As of yet, Stack Exchange has not replied to the above post, but they did promptly and within hours gave me a year-long ban for merely raising the question.
Laws mean nothing anymore. Therefore licenses mean nothing. Therefore ownership means nothing, and "theft" no longer exists.
Crucially, the policies Trump wants are designed to make himself and his cronies richer. But they will not lower consumer prices -- it's quite the opposite in most cases.
Hence the need for the diversion. Shit is about to get a lot worse and he's hoping no one will notice.
I've been thinking of the "capitalism breeds innovation" thing a lot lately.
It may still be true, but the latest innovations are always in money making. There is no incentive to innovate in a way that serves a common good, but there is massive incentive to "innovate" in a way that drives profits up.
Subscriptions to everything and the erosion of ownership? Innovative.
Insurance companies taking your money and then denying your claims? Innovative.
Uncapped campaign finance and buying politicians? Innovative (well, it's been done before, but not to this scale in a very long time).
Exactly this. There was a meme (or maybe many) rolling around long ago about how the intention was not to have humans do all the jobs and AI do all the art: quite the opposite.
This is related to the growth in productivity we have seen across industries for the last 50 years. It is through the roof, but wages are lower per unit production and aren't showing any signs of ending their stagnation.
The problem there is the same with all this new tech enhancing lives and production, while people still have to work as much as before, if not more: the gains, monetary or otherwise, are being pocketed by someone else.
It's like wage theft, but "better": it's progress theft.
While this is a good thing, holy hell does it show the absolutely horrible state of health care in the US. Medical bills that can ultimately end a life (in a financial sense) simply should not exist.
But we clearly can't fix the for-profit system, so we band-aid it by excluding the unpaid bills from credit reports.
Meanwhile, the incoming US President wants to fix health care by "privatization". Someone should let him know that the system is (mostly) privatized already, which is the entire problem.
(Edit: last bit /s. He clearly knows, but wants to make him and his cronies even more money)
I haven't even gotten on the 4k bandwagon yet. I fully expected to by now, but then again, my eyes aren't getting any better and 1080p content still looks... fine.
One more example of a private service being used as if it were a utility.
This one is especially egregious considering it's an Amber Alert, but it isn't necessarily unique. Despite the internet being designed as open, it has been taken over by private entities, and any popular service is ultimately controlled by such entities.
It's a hard problem to solve. Look at federated platforms like Lemmy: they take a long time to populate, and their usefulness is partly a function of how successful that population is. By definition, a free, open platform will not have the advertising, reach, or "it factor" of a corporate service. When given the choice between an open platform and a corporate one, we see people choose the corporate one time and time again.
We have taken our open network and handed it, willingly, to private enterprise.
This is mostly immaterial given the way Trump seems to want to operate this time around. DOGE does not need to exist; Trump will push for whatever Musk and Ramaswamy say.
This is not the time for suggestions of "well, he can't do this because X, so we don't need to worry about it." We absofuckinglutely need to be worrying about all possibilities, even those which may seem impractical given the law.
When will these corpses go away