Something ain’t right

Ah, I think what you’re looking at there is called “capitalism.” It’s what enables selfish anti-social/sociopathic behavior without triggering our societal inclination to kick them out.

Civilizations, societies, communities. The Apollo program. The National Park Service. Emancipation. Everything good we’re capable of as a species comes from working together.

The mass weaponization of it is, of course, a problem.

It is a justification, actually, because other people are using it against them to extract value for themselves. Users of corporate social media are no more responsible for their addictions than alcoholics are. Some people break it, sure. And some people use it without developing an addiction. But those aren’t the people we’re talking about here.

And it served us well for millennia. In a lot of ways, it made us who we are.

I understand that logic, but “being the product” must not really be that bad for them. They might complain, but if it was truly distasteful, they’d do something about it.

And being exploited for profit and explicitly knowing it is about the saddest thing I can think of for my fellow humans. It’s no wonder the billionaires just take and take, because people let them.

One may as well have said the same things about cigarettes up through the 1960s. Sometimes we do things against our best interests. Sometimes it’s really, really bad for us. Sometimes it’s painful and deadly.

Humans aren’t rational creatures.

Will it only be seen as an alternative once a critical mass of users move there?

I mean, yeah? That’s how social media works.

$5 million is less than 0.2% of the Disney company’s annual income. They probably spend more than that on copy paper.

That $34 a month for an individual, on the other hand, could be the cost of a prescription, or a phone bill, or something like that. It’s a more significant amount of money than it seems, especially since authors aren’t typically rolling in money.

It’s the characters that are most interesting to me. The Hardy Boys fell into public domain last year, Nancy Drew follows in a couple of years. Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh, obviously. Popeye. Sherlock Holmes.

These characters are still relevant in the public consciousness, and now they can appear in other works, be remixed, etc.

Unfortunately I think this would have the opposite effect. Individuals would have to weigh the benefits of renewing their copyright vs. buying groceries, while companies could, as you note, write off the fees as chump change.

So (for instance), next year, John Green would have to try to decide whether he should pay to renew the copyright on his massive 2012 hit The Fault in Our Stars, while Disney wouldn’t think twice about renewing the copyright on box office flop Tomorrowland in a couple years, just on the off-chance that it might someday be popular.

Instead, I think copyright should be an initial 14-year term with the option to renew twice at no charge; but the catch would be, only individuals and groups could hold and renew copyright. Copyright could not be owned by, assigned to, sold to, or administrated by any corporate entity, only by an individual and their heirs. Work-for-hire would come with an automatic blanket license assignment for the duration of the first copyright term, but following that? Better keep Andrew Stanton and Joe Ranft happy if you want to make any Toy Story sequels, Disney. And if you don’t, they can take the characters to DreamWorks after 14 years.

It gets sticky with movies themselves, since you essentially have a group of hundreds or even thousands of people to coordinate the license terms for, but I’m sure some sort of voting system or trust could be put in place. Yes, it could be manipulated, but hardly more than it already is.

The bottom line is, authors and creators (and their families) should be able to make money off of their creation for a reasonable amount of time, but also adult creators should be able to make adaptations of media that they enjoyed as children. Balancing those two things isn’t as hard as companies have convinced Congress it is.

It’s going to happen (probably this year or next), but it’s going to be mostly Chrome OS and Steam OS.

Complex stuff (talks, projects, brainstorming, etc): The notes get taken on paper. Some things stay there, because the act of writing them down is enough. Some things then move to my “second brain;” for personal stuff, that’s currently on Notion (I’m contemplating migrating it to Obsidian or something similar). For work stuff, that’s a Slack thread, or (if it’s really important) Confluence.

Todos go into Google Tasks. I used to use Todoist, but I got frustrated by how inflexible the notification system was.

Shopping lists (and a few other similar lists that need to be shared) go into Google Keep.

Absolutely. And Vice and Gawker, and to some extent even The Onion. Some survived, some did not. Dropout in particular is one of the few semi-success stories of it. It was called the “pivot to video,” and it’s almost a joke in online content communities now; especially since everyone on these platforms was saying, “we don’t want this!” even as Facebook was saying, “everyone wants this!”

This is absolutely going to crash and burn for Meta. When companies look at the metrics for their posts on these platforms, they’re going to see massive amounts of engagement, none of which converts into sales; and they’re going to stop buying ads on those platforms thinking that their market isn’t there.

Another example of AI being deployed in a place where AI is not useful; though in this case it’s actually harmful to the goal of the company deploying it.

Oh, interesting! I stand corrected.

“Can I borrow that VHS?”

20 years ago it would have been DVDs. But even before that, we didn’t call them "VHS"es. We called them tapes, or video tapes if we wanted to distinguish from audio tapes.

• Digital Wellbeing. Enforce the decisions you made about app usage. Honestly it’s kinda saved my sanity, particularly this year.

• Scheduled text messages. This should be in every single messaging app. I schedule reminders for other people, I schedule messages that I think of at ridiculous hours to go out at reasonable times, I even schedule messages so that sometime else reminds me to do something.