If you compare it with Gold

Which you shouldn’t do because gold is a very volatile commodity. It went down from 2012 to 2018, then up from 2018 to 2024, then it went up extremely quickly since 2024. Gold is just something people put money in based on FOMO, or based on fears of stock market crashes, or based on other “vibes”.

In addition, a lot of the world’s gold is simply held in the form of jewelry in India. It’s not even used as a direct “investment”, it’s just a pretty, shiny metal.

the USD moved in lockstep until the US left the Gold [Standard]

You’ll never guess why that happened… although if you look at the name of the standard, it might give you a clue.

which is why a single blue collar salary that used to be enough for a good house, a car and the expenses for a family of 5 in the 60s

In the US. You know, essentially the only industrialized country that escaped from WWII with its manufacturing infrastructure intact, and was, as a result, supplying the entire world while everyone else was rebuilding.

The UK was another victor in WWII along with the US, but their workers weren’t living in luxury. Rationing of meat ended in 1954 in the UK, nearly 10 years after the war. If you want to know what it was like in the UK in the post-war period, just look at stories of the early lives of the members of the Beatles.

In the US, the post war period not only followed the war, but also the great depression. The great depression ended with the New Deal, which shifted a lot of power from the rich to the workers. Workers from 1945 to the 1970s or so greatly benefited from those policies.

So, this 1960s family with 5 kids, a car and a good house on a worker’s salary wasn’t typical. It was probably the best off that workers were in the world since European workers who survived the black plague – and all it took was a devastating world war that destroyed the infrastructure of most of the world’s developed countries, other than the USA, plus a devastating depression lasting a decade that forced the government to institute programs that gave workers benefits.

(Oh yeah, and it only applied to white Americans.)

AI art is currently free because it’s subsidized by the AI companies who are spending investors’ money to try to buy marketshare and mindshare. When that subsidy ends, you’ll have to pay for it too.

It does provide nearly unlimited access to knowledge. But, the Internet user needs to bring their own ability distinguish knowledge from strongly held ignorant opinions.

If you’re an eye surgeon you can probably use the Internet to find out the newest techniques in eye surgery. You probably have enough knowledge of your own to spot fraudulent things, and to know where the real information can be found and how it can be vetted. OTOH, if you’re an eye surgeon, you might know nothing about farming, so you might not be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. If you’re not careful you might come away believing some crazy farming-related conspiracies.

In the past there were gatekeepers. That sounds like a bad thing. In some ways it was. But, at least Walter Cronkite wasn’t allowed to go on a rant about the chemicals turning the frogs gay.

Yes people make creative things, but they don’t make games that requires a game studio and give them away for free

They used to, they called it shareware. It could happen again.

Look, if my personally ignoring copyrights for certain things causes certain media companies to go bankrupt and causes a whole re-think of how the creative economy should work, I think that’s a good thing. I don’t think my choices are that powerful, but we can always hope.

Of course you understand that people made creative things before copyright existed. You understand that that happened when the copyright term was 14 years. You understand that it happened before Warner Bros. Discovery existed.

You understand that it is possible for a company to make games without requiring a 120 year copyright term, right?

Right. Copyright is supposed to be for the good of the population. In order to encourage people to create things, they’re given a short monopoly on it after which it enters the public domain. The original copyright term was 14 years, I think.

The new setup is absurd. The public doesn’t benefit for more than a century, at which point the copyrighted item is probably of next to no value.

And, like you said, the artist rarely benefits. Writers are probably the ones who come the closest to benefitting. They only have to pay their agent a cut, their publisher, then, finally Amazon. With advances, etc. you have to wonder how much they get paid for each additional book sold. Musicians basically don’t make anything anymore, with the bullshit that Spotify (partially owned by the record companies) does. And then movies, TV, and other video stuff, the amount that creators get is massively watered down, and that’s after the “Hollywood accounting” makes profits from even successful things disappear.

I really don’t respect copyright anymore because it doesn’t benefit me (a member of the public) nor does it benefit the artist. It’s just a tool to hand money to certain entertainment conglomerates.

“give it back” means “seed to at least a ratio of 1.0”

There are a few authors and musicians who do things like that, selling things DRM-free on their own site. But, the US “content” industry is a handful of mega companies who are doing everything possible to maximize copyright so they can lock up and control as much stuff as possible.

Piracy has never been stealing.

When you steal something, the real issue is that the other person is deprived of some tangible item they used to have.

When you “pirate”, you’re merely violating a copyright. The government granted someone a monopoly on the expression of an idea, and you’re not respecting the government’s decision on that item’s exclusivity.

Something about using an LLM to make art and wanting people to appreciate them for that.

Nobody said that your nerdy cousin should do it for free. Give him/her $10 or something.

You ate at the onion.

Yes, then (as expected) the companies passed on the cost to their customers.

If there were a competitive marketplace, retailers would be offering refunds to their customers or putting on huge deals so that annoyed customers didn’t switch to a rival retailer.

But, when Amazon has some massive chunk of the market, what happens if they piss off a customer? What are they going to do, go to the mall? The mall closed a long time ago.

Blondies? Pound cakes? Cheesecakes? Honestly, none of those appeal to me. They all seem like such bland treats.

Vanilla is a good flavour enhancer. I love it as an addition to something like a chocolate mousse or an egg nog. But, on its own it’s as exciting as white rice, or spaghetti without sauce.

The disease caused the decease.

Yes, ISO-8601 is objectively better than YYYY/DD/MM or MM/DD/YYYY or other strange formats. But, because it isn’t the most widely used format, it can be less efficient when there’s no danger of MM/DD vs DD/MM confusion.

If person A is talking to person B and they’re from the same culture, some culture-specific version like DD/MM/YY might be easier for them because it’s what they’re both used to, even if it is objectively inferior. But, if person A is talking to person C who is from a different place/culture things get more challenging because if the day of the month is 12 or under, it’s hard to distinguish between DD/MM or MM/DD. Even if person C knows that person A comes from a place that does DD/MM, they don’t know if person C used the native DD/MM format they’re used to, or translated it to them to MM/DD because person A was trying to make things easy for person C.

One of the advantages of the hyphens in ISO-8601, aside from them working with files, is that hyphens in dates are less common than slashes, so if someone sees 1212-11-12 they’re more likely to understand that it’s an ISO-formatted date. If they see 1212/11/12 it might be a MM/DD date or a DD/MM date.

But dd-mm-yyyy is better for day to day daily life usage

Uh, no.

To Apple’s… phone?

The “boing” part should really be the sound of parts falling off.