send me a letter

yup digital music is functionally free already streaming makes artists a pittance and most artists make most of their money from live shows and merch sales and physical media. I literally do not pay for any digital media at all. I pirate everything and if I was to buy like a t shirt from a band I like I’d be giving them more profit than someone who listened to their song 1000 times on spotify. As it pays 3-5$ per 1000 streams and the profit from a single shirt is easily like 15-20$ atleast.

I think you are taking this the wrong way maybe. I’m not even saying I want it to be this way. I’m just saying this is how digital goods work. The best way to explain it is that there is no scarcity in the digital space. Yet we try to artificially introduce scarcity in order to make it work with out currently scarce physical reality. There’s a mismatch. I just think we should embrace the post scarcity nature of the digital commodities market and that the benefits of accepting this reality would outweigh the potential issues. Mostly because its a losing battle. But also because its both wrong and counter productive. All artifical scarcity for digital goods accomplishes on a societal level is that we have a bunch of hugely profitable corporations that literally produce 0 productive capacity for society. Take like Adobe, Spotify, Microsoft, All the AI companies, etc. Them being so huge is fucking up the economy of actual physical commodities that are actually scarce.

Yeah. I guess I’m a bit used to it? It seems normal to me. I’ve been like this for over a decade now. Just working, getting by, and minding my own business. I have a cat. It doesn’t bother me a whole lot like you might imagine. But even as a kid all my interactions with other people were pretty negative. So I kind of associated other people with being hurt and saw getting to be alone as an escape. I see myself as like a modern version of the hermit who lives in the woods.

Edit: To be clear by saying yes to estranged I mean like I keep them at arms length. I see them from time to time. But I don’t tell them anything, and I don’t trust them. I mostly just interact with them to be polite.

Hey mad respect for the consistency and just fyi that’s like the literal official stance that was being told to US soldiers when the iran war popped off.

Yeah I guess my perspective is scewed by being one of those people. I pretty much have no one that knows what I do day to day. There are people who might wonder where I went and call the cops when I don’t show up to certain places but they’d have literally 0 leads unless I was stupid enough to leave a digital paper trail or something.

yeah basically thats what the US military does so very accurate.

He was clearly a threat. I’m so glad they’re keeping us safe!

I don’t think you understand just how big of a difference it is. Flying on a plane is one of the most regulated things ever, and despite crashes getting tons of media attention actully dying on a commercial flight is so rare that you are basically in no more danger on a plane than you are just sitting on a random bench in the park.

To put this in perspective in the year 2023 72 people died worldwide from aviation accidents.

In that same year 40k people died in the US alone from car accidents.

To put it further into perspective more people die on planes from random health events that just happened to occur while they were on a plane, like a cardiac event, than they do from actual plane related accidents.

The same sort of propaganda that would be in jihadist videos but from the other side. Trying to recruit young americans to join and go kill americas enemies.

Oh, yeah. What your descrbing isn’t what I meant at all by the wilderness. I was talking like, actual wilderness. Not even managed necessarily. If you don’t want to be found there shouldn’t be a parking lot or a visitor center to the area you go. That should be obvious. I’m talking like literally just drive out into the middle of a national forest until the roads end and then just start walking. If there are trails your in the wrong area.

If you are curious about the disappearances tho you should look into Missing 411 (fair warning there are a lot of conspiracy theories surrounding it). The missing people are real, but people get weird about it if you look at the wrong corners of the internet lol.

Eobard.

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I’ve cracked the code. I have learned robospeak.

*That we know of

So then let’s copy that exactly. Someone is an American who lives with a US soldier and posts tiktoks about the US Army. Is it ok to drone strike them?

Yeah the pentagon already came out in support of the soldier according to the article too. Punishing them for doing their job like this would cause basically every NCO to be livid. Idk that the military could afford to do that.

Do you know if those are this phenomenon vs just like people dying by accident out there? I imagine a lot of people just die by accident on hikes too.

Isn’t that a good thing then? They won’t kill themselves because they’ll change their mind on the hike. Problem solved.

This is the fallacy. It is not simply “My money/time” -> “Unique thing”. The entire technological base of human civilizatio made it possible for you to make that thing. Most of the costs were bore by society. Yet you would now wish to privitize the profits and deny society access to that way to do things without your permission.

Take open heart surgery for example. There is very clearly a right way to do it. Perhaps a few good ways to do it too. But 1 way is the BEST way. Imagine if only 1 surgeon owned the patent to that best way. Other surgeons have to figure out their own way. Even if they figure out the same way as him independently he did it first so they can’t use it. This would make that surgeon very rich, but it would harm medicine overall, and harm heart surgery’s progress.

Then what happens? Let’s take the language example. “Hi, how are you?” is patented. “Hello, are you well?” is patented. “Howdy!” is patented. etc. You want to greet someone. Now you don’t just need to figure out a way to do that. You have to make sure YOUR way to greet someone is different than the thousands of patented ways to greet someone. So you have to do something like “Hey, hey, hey! Me say welcome to you! Haha! Good, yes?” this is what I meant by it getting silly. All the obvious ways to do something become patented and so you have to find some roundabout way to get the same result. Which is usually inefficient and complicated for no good reason.

Patents also do not simply stop “stealing” as you put it. If you and someone else both put in the effort to independently invent the “turns lead to gold” machine then whoever patents it first owns it. The other person, despite also putting in the effort and not even knowing you exist, just has to basically go fuck themselves.

But I’d push back on even that. You don’t own an idea. Because 99.99% of the effort to get to the point where that idea could exist was not yours. It was every other humans. You stand on the shoulders of giants and touch the stars. Then want to claim the stars as your own.

No it was an example of having some random meaningless connection to a terrorist. A US soldier is the terrorist in this example. They drone striked people for essentially having some social connection to someone else they thought was a terrorist.

I am simply pointing out an unfortunate fact of how digital goods work. I am not saying your labor has no value inherently, but that because the product can be infinitely reproduced it becomes so diluted as to approach 0. Imagine an artist made a sculpture. It has immense value because it was very hard to make. Yet if they could snap their fingers and create 2? And then 20? 200? 2000? Suddenly its not worth very much.

It’s even worse because with digital goods anyone can do the copying.

The reason I say the current model of proprietary software is exploitative is because it attempts to legally enforce a monopoly of this infinitely reproducable commodity in order to extract infinite profit from society in exchange for its use.

I will clarify about the monetization model. If you wanted to write some code, then tell people they can access it for a set fee, and once accessed it has no DRM, no restriction on copying, etc then that’s fine. It’s not the act of asking for money in itself but the act of attempting to claim ownership over all the infinite copies I take issue with.

There are many ways to monetize something without doing that. One of them is asking for donations. One is the single payment before access to an unrestricted product model above, and there’s all kinds of other ways too.

I do understand why you are upset by what points I made. I just think that you are wrong that we need to be fully communist to implement a different model. Many of the current issues with open source not recieving many donations, and not having much in the way of support is because of the massive companies with proprietary software that absorb all the software markets value for themselves. This also fragments the software infrastucture of society.

Most of the funding for software in general comes from huge companies. But they lock down the things they pay for. So nobody else can use them. This means open source devs have to reinvent the wheel to get anything done. If you got rid of the proprietary model companies would still have a need for software, and would still pay to have it made, but their software could then be repurposed for other uses. Developers would get paid for their initial labor by the companies and then the product is out there and can be copied for free by everyone else. This does not require communism to work. It just requires restrictions on how software can be locked down.

Now as to the personal point. You asked above to list all FOSS software I use and say how much I’ve donated. I can’t list everything. I assume that was a point you were trying to make about the invisibility of things like libraries. So how are they meant to get donations? I use Debian. I give money to Debian. Not much, but I try to give them 5-10$ every year. I’m not a wealthy person. In fact I live below the poverty line. But I do this anyway because I appreciate what Debian does. It’s my opinion that the way this should be structured is as follows:

Visible Software (OS) -> Infrastucture A -> Infrastucture B

Visible Software collects donations. It has the visibility to request them. It should then be required (by law? by expectation and social pressure? We would need enforcement, I am aware.) to have a list of attestations. What other FOSS projects made their project possible? To what extend did they do so? Then Debian in this case would need to take their 10$ donation and divy it up. Infrastucture A was used by them then is given 1.50$ by them from that 10$. If Infrastucture B was used by A then A would need to figure out how much they helped it and pass on some to them. Say 50 cents. This would act like a donation dispersion model where a donation to Debian is a donation to all the infrastucture that makes Debian possible by proxy. This is sort of how Debian works now tho I don’t think they have it down to quite a science.

Hopefully this clarified my position for you.