Piracy is midnight oyster and clam harvesting without a license to break the oyster cartel, making restaurant oysters and clams more available and cheaper to customers.

It is from this grand tradition along the US West Coast that the notion of media piracy rose, and much like the Golden Age of Piracy robbing the Spanish Silver Train, piracy is associated with snatching ill-gotten gains from those who don't deserve it, sometimes benefiting communities that do. (YMMV).

Media Piracy is copyright infringement, which is totally not stealing.

The US Supreme Court taking content out of the public domain so that it can be reserved for private use isn't stealing either, but it causes more harm than piracy.

Currently there are an awful lot of bills currently in process in federal or state legislation in the US that aim to restrict healthcare, education, legal recognition, access to gender-separated public spaces and so on. Furthermore, hate crimes against trans folk, and suicides by transgender persons are at elevated levels and have been since 2016.

It may be specific to the US, the UK, Australia and a handful of other countries, but right now a lot of bad shit is going on. Yes.

Do I know when it was last this bad? No.

The nice way to beat fascism is to make it less appealing. When families live in precarity or in poverty, they start looking to blame someone. Sometimes it's obvious, like billionaires forcing workers to pee in bottles.

In response, the affluent elite utilize their resources to create a propaganda campaign to blame scarcity on already-marginalized groups (in the US and UK, the rising genocide of transfolk is an example). Hangry communities feeling insecure + Tucker Carlson spewing hatred every night leads to fascist action.

Note that it works because its instinctive. We don't like living in societies with more than a hundred people, even when it means we get infrastructure like running potable water or internet or electricity or food at our grocery stores so we don't have to farm and hunt, ourselves. We actually have to train ourselves to live and let live, and not start a centuries-long family feud every time someone cuts us off on the freeway.

Social safety nets and better standards of living can pull people out of poverty and precarity, so they don't feel they have to begrudge everyone outside their front door.

Otherwise, we're going to keep trying to organize labor, and in response, the companies are going to try to distract with hate campaigns. Remember Trump commandeered the GOP in 2015 and 2016 because he gave permission to hate while the other candidates wanted to just continue to quietly oppress with code-worded fears. Even if we quash Trump, they'll find new Mussolini-wanabes to back and worship, and eventually they'll start a civil war.

If we don't want the civil war, we need to make shit less bad for the 80% living paycheck-to-paycheck (or worse) and we need to reform elections so that their outcomes are better informed by the interests of the public (not the elite). Or at least that's what CIA analysts (retired) interviewed on PBS think.

Once civil war breaks out, though, or they're harassing marginalized people and committing hate crimes, yeah, feel free to [REDACTED] off the face of the earth. And anytime a law is passed or a rule is adjudicated that retracts a civil right, remember that is violence.

We kinda knew this was going to happen. New Hollywood really wants to be classic Hollywood, where the studios own the lives of the actors and control every aspect. But I expected them to start by cyber-thesbianning Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, Jean Harlow and Clark Gable.

But yeah, the studios are going through a creativity crisis, now decades into a best practices run of avoiding new ideas for less risky sequels and high concept films, preferring spectacle over introspection and character study.

The copyright maximalism and Hollywood accounting isn't really about piracy or greed so much as desperation to keep old promises of exponential dividend growth.

Every bubble eventually pops, and the longer they try to keep it intact, the more disastrous the outcome.

In the meantime, I look forward to when small indie directors can star Bogart and Harlow in their concept film.

Having recently migrated from Reddit (and kept up with commercial social media hacks) I'm used to Nothing To See Here! We totally didn't store your personal information in plaintext for hackers to snatch. Oh and maybe please change your passwords. All Part Of The Show!

So, by comparison, the response here is downright heartwarming.

Youtube's ad policy is abusive, and online ads are not always safe. Regardless of whether adblocking is legal or fair to Youtube, not doing so puts you at greater risk of malware insertion so is a necessary safety precaution.

As YouTube profits from your engagement through more than ads, YouTube still benefits even when you watch videos without ads.

Yes. In order to run pirated content I had to run through a couple of hours of troubleshooting to disable the Microsoft anti-malware software, which would quarrantine and refuse to restore software without consent.

Pluton is a new name and may be Windows 11. Hopefully you can uninstall it with a third-party utility (windows utilities won't let you, and doing it by hand involves mucking around with the registry.l

I'm going to make the switch to Linux once I can brave it because Windows is malware and spyware and getting worse with each iteration.

If this lawsuit is ruled in favor of the plaintiff, it might lead to lawsuits against those who have collected and used private data more maliciously, from advertisement-targeting services to ALPR services that reveal to law enforcement your driving habits.

The point of the prisoner's dilemma is how we are prone to cooperate with others even when it's to our advantage to betray the other guy (even when it's a stranger, or someone we don't like too much.)

Partially, because fuck cops. Whether we're arrested by law enforcement or Nazis (or are wolves fighting off a bear), we hate the bastards more than we distrust our fellow heister.

But as I hinted above, our instinct to stay loyal has evolved since long before we walked upright. Think of the prisoner's dilemma as a recurring thing (because it is, even if the exact specific circumstances are not repeated) the tribe stays more coherent, and more survive if we don't leave our fellow dwarves behind (Rock and Stone!). If we left our buddies to die rather than risk ourselves to rescue them, we'd run out of buddies.

So we never take the deal. Besides which, in the US, you can't trust law enforcement anyway. They are legally allowed to lie to you to secure a confession, even a false one. And they will. Shut up and ask for your lawyer.

I'd think that we're here for the quality of our experience and not for loyalty to a specific platform. Lemmy has some great advantages, especially for those of us fresh from Reddit who are sick and tired of corporate shennanigans and enshitification.

There's lemmy politics which seems about disagreements that may or may not lead to defederating. But this isn't for me a dealbreaker, and Reddit corporate made it super clear that it was on the side of the conservatives even if it found their hate speech brand-unsafe. My kind were not liked, and we could expect spittle in our drinks now and again.

So what would woo me away from Lemmy? Only if I found subs of my interests that I couldn't find here, and then I'd haunt both platforms.