awsamation

By that reasoning there is nothing preventing you from being prosperous except your own greed.

Go out into the wilderness and be prosperous like the cavemen. Having your tapwater taken away shouldn’t hinder you, those prosperous cavemen didn’t have the luxury of any modern amenities. Just the streams they could find and the food they could scavenge or kill.

Abandon your greedy insistence on enjoying modern luxury and go prosper. You’re the only thing stopping yourself.

And I’m sure you’ll have no trouble staying connected when you find the cellphone tree. After all, if humans didn’t create anything then everything must be naturally occurring. It’s just an illusion that modern technology requires creation of parts that could never exist naturally.

Humans absolutely created prosperity. The thing that was already here was nomadic hunter gatherer tribes that were perpetually one bad winter away from death.

Cutting off necessary resources is cruel. But refusing to acknowledge that those resources are provided by man made systems doesn’t help you. Going to bed hungry is very natural. Wild animals do that all the time. Tap water is not natural, everything about how that water got from the river into your tap was man made.

Just because it’s natural doesn’t mean it’s better, and just because it’s man made doesn’t mean it’s bad.

That “seem” is a tricksy word. Someone who is good at trickery is going to seem trustworthy, otherwise they probably wouldn’t be good at trickery.

Exactly.

Everyone loves to support local independent small businesses when it’s convenient. And some people even have the gumption to hold to those ideals when it’s difficult. But the vast majority don’t care most of the time.

When big business makes it cheaper and more convenient to buy from them, most people will. I’m just as guilty of that as anyone else. When money and time are plentiful I love supporting a local bakery for lunch and a local book store for that greeting card. But when I’m pressed for time or money is short, it’s straight back to Walmart to get a card and an entire meal for the price of one baked snack from the local place. And in 10 minutes instead of half an hour.

And the megacorps don’t need a majority market share to win. They don’t even need a large enough market share to be profitable, they just need to make sure your market share is too small to survive. And once you fail, then they can change practices away from kill competition and back to make money.

Do you actually care that much about the creative story behind the latest widget that was added to your new appliance? Are you going to be choosing the 30% more expensive option every time because of that concern.

We aren’t talking about art here, very few people give a shit about getting a “personal connection” with their new toaster. We’re talking about buy use forget consumer goods. And if someone else is selling the same quality and the same features at a lower price, that’s the one that your average Joe will buy. And will keep buying until you can’t afford to keep making and selling yours because you can’t compete on the metrics that people care about most.

And you’re going to compete with them on price then? Even when they can and will sell every unit at a loss until you’re driven out of the market. Unless you’re wealthy enough to be part of the good ol boys club, you can’t afford to play that kind of game. They can.

I’m sorry for, pointing out how popular isn’t the best choice of word?

But no matter how you slice it, popular isn’t a great descriptor. Whether you choose the prescriptivist “the dictionary says x thus the word means x no matter what” or the descriptivist “most people use the word to mean y thus the word means y no matter what”, in this case they both agree.

Both groups agree that when I say “Jim is popular” it makes you think that people generally like Jim. It evokes some level of communal approval. The dictionary literally defines the word to mean likeable, and the general usage still seems to denote general approval.

So either way, it doesn’t represent the Empress situation. A situation where the majority of the community at best doesn’t care and at worst openly dislikes her as a person because of her behavior, but still comes back for the games. She has a monopoly, but that doesn’t make her inherently popular. Most people who know seem to dislike, and most who don’t will also have no bearing on her popularity.

Because those big businesses are only motivated by the profit possibilities.

If you take away that protection then they’ll just stop trying. They don’t give a shit about any of the motivations you listed. They’ll wait for you to come up with something new, then use the advantage of their size to force you out of the market. You’ll end up either giving up or trying again at which point they’ll just repeat the cycle.

And there’s nothing you can do to stop them because now they can be as open and blatant as they want with directly using your exact plans.

None of those motivations you listed actually need IP to be abolished though.

If you’re trying to differentiate yourself from the competitors, having IP protection is jn your favor. The large corporation you’re competing with can’t just swoop in and destroy you by making an identical product at a such a loss of profit until you run out of money.

If you’re fueled by creating open source knowledge, well you can already do that. You can choose to release your IP into the world for anyone to use unrestricted.

And for a sense of community, well that’s just the second point again. Abolishing IP was never going to make you feel community with Amazon. But having IP isn’t preventing you from having community with individuals. You can still work on a project together without abandoning the idea of IP ownership.

Depends on how exactly you define popular.

If you use a definition that includes anything like “liked and admired” then she doesn’t fit. Her service is busy but as this thread shows, most people openly state they only go to her because they have no other choice for these cracks.

Using popular hides how many people actively want to jump ship if only there was competition. It’s like saying that Comcast is popular because they have so many customers who don’t have a viable alternative to using them.

Popular feels like the wrong word. If you’re the only game in town for a specific service, that doesn’t inherently mean you’re popular.

Even assuming they’re mostly spam, you still need to listen to them in order to sort out which messages are legitimate.

I understand being annoyed by the task, but this is a job that’s justifiable. It’s not some petty make work bullshit (unless these messages have been collecting for months, then they can probably be safely ignored). Either way, it doesn’t seem worthwhile to try and get all petty revenge about the situation.

Factories employ a fraction of people they did before the 80s.

Depends on the industry. Automobiles? Yeah, that has been largely automated. Trailers? The most common trailer brands I can think of are still built manually.

CNC machines still need operators, and those operators are still doing manual labor. An entire factory only needs one guy on a computer to manage all the programing those CNC machines need. Everything else is about making sure the material is correctly positioned and the machine is working correctly.

Manufacturing isn’t nearly as automated as you might think. Not as many industries have adopted the rote programing robotic arms that you’re imagining from some Ford production line.

Plus factories and industrial are only a fraction of the manual labor world. Agriculture, construction, forestry, trades, all sorts manual labor jobs exist that have nothing to do with factories. And that’s not even counting other unskilled labor fields like the service industry.

The problem is that replacing art is an entirely software task. You don’t have to figure out a robotics issue for actual manual labor to be done. And for white collar work, art doesn’t have an objectively correct finishing point, spreadsheets and reports do.

So real world money that I can’t actually take into the real world. This just feels like calling they’re premium currency dollars and pretending it’s not locked into their system.

In this context it feels less like an ad, and more like “hey look how desperate they’re getting”.

But you did go on to compare this situation to the war on VCRs. Which I think is a poor comparison. You gave your opinion, so I gave mine. That’s kind of how this works here for everyone, not just for you.

Nobody here is trying to force you to stop using it though.

They explained why they don’t use sponsorblock, and why they believe you shouldn’t either. But the choice is still yours.

Theres is a wide gap between offering a perspective on why watching the sponsorships is worthwhile, and trying to legally force you.

Embrace, they join the fediverse seemingly in good faith. Bringing their larger userbase to massively increase the size of the fediverse.

Extend, they add some features that are convenient when interacting with their base across the fediverse. But these conveniences require proprietary software integration.

Extinguish, once enough users and platforms are tied into the conveniences of extend, they use that to force compliance. Stricter and stricter rules on their proprietary software. Comply or die.

The fediverse won’t be gone afterwards, but if it EEE works then we will end up very stifled.

It’s worse because a large portion of people here are the people who don’t use Facebook/instagram/tiktok. So while this isn’t a new extreme in terms of privacy breaches, it is a new level in terms of what’s potentially affecting us directly.