Random Dent

I have a few personal rules about it, eg. I’ll try not to pirate smaller, independent things where it might conceivably screw over the creator, but other than that it’s all fair game IMO.

As a side note, it’s been interesting to grow up hearing non-stop from the corporate world that piracy is evil and is killing art or whatever, only to watch them do a full 180 in the last couple of years now that they need to pirate the entire internet to train AI.

Yeah it’s pretty much the same whenever the Money People get involved in anything. It inevitably stops being about making something really cool, or even just making a living from making something, and becomes all about shipping the absolute minimum viable product and then strip-mining as much cash as you can out of it at all costs, and then dumping it when people stop buying it.

And the thing that gets me is that this makes nobody happy. The creators hate it because they’re making trash, consumers hate it because they’re being ripped off, and the Money People aren’t even happy because they never are. They always want more.

Out of curiosity I looked it up and I guess when it was built, the Statue of Liberty cost ~$250,000, which is only about $7.8 million in today’s money. And it costs about $6 million a year to maintain.

Back when the Queen was still alive, Stephen Fry described her role as being “as if Uncle Sam was a real person.” Meaning, being a sort of personification of the country without actually holding any real power over it. I’m not a huge fan of the British monarchy, but if we have to have one I’m at least glad it’s limited to being essentially a powerless tourist attraction.

It sucks that we all have to live through it, but I feel like the current times in the US are a really interesting test of the sort of limits of democracy. By that I mean, what happens if the majority of the population just willingly elects the worst person they can find, and at the same time every check, balance, rule and tradition that everyone assumed would keep things on the rails just… turn out to be kind of bullshit because nobody is willing to enforce them?

It raises all sorts of weird questions, like at a certain point is it okay to overrule democracy in some way to protect the country and the people, even if the majority seem to want to just run the bus off a cliff? And what about the people who didn’t vote for this? Are they expected to just go down with ship or have to leave their home country altogether? An informed and engaged populace is vital to a healthy democracy, but what if enough people are uninformed/propagandized enough that they just willing take down the whole country? Does the rest of the world just let it implode?

I have no real answers to these questions, but I’d love to be studying this whole situation from like 100 years after it’s all over.

Bit of a weird thought, but I wonder also if they see Mozilla as a sort of controlled opposition too? As in, keep Firefox around so they don’t get in trouble over antitrust or something like that?