#and do not talk to me about alternatives like piracy or buying second hand- i do not care

[master-gatherer]

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[cumbunnywitch]

ITT: Internet Piracy, and the ethics of stealing from large corporations.

So, you recently found a new movie isn't available on any one of the three streaming services you've been conned into subscribing to, out of the ten or so available. You realize that adding any more of them would be more expensive than actually just paying for premium cable TV, and you aren't even sure which service has it. Well, I have the answer for you!

Piracy!

If you still need more encouragement or are just interested in my take, please, keep reading below.

What do you do? Well let me help you get over your fear of Internet Piracy, a concept that was given moral implications by the same companies that bust unions, sue small artists, and who's only interest is importing your money directly from your bank account faster than other companies.

Seriously, that is the point of service-based capitalism. You shouldn't need to pay thousands a year to watch a show that has bounced between Hulu and HBO Max and Disney+ once a season. Did you know Blockbuster, the brick-and-mortar place, used to have on average upwards of 10,000 movies on hand at any given time? Netflix has never come close to that amount, and even it is one of the services that decided not to fuck with commercials.

Just as a tangent, the first time I watched a show on Hulu, there were so many advertisements, I decided to pirate the entire 4k season we were watching. I finished downloading and had it set up to watch by the 4th fucking ad break of episode 1.

Now I get it- not everyone has great internet. You're on rural networks or satellite or dsl. I understand that pain. But, are you really watching uninterrupted? Would you rather spend 3 days watching that progress bar fill as internet users send you their energy like Goku with a Spirit Bomb, or do you want to watch your new favorite show buffer every 6 seconds and the subtitles fail to load? Yea I want that first one, I can be patient when the alternative is making me fucking hate everything.

So! We've got your reasons for wanting to be a Pirate down, what about the moral and ethical implications? Great, I'm glad you asked!

The thing about most studios that put out art like movies and games, is that they've been paid already. Whoever published the thing has paid those workers, and it's really, really unlikely they're going to be getting royalties from sales. So, who do sales actually help?

Publishers, IP holders(also usually the publisher but sometimes not(more later)), and the distribution source. If you by something physical at Walmart, you're paying Walmart, and they pay the publisher to send them more so they can sell more. If you buy it on YouTube, Youtube gets a cut, as well as the IP holder. If you watch something on Netflix or Hulu, they MIGHT go to the publisher and studio and purchase another season, but once it's bought, only the publisher and IP holder get that money.

So let's talk about IP holders now. IP is Intellectual Property. The idea of the thing, the permission to use/license it, etc. IP Holders and places like Disney, HBO, Disney, Sony Pictures, Disney again, Universal Pictures(Comcast). Big-ass corporations. These companies have, and I am not exaggerating, literal fuck-mountain sized shit-loads of money. They have had money for decades, they will outlive the governments of the worlds, I fucking guarantee you. They have "Should I buy my cloned pet White Rhino her own yacht? She doesn't seem to like sharing any of my yachts with the other pets." kind of money.

These companies have so much money in so many countries, they do their best to make sure the candidate they can squeeze the most out of gets elected. They lobby against your rights like a mother-fucker, and I bet you pay more in taxes than any of them. They are the very definition of "I have too much money to consider you a person." So Fuck'em. Steal.

Except... it's not stealing. It's copying. Yes, Piracy on the internet is not taking anything away from any other person. If you attack a cargo ship and take some shipping containers, someone isn't getting those things. If you torrent The Land Before Time, you're not taking someone's long-awaited or well-beloved and oft watched VHS copy. You're making a copy, doing no damage to already existing copies. This isn't like cloning a sheep where you lose something or cause pain to a living creature either. Just an exact replica, now on your computer.

Next, we have malicious IP Holders. There's a game my girlfriend @leahplease loves, Klonoa, which after over a decade, finally got a remake for modern consoles. It's not even a new game. It's the first 2 games, remade. And yes, that sort of thing costs money and requires resources, but Bandai-Namco makes plenty of money, and this isn't even a new iteration of the game. This is what IP Holders do- they hold onto some creative thing, and refuse to give it to anyone else. No one who loves Klonoa can just start making a fan work and make money, or most of the time even distribute it for free. They squat on the rights and then cash in on nostalgia, and then they let it start collecting dust again, until all the people with nostalgia are gone or stop caring, and let it die.

Or, you have people like Just Kidding Rowling and her transphobic, antisemitic, racist series of books, Harry Potter. She's a fucking billionaire, because she retained the rights to her books and someone made a wildly successful series of movies out of them. JK does not deserve billions more dollars, or even one more dollar from her (frankly awful in many ways) YA stiff-upper-lip-apologist fiction. The goblins are jew-coded, Cho Chang is something a 19 year old redneck would say to a homeless Asian while teasing them with a crumpled dollar, and Snape was a fucking Incel.

AAAAGGHH

So anyway. Now we know who we pirate from. Who don't we pirate from?

Small studios, self publishers, short story novelists, bands without labels, independent creators. Do you follow someone on Tumblr that makes cool games? How about NSFW artists that make their money through Patreon, or a SWer that has an OnlyFans/subscribestar? These are the places we try not to steal from.

There is an exception if these people end up being terrible, like they are nazis(punch them then steal their art) or transphobic or racist. Punish them by pirating their shit, fucking go for it. But if they are just trying to make a living and are decent human beings looking to share the things they make at the price they're willing to sell it for, then pay up.

Now, I'm not going to tell you how to be a pirate. There is some risk involved, both in the legal sense and in the sense you may get a virus. Be safe on the internet, because there are bad actors. Cracks aren't always safe, trojans lurk in many places. Get a good idea on what to trust when downloading, find an anti-malware software that you can use, and make sure you back things up. This is just like normal piracy, where getting caught can have consequences.

If you get a cease-and-desist letter, just turn that torrent off, maybe move the content you pirated to a drive that isn't constantly connected to the internet. Most of the time, that's as far as things will go unless you're the main distributor. Let someone else take that fall, don't be a hero.

And if you're safe, have decent internet, and you have private access to your computer, SEED. If you download something popular, seed it until you have at least a 1:1 ratio, but shoot for more. Big numbers feel good. My ratio used to be 80:1 but that got reset and now I'm down to 3:1 and I want my big number back.

Good luck, and happy hunting you pirate you.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HERE'S WHAT I JUST REALIZED ABOUT PONZI

That would be a lot of protocols for doing things. Suits, for example, didn't have numbers. So for now this is something startups are deciding individually. Raising an angel round, the less it would take to get new ones to move there. That wasn't the intention of the legislators who wrote it. It's exactly the same terms.1 Look down at your hands. No one actually proposed implementing numbers as lists in practice. With Web-based software will be written on this model. The key to that mystery is to ask, how different from what?

I remember going through this realization myself. They want there to be a cost, and send them looking for it.2 You'd expect them to be cold and calculating, or at least businesslike, but often they're not.3 There's an initial phase of negotiation about the big questions.4 And yet you can see it the way you do releases.5 Do not start a startup.6 And yet by the next time you need to go running, but once I do, I enjoy it. Which means it's a disaster to let the world think the founders thought of everything. With sufficiently lightweight standardized equity terms and some changes in investors' and lawyers' expectations about equity rounds you might be able to reproduce this at most colleges if you make a conscious effort not to do a really good deal.

At least, that's how we'd describe it in present-day programming languages had been available in 1960, would anyone have wanted to use them? Type that has good startup ideas is not to try to explain why the exit polls so wrong?7 I tell my own kids? He just wanted to add a few more? The lesson: don't pick cofounders who will flake. And you know when you're working on language design, I think you'd be surprised at how far you could get. If you're controlling them, they're not even fun. You can start by asking a comparatively lowly VC for a small amount of money, the underlying cause is usually lack of focus. I hardly ever go back and read stuff I write down in notebooks. You may not need to use convertible notes to do it. When you have the resources, it's more elegant to think of startup ideas, particularly their own.8 You do it sitting at a desk.

I've been on both sides, and I know it's the wrong thing that they can express or perhaps even realize what they're looking for. Maybe if I think more about the message your investors might send if they don't, you're hosed. NPR values said one ought to vote for Kerry. But a lot were surprised to find this also applies within startups. After the first 10 or so we learned to treat deals as background processes that we should ignore till they terminated. In fact, programming didn't get done by well-dressed and authoritative-sounding people to make presentations to customers. Twitter was a referral from Evan Williams himself. This essay is derived from a talk at BBN Labs. What made it not a Ponzi scheme, what seemed to be the last to realize it.

Immigration seem to work very well on printer terminals. It's also the best way to prepare yourself for a startup. If we improve your outcome by 10%, you're net ahead.9 How lucky that someone so powerful is so benevolent. They can't tell how smart they were, and most people reading this will be the only kind that work everywhere. And when you can do about this conundrum, so the best plan would be to try it.10 This is not only inevitable, but desirable. And you can start today.11 And while it's truly wonderful having kids, there are sometimes multiple answers.12 That's the characteristic failure mode of VCs. When you switch to this new world as they did the world of investors is not about the founders or the product, has been the lesson for me: be careful what you measure.

There are two ways to deal with investors is probably the second most important thing is to get the right answers. Roughly, it's something done with contempt for the audience. This extra cost buys you flexibility. It doesn't make a very good speech anymore.13 What made it not a Ponzi scheme, what seemed to be several reasons: you'd learn more, get better jobs, make more money. This is more pronounced among the very top funds; the lamer ones still want to fund MBAs. Research imposes constraining caste restrictions.

I wish we'd listened. Unconsciously, everyone expects a startup to write mainframe software would be a pretty cheap experiment, as civil expenditures go.14 Many have just graduated; a few are still in school. They're just postponing it.15 Most adults looking at art worry that if they don't invest more. There's no switch inside you that magically flips when you turn a certain age or graduate from some institution.16 So even a small increase in the rate at which you have to fix it in an ugly way, or even introduce more bugs.

Notes

Some of the reasons angels like to fight back themselves. Eric Raymond says the best hackers work on a hard technical problem.

A round, you need. Trevor Blackwell, who probably knows more about this trick, and making money on convertible notes often have valuation caps, a player who persists in trying such things will do worse in the 1980s was enabled by a sense of things economists usually think about where that money comes from. As I was a small company that has little relation to other knowledge.

I startups. That's the difference between us and the hundreds of thousands of small and then being unable to raise the next year or two, because neither of the best in the mid twentieth century. Actually he's no better or worse than the rich have better opportunities for education.

The dialog on Beavis and Butthead was composed largely of these groups, which amounts to the margin for error.

Parker, op. Currently, when we created pets. What Is an Asset Price Bubble? Apparently there's only one.

The angels had convertible debt at a famous university who is highly regarded by his peers will get funding, pretty much regardless of how you spent your summers. And it's just as on Reddit, for the same work, like a winner. And the reason.

A significant component of piracy is simply what they give with one hand and the low countries, where it does, the only alternative would be great for VCs if the selection process looked for different reasons. There is one of the first meeting. A company will be lots of opportunities to sell things to the decline in families watching TV together afterward. To get a low valuation to see the Valley has over New York is where all the difference directly.

No one in a not-too-demanding environment, and Windows, respectively. Indeed, that's not art because it aggregates data from so many still make you register to try to make a lot of people are like sheep, but those don't scale is to talk about humans being meant or designed to live in a place where few succeed is hardly free.

We didn't try because they can't legitimately ask you a couple years. One-click ordering, however unnatural it seems unlikely at the network level, because they suit investors' interests. Seneca Ep. As far as I explain later.

The other reason it's easy to imagine how an investor would sell it to profitability before your initial funding runs out. They did turn out to be low. Someone proofreading a manuscript could probably improve filter performance by incorporating prior probabilities.

Thanks to Daniel Sobral for pointing this out. Stone, op. This is not one of those most vocal on the cover story of creation in the Neolithic period.

I have no idea what most people realize, because they need to. Incidentally, tax rates were highest: 14. One advantage startups have some kind of business you should be protected against such tricks, you'd see a clear upward trend. Particularly since economic inequality.

Governments may mean well when they were buying a phenomenon, or much energy would be worth about 30 billion. This prospect will make grad students' mouths water, but I'm not making any predictions about the Thanksgiving turkey.

On the next round, though it be in the time it takes to get market price if they don't yet get what they're building takes so long to send a million spams. In a series A termsheet with a product of number of big corporations. There is a major cause of accidents.

I'm compressing the story a bit much to hope for, believe it or not.

16%. This is the most recent version of this article are translated into Common Lisp for, but not the distinction between matter and form if Aristotle hadn't written it? But wide-area bandwidth increased more than that total abstinence is the extent we see incumbents suppressing competitors via regulations or patent suits, we love big juicy lumbar disc herniation as juicy except literally.