrate to France and others.
Politicians and folks in the third world are not keen on developing their own countries. Clean water, clean energy, better education, less corruption are not something they are striving for. Politicians there want to make money for generations, while sending their kids to US/UK/EU for studies, while at the same time selling bad policies for public (freebies, this or that scheme just to garner power to make more money off looting via contracts, natural resources).
The Uber drivers I talked have their families back home. That is how we end up comparing airports. That tells you where third world people see their future.
Every foreign-born person I (American) have as friends is either: 1. planning on moving back to their home country soon (which comparatively has its shit together) or 2. has already moved back to their home country. They know when they're no longer welcome here, and most have made a decent enough living here to coast back in their countries. Hell, I'm seriously considering what it would take to escape, before we turn into some horrible mix of Idiocracy and the Handmaiden's Tale, and I'm naturally born here.
The first world is defined as the countries that are affiliated with the USA, so that's not strictly accurate. However, we can say it's a developing country - a first-world developing country.
If I may go a step further in history: tearing up the JCPOA (AKA the Iran deal) was like shouting from a megaphone "the US word means nothing now". Even the Palestine situation could've been predicted 6 years before Oct 7th when the US was the very first nation to move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, before 5 others followed (none of them "significant").
Things have definitely accelerated in the second term, but it's not like there weren't signs that political leaders definitely noticed were disruptive, even if the wider public weren't as aware at the time.
I do wonder how far certain acts could go in rebuilding the trust.
Ie real actual legal liability. Line up anyone who did insider trading, the doge guys, the big mouths in the big house, and put them through a zero tolerance military tribunal.
No bullshit kangaroo court where they're let off with a slap on the wrist because they're rich.
I mean strip every last one of these motherfuckers of everything they're worth. 180 the kangaroo court. Make a public mockery of them. Posters everywhere.
Think of it as a peace offering for the rest of the world. We could even include the war on terror guys in there, all the liars who claimed WMDs could go to the same federal prison. No cushions.
The Supreme Court doesn’t care. That’s the #1 sign the country is over, it’d take a miracle to get out of this decline. And then everyone is just going to be pardoned. There were no ethics baked into the constitution, that was the fatal flaw, even businesses have such things to prevent lawsuits or internal drama or issues
> The rest of the world would then take a wait and watch approach.
Agreed, as I have said before (1) even if the next administration is very different, that has happened before in 2020-2024. The lesson that the USA just is a country that does this from time to time. Expecting it to happen a third time is reasonable. Wait and watch would be an appropriate response.
"Hey sorry all these guys completely hijacked our checks and balances in their favor, we're going to remove them completely from societal circulation and try again"
IMHO Pax Americana ended (passed the point of no return) with GWB. Iraq, 2008 financial crisis, SCOTUS picks, unitary executive, extraordinary rendition, breaking of weapons treaties (nuke testing, bio & chem warfare), abandoning peace between Isreal & Palestinians, etc, etc.
Forfieted any remaining goodwill.
(Post 9/11, It would have been so easy to choose the other path.)
When the roman republic collapsed, they were still at their upwards inflection point. Ceasar was still on a roll. They hadnt peaked yet. This feels more like when the empire was in the early stages of coming down from its peak.
I think the roman republic to empire transition doesnt have much to do with the trajectory of rome at all. Their institutions were still strong. With america, her institutional knowledge is being stripped apart. Thats hard to pull up from
> It's just that the production base was sold off to foreign lands
It wasn't. You are conflating "production" with "manufacturing." They're not the same. The US, for better or worse, produces a lot of value.
> moral project of "America" was effectively discontinued
I'm not sure America was ever a "moral project," considering the many many dark parts of its history. Nevertheless, at the moment moment, it seems to be on a quest find the bottom of the pit of depravity.
The land of the free, and all that. America was a radical moral project when it was founded, as a republic (when monarchies dominated the world) with enshrined religious freedom (when state-enforced religions were the norm). The Civil War arguably had a large moral dimension, too.
Slavery was not supported in half of the initial US of A, and initially Native Americans had relatively benign relationships with the settlers, while the latter were weak. The course of America as a moral project was pretty meandering, but the moral dimension was almost always there.
> Native Americans had relatively benign relationships with the settlers, while the latter were weak
Translation: Native Americans were nice to the European settlers, until the European settlers were in a position to murder and expel in the Native Americans. The genocide against the Native Americans happened both before and after the founding of the United States, which casts serious doubt on a claim that the US has a "moral" mission.
> Slavery was not supported in half of the initial US of A,
Not sure where this math came from. Slavery was legal in all 13 colonies at the time of the revolutionary war. It wasn't until later, and in some cases much later, that the so-called "free states" actually freed slaves.
The US had a highly moral mission at the time of its founding; but that moral platform differs significantly from our own today. The adjective "moral" does not mean "in good standing with what I believe is proper morality", it means "of or relating to principles of right and wrong in behavior".
I do not believe that the majority of Americans today believe that there is any "moral" purpose for the American government to exist. The left wing sees the US as a fundamentally illegitimate country founded by the dual sins of slavery and genocide that should be improved by dismantling its own myth structure and importing as many foreign cultures as possible to supplant whatever came before. The right wing is only interested in the existence of American hegemony insofar as it can use it to crush its cultural enemies or enrich itself, and is happy to violate by theft or violence any American principle in name or in spirit so long as there's good short term gain.
Neither is thinking of the Nation as an aesthetic and moral project to advance the state of mankind under God, or even Science, or Human Rights, which was how its founders explicitly thought and wrote about it.
> The US had a highly moral mission at the time of its founding;
I guess you are referring to the principle of "no taxation without representation." Fair enough, but I don't find that consistent with twoodfin's comment, to which I am indirectly replying, that "America was a radical moral project when it was founded."
> Neither is thinking of the Nation as an aesthetic and moral project to advance the state of mankind under God, or even Science, or Human Rights, which was how its founders explicitly thought and wrote about it.
That is certainly how they wrote about it, but the point that suzzer99 and I are making is that they did not walk the walk. It's one thing to write fancy documents about all men being created equal, and it's quite another to actually emancipate the slaves or stop genociding the natives.
> The left wing sees the US as a fundamentally illegitimate
I have a lot of lefty friends, and I don't know anyone who thinks anything remotely similar to that. Criticizing the ethical failings of a country in the hopes of improving it does not amount to a statement if illegitimacy. And I'm pretty sure that elected leftist politicians don't consider the government that they form to be illegitimate.
"Sold off" isn't wrong per se, but glosses over the root cause: Triffin dilemma.
The USD cannot exist as a reserve currency and support domestic manufacturing. That is to say, the US political engine and its benefactors sold out domestic manufacturing for international leverage.
Did it have to be this way? No, we could have implemented the Bancor, but the appeal of dominating international politics was irresistible. We cannot reindustrialize without giving up international financial power and with that in mind, who would still decide to switch?
Yeah, the more I learn about American history, the more I realize American elites were never bought in to the “moral project”, but were happy to use it as PR to a largely religious public.
Though I’m not particularly looking forward to living through the decline of the empire, I cling to the hope that a post-imperial America can emerge and attempt to live up to the dream of FDR, MLK, and that Jesus guy everyone seems to like so much but ignores all the inconvenient tolerance and sharing stuff he was so obsessed with.
Forget modern computers. I booted up my dad's COMPAQ from 1998, running Windows 2000, and was blown away by the speed and logical layout of the applications. I have to grit my teeth using W11 File Explorer because of what I recently re-experienced.
I take some issue with these kinds of articles that minimize the impacts of "street crime" in favor of the admittedly much broader and insidious effects of corporate crime.
Corporate crime generally can coexist with a functioning system, even while it drains the prosperity of society, but street crime will just dissolve the society overnight. People physically abandon locations with high street crime.
A corrupt system is still a system, meaning that in theory it operates to produce something of value for society (e.g. in addition to lying about climate change, causing cancer, and blocking renewable energy via lawfare and propaganda, BP provides a colossal amount of fuel for society) but street crime produces nothing and destroys community outright at the local level.
But street crime is often a symptom of the "much broader and insidious effects of corporate crime": social systems stripped of resources by politicians to provide grants to baseball stadiums, police patrols in quiet wealthy streets but abandoning poorer quarters, tax incentives to companies that then pay their employees so little they are a burden on the food security systems, mental health care priced out of reach for the poor so they end up homeless and violent.
> People physically abandon locations with high street crime.
Exactly. Which is why
> ... street crime will just dissolve the society overnight
is false. Street crime is also generally limited to poor areas and people who can't move out will be the first victims. Street crime does not dissolve trust at the societal level, it just dissolve trust of everyone into a few segments of the population (whose members are also now the first victims of that loss of trust)
Whereas corruption is a cancer that takes hold of all institutions as anyone and you might need to leave your country altogether when it becomes a third world hellhole.
The two American political parties are so perfectly shielded by their own ideological blinders to avoid any possibility of national protectionism against offshoring and outsourcing that I don't think there will ever be any kind of movement against this.
The conservative base is unfriendly to foreigners and foreign cultures, and claims to prefer American-made goods and services, but will immediately guillotine any internal party member who causes consumer prices to raise substantially--which they would have to do in order to support American workers creating products rather than our offshored counterparts. And the business owners and shareholders who love to outsource generally aren't true blue voters.
The liberal base is in theory pro-union and pro-worker, but will immediately guillotine any internal party member who suggests economic discrimination in favor of native-born industries and workers.
In my opinion, it's because the two party divide has reached the point of extremism on both sides, and extremists act on emotion rather than logic or reason. Up until a couple of decades ago, they both did a good job of keeping their more extreme members out of sight and mind. Now they're embracing and amplifying them.
Conspiracist nonsense. Like, this could hypothetically explain a few things for a few industries where both parties somewhat align, but in general this is populist slop.
Its very obvious, imo they are going to have a hard time signing young men up to fight for this country when they inevitably make everyone so poor they beg anything, even a war.
But...
They'll use profits and greed to alienate the working class further and further, they'll try to get us to go fight wars to capture resources for the KKKapital owners. My prediction is the only war the American people will be willing to sign up to fight, is against those same KKKapital owners.
Probably explains why they love bunkers so much, for the case where this whole experiment backfires on them.
“If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon's but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.”
― Ulysses S. Grant
> The conservative base is unfriendly to foreigners and foreign cultures, and claims to prefer American-made goods and services, but will immediately guillotine any internal party member who causes consumer prices to raise substantially--which they would have to do in order to support American workers creating products rather than our offshored counterparts.
Currently, the head of the party is raising and lowering tariffs at will, so I don't quite think this holds anymore.
Agree. It is harder to manufacture in America when the party leader breaks critical parts of your supply chain with rapid and unpredictable tariff changes. It is impossible to lower consumer prices on a good by raising taxes on it.
This is not even mentioning the astounding corruption of a president and his family personally and directly benefiting from these tariffs threats.
Does the party not understand the realities of this? Do they understand and are just lying about it because they're afraid of the leader? Afraid of admitting that they're wrong? I believe people are usually rational but I do not understand a rationalization where choosing to harm American manufacturers and consumers on the whims of a visibly corrupt leader is good, actually.
I think there are a lot of people who recognize these changes as not very durable and don't see an immediate political benefit to opposing them right now.
They're assuming normalcy will return after the senile tenant-from-hell is either evicted from his taxpayer-provided housing or just keels over, ignoring that the senile guy writes angry screeds about how he's not going anywhere and was put and is kept there by a whole conspiracy of enablers.
We're a product of a very, very strange time and place in history where the average person had at least some recourse against tyrants. From prehistory to about the mid-point of the 20th century, if you were alive on planet Earth, there's a near guarantee that you lived life basically as a possession of some person or family who controlled where you lived, where you could go, what clothes you wore, what work you could do, whether or not you would be educated, who you would marry, if you would have children, which god (if any) you could worship, what you could say, and even whether you lived or died.
That was your existence.
This whole thing where you have some control over your destiny? That's the fragile set of changes. Someone behaving like Trump is historically insanely durable.
It's been over a decade. He's been impeached twice, lost an election once - and it sounds like the lesson he took from that is "get rid of elections" - been convicted on thirty-four felony counts, charged with even more, mismanaged a pandemic, "shot at", wiped his ass with a number of strategic alliances, sent thugs out on America's streets to harass people for being Latino, and been linked to a cabal of child-trafficking sex offenders.
A few hundred bucks a year ain't gonna move the needle at this point.
I really find the state of American (but not only) politics dreadful where everything is seen under the lenses of conservatives vs liberals.
Most people I know, everywhere in the world have mixed views on most topics.
Let alone the fact that ideologies tend to change, modern rights are way more populist and economically-socialist than they were 2 decades ago. See Poland, Hungary, Italy, etc, where governments make money fall on the poorest, on the elderly, etc ignoring their historical electorate (middle class).
I agree, but the fact of the matter is that for voting purposes there are two "teams" in the US, and they vote and argue in public down pretty well-defined ideological lines. If you know the two or three most strongly-held moral-political beliefs of an American, it's highly likely that you can guess another 150 sociopolitical beliefs they at least profess to hold to their friends.
liberal base is in theory pro-union and pro-worker, but will immediately guillotine any internal party member who suggests economic discrimination in favor of native-born industries and workers.
Well, yes, because discrimination on the basis of where someone was born is illegal. The American liberal base is, and has always been, fine with economic discrimination in favor of those in America (without regard to where they were born or their residency status).
There is a stereotype that conservatives are "less fine" with outsourcing than liberals. I'm not saying it's strictly true, but it's a very strongly embedded stereotype if it's not true.
Also, you're resigning the biggest part of the conversation (immigration and residency policy and enforcement, especially with regards to employment) to an implication in a parenthetical?
Protectionism may work in some cases, but even when it works, it works by making things more expensive. People don't buy American cars because it's cheaper to make similar cars in Mexico. Fine, so let's force companies to make cars in America. It's now more expensive (otherwise we won't be importing from Mexico in the first place).
You add more and more protectionism, it may get some jobs back, but the price is that things get more and more expensive. And not by a few percent, more like by 50% or more. (Just think of how much money an American worker needs to have an ordinary middle-class life compared to a Mexican worker.)
Now consider how much people were angry over the Covid-era inflation and how it was a major factor in Trump coming back (and looks like it's going to be a major factor in Republicans losing the mid-term election this year). Nobody wants prices to go up. Americans say they want protectionism but what they want is a fairy tale protectionism where jobs comes back but prices magically stay stable. It cannot happen, and if the choice is between some other group of Americans in Michigan getting better jobs and you getting your SUV at a "reasonable" price, people will choose the latter. (I'm not digging at Americans - the same is going to happen everywhere.)
It's basically "It's extremely hard to defeat capitalism at its own game." Nobody likes capitalism, but that doesn't mean you'll get popular by defying capitalism.
Well, of course, I agree with you. That's why I said I don't think it would happen.
I personally wouldn't mind a world where consumer goods were much, much more expensive and difficult to acquire, even though it would mean that my life would feel harder and less wealthy than it does now.
What I don't understand is whether or not there's any path to take besides watching the country gently sail along the sunset path into oblivion. Is that it? We gave away the keys to the country's wealth generation mechanism, and now we're at the mercy of the global economy to do whatever it wants? I don't want to compete with foreign firms who can hire foreign labor to compete with me and sell on my territory, but do I simply have no choice?
That's very nice but to people middle class and lower, it's not about paying a higher price, it's being able to buy what is needed to live at all. I still don't see what is wrong with capitalism. It did show that many self proclaimed advocates of capitalism were liars and changed to hardcore communist economics and became sore losers when they felt "someone else" is "winning".
What are you talking about? I haven't said anything against capitalism. If anything, the problem with the current scenario is that there's not _enough_ capitalism.
How do you propose to compete with foreign workers when the government prevents you from matching their employment conditions within your own company?
- The massive regulatory burdens on American businesses are dissolved in order to permit genuine competition with the globe
- Economic protectionism is applied so that the heavily regulated American business can compete on price with less-regulated foreign businesses
In both cases, the prices of goods would increase--in the first case, less than the second. But both would be better than the current status quo, in my opinion.
I don't want to live in a country where I have to pay American prices for goods and services, but the owner class only has to pay foreign prices for labor and supply. I have no desire to be outcompeted by foreigners while my hands are tied by local laws.
I think all of your points are valid and I can't really see any part if your argument that isn't at least directionally correct. But then I'm left wondering:
Okay, I'm really talking out of my ass, but my very uninformed take is:
Protectionism is "working" for China because it's still a poor country, it was much poorer only a generation ago, and when you have no industry, it's easier to deliberately keep people poor for a little longer in exchange for more jobs. Once the pipeline is built, it's just societal inertia.
But I have to wonder how much it working out for China is just "China is still poor, so people have little choice." Among millions of Americans decrying outsourcing of American jobs, how many are willing to work under an average labor condition of China if they were given the opportunity?
That's a critical question that isn't being asked enough.
Americans aren't allowed to compete like that; there are too many labor and environmental protections in place to experience "Chinese working conditions" even if they wanted to. We legally can't work Chinese hours or affect the environment like the Chinese.
So while it's true that Americans aren't really willing to work hard enough to compete on price with the Chinese, it's also literally impossible.
And many outsourced jobs are like this. Americans can't compete because it's illegal to compete. Our hands are tied. We can't bend the local laws to make life cheaper for ourselves, and most of our products are sold to us by people who can and do.
I would be curious what would happen if in order to sell to American workers, you had to meet American environmental and labor conditions. I think that's a total non-starter, but it's a hypothetical that may cause the ponderer to address the huge gap in how competitive other countries are allowed to be to sell to Americans, vs. how Americans aren't really allowed to compete with them.
> I would be curious what would happen if in order to sell to American workers, you had to meet American environmental and labor conditions. I think that's a total non-starter, but it's a hypothetical that may cause the ponderer to address the huge gap in how competitive other countries are allowed to be to sell to Americans, vs. how Americans aren't really allowed to compete with them.
This plus capital controls would reduce a lot of economic inequality between countries. It would be super, super rough in the short-term but probably globally beneficial in the long term. I believe Bernie Sanders was proposing this back in 2016.
I think you need to look at the data before making assertions like this.
> People don't buy American cars
53% of cars sold in the US are assembled in the US versus 18% assembled in Mexico.
> things get more and more expensive. And not by a few percent, more like by 50% or more.
The total cost of manufacturing wages only account for 5-15% of the MSRP of a vehicle. So moving manufacturing from an expensive country to a cheap country only changes the price by maybe 10% due to the impact of wages.
What happens when you remove the velocity of money from the economy and replace it with companies that count on their employees receiving government assistance in order to be able to live? Are things actually cheaper for the average worker long term in our current scenario? Or is it a temporary affordability in exchange for a worse economic future? It seems like things still have to keep getting worse and worse to be financially viable in our current cycle (clothes are Kleenex quality like sci-fi books joked would be issued in a UBI future, enshitification is in everything).
When a system takes the money from the economy and delivers it to the capital class and foreign workers, what happens to that economy? We don't know. We're gambling it will somehow be ok. We are also losing the 50% of taxes that comes from individual workers, so add in losing that velocity of money vector going through the government as well.
It doesn't seem like a sustainable system, nor a cheaper system. Only a very risky short term gamble.
Things may get more expensive, but if more Americans can live a middle class life even accounting for the inflation of consumer goods I think that is a good tradeoff.
Savings are literally being passed onto the consumers. The #1 reason people buy imported goods is that they are cheaper: if they're the same price as domestic goods then there will be little incentive to buy imported goods and domestic jobs won't be going away.
In other words, the only reason foreign industry threatens domestic jobs is because it's cheaper to produce the same thing in these countries and the cost savings are being passed on to domestic consumers.
Sometimes I wonder if we're simply living in different realities. You may claim it's not worth it, but you can't claim it's not happening. Just go to grocery and see the prices of Mexican avocados and everything.
What ICE is doing is naked incompetent fascism and the entity needs to be disbanded with hostility.
With that said, no, it's not evil to deport people who entered a country illegally. If I sneak into China, and China finds out, they are morally and legally clear to send me back, whether or not I've had children in China.
It likely wouldn't poll well for elections, but today's ICE does need to be disbanded. Its tasks can be given to other agencies until a replacement can be created and staffed. The recent recruitment drive makes it nearly impossible to reform the agency. There's just too many agents introduced in the poisonous culture and goals.
An easy win that should get widespread approval is bolstering the immigration court system. I have dark worries, but I'm still not entirely sure why this administration is whittling away at immigration courts. You'd think they'd want to process asylum applications faster, so invalid claimants could be deported sooner.
>An easy win that should get widespread approval is bolstering the immigration court system. I have dark worries, but I'm still not entirely sure why this administration is whittling away at immigration courts. You'd think they'd want to process asylum applications faster, so invalid claimants could be deported sooner.
Absolutely. Especially since upwards of 80% of asylum claims are denied[0] when they actually get adjudicated. Which usually takes years to happen because there aren't enough immigration "courts."
Provide enough immigration "judges" and "courts" and we could clear up the backlog within a couple years. I'd also point out that while asylum seekers aren't (yet) legal immigrants, they are (based on Federal law[1]) legally in the United States until their case has been adjudicated -- once again arguing for increasing the number of immigration "courts" and "judges." It certainly doesn't argue for hundreds of billions of dollars for a bunch of jackbooted thugs to terrorize citizens and immigrants alike, all to deport fewer people than other administrations who didn't need to shoot citizens to do so. Funny that.
OG classical fascism was pretty incompetent and bumbling at times too.
eventually they got their shit together.
China is a demographic disaster in slow motion and should be keeping anyone they can get who wants to say. The US and EU have avoided much stagnation by importing more bodies, and there is no ethnic component to USA-ian identity compared to being Han and being forced to speak Mandarin.
In addition to not having practice as you said, my thoughts:
1. Camera phones and social media have trained all young people to be aware that anything they say or do could be reported on
2. A lot more overt moralizing about power, gender, and race dynamics by young people makes people hesitant to interact outside of their group
3. Racial and cultural diversity have increased, and people don't reach out across those barriers as freely and easily as within their own homogeneous culture(s)