Enshittification is the goal of incorporated entities, not some sort of degradation.
A modern corporation needs to gather customers fast and this means being nice to people. The internet makes this process extremely fast compared to the past, as word automatically spreads about the new "Nice" Company electronically. World-wide.
The goal however, is to make their product or service popular by being nice, until such time as they have what they determine to be enough customers dependent on that product or service to be able to drop the niceness facade and turn full corporate, because they can at that time afford to compete effectively against younger stiil-nice corporations.
GIF comes to mind immediately.
It is in effect, the natural maturing of a modern company. Corporate Adulthood.
Any corporation that does not use this method today will likely fail in the marketplace because of all the other corporations selling similar products or services that do use this "be nice" method, competing against it.
Enshittification is both expected and inevitable, because it is the natural and intended maturation of an incorporated entity.
It is how a baby legalized make-believe entity becomes a full grown legal imaginary person.
Has it ever occurred to anyone that legislation prohibiting freely accessible pornography on the web causes the price of illegal porn to rise to counter the additional costs caused by this kind of legislation?
States that have these new ID bills are actually increasing the value of illegal pornography by making it difficult to find/view legal pornography on-line and forcing those wishing to view porn to seek less legal sources. In other words, this legislation forces people to utilize the black market.
Secret illegal pornographic product manufacturers in these states can now raise the cost of their black market products due to this legalized difficulty and can also enjoy a large rise in customer numbers.
This makes the secret financiers of such manufacturers very happy, as their profits increase exponentially, because people are forced into their market by these anti-porn ID-exposing internet laws.
I think this whole situation is nothing more than a successful illegal-business-plan.
I suspect that many of these wealthy Anti-Porn politicians and activists are indeed involved in the secret financial support of illegal pornographers, such as those producing CSAM and that's the real reason they're high-fiving each other. If there is one thing Republicans all love, its more money in their pockets.
Just saying...
"I might not be an intergalactic business genius, like many people assure me Musk is, but I fail to see how this strategy succeeds."
That would depend on what kind of "success" the strategy is actually aimed at.
So far, the goal seems to be the total destruction of Twitter as a public news and information source, and its reincarnation as a Rightwing BS center that will be a source for misinformation and fake news, supported by fascist owned corporations, bigots and criminals of every stripe. It will be a place for all the True Believers to get their daily hate-reinforcement propaganda-gospel dosage.
No longer will Twitter be a threat to the fascists by educating and informing the peasants, and its purchase and transformation into a un-washable urinal, will send the simple message to any new Twitter clones, that money trumps all.
Pun intended.
Methinks that as long as the American Legal System continues to entertain the notion that bribery should be a legal aspect of government, you can expect crooked results such as the continuous "caps" scam being perpetrated by the Telecom monopolies. When you legalize the bribery of officials, you tell those with money that they can control the government, legally. When criminals write the laws, only the innocent need worry.
Millionaires, Billionaires and the race to be the first Trillionaire!
Can someone explain to me why hoarding billions of dollars is not considered to be a threat to the national economy, since that money has been literally removed from circulation.
If you have 1000 billionaires with 10 billion each, does that not mean that $10,000,000,000,000.00 has been removed from circulation?
Why is this not considered a bad thing?
Well I'll be damned (very likely:), it looks like somebody has finally seen through the mist.
A bunch of really rich Conservofascists paid the idiot king Elmo to publicly destroy the site in order to send a message to any other site that might refuse to do their bidding in future.
Not really a new tactic but an ever-effective one.
'Fuck with us and we will legally buy your livelihood out from under you and destroy it and you financially.'
Someone really oughta quietly release that backers list to as many sites as possible. As a public service. :)
That would be incredibly interesting.
A list of the Wealthiest American Traitors in America, and maybe a couple of America's foreign enemies abroad as well.
That'd be a nice read.
I suppose, given a few more years, all you folks will finally realize exactly who the government's "adversary" really is. Not holding my breath though. :)
I made a copy of this post a long time ago simply because it was a complete argument without holes, as to why Copyright Laws need to be repaired. I'm not even sure where I read it, although right here on TD is a good guess.
If it turns out that re-posting this comment somehow infringes on somebody's copyright, please forgive and delete.
==================================
Tice with a J,
May 21st, 2014 @ 9:23pm
In defense of pirates
There is an idea that, in my opinion, is very important in any discussion of copyright/patent/IP. The idea is this: "Content creators deserve to get paid for each and every use of their content". Whether that content is a song, a program, a design, or any other kind of information, the idea is that the maker of that information has a right to be rewarded for every use of that information.
This idea appeals to our notions of fairness, especially when you consider an analogous physical situation: the skilled craftsman, whom I will call "maker" because I'm a Doctorow fanboy. A very good maker has the power to make something that no one else can make, like a Stradivarius violin, and there's no way to get a violin like that without either buying it from Stradivarius or buying it from someone else who bought one... or stealing it, of course, but we have ways of preventing theft. The point is that the maker has total control of how many copies there are of what they sell, and whenever you see a copy in the wild, you can safely assume that the maker got paid for it.
Moving back to the realm of information, we still have skilled makers, making patterns of information that no one else could have made. We value what they make, and we want them to be rewarded, just as the physical makers are rewarded... and the information makers want to get paid, so our interests line up. So far, so good.
But now we run into trouble: information, unlike physical goods, is very easy to copy. It may take a genius to write a good book, but any common scribe can copy it. And then there are the copy machines. In fact, go take a look at all the books you own, and tell me: how many of them are copies? In my case, the answer is: all of them. I don't own any original manuscripts (unless you count my own writings, but I don't consider my jumbled piles of scribblings to be books). If I want to read something by, say, Edgar Allen Poe, I don't have to ask Poe to write me a fresh copy, nor do I have to deprive anyone else of their copy. I just need someone who'll let me make a copy of their copy. And whenever I see a copy of Poe's work in the wild, I can usually assume that Poe wasn't paid for it, since the vast majority of existing copies (including the one on my hard drive) were made long after his death!
Now, this offends our notions of fairness! "How can someone get something for free? Someone had to have lost something!", we think. And so we call copying "theft of intellectual property" or "piracy", because it feels like something got stolen. But this is wrong. Nothing has been stolen. No one's purloined a violin. Neither the maker nor the customers have lost anything when one customer makes their own copies and gives them away.
Now this is the point in the discussion where pro-copyright folks bring up sunk costs. It takes time, talent, and energy to make good content, just as it does to make a good violin. Surely the content deserves some protection, yes? But wait! Somebody moved the goalposts. "Sunk costs" didn't even come up when we were discussing the Stradivarius. Why bring them up now?
But more generally, sunk costs are irrelevant, for 2 reasons:
There is no direct relation between sunk costs and quality. There's a lot of literature on this subject, but here's my favorite piece of evidence: going by official records, the most expensive film in history was Spider-Man 3. Whether you count inflation or not, that's the top. Worth the investment? I didn't think so.
There is no end to the amount of monopoly that we can justify by appealing to fixed costs. We could even justify slavery (The landowners put a lot of time and money into raising those negroes, so don't they have a natural right to claim the product of the negroes' labor?). Unless we're trying to justify the total state, we need to do better than to appeal to costs.
In fact, let me harp on that second point some more. Sunk costs were the justification for DRM. And what is DRM? It is the loss of control of your own computer. It invades your privacy and takes over your property. Snowden's leaks are only the latest reminder of how dangerous this sort of thing is. Crooks and elites are all too eager to gain control of our lives, and we shouldn't be giving them any opportunity to do so. That's why DRM is inherently bad (Why, Mozilla? Why?). I won't let anyone try to justify it with a sob story of how much it costs to make good cinema.
Now then, if DRM can't be justified on the basis of sunk costs, what can be justified? For the effects of copyright are in need of justification.
Remember the central idea, that content creators deserve to get paid for each and every use of their content (or at least, for every copy). The practical effect of this is to deny customers their freedom to communicate. They must either report to the creator for every copy they make and submit to a fine, or they must refrain from copying at all. This is a broad prior restraint on speech and press. Is it justified?
It gets worse. All manner of communication goes on in private, and all of it is potentially full of illicit copies. If we want to pay the creators for every copy, we'll have to either revoke the right to privacy in order to track down the copies, or we'll have to pass a blanket tax on private communication (in effect, assume that all people are guilty and punish them in advance). The current U.S. legal system has both the loss of privacy and the punitive tax. Are either of these justified?
In summary, the idea of getting paid for every copy is nice, but there's no way to implement it without compromising or abandoning other nice ideas, such as free speech, privacy, presumption of innocence, and secure ownership of personal property. That's a lot to give up, and for very questionable benefits, too.
That's why I have no qualms with "piracy", and I refuse to condemn the file-sharers. Not because they're heroic or anything like that, but just because they're doing nothing wrong. Copying, sharing, and ruining people's business plans are natural human activities, and no one has any business trying to outlaw them.
P.S. Given the opportunity, I would download a car. Wouldn't you?
"So what should we do about the Fascist threat?"
That in a nutshell, is the five million dollar question.
As far as I can tell, fascism always wins.
It wins because the people behind this eternal business plan are all billionaires - people that everyone wants to be or be like, and who we thus do not allow ourselves to see as bad people. After all, we don't want to be, or be like, bad people, right. So they get a pass. We simply cannot believe that our heroes are trying to drain the nation and its people of their assets. After all, these are the people who already have everything one could want right.
Add to that the simple fact that their wealthy status allows them the extra-legal privilege of buying their way out of any misdeed they are caught perpetrating, and the fact that they normally pay others - minions - to do the actual dirty-work, and you have the new "Untouchables".
Due to their combined wealth, a fascist cabal controls the law by controlling the law makers. Politicians, notorious for accepting "Gifts" in return for creating legal loopholes in restrictive laws that billionaires can safely traverse to "get the job done", are lined up at the doors of these billionaires, begging to lend a hand in the destruction of their nation, for a price.
But this is ALWAYS the way of things. If there is an exit from this mess we have built around us again, and the inevitable final exploitation by our own most influential citizens, history does not offer it. I think in fact that many if not most of the failed attempts at civilization in our past, (save a few natural disaster scenarios like buried by volcanoes), were due in fact to this very same situation - fascism - the wealthy attempting to take it all by subverting the law.
It might help somewhat to note that Fascism is NOT a political aspiration. It is 100% commercial. It is the act of wealthy individuals, conspiring in secret, to take it all, by utilizing government as a weapon and a disguise. It simply works.
If there is an answer to this recurring nightmare, we had better damn well start looking soon though. So far they have won every battle, simply because we refuse to believe who the enemy - who we all want to be or be like - is, and so we attack someone we don't like instead of the true enemy, making matters worse.
"...that will act to suppress both free speech online and the ability to communicate securely and privately."
But of course. A fascist regime cannot thrive and prosper as long as the public can conspire secretly against it via encrypted communications, and the ability to actually spy on every single citizen has been a fascist wet-dream since - forever.
This bill will kill many birds with one stone and open the USA to some serious legally-allowed exploitation and dissident-culling by the Trump Cartel and any billionaires (s)elected as POTUS who follow until the USA is a bankrupt hulk - wide open to invasion - and just another foot-note in history, which will of course be written by the billionaires.
And just in time too, what with many of the big US cities considering the notion of dismantling some of the extra-legal (read criminal) and secret police units and the criminally insane Police Unions that train and protect them, this bill will help put things back on track and let the billionaire's final solution get back in the saddle, before any real damage to the business-plan occurs.
And as long as its socially totally un-Cool to consider - let alone discuss - the idea that a fascist regime could actually take over the US government and destroy the USA from within, the Urn It Act should suffice to eliminate any real threats to the systematic transfer of the American economy into off-shore safe haven bank accounts by American billionaires and their foreign friends.
It IS happening here folks.
Wake up or kiss your American Dream goodbye.
"...but, in reality, the real goal is protecting government employees from the people they serve."
You don't really think that these folks are actually interested in "serving" the public do you?
That is extremely naive.
The millionaire members of any fascist or corporate-owned state are solely and explicitly interested in turning the public into a money making machine through the re-writing and re-interpretation of laws that normally protect the public from the exploits of the rich.
The public serves them, until the public is empty, and then the fascists move on to the next victim state.
"... definitely not what Congress wanted to have happen when it passed Section 230 in order expressly to protect that economic vitality."
Perhaps not.
However, there are a large number of corporations, politicians and other criminal types who would absolutely love to see this idiocy written in stone, specifically in order to break the internet.
Hollywood and the Record Industry come to mind immediately.
Looks like a legal battle between dinosaur-money and the public-interest.
Given the present track record for the courts to get this stuff right, my bet is on the Dinosaurs getting their way. Again. And again.
After all, its just so damned hard to say No to Money.
Methinks that as long as everyone keeps "believing" that all of this stuff is caused by ignorance/incompetence, rather than willful, intentional malice, its just gonna get worse. And, from I've seen over the last decade, its just gonna get worse.
After all, according to what we are learning these days, nobody is really waging any sort of "war" against the Drug Trade anymore anyway.
The Police have basically become employees of the Drug Trade, earning a far larger income from the Black Market than that which the public pays them. Exactly the same thing happened during the last moral prohibition.
This double income explains too, their recent Reverse Robin Hood assaults on the public, as their loyalty shifts towards the employer who pays the higher wage.
As the Drug Cartels collapse without a legally contraband product to sell, all the Drug Warrior Cops immediately lose their secondary employer and their second income, as the Drug-Trade based forfeiture laws lose their very reason for existence.
Lets face it. Ending the war On Drugs would be the biggest blow to organized crime since the end of the last phony political morality war - Prohibition.
Problem solved.
No muss. No fuss.
And most of the bad cops - who are only in it for the extra income - would likely quit the force soon there-after, making room for employment of some actual crime fighters and investigators.
Then, while sanity is actively present, maybe we could also accept that the Drug Problem is a social and medical problem and not a criminal problem, and that its purported dangers are actually far more Hollywood Hero bullshit than Reality-based anyways.
Its where the very wealthy alter the laws so that they can rob the nation blind, legally.
It doesn't matter if the scam does not last long because the wealthy are busily pulling in millions of US dollars every day and like all the rich-guy scams of the past, nobody involved in this Reverse Robin Hood scenario will suffer any consequences when and if the scam and its membership is busted.
They changed the laws of the land first and are thus not guilty of breaking any laws.
The peasants have had a good run and have accumulated a ton of nice things. Its now time for the lords of the land to legally reverse that trend and take all those nice things for themselves.
You make it sound like the creation of their "claimed" moronic lack-of-filing non-system was a mistake they need to correct.
How could they realistically claim to need a legal loophole because of the horrid state of their record-keeping, if they don't convince the public that their record keeping ability is a complete disaster?
The simple truth however, is that they can and often do - for special corporate clients - search and retrieve thousands of documents in mere minutes, using their state of the art (tax-payer purchased) documents storage, retrieval and record-filing systems.
It is only the public-face of the agency that cannot find its ass with both hands, and that is 100% agency policy and has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with their record storage and retrieval capacity.
If the claim was true, you would be seeing that agency begging for federal funds to update its technology, every two years, minimum.
As with almost every other branch of the American Fascist Government, bull-shitting the public, while shrugging off legal irritants that might benefit the public in some fashion, is now policy.
And why not? After all, like you, Americans mostly believe the bullshit their government and its agents spew, and besides, Americans no longer have the means to verify or dispute the claims anyway.
F.O.I.A. now stands for "Fuck Off Inquisitive Americans"
Ah, the inevitable growth of fascist control, as it continues to shield itself from the clutches of those it exploits, while insuring only that the millionaires making up its membership, thrive and profit at the expense of all others, by changing the laws of the land.
Keep up the great work America. Your continued ignorance of the situation you face and your determined failure to act in self defense, will insure the fascists succeed in bringing America to its knees financially from within, and thus create a perfect warning to the people of all other nations on earth.
We've never before actually witnessed and thus recorded, the process of national disintegration from within, at the hands of a nation's own wealthiest individuals, since it is they, the winners, who always write history.
Fascism. National Entropy.
Know that your sacrifice will aid those other nations who are watching your demise, in protecting themselves from the greed of those who are least in need, when the fascist millionaires use these same methods in their own respective nations.
Thank you Americans. You do the nations of the world a great service. You will not be forgotten. Soon.
"The problem, of course, is that all the public screaming in the world has yet to shift the thinking of
{well-lobbied}
net neutrality opponents in Congress..."
There, in a nutshell, is the real problem today, not just for Net Neutrality but for absolutely everything concerning law.
As long as its 100% legal for corporate crooks to buy politicians, and 100% legal for politicians to take bribes and do the bidding of their corporate benefactors by writing laws that help the crooks make more money and ending laws that interfere with the crooks' methods of making more money, this thing can only get worse.
No matter what the public does, it will have far less effect than giving politicians wads of money has, and even when the public succeeds, it will only be a temporary success, undone once the crooks raise the amount of each politician's "lobby", or legal graft pay-outs.
End "lobby" payouts - legalized bribery - and you will go a long way towards making things right again.
As long as it is up to the politicians to decide whether to end legal graft or not, nothing will change. They will NEVER choose to end the lobby fountain that constitutes a second income for doing corporate favors.
enshittification
Enshittification is the goal of incorporated entities, not some sort of degradation. A modern corporation needs to gather customers fast and this means being nice to people. The internet makes this process extremely fast compared to the past, as word automatically spreads about the new "Nice" Company electronically. World-wide. The goal however, is to make their product or service popular by being nice, until such time as they have what they determine to be enough customers dependent on that product or service to be able to drop the niceness facade and turn full corporate, because they can at that time afford to compete effectively against younger stiil-nice corporations. GIF comes to mind immediately. It is in effect, the natural maturing of a modern company. Corporate Adulthood. Any corporation that does not use this method today will likely fail in the marketplace because of all the other corporations selling similar products or services that do use this "be nice" method, competing against it. Enshittification is both expected and inevitable, because it is the natural and intended maturation of an incorporated entity. It is how a baby legalized make-believe entity becomes a full grown legal imaginary person.
Money
Has it ever occurred to anyone that legislation prohibiting freely accessible pornography on the web causes the price of illegal porn to rise to counter the additional costs caused by this kind of legislation? States that have these new ID bills are actually increasing the value of illegal pornography by making it difficult to find/view legal pornography on-line and forcing those wishing to view porn to seek less legal sources. In other words, this legislation forces people to utilize the black market. Secret illegal pornographic product manufacturers in these states can now raise the cost of their black market products due to this legalized difficulty and can also enjoy a large rise in customer numbers. This makes the secret financiers of such manufacturers very happy, as their profits increase exponentially, because people are forced into their market by these anti-porn ID-exposing internet laws. I think this whole situation is nothing more than a successful illegal-business-plan. I suspect that many of these wealthy Anti-Porn politicians and activists are indeed involved in the secret financial support of illegal pornographers, such as those producing CSAM and that's the real reason they're high-fiving each other. If there is one thing Republicans all love, its more money in their pockets. Just saying...
Just saying...
"I might not be an intergalactic business genius, like many people assure me Musk is, but I fail to see how this strategy succeeds." That would depend on what kind of "success" the strategy is actually aimed at. So far, the goal seems to be the total destruction of Twitter as a public news and information source, and its reincarnation as a Rightwing BS center that will be a source for misinformation and fake news, supported by fascist owned corporations, bigots and criminals of every stripe. It will be a place for all the True Believers to get their daily hate-reinforcement propaganda-gospel dosage. No longer will Twitter be a threat to the fascists by educating and informing the peasants, and its purchase and transformation into a un-washable urinal, will send the simple message to any new Twitter clones, that money trumps all. Pun intended.
Be a patriot. Rent a politician today.
Methinks that as long as the American Legal System continues to entertain the notion that bribery should be a legal aspect of government, you can expect crooked results such as the continuous "caps" scam being perpetrated by the Telecom monopolies. When you legalize the bribery of officials, you tell those with money that they can control the government, legally. When criminals write the laws, only the innocent need worry.
Money
Millionaires, Billionaires and the race to be the first Trillionaire! Can someone explain to me why hoarding billions of dollars is not considered to be a threat to the national economy, since that money has been literally removed from circulation. If you have 1000 billionaires with 10 billion each, does that not mean that $10,000,000,000,000.00 has been removed from circulation? Why is this not considered a bad thing?
Finally
Well I'll be damned (very likely:), it looks like somebody has finally seen through the mist. A bunch of really rich Conservofascists paid the idiot king Elmo to publicly destroy the site in order to send a message to any other site that might refuse to do their bidding in future. Not really a new tactic but an ever-effective one. 'Fuck with us and we will legally buy your livelihood out from under you and destroy it and you financially.' Someone really oughta quietly release that backers list to as many sites as possible. As a public service. :) That would be incredibly interesting. A list of the Wealthiest American Traitors in America, and maybe a couple of America's foreign enemies abroad as well. That'd be a nice read.
Words on the wall
I suppose, given a few more years, all you folks will finally realize exactly who the government's "adversary" really is. Not holding my breath though. :)
Re: In Defense of Pirates
I made a copy of this post a long time ago simply because it was a complete argument without holes, as to why Copyright Laws need to be repaired. I'm not even sure where I read it, although right here on TD is a good guess.
If it turns out that re-posting this comment somehow infringes on somebody's copyright, please forgive and delete.
==================================
Tice with a J,
May 21st, 2014 @ 9:23pm
In defense of pirates
There is an idea that, in my opinion, is very important in any discussion of copyright/patent/IP. The idea is this: "Content creators deserve to get paid for each and every use of their content". Whether that content is a song, a program, a design, or any other kind of information, the idea is that the maker of that information has a right to be rewarded for every use of that information.
This idea appeals to our notions of fairness, especially when you consider an analogous physical situation: the skilled craftsman, whom I will call "maker" because I'm a Doctorow fanboy. A very good maker has the power to make something that no one else can make, like a Stradivarius violin, and there's no way to get a violin like that without either buying it from Stradivarius or buying it from someone else who bought one... or stealing it, of course, but we have ways of preventing theft. The point is that the maker has total control of how many copies there are of what they sell, and whenever you see a copy in the wild, you can safely assume that the maker got paid for it.
Moving back to the realm of information, we still have skilled makers, making patterns of information that no one else could have made. We value what they make, and we want them to be rewarded, just as the physical makers are rewarded... and the information makers want to get paid, so our interests line up. So far, so good.
But now we run into trouble: information, unlike physical goods, is very easy to copy. It may take a genius to write a good book, but any common scribe can copy it. And then there are the copy machines. In fact, go take a look at all the books you own, and tell me: how many of them are copies? In my case, the answer is: all of them. I don't own any original manuscripts (unless you count my own writings, but I don't consider my jumbled piles of scribblings to be books). If I want to read something by, say, Edgar Allen Poe, I don't have to ask Poe to write me a fresh copy, nor do I have to deprive anyone else of their copy. I just need someone who'll let me make a copy of their copy. And whenever I see a copy of Poe's work in the wild, I can usually assume that Poe wasn't paid for it, since the vast majority of existing copies (including the one on my hard drive) were made long after his death!
Now, this offends our notions of fairness! "How can someone get something for free? Someone had to have lost something!", we think. And so we call copying "theft of intellectual property" or "piracy", because it feels like something got stolen. But this is wrong. Nothing has been stolen. No one's purloined a violin. Neither the maker nor the customers have lost anything when one customer makes their own copies and gives them away.
Now this is the point in the discussion where pro-copyright folks bring up sunk costs. It takes time, talent, and energy to make good content, just as it does to make a good violin. Surely the content deserves some protection, yes? But wait! Somebody moved the goalposts. "Sunk costs" didn't even come up when we were discussing the Stradivarius. Why bring them up now?
But more generally, sunk costs are irrelevant, for 2 reasons:
In fact, let me harp on that second point some more. Sunk costs were the justification for DRM. And what is DRM? It is the loss of control of your own computer. It invades your privacy and takes over your property. Snowden's leaks are only the latest reminder of how dangerous this sort of thing is. Crooks and elites are all too eager to gain control of our lives, and we shouldn't be giving them any opportunity to do so. That's why DRM is inherently bad (Why, Mozilla? Why?). I won't let anyone try to justify it with a sob story of how much it costs to make good cinema.
Now then, if DRM can't be justified on the basis of sunk costs, what can be justified? For the effects of copyright are in need of justification.
Remember the central idea, that content creators deserve to get paid for each and every use of their content (or at least, for every copy). The practical effect of this is to deny customers their freedom to communicate. They must either report to the creator for every copy they make and submit to a fine, or they must refrain from copying at all. This is a broad prior restraint on speech and press. Is it justified?
It gets worse. All manner of communication goes on in private, and all of it is potentially full of illicit copies. If we want to pay the creators for every copy, we'll have to either revoke the right to privacy in order to track down the copies, or we'll have to pass a blanket tax on private communication (in effect, assume that all people are guilty and punish them in advance). The current U.S. legal system has both the loss of privacy and the punitive tax. Are either of these justified?
In summary, the idea of getting paid for every copy is nice, but there's no way to implement it without compromising or abandoning other nice ideas, such as free speech, privacy, presumption of innocence, and secure ownership of personal property. That's a lot to give up, and for very questionable benefits, too.
That's why I have no qualms with "piracy", and I refuse to condemn the file-sharers. Not because they're heroic or anything like that, but just because they're doing nothing wrong. Copying, sharing, and ruining people's business plans are natural human activities, and no one has any business trying to outlaw them.
P.S. Given the opportunity, I would download a car. Wouldn't you?
Re: Re: The Urn It Act
"So what should we do about the Fascist threat?" That in a nutshell, is the five million dollar question. As far as I can tell, fascism always wins. It wins because the people behind this eternal business plan are all billionaires - people that everyone wants to be or be like, and who we thus do not allow ourselves to see as bad people. After all, we don't want to be, or be like, bad people, right. So they get a pass. We simply cannot believe that our heroes are trying to drain the nation and its people of their assets. After all, these are the people who already have everything one could want right. Add to that the simple fact that their wealthy status allows them the extra-legal privilege of buying their way out of any misdeed they are caught perpetrating, and the fact that they normally pay others - minions - to do the actual dirty-work, and you have the new "Untouchables". Due to their combined wealth, a fascist cabal controls the law by controlling the law makers. Politicians, notorious for accepting "Gifts" in return for creating legal loopholes in restrictive laws that billionaires can safely traverse to "get the job done", are lined up at the doors of these billionaires, begging to lend a hand in the destruction of their nation, for a price. But this is ALWAYS the way of things. If there is an exit from this mess we have built around us again, and the inevitable final exploitation by our own most influential citizens, history does not offer it. I think in fact that many if not most of the failed attempts at civilization in our past, (save a few natural disaster scenarios like buried by volcanoes), were due in fact to this very same situation - fascism - the wealthy attempting to take it all by subverting the law. It might help somewhat to note that Fascism is NOT a political aspiration. It is 100% commercial. It is the act of wealthy individuals, conspiring in secret, to take it all, by utilizing government as a weapon and a disguise. It simply works. If there is an answer to this recurring nightmare, we had better damn well start looking soon though. So far they have won every battle, simply because we refuse to believe who the enemy - who we all want to be or be like - is, and so we attack someone we don't like instead of the true enemy, making matters worse.
The Urn It Act
"...that will act to suppress both free speech online and the ability to communicate securely and privately."
But of course. A fascist regime cannot thrive and prosper as long as the public can conspire secretly against it via encrypted communications, and the ability to actually spy on every single citizen has been a fascist wet-dream since - forever.
This bill will kill many birds with one stone and open the USA to some serious legally-allowed exploitation and dissident-culling by the Trump Cartel and any billionaires (s)elected as POTUS who follow until the USA is a bankrupt hulk - wide open to invasion - and just another foot-note in history, which will of course be written by the billionaires.
And just in time too, what with many of the big US cities considering the notion of dismantling some of the extra-legal (read criminal) and secret police units and the criminally insane Police Unions that train and protect them, this bill will help put things back on track and let the billionaire's final solution get back in the saddle, before any real damage to the business-plan occurs.
And as long as its socially totally un-Cool to consider - let alone discuss - the idea that a fascist regime could actually take over the US government and destroy the USA from within, the Urn It Act should suffice to eliminate any real threats to the systematic transfer of the American economy into off-shore safe haven bank accounts by American billionaires and their foreign friends.
It IS happening here folks.
Wake up or kiss your American Dream goodbye.
Silly Wabbit...
"...but, in reality, the real goal is protecting government employees from the people they serve."
You don't really think that these folks are actually interested in "serving" the public do you?
That is extremely naive.
The millionaire members of any fascist or corporate-owned state are solely and explicitly interested in turning the public into a money making machine through the re-writing and re-interpretation of laws that normally protect the public from the exploits of the rich.
The public serves them, until the public is empty, and then the fascists move on to the next victim state.
Fascism is a fatal social disease.
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Dinosaur Money VS The Public Interest
"... definitely not what Congress wanted to have happen when it passed Section 230 in order expressly to protect that economic vitality."
Perhaps not.
However, there are a large number of corporations, politicians and other criminal types who would absolutely love to see this idiocy written in stone, specifically in order to break the internet.
Hollywood and the Record Industry come to mind immediately.
Looks like a legal battle between dinosaur-money and the public-interest.
Given the present track record for the courts to get this stuff right, my bet is on the Dinosaurs getting their way. Again. And again.
After all, its just so damned hard to say No to Money.
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The United States of Denial
Methinks that as long as everyone keeps "believing" that all of this stuff is caused by ignorance/incompetence, rather than willful, intentional malice, its just gonna get worse. And, from I've seen over the last decade, its just gonna get worse.
Solution
Easiest solution.
End the War on Drugs. Immediately.
After all, according to what we are learning these days, nobody is really waging any sort of "war" against the Drug Trade anymore anyway.
The Police have basically become employees of the Drug Trade, earning a far larger income from the Black Market than that which the public pays them. Exactly the same thing happened during the last moral prohibition.
This double income explains too, their recent Reverse Robin Hood assaults on the public, as their loyalty shifts towards the employer who pays the higher wage.
As the Drug Cartels collapse without a legally contraband product to sell, all the Drug Warrior Cops immediately lose their secondary employer and their second income, as the Drug-Trade based forfeiture laws lose their very reason for existence.
Lets face it. Ending the war On Drugs would be the biggest blow to organized crime since the end of the last phony political morality war - Prohibition.
Problem solved. No muss. No fuss.
And most of the bad cops - who are only in it for the extra income - would likely quit the force soon there-after, making room for employment of some actual crime fighters and investigators.
Then, while sanity is actively present, maybe we could also accept that the Drug Problem is a social and medical problem and not a criminal problem, and that its purported dangers are actually far more Hollywood Hero bullshit than Reality-based anyways.
Hey. I can dream, right. :)
Re: Re: Easier?
The Game is a simple Get Richer Quicker Scam.
Its where the very wealthy alter the laws so that they can rob the nation blind, legally.
It doesn't matter if the scam does not last long because the wealthy are busily pulling in millions of US dollars every day and like all the rich-guy scams of the past, nobody involved in this Reverse Robin Hood scenario will suffer any consequences when and if the scam and its membership is busted.
They changed the laws of the land first and are thus not guilty of breaking any laws.
The peasants have had a good run and have accumulated a ton of nice things. Its now time for the lords of the land to legally reverse that trend and take all those nice things for themselves.
Call it Trickle Up Economics.
Fascism is not a form of government.
Its a business plan.
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Re: Re:
Feet to the fire.... methinks one's time might be better spent attempting to get We The Peoples' heads out of their asses.
One must realize that once a voting system becomes fully corrupt, the public threat of NOT VOTING for someone no longer has teeth.
Once the politicians know who will win and who will not, before the vote is cast, they can and will, do as they damn well please.
Exactly what we are seeing today.
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Re: Fix the problem
You make it sound like the creation of their "claimed" moronic lack-of-filing non-system was a mistake they need to correct.
How could they realistically claim to need a legal loophole because of the horrid state of their record-keeping, if they don't convince the public that their record keeping ability is a complete disaster?
The simple truth however, is that they can and often do - for special corporate clients - search and retrieve thousands of documents in mere minutes, using their state of the art (tax-payer purchased) documents storage, retrieval and record-filing systems.
It is only the public-face of the agency that cannot find its ass with both hands, and that is 100% agency policy and has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with their record storage and retrieval capacity.
If the claim was true, you would be seeing that agency begging for federal funds to update its technology, every two years, minimum.
As with almost every other branch of the American Fascist Government, bull-shitting the public, while shrugging off legal irritants that might benefit the public in some fashion, is now policy.
And why not? After all, like you, Americans mostly believe the bullshit their government and its agents spew, and besides, Americans no longer have the means to verify or dispute the claims anyway.
F.O.I.A. now stands for "Fuck Off Inquisitive Americans"
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Requiem; Cause of death; Fascism - national putrefaction
Ah, the inevitable growth of fascist control, as it continues to shield itself from the clutches of those it exploits, while insuring only that the millionaires making up its membership, thrive and profit at the expense of all others, by changing the laws of the land.
Keep up the great work America. Your continued ignorance of the situation you face and your determined failure to act in self defense, will insure the fascists succeed in bringing America to its knees financially from within, and thus create a perfect warning to the people of all other nations on earth.
We've never before actually witnessed and thus recorded, the process of national disintegration from within, at the hands of a nation's own wealthiest individuals, since it is they, the winners, who always write history.
Fascism. National Entropy.
Know that your sacrifice will aid those other nations who are watching your demise, in protecting themselves from the greed of those who are least in need, when the fascist millionaires use these same methods in their own respective nations.
Thank you Americans.
You do the nations of the world a great service.
You will not be forgotten.
Soon.
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Malice VS Incompetence
As with so many other old truisms, this one is long overdue for an overhaul.
In today's fake news media, official misinformation and pure bullshit political forum, this is now the reality.
"Never attribute to stupidity, incompetence, or ignorance, that which can be better explained by malice, and attempted deception."
In fact, the only truism that still rings absolutely true, is the one so few actually utilize.
"Follow the money trail."
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Legalized Bribery cancels Democracy
"The problem, of course, is that all the public screaming in the world has yet to shift the thinking of
{well-lobbied}
net neutrality opponents in Congress..."
There, in a nutshell, is the real problem today, not just for Net Neutrality but for absolutely everything concerning law.
As long as its 100% legal for corporate crooks to buy politicians, and 100% legal for politicians to take bribes and do the bidding of their corporate benefactors by writing laws that help the crooks make more money and ending laws that interfere with the crooks' methods of making more money, this thing can only get worse.
No matter what the public does, it will have far less effect than giving politicians wads of money has, and even when the public succeeds, it will only be a temporary success, undone once the crooks raise the amount of each politician's "lobby", or legal graft pay-outs.
End "lobby" payouts - legalized bribery - and you will go a long way towards making things right again.
As long as it is up to the politicians to decide whether to end legal graft or not, nothing will change. They will NEVER choose to end the lobby fountain that constitutes a second income for doing corporate favors.
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