I think it's very fair and valid for you to feel however you want with regards to shelter-in-place/wfh/lockdown, but to me it seems somewhat unconscionable to be smug like enjoying your time alone is a huge win against extroverts.
I feel like it's a pretty ridiculous over-statement to say that introverts feel like they're in a pandemic normally. I'm an introvert and don't feel like that. I suspect the only people who could reasonably feel like that are people with anxiety disorders or phobias.
I don't know, I'm not saying you can't express your opinion or feel how you feel. But I want to express I'm a bit grossed out reading your post, as you seem just a bit too gleeful and smug at this whole situation.
Please tell me where I expressed any glee at other people's misfortunes. What I said was the following which is a statement, not an expression of emotion:
> Those of you who have found the slightly over a year duration of the pandemic difficult have gotten a sample of how miserable pre-pandemic life was for those of us who are more introverted or misanthropic.
It doesn't impact me what other people feel, but I do hope that people who have not enjoyed lockdown can gain some empathy for the people who have enjoyed lockdown. It seems more like you're defensive at somebody having different preferences than you, which is just how life works.
Additionally, I don't have anxiety. Not before nor during the pandemic. So my point was not anxiety, my point was that the same way life during the pandemic has caused many people inconvenience and frustration, pre-pandemic life is inconvenient and frustrating to me because of the obligation to play social games and always be around people. It's quite tiresome and irritating.
> I'm an introvert and don't feel like that.
I also didn't say all introverts feel like I do, I said pre-pandemic life is miserable for those of us who are _more_ introverted or misanthropic.
I think you’re being overly reactive to the OP. Glee would be a lot more blatant and celebratory of the misfortune of others. I don’t think that’s their point. Not mine anyway.
I’m pushing back on the sentiment you pose because it’s far too often used and oppressively effective.
It seems OP is quite gratified at the rest of us having gotten "... a sample of how miserable pre-pandemic life was for those of us who are more introverted or misanthropic." when even as mostly an introvert this pandemic has been more than the typical anxiety of having to interact with others when I didn't want to.
Please tell me where I expressed any glee at other people's misfortunes. What I said was the following which is a statement, not an expression of emotion:
> Those of you who have found the slightly over a year duration of the pandemic difficult have gotten a sample of how miserable pre-pandemic life was for those of us who are more introverted or misanthropic.
How other people feel doesn't impact me, but I do hope that people who have not enjoyed lockdown can gain some empathy for the people who have enjoyed lockdown. Pre-pandemic life was as uncaring and dismissive of people who thrive during the pandemic as pandemic life is towards people who thrived before the pandemic.
Maybe I'll change my tune when I hit 30, but we had Aerons at my $lastjob and while I liked it well enough, I now work from home in what is essentially a Lazy Boy welded onto rolling wheels, and it cost rather less.
I do have a sit/stand desk now too though, so whenever I feel like I've been sitting for too long I switch to standing for about 30 minutes. Maybe that helps too?
I know this is bait, but I want to provide my experience as counter-example.
I went to a STEM college where anyone who graduates could quite reasonably expect to be able to build themselves a middle-class career, live comfortably, and perhaps even have some economic mobility (moving from middle-class to upper-middle, mainly...).
There weren't a lot of women there, and you would expect that what women were there would be disproportionately the kind of woman who would be interested in having a life-long career.
Just anecdotally, looking at peers who graduated with me, that is not the case. Many are married, and many have chosen to end their careers (where finances allow) to stay at home.
If anything, I would argue the main failing we've committed upon the young generation (regardless of gender) is to provide them an economic framework wherein more than a single-digit percent of wage earners can hope to raise a family on a single income.
In my experience, there are a growing number of men who wish they could be stay-at-home dads if finances permitted.
But instead, most households are dual-income out of necessity.
And beyond that, we've also demonized living with your parents pretty thoroughly, so people are hesitant to save money and get free childcare by living with their extended family.
Something else I want to mention is how poorly we've tailored the current world to making raising a family easier. Letting your kids go further than your lawn unsupervised is tantamount to child abuse now. Childcare is absurdly expensive, low-quality, low-availability (enrollment is headcount-capacity-limited in most places) and low-flexibility (many places either want your full-time enrollment or not at all. You can't just pick some days).
And we've also demonstrated that we're, as a system, willing to totally f** over parents when disasters strike. Covid has been a total disaster for dual-income families with children. I've heard it was not uncommon for it to be "lucky" a partner was laid off because otherwise they would've had to quit, without unemployment benefits, to care for kids full-time.
Anyway, my point is, we've made it really fucking inconvenient to have kids and now there's all this overly-simplistic sexist whinging from a certain segment of the population about how it's somehow all the fault of young women. It's disgusting both from a moral standpoint and in how intellectually lazy it is.
I think you and the parent don't disagree too much, but parent was trying to be funny.
I loved that feminism gave a choice and legitimised working women - but it also broke down the family structure (+divorces and unstable families - which statistically raise less successful people) and having twice the workforce heavily depressed wages' purchasing power so that now families need two working parents to survive.
I think the result for the next generation will be a demographics crash and hopefully what comes next is not reminiscent of the Handmaid's Tale.
I would point out that non trivial amount of those dicorces were genuinly abusive relationships - physically and mentally. Or partnership where one of them despised and looked really down on each other.
It is absurd that divorce is seen as that big familly failure, but staying in violent or abusive relationship is treated as "succesfull familly".
> as counter-example ... the kind of woman who would be interested in having a life-long career ... that is not the case ... men who wish they could be stay-at-home dads
You seem to be saying the same thing OP is saying: there are few women who are comfortable being the primary (or sole) breadwinners.
I'm not, your ellipses abbreviate too much. I'm seeing, among a group of people who would theoretically be predisposed to not want to stay at home, people still electing to stay at home. This contradicts the OP's glib remark that less women nowadays want to stay at home.
Here's a more nuanced view: both partners in a marriage should try both full time work and full time parenting. Then both partners will better understand the choices they make and have empathy for the other's situation.
The thing is, if you didn't integrate Stripe, you'd either be:
1. integrating someone else who does roughly the same thing as Stripe
2. integrating with and maintaining 100's of individual payment methods and countries, and dealing with tons of entities and managing relationships with them.
You might be able to cheat if you just do visa cards and only in the US, or something. But that is dramatically less than what you're getting when you integrate Stripe.
It punishes smaller transactions unfairly, which doesn't make a lot of sense since the size of the dollar amount probably doesn't have anything to do with the incremental cost to stripe to compute the tax bill.
It's worth noting that there's the interchange fees that come along with using a credit card in the US aren't just a pure profit rake for the credit card companies.
It obviously pays for computing resources and staffing and such, but beyond that it also, roughly, pays for all the fraud that happens with any credit card. In many cases, when someone does a fraud, it's someone "in the middle" (i.e. not the fraudster, the card holder, or the merchant) who ends up holding the bag.
It's also paying for some aggregate amount of credit risk that card users pose to their banks.
Credit card fees are high because fraud is such a colossal problem, and at various levels it's better for institutions to just eat costs (and thus slightly raise the minimum viable price they can charge for processing) than make it harder for people to buy things.
I did a 6 to 8 migration at $lastjob. The upgrade was smooth except for 2 issues:
* It exposed a kernel panic bug in our Linux kernel when Hadoop applications de-allocated huge amounts of RAM at once (e.g. a Spark program with a 100GB heap exiting suddenly would panic the system)
* It introduced a weird UI behavior change in Swing in one of our desktop apps. In fairness, whoever wrote the app first did some weird unnecessary shit with JComboBoxes, but it was still somewhat odd to me that the behavior changed. The bug was like, when previously if you clicked a box it'd swap it out for a JComboBox that had the previous content of the non-combobox-view-thingy that was in its place. On 8, for some reason it would always be blank and discard the old content. Don't quote me on this description, though. It was a while ago and it was a weird interaction regardless.
Where does the article mention a website-blocking system? I'm curious as to the technical details. I'm sure it'll work this time.
"For Canada to have an innovative and flourishing digital economy, we must protect copyright online"
Hrmph. Citation required.
Anyway, I'm not sure why businesses are so concerned about copyright still. Maybe this is specific to Canada? But country-specific things aside:
* The DMCA already makes it easy enough to keep things like KickAssTorrents offline, which was honestly the closest I've seen to a good tracker going mainstream.
* Steam has already shown how to "best" piracy to the extent that a business can. It's not via copyright laws. Everyone thought rampant piracy would mean Steam won't work in Russia. That aged well.
* Actually combating piracy on a technical level suffers greatly from the 80/20 rule. You can eliminate 80% of the piracy with 20% of the effort. But getting that last 20% is going to take 1000% of the remaining 80% of the work. (Sorry, yes, that was an attempt at a joke). It's basically not going to happen. Look at how well things like optical media DRM have gone. Look at how streaming DRM is going. Look at how hard it is for even *China* to stop its people from accessing free information online, much less normal countries with normal amounts of human rights abuses stop people from getting downloads of whatever Disney's latest remake is.
Dunno. As much as I hate copyright, and as much as I love free culture, it's hard for me to get too interested or worried about stuff like this nowadays, from a legal realism standpoint.
> * Steam has already shown how to "best" piracy to the extent that a business can. It's not via copyright laws. Everyone thought rampant piracy would mean Steam won't work in Russia. That aged well.
What's ironic to me is that, movie piracy was steadily falling and effectively dead after Netflix launched their streaming-video platform, very similar to how video game piracy started to taper off as Steam gained traction. For a single low monthly fee you got access to movies from all the major networks, and a good selection of TV shows as a bonus. The networks started getting greedy - HBO Max, Paramount+, Disney+, Peacock, Discovery+, the list goes on - all wanting their own $5-$15/month cut on the action. It's a wonder why piracy has been back on the rise[0].
I agree that the quasi-monopolies of early Netflix or Steam through most of it's history are arguably bad, but the irony is that they're the most consumer-friendly ways to distribute media while effectively curbing piracy. The fragmentation of services; managing potentially a dozen subscriptions and the apps the accompany them, gets tiring for users who just want to sit down and watch Star Trek without hunting for it.
I'll throw in my two cents, that my personal experiences line up with this 100%. Before ~2010 when I was introduced to Steam I pirated virtually every game I played, but since then have only done so in very extreme circumstances. Similarly with music, as soon as Spotify, then Tidal were introduced to Canada, I haven't pirated a song since. Movies on the other hand, there was a several-year period where I didn't pirate a single movie- nobody I knew did anymore. In the past ~2-3 years I've been having people ask me about torrenting movies again, and I've caught myself doing it a lot more often than I would like to, but I just can't bring myself to spend $15/month on Netflix, $12/month for Disney+, $10/month for Crave, $6/month for Paramount+... While you can setup Radarr/Sonarr and Emby to accomplish the same for $0 (you could argue the cost of storage, but the $43/month saved on services gets you 3 brand new 4TB hard drives each year with money to spare).
The problem is that Hollywood doesn't understand "commoditize your complement."
Having more than one streaming service isn't a big problem, assuming they're priced reasonably. Going from one service with everything for $15 to ten services with a tenth of everything for $15 each isn't really that, but that's not the root of it.
Their problem is that people are going to want a single interface to view everything through. If you actually subscribe to three different services, you want to turn on your TV and see everything available to you.
The companies in the best position to do this are the likes of Google, Apple, Sony, Microsoft. Hollywood isn't too stupid to realize the dangers of that, but they're missing the obvious solution to it.
Publish a standard streaming API, so that anybody can make a streaming client, the same as anybody could make a VCR. Then the dominant consumer of the API won't be a big monopolistic corporation that will then be able to use its power against the movie producers, it will be a zillion different companies selling dirt cheap HDMI dongles with WiFi who each individually has no power at all. They'll all end up running whatever open source software somebody publishes to consolidate all the different services into one interface, which Hollywood could then improve themselves the same as any other open source project. It competitively atomizes a third party middle man that they don't want.
But it's basically the opposite of DRM. Security through clarity -- make everything open so nobody powerful can insert themselves between you and the viewer. Because big tech companies are more of a threat to them than The Pirate Bay. And they have to realize that before they're willing to do it.
> Their problem is that people are going to want a single interface to view everything through. If you actually subscribe to three different services, you want to turn on your TV and see everything available to you.
Google's & Apple's TV interfaces do that now. Search for a show, it tells you which streaming apps have it, including a CTA to maybe buy / subscribe one you don't have. There is a recommended show stream on the front page for google that is service agnostic too.
Yes you still have to download and login to an app, but people are used to downloading and logging into an app for their phones already and it's only a 15 minute procedure every 5 years you buy a TV, if that.
Instead, they are fighting against windmills - adding more layers of DRM, incompatible clients, weird limitations...
99% (thin air statistics irrelevant) of the people won't save a copy of your stream and share it unless there's a dedicated GUI for it. The remaining, well, pirates gonna pirate.
As you said in more detail, they are fighting totally the wrong battle. It feels like an even dumber version of the war on drugs.
> Their problem is that people are going to want a single interface to view everything through.
I mostly agree with this. I know you're talking about a single streaming service, but just to expand your point, for me, my single interface is Roku. From it I can access Netflix, HBO, Amazon, Hulu, and a ton of others - all with the same remote on the same TV. One of my favorite permaculture Youtubers even has his own Roku app/channel. I've been looking into creating my own Roku app and the process doesn't seem overly burdensome. You need video content, an HLS or MPEG-DASH streaming webserver (I'll use nginx and HLS), some json, and maybe something minor I can't remember now.
But I like your idea of a standard streaming API. If it actually happened the resulting ecosystem would be awesome.
This is what Roku is attempting -- to control the point of contact (physical TV in living room) and commoditize streaming services. They've been able to squeeze some concessions out of streaming companies in exchange for customer access.
> I agree that the quasi-monopolies of early Netflix or Steam through most of it's history are arguably bad, but the irony is that they're the most consumer-friendly ways to distribute media while effectively curbing piracy.
I doubt that would remain the case indefinitely. There would be too much temptation to increase revenues once they were established.
Perhaps the question should be: what would the market look like if there were multiple providers, each of which had equal access to license content they felt best fit their customer base?
This is where government could perform a useful function. Content creators selling to the government and the government reselling full access of all that content to distributors is a realtopian dream of mine. It seems win-win all around to me. Consumers could go with the provider that has their favorite interface/content/price, creators would have a choice to sell to the govt and receive full draconian protection or sell on the open market and forgo legal protection of their works, and govt could feel good about running such a snappy program that serves all its citizens.
This isn't a case of we need providers to license. The issue is providers thimking of all money not collected as left on the table, leading to the jacking up of prices, for ever diminishing quality of product.
>For a single low monthly fee you got access to movies from all the major networks, and a good selection of TV shows as a bonus. The networks started getting greedy - HBO Max, Paramount+, Disney+, Peacock, Discovery+, the list goes on - all wanting their own $5-$15/month cut on the action.
It's funny to think that the platform, which is pretty easily replicable, is nearly as valuable as the content.
Why should the content creators hand over all over the margins to Netflix?
Sony just signed a massive content licensing deal with Netflix. Funny thing is, if you asked me which companies should have their own streaming service, Sony would be towards the top of the list. They have the content and very relevant tech expertise for it. Yet they ran the numbers and realised that there probably isn't room in the market for yet another ground-up service. Paramount, NBC, Showtime, Shudder, Epix, Discovery, CBS, Starz, AMC all apparently didn't.
Amazon has the best compromise for this IMO. Users have a single account and payment method, and can subscribe to different "channels" from the Prime Video app itself. Content owners don't need to license stuff to Amazon, just pay them a cut of the add-on fee.
d. clarify or strengthen rights holders' enforcement tools against intermediaries, including by way of a statutory "website-blocking" and "de-indexing" regime.
> The DMCA already makes it easy enough to keep things like KickAssTorrents offline, which was honestly the closest I've seen to a good tracker going mainstream.
The DMCA is an American law, which does not apply in Canada or much of the rest of the world.
It's an American law which implements a certain part of the WIPO Copyright Treaty, which is indeed in force in Canada (since 2014) with a local implementing law, as well as in the European Union and many other countries worldwide:
With all of that said, Canada's legal analogue to the DMCA is a "notice and notice" regime, not a "notice and takedown" regime. The rights holder or their agent notifies the ISP, and the ISP notifies the user without necessarily taking down the content. A court order can be sought to force it offline, and I'd guess (but don't know) that some ISPs will voluntarily cooperate to some degree beyond the legal requirement.
Tell that to the founders of the Pirate Bay who were continuously raided and eventually wound up in jail, despite not being American, and not being in America.
Oh, copyright law in general is present worldwide through multiple international agreements. Going after the Pirate Bay didn't have to rely on the DMCA.
Even if it had needed to rely on DMCA-like concerns, over a hundred countries worldwide are party to the treaty which mandates a law addressing the scope of the DMCA, so enough other countries have such a law. (The details vary and not all such laws mandate a quick takedown of the allegedly infringing content.)
The DMCA is like the EU's GDPR: a law specific to affected countries, that nevertheless affects the entire world.
In the GDPR's case, that's because every company wants to be able to have European customers.
But in the US's case, it's because Internet commerce and ad-tech companies mostly exist within the US, and so you can't have a profitable torrent tracker / pirate-TV streaming site / etc. because — if the DMCA says you're not to be traded with — then you won't be able to get these US businesses to place ads on your site, or engage with US payment processors, etc.
And sure, anyone could run a perfectly robust torrent tracker over Tor, that nobody could take down through DMCAing the DNS provider et al. But, without a large accessible market of people visiting to show ads, there'd be no economic incentive to do so — so nobody bothers.
> But in the US's case, it's because Internet commerce and ad-tech companies mostly exist within the US, and so you can't have a profitable torrent tracker / pirate-TV streaming site / etc. because — if the DMCA says you're not to be traded with — then you won't be able to get these US businesses to place ads on your site, or engage with US payment processors, etc.
The DMCA doesn't talk about who can be traded with, in general. It mainly places obligations on companies which host third-party content if they want to receive liability protections beyond what the law previously provided. The payment processors may not want to participate to avoid secondary copyright infringement liability, but that's entirely unrelated to the DMCA.
Similarly, the ad tech companies have their own separate reasons for not wanting to piss off the media companies, and the DMCA would not be triggered if the infringing content is not handled through those companies' services.
PC piracy has been neutered by Denuvo, which is the most effective DRM the platform has ever seen, and has been embraced by almost all major publishers.
Ubisoft embraced Denuvo for all PC product in 2017. Thereafter their PC sales revenue and PC's share of their total revenue has hit record levels.
The other factor is that with the rise of Crypto, PC torrents are now filled with miners and other malware.
The other factor is the largest games being online-only or having exclusive online functionality.
Digital distribution (Steam) is an aged and established concept now. What Steam provides is not and has never been unique - they just had the best exclusives (Valve games).
Denuvo is being cracked by Empress, who is pretty legendary considering all scene groups gave up. Interestingly she has a habit of making controversial comments on gender identity on reddit.
The reason things like steam can "best" piracy is because piracy is so crippled by anti-piracy. Between sites disappearing, spotty content, abusive ads, viruses, malware, and risk of prosecution, it's not hard being better. Imagine if that weren't the case and the free experience were seamless.
If your definition of "piracy" are crappy streaming websites and shoddy warez dumps full of links to rapidshare, they are the same they were 15 years ago: full of malware and questionable ads.
BitTorrent trackers are more alive and popular than ever, and you always get what's advertised thanks to relatively high quality moderation (if you visit the right places, of course, sites like TPB don't count)
Are you kidding? Piracy has never been easier lol, gb internet and torrents for every popular show and movie on public trackers. The pirate bay is still around and going strong. I just don’t want my Goverment to waste money trying to stop the internet stoppable
It's a lot simpler than that. If one team has to pay artists, and another team does not, ceterus paribus the second team will win. Only by constraining the second team does the first team have a chance to play. If government didn't "waste" money constraining pirates then pirates will necessarily have an outsized presence in the space given their unfair advantage.
silly. spotify killed music piracy not any government. Steam killed game piracy not any government. Netflix had killed movie piracy but with all streaming services making it annoying again piracy is back - despite all their efforts. notice how the government fails to move the needle at all?
As soon as you build a business model capable of delivering a quality experience, the necessary logistical entanglements that facilitate your business are now directly targetable by legal systems everywhere.
This is the soft power of the market at work. Short of refusing to create business presence or monetize, you'll never be able to get much of anything done.
If anything is to be done to force providers to raise the bar above a compelling, high quality piracy alternative, it quite literally has to be out of the goodness of contributor's hearts. Which means it must be so easy to build, people don't mind spending leisure time on it.
And assholes would still screw it up and ruin a good thing for everyone else. That won't ever change.
I can't wait until competent leadership who actually understand business, who are actual entrepreneurs, get into positions of power - like Andrew Yang with his policies.
I keep saying this: I believe piracy is a valid counterweight mechanism to the capitalistic for-profit system that would milk society dry/fleece us year round until we die from the elements: charging us more than is reasonable so we'll so FU and pirate, or due to there being so much amazing content that you're competing for our time for entertainment because there's so much amazing entertainment to choose from?
Likewise I believe a UBI lever, where $xxx is allocated/earmarked monthly towards different types of creative/content work (to be defined/determined) will be how you fund the industry and artists (once they reach a level of competency commanding whatever level of pay); they can live off of their general UBI, developing their talents, their health/self-improvement/knowledge and skill development, or raise a family - in the meantime. And then we'll also have content produced that better mirrors the likes/needs/desires of society; Andrew Yang's Democracy Dollars voucher policy, every eligible getting $100/year to contribute to the political candidate of their choice falls is a similar/same mechanism but for different system - to break apart the duopoly - along with Ranked Choice Voting would compound powerfully; he wants to do this for journalism - "Journalism Dollars" - essentially to combat the duopoly (to create more than 2 core narratives that gets pumped out) but also the mainstream media/media industrial complex in general.
Re: "Dunno. As much as I hate copyright, and as much as I love free culture, it's hard for me to get too interested or worried about stuff like this nowadays, from a legal realism standpoint."
Jordan Peterson's Rule 1 of his latest book - "Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life" - goes into this necessary balance in very good detail - I'd recommend reading it; "DO NOT CARELESSLY DENIGRATE SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS OR CREATIVE ACHIEVEMENT"
Translated: I can't afford X so it's OK to steal it, because corporations are evil for being for-profit. Got it.
re UBI: you don't have to wait to see how 'well' would UBI work in practice - ask anyone from any European countries about their Roma population and how effectively they use the 'subsidies' (not the right word, but I can't recall the right one) from government. So many enterpreneurs and artists ... (/s just in case)
Re: Re: UBI — there's a difference in how a person who's in pain but otherwise healthy will use painkillers, and how a person who is in pain but also is addicted to painkillers will use painkillers.
Like an addiction, prolonged poverty — and especially being born into poverty, and having your social circle consist mostly of other people born into poverty — changes many people for the worse, such that they become less able to effectively strategize to lift themselves out of poverty if they do get offered the resources to do so. They never learned how, and/or they have no role-models to mirror, so they don't even try.
UBI certainly isn't a magic fix for poverty. But I've never seen anyone claiming it to be. People in poverty are already usually receiving social assistance, so UBI wouldn't even change anything for them!
Instead, UBI is more likely to serve as a prophylactic to prevent poverty. It's a secure, predictable safety net that's just always there by default; a much-improved version of Unemployment, without stigma (because everyone gets it no matter what) and without restrictions (e.g. you get it even if you were previously self-employed. I mean, you get it even while you're employed, so of course you do.)
I feel like it's a pretty ridiculous over-statement to say that introverts feel like they're in a pandemic normally. I'm an introvert and don't feel like that. I suspect the only people who could reasonably feel like that are people with anxiety disorders or phobias.
I don't know, I'm not saying you can't express your opinion or feel how you feel. But I want to express I'm a bit grossed out reading your post, as you seem just a bit too gleeful and smug at this whole situation.