If the movie is good, you should support it by making a donation to the strike fund of the unions that represent the artists that actually create the movies. You can support artists without supporting the amoral companies that produce these works.
I decided on my moral beliefs on piracy back during the days of Kazaa and Limewire. Back then the RIAA was shaking down teenagers, threatening them with statutory liabilities of a quarter million dollars per song, simply because the law allowed it. They would threaten low-income families with lawsuits in the millions and get them to settle for a still-ridiculous settlement of few thousand dollars. Even the settlements were far in excess of the full retail cost of purchasing these songs.
I decided then that if the law allows this kind of thing, then copyright law as it exists now is fundamentally immoral. And immoral laws are not worthy of respect.
I mostly take a pragmatic approach to copyright. Whether I pay for something is a combination of the quality of the work, the reputation of the company selling it, the customer service provided by the legitimate product, the probability of getting caught for violating copyright law, etc. An indie publisher that treats their people well? I’ll buy it. Mass market schlock made by criminally underpaid artists for rent-seeking megacorps? I’ll pirate that all day, every day.
But morality literally plays no part in it. I learned long ago that copyright law exists outside of the realm of morality. The decision to buy or pirate is an entirely practical one; morality simply isn’t a factor.
Meanwhile, your morality is just the bandwagon effect.
When I die, I want to be turned into a drone.
It’s a travesty that his inauguration will coincide with MLK Day.
The same people who love crypto love AI. It’s all lazy people looking to make a quick buck by lying to and manipulating others.
Many will say that World War Three cannot happen, that nuclear weapons will prevent it. However, this assumes that World War Three has to be global thermonuclear war, rather than some repeat of the previous world wars.
Cities don’t have to be leveled for nations to fight a world war. The US fought two world wars, and we never had our cities and infrastructure decimated. What I can imagine is a future world war where all the major players fight the war in the same way the US fought the two previous wars. Both sides contribute massive resources, adopt wartime economies, throw their whole populations behind the effort etc, but at no point do the various combatants directly attack the main territory and population centers of the other side. You could have a conflict where both sides lost millions of troops fighting it out in some third party territory, but the nukes never fly as all sides realize that invading the home territory of the others is suicide.
Potash for quota I need. But no potash have I. However, tungsten I have. Is anyone I can I trade tungsten for potash?
Wood science, I suppose.
My bugbear with Mc’D’s is how they now always ask you if you are using their damned app.
I know I shouldn’t, and that they’re just teenagers reading from a script. But I just can’t help myself. Whenever they ask if I’ll be using the app, I flippantly reply, “nah, I don’t want Ronald reading my email.”
The ability to pay for subsidies has no relation to the source of the funds. What matters is GDP, overall national wealth. And Norway is only slightly ahead of the US. Considering the US’s far superior manufacturing capability, if Norway could go all electric, than the US certainly could have by now. Norway’s had to import almost all its electric cars; the US can make its own cars.
I prefer the conspiracy ouroboros:
Conspiracy theories do not generate spontaneously. They’re all crafted deliberately by a nefarious cabal of corporate interests to distract and manipulate the public.
“Look at the racist things I saw down at the Klan rally!”
No shit. Why are you sharing it?
You’re assuming the law will be applied consistently.
I’ve come up with the most cursed business idea in history.
I envision founding what is effectively a suspiciously cheap home-cleaning service. Like a cleaning service, we’ll require access to your home. We’ll need a key or door code. However, we don’t actually ever send anyone to clean your house.
Instead, we let you do the cleaning. We don’t DO the cleaning. We INSPECT your cleaning. When signing up for our service, you’re signing up to have a cleaning inspector show up to your house at any random time between 8 AM and 5 PM. It will be completely at random. It could be months between the random inspections, or you could get inspected 3 days in a row.
The inspector will be a form of your choosing. You can sign up for an angry boot camp drill-instructor type. You can sign up for someone who will more have the vibe of a grossed-out boyfriend/girlfriend. Or they can send a team of older inspectors that will make it feel like you’re being berated by your parents. The choice of shame is up to you!
The inspectors will go through your home, call you a slob, and belittle your cleaning ability. We won’t make it too ridiculous. By default, they would just expect you to keep things clean and neat, not lab-grade sterile. But if your laundry pile grows, you need to dust, or the bathrooms are a mess? Well you’re going to hear about it! If you are present, they will shame you in person. Regardless if you are there or not, you will be sent a report documenting in disgusting detail all the messes and cleaning errors in your house. The report will be filled with professional-grade photos of your filth. And to provide further damning motivation? The report will be posted on the public internet for anyone to view for free.
Note: customers who are clearly using this as a sex thing will be dropped from the service.
They won’t even need to use terrorism. Right in Project 2025 is a plan to slowly classify any public existence or acknowledgement of LGBT identities as “pornographic.” And in turn classify showing “pornography” to children is pedophilia and worthy of being put on the sex offender registry. They want to make it so if say, a trans woman, goes out in public and a child sees her, then that is the equivalent of grooming an 8 year old child by showing them pornographic videos. Oh, and they also want to attach the death penalty to crimes of pedophilia.
They’re talking about rounding up 20 million people and deporting them. Do you really think you can do that without setting up massive camps that match or exceed the scale of anything the Nazis set up? And if you really want to move that many people around, you may end up having to use trains.
Oh, and worse, they have no plan on how to actually deport that many people. The Nazis originally planned to deport all the Jews as well. Yet they quickly found that there simply weren’t enough nations willing to accept all these deportees. Other countries aren’t obligated to accept your deportees.
So you now have millions of people in camps, costing a fortune to maintain, and no where to send these people. That always ends in slavery, death, or death by slavery. Whenever your plan starts with “round up tens of millions of people and put them in camps,” you can guarantee that a massive death toll is going to follow.
Anything less than tens of millions dead falls short of your comment. And that’s likely not the reality.
Trans people, the group currently most targeted for elimination by the right, represent about 1% of the US population. Jewish people in pre-Nazi Germany also represented about 1% of the population.
When Republicans past eliminationist laws meant to persecute trans people, deny them from public life, and kill them by taking away their healthcare, they are committing crimes of the same order as what Germany did in the 1930s.
That is simple historical by-the-numbers truth.
You’re thinking far too short-term in your economic analysis.
Imagine if everyone tomorrow just started pirating the works of the major video game and film studios. Will high quality movies simply stop being made?
Of course not. There are many ways to structure a film industry. Why are films made by big for-profit companies in the first place? Market conditions have simply allowed for that consolidation. But if we change those market conditions through targeted mass piracy, the current major studio model will disappear in favor of other organizational structures.
Why can’t films be made by collaborations of various worker co-ops? You could have an actor’s co-op, a videographers guild, an employee-owned animation studio, etc. And they could all come together to collaborate on projects for a share of the total profits. Or hell, there’s nothing preventing even a major film studio from being entirely employee-owned.
If everyone stopped buying things from the giants, then the film industry wouldn’t disappear; it would adjust. Companies would become smaller as the “evil megacorp” model became unprofitable. And more space would open up for more distributed production models and for employee-owned businesses.
Your vision and imagination are ultimately simply far too limited.