They call them ReTruths?

I literally can’t even.

I don’t fault him at all. If you’re in the entertainment industry (and want to stay in it), a Twitter presence is pretty much required. Online posting isn’t just a hobby, it’s part of your job, and Twitter is where the audience is.

Why are you booing them? They’re right!

It’s not even piracy though. I never saw anyone torrent Windows_XP_Home_Cracked.iso and go “Hey guys, check out this operating system I made!”

It’s not that hard.

Fuck the RIAA: The artists should hold the rights to their music, not the publishers.

Fuck AI: The rights-holders (which ought to be the artists) should be able to distribute their work without fear that a bot will be allowed to use it to compete against them.

I just don’t see a healthy creative culture where you don’t push both buttons.

Pirating Windows for your own personal, private use, which will never directly make you a single dollar: HIGHLY ILLEGAL

Scraping your creative works so they can make billions by selling automated processes that compete against your work: Perfectly fine and normal!

Comments here: “Yeah right, I’ll believe it when they explain how.”

Article: literally has a section explaining how

Edit:

Replies: “Yeah, but that’s just a summary. I’ll believe it when they explain in full detail.”

Article: literally has a link to the detailed explanation

Well yeah. I mean, the big companies hire psychologists to conduct user studies to maximize time on device, and they model their user experience after variable reward schedules from slot machines. Seems obvious that they’re nefarious.

I just have no idea how you can effectively regulate big tech.

At every corner, the fundamental dynamic of big tech seems to be: Do the same exploitative, antisocial things that we decided long ago should be illegal… but do it through indirect means that make it difficult or impossible to regulate.

If you change the definition of employment so that gig-work apps like Uber become employers, they’ll just change their model to avoid the new definition.

If you change the definition of copyright infringement so that existing AI systems are open to prosecution, they’ll just add another level of obfuscation to the training data or something.

I’m glad they’re willing to do something, but there has to be a more robust approach than this whack-a-mole game we’re playing.

Edit: And to be clear, I am also concerned about the collateral damage that any regulation might cause to the grassroots independent stuff like Lemmy… but I think that’s pretty unlikely. The political environment in the US is such that it’s way, way more likely that we just do nothing – or a tiny little token effort – and we just let Meta/Google/whoever fully colonize our neurons in the end anyway.

Silly goose, you don’t own Windows — you license it.

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Are we looking from the perspective of the user or the wall?

It is kinda brilliant though, the way they set it up.

If you don’t like the joke, you can always fall back to the meta level: this is a 40-something dad recalling how dumb and cringe-worthy he and his friends were in their 20s.

Get involved with Represent.Us, the site that was linked to.

They have a pretty good strategy, and they have been making progress.

Governance is discouraging because it’s complex. And when things are complex, it’s difficult to see progress and it’s easy to predict that there will be problems.

It’s also difficult (and unrewarding) to have serious conversations about this stuff on social media.

The posts get too long, with no satisfying simplistic conclusion, and even if you make an incredible magnum opus of a post that acknowledges enough complexity to be realistic while also being short and snappy enough to catch people’s attention… it drops off of the trending posts algorithm after a day.

Really bad graphic design overall. They might as well have used WordArt.

I’m gonna do the most annoying thing in the world here, and just tell you to go watch Finding The Money. I feel like that’s a dick move in 99% of circumstances, but I did explicitly start this thread with the notion that after watching that documentary… I felt like these were misleading terms. So if you wanna discuss whether they are misleading terms given that context, it might be useful to share that same context.

I’m down to talk more afterwards. You’ve been a good pen pal.

I, uh… think we got off on the wrong foot. I don’t see spending or taxation as a bad thing.

I mean, peep the @midwest.social, for a hint. And I did specifically say that I wouldn’t recommend any terms to replace “raise” and “revenue” that have a negative connotation, such as “deactivation” or “destruction”.

I’m also aware of the multiplier effect. The benefits of government spending are actually why I’m so interested in reframing the conversation about spending and taxation.

I will quibble with this:

The spending of a tax dollar is the beginning, not the end, of the benefit.

The spending is the beginning, yes – but not a tax dollar.

Governments don’t need to tax first, in order to spend second. It’s the opposite. That’s why “raise” and “revenue” are such terrible terms. Because they prime you to think that taxes are how we pay for things. We pay for things by just paying for them. The government spends dollars into existence. Taxation is just there to incentivize economic activity to chase those new dollars and keep a stable value.

If you view taxation as necessary to gather the funds to do something, you can have a bunch of resources just sitting around doing nothing and never be able to utilize them because you can’t gather the funds without destabilizing the economy. But if you can just spend the money into existence, you can go ahead and increase the utilization without taxing first and then adjust taxation as needed from there on out.

And it turns out, this is how money has always worked. Taxation has always been a cleanup step to keep the spending productive, not a prerequisite to enable the spending in the first place. The myth of tax as revenue is relatively new.

I’m not sure. I’m not a wordsmith or an economist. But I would expect it to be something that conveys a sense that the money is being decommissioned rather than mobilized, or annihilated rather than gathered.

But the sense of deactivation or destruction is usually a negative feeling, so I would want to find a word that puts a slight positive spin on it. This is a happy conclusion to the money’s journey. Its task is done and the inflationary pressure associated with its work is now relieved.

After watching Finding The Money, terms like “raise” and “revenue” applied to taxes seem deliberately misleading.

He was also depicted as the villain in the Robin Hood tales.

Feels about right.

So any day now, we can expect a custom porn video where the stars make fun of a meme collector’s folders and then delete them.