I don’t know if anyone needed a harmless (slightly dark) laugh on the subject, but I recently played an indie PnC game called “3 Minutes to Midnight” with a joke around this. You open a wall medical kit, and there are sheets of paper inside, which read “Thoughts and prayers”.

I don’t even know if I disagree with that approach, but how would you mandate equal pricing? The relationship between producer and content distributor today is normally based on length of time and the general size of the audience, like “$2 million to distribute in these five countries for the next year”

For that matter, given how much media is produced internationally, how would you set up every country to agree on terms simultaneously?

I’m in favor of a system that empowers creators, but I’m also aware they tend to only get funding from big publishers with big expectations on return (including licensing rights). A system without lock-in contracts may just mean no one helps them create their vision.

What if my local coffee shop owner admits that he sought profit right from the beginning? And, so happened to aim for that by building a loyal customer base?

Free game for throwing rocks and stealing espresso brewers?

Or, maybe it’s worth establishing a system of nuance where you actually pay attention to the individual acts of particular companies, rather than grouping all businesses as “Corporations”?

I’ve always wondered - what qualification do we use to decide when a “business” (run by a kind guy behind a counter he built himself from scrap wood) evolves into a “corporation” (evil and scheming, part of the global capitalist conspiracy)?

Like, if the guy who runs my local coffee shop opens a second cafe further down the street, should I start tapping his phone to find out how the YouTube Content ID system works, now that he’s a part of The Corporations? Should I start breaking into his cafe and start stealing scones? Or do we want to wait until he has a third location

I’d be more likely to reply if you’d actually withdraw the argument. Say “You’re right, sorry, that was a dumb thing to focus on since it has nothing to do with the point about intellectual property. But the point stands.” Don’t just put the onus on me to “ignore the times I say something I can’t substantiate.”

Basically, if I know you’ll never walk something back from being convinced, you’re not arguing in good faith, and addressing the rest of it (something you can imagine I’ve wasted my time doing before in previous online discussions) is really not worth my effort.

Yeah, you’re right, sorry, we can’t have a concept of intellectual property without Disney mandating we attach a murder clause into it. That’s certainly not stretching the argument.

If it’s the photographer’s wish to make money off the photo, and each person who sees it agrees that it’s high value, then yes, I’d be upset about him not making money. If it was so easy to take good photos of peaches, I’d prefer everyone took their own for their eye-catching uses. As it so happens, it’s not so easy.

In fact, it’s extremely hard for photographers to convince clients, even wealthy magazines, to pay for photo licenses.

You Wouldn’t Look At A Peach…

You’ll need to juggle several different services if you want what you can otherwise get for free on a central hub.

This one, while common, I kind of take issue with. You’re basically complaining that there is no one, all-consuming media oligarchy that owns EVERY show/movie, and distributes it on their singular massively overpriced service (and yes, with that market stranglehold, they would massively overprice it)

Shouldn’t the principle of competition mean there are multiple services, each trying to present better content? People reasonably contend with only being subscribed to a few they care about - I don’t know who is assuming they should get access to all media, all the time, without paying truckloads of money.

I will grant that for games, no service beats Steam, but I will absolutely buy games from other platforms like Itch and GOG in the spirit of competition when their prices or better or the dev has avoided Steam for reasons of adult content censorship.

Semantically doesn’t matter much.

If a peach seller has a harvest of 1,000 peaches that will go bad in a week, he doesn’t care about “only having 940 peaches” when someone steals 60 of them. He cares that he spent all that effort and money growing the peaches on the bet he’d make a profit, rented the shop space in the market, hired an assistant to bag and sell them, and some douchebag still didn’t pay for them.

The quantity of product a seller maintains is generally almost completely irrelevant to the costs. It’s about the societal expectations of paying your due to people who have put work into something you want.

“My name is Stabby McKiller! Yes, I clearly stabbed four people in that home, and yes, I was convicted! BUT, I am also running for president! For total fairness, I demand my sentencing be delayed, so my sentence does not sway voter opinion!”

What fucking bullshit. THIS is bias.

My spiders make such efforts to get away from my hand that I often end up taking the simple route and…killing them.

Normally I’m fine with them around to cut down on other insects, but they do show up in some annoying places for me.

There was an early criticism of celebs like Taylor Swift using private jets, because of the ecological effects / fuel usage; claiming it’s hypocritical because she’s pro-environment.

Honestly, given the equipment / celeb focus (and that people all around the world want to hear her live), the use of a jet isn’t that wasteful imo, but the continued meme of having her take a jet for minor trips is silly enough it’s fun anyway.

It is American public transit, so the trolley only passes once every four hours

I guarantee you they’ve only ported over about half of the Control Panel’s features. The common stuff, sure. The rest…

I’d argue part of this is true because of minimum wage and wealth disparity.

When you have a healthy disposable income, it feels more reasonable to give out some donations for good online content. But that’s not the case for a lot of people now.

It sucks because monetization models definitely influence the types of content we get. For instance, freemium video game models with cash shops are better for our current wealth gap, while a large set of consumers having extra cash through the year is much better for expensive, well-produced singleplayer games.

Part of me once wished for a utopia of only getting ads for things I have a reasonable interest in - working to inform me about options to spend my money on a service or product I need. It was based on Steam, which shows ads for games I like. No repeating ads to harass a particular message, no convincing people they need Brand X.

I don’t imagine we’ll ever get close to that.

This isn’t a case of fighting moral codes. This is a case of battles of safety.

There are many issues of safety that affect all people, including food safety, mental safety, economic safety. All of those have resulted in court battles, as well as court failures. Safety from violence is the basic one, and people will often need to make their decisions around it on a faster basis than courts can proceed.

That’s the practical analysis, rather than the idealistic view where every single disagreement of any kind would receive a protracted court debate with all evidence present.

People are all capable of in-the-moment vigilantism (heck, most murderers feel this way). Society can still evaluate their cases afterwards to say whether they were warranted or not. I argue people should feel some safety from repercussions if society can agree their actions demanded some form of immediacy beyond what courts could provide, and did something good for society or were necessary for their own safety.

A zealot would get no such votes unless they were given a jury of their fellow zealots, and if that’s possible then I can think of no fair justice system in such a society.

There’s still answers out there that are “more right” than others.

Jill, what do you think the price of this bag of rice is? $8.50? Unfortunately, not correct at all. Bob? The 1950s Hall of Rock and Roll on VHS? That’s a thoroughly nonsensical answer that barely even respects the question! The answer was $11.

Sentencing judge, what do you think this man’s punishment for rape should be? Nothing? Oh, wow, that’s a very obviously wrong answer! Vigilante, your go. Well, we were looking for “A life sentence with chance of parole after 30 years”, but I will say, “Shoot him in the head” is closer to correct.

I feel like some people there’s a “magic light” applied to courtrooms with judges, that makes their judgments more fair by implication. But it’s absolutely possible for three people in lawnchairs discussing matters over beer to make a more fair judgment than some judges.

Man, if I went around shooting all the people that raped and imprisoned me for years, the streets would be awash with a whole 0 gallons of blood.