Just admit you don’t care about pirating from a major company. You don’t have to lie to yourself to concoct a moral justification.

But I can’t help but feel that 90% of the “back to the high seas” comments on Reddit or social media discussions of streaming is just pirates justifying the piracy they were already committing.

Pirates love having some moral justification. Shit, they should just admit they prefer getting something without paying for it.

In my UMC area that was formerly MC there are a lot of tear-down rebuilds that trade one single family home for another. They barely increase stock ( though the houses probably have more bedrooms).

One defense is that the old AT&T system was really expensive and slowed progress. Deregulation was a big win for consumers.

I agree that well regulated monopoly ISPs could deliver better service. But I'm deeply skeptical that, in practice, we'd manage to actually regulate the ISPs properly.

Our regulated power companies have shitty, underfunded grids that create massive forest fires.

I would half expect really cheap nationwide DSL.

But I’m not against civil forfeiture if practiced better with better safe guards.

Every year the government takes 30%+ of the money I make via taxation. Unelected administrative functionaries lay down laws that can massively change the value of your property.

I’m not going to cry if the government keeps money whose origin you can’t explain. By law, I have to file tax returns that explains my income. There isn’t a huge difference. These kind of seizures makes organized crime much easier to fight.

But again, a lot of these examples look more like straight theft.

Also, law enforcement shouldn’t get to keep the money it seizes. It’s a perverse incentive. Should just go into the general treasury.

I have no issue with it being default, but since covid ended, the places that still use qr menus seem not to have paper menus on hand.

It’s not the end of the world but it makes your restaurant feel cheap.

Still 100 times better than places that make you order on your phone.

You don’t use them because it costs 6 bucks a pop.

That’s a price motive not a service issue.

Now streaming is putting the TV networks out of business. Nobody is going to make content to dump on streaming for nearly free.

People also forget that in the glory days, Netflix’s steaming movie selection was always bad. Like discount bin at Walmart bad.

What it does do is forfeit a safe harbor defense against copyright infringement liability. Basically, as long as you comply with take down requests, you can’t be sued for copyright infringement unless you knew about it.

It’s part of a quid pro quo with online services that publish user content.

Other publishers are liable for what they publish even if they didn’t know about it.

Without the DMCA, Google would be liable for all the piracy that happens on the site.

It was commonly mis-used to mean “eh that just a minor exception that you should ignore.” But it’s been mis-used so much that now it has both meaning.

iPhones aren’t anymore either. You seen poor people with them all the time.