I understood the crappy, incorrect points you tried to make very well. It is just that they were indeed crappy and incorrect.
Yes, people did buy houses outside what they should have been buying, but they were told, very explicitely, that they would be able to afford them. The banks made arguments for increasing wages and growing economies and told people they had nothing to worry about. Was it stupid of people to buy them? yes, but it is also stupid to fall for a scam artists trick, that doesn't make the scam artist any less guilty. Especially considering they played houses as investments, telling people that their house would increase in value, so if they were in danger of losing their house they could sell it and make a profit. Scam artists to the bone.
Also, look at the average home price per square foot from 1900 until 2008, and compare that to the increase in income from 1900 to 2008. The latter will be much smaller than the former, by at least a single order of magnitude, if not by two. If you don't understand the problems that causes, you don't deserve to be having this debate.
They absolutely can, the primary mortgage bank in my area is currently was holding 30 homes off the market last year, prices increased locally and they sold a couple of them at the increased price. It is easy to control the markets when you control supply, and in the area I live in right now most people have to walk to where they work to get there, so living further away isn't an option, they either buy the more expensive property, or they can't take the job. And building up in the city is extremely expensive and takes a large amount of capital to do, it is typically only done where property values are off the charts.
Yes, small towns have jobs, but very few compared to urban areas. There are far more businesses and industries in cities than in small towns.
Also, if you can't comprehend the expense of a higher education or training program for the average person, if you honestly believe it trivial, then you are more out of touch with the average american than anyone else in the top 5% of the country, and you aren't even qualified to give bigoted commentary on the subject.
Banks derive their power from ownership of physical capital. They have the goods, and they hate the goods in the location you need them to be at. You either buy from the bank, or you don't buy at all, and you either spend 50+ years saving up for a cheap house, or you get a mortgage. Banks have the power because they have the physical capital that you need, and you don't. If people had the capital, they wouldn't need banks and could get buy without them, but they don't, so they need to use banks for these things. And sure, you can get smaller places to an extent, but property values are ridiculous even for small houses and tiny apartments in some places, for example, a studio apartment in DC can cost you upwards of 1,000 a month, but where I live you can get a full 2 bedroom for half that, but of course I live a good 1000 miles away from there. To get an apt. under 750 a month, you would have to live at least 100 miles from DC, and even then it is a very slim maybe, and you then have to have a car you can rely on, and be able to afford gas, repairs , and parking.
Also, you don't lose your house on a mortgage until you haven't paid for two years, when it enters a state of default. Simple fact is that people need a place to sleep, shower, and store things like clothes.
Well, it wouldn't have to be either if the FCC stayed the fuck out of content and only worked on making sure business didn't fuck over consumers by censoring data and overcharging to eliminate competition. Sadly, It seems it will be one or the other, and both are extreme. But business is going about it far more slowly that the FCC takeover will this month if it isn't stopped in time.
Now to get good 3d television and porn without those stupid glasses you will have to overpay for something you can't watch in a room that has natural light, as the glare would be insane (being an apple product) and will cost 15x as much as the equivolent would from any other company (being an apple product).
There is nothing to blame on the "other side" at all.
The simple fact of the matter is that the banking industry can remove enough houses on the market, keeping them abandoned, that the demand is extremely high.
And your argument totally ignores many fiscal realities, first of all, you live where the jobs are, the slightest change in housing prices has a dramatic effect on rental values, less than 10% of the country can afford the asking price on a house at any point in their life. You would have to save up for at least 15 years, and considering how housing prices have been rising in the past 50 years, the expectation is that in 15 years you would only have a tiny percent of the new cost.
Really, it all has to do with location, supply and demand. Demand is absolutely static, supply is controlled enough by banks that they control prices, and can force people out of areas and into others. Banks can affect negative social change, they can create ghettos, they can cause areas of low property value and dangerous neighborhoods to essentially remove people who aren't generally qualified to protect themselves in shitty areas out of the market for areas, their power is ridiculous, and the simple fact is that most of the property that isn't owned by banks is in the country, but the jobs are in the cities, where the banks own the vast majority of the property, giving them so much control over supply that they have more power over cities that local, state, and national governments combined.
In any important job, interviews are what matters. If a potential employer sees you as out of touch, that puts you at the bottom of the list. Especially important in times when the unemployment rate is so high.
First of all, modern copyright has nothing to do with protecting artists, it has to do with perpetually milking every cent possible from customers. Copyright was originally 2 years of protection, and meant to protect people from somebody going out and selling your work as their own. Now it has turned into "you are piggybacking off something related to us in some way, pay us millions of dollars or we will crush you with the full might of the law, even including copyrights up to 80 years old, that have nothing to do with protecting our intellectual property as much as it does profiteering from the fact that you are a part of culture"
The extent of the power a law holds is only as far as the people put into it. If a law by definition fucks everyone up the ass, it doesn't hold a lot of power. Think of what I am doing as downloading movies to distract me from my shitty life in my freezing slummy apartment with cluster headaches and stress out the wazoo. I don't need to justify violating an invalid law.
4. Yea, because I want to spend more time figuring out if a movie will be good than I will spend watching it
First sale doctrine has been irrelevant for years now. You see, you are never actually buying a movie, you are buying a license to use the movie under certain conditions, some of those conditions include not reselling the material with very strict penalties. Basically, as if copyright law wasn't fucked up enough, companies figured out that instead of selling the movie or the software, they can just sell licences to use that specific piece of data, and stipulate conditions in the fine print that nobody even knows about until they are sitting in a courtroom with the best lawyer their poor ass could afford, crying their eyes out as they watch their life be destroyed because they sold a copy of a movie they no longer like to a friend. This happens all the fucking time, especially with "bulk suits" by the copyright giants.
Also, renting and lending of movie is prohibited under the standard license you buy, only certain organiztions which pay large amounts of money for said advanced licenses get to rent them, and they, on top of the original fee they have to pay royalties. Like I said, this system is so fucked up it makes people with emotions want to jump off bridges, and it has made many actually do so.
I moved from one state to another. In order for me to receive the benefits associated with residency, I have to pay at least 10k in income taxes over the time I have lived here. Since all of that time has been spent in college and in agonizing pain from cluster headaches, I have not even come remotely close to this number.
9. Let me rephrase that. I don't respect those laws, and feel no need to work within them at all. All of the existing laws were flat out purchased through corrupt means, and are all ignored for more extreme contractual laws that are fundamentally damning. What kind of moron in their right mind would pay for software when the license says "we can remove your right to use it at any time without refund, you can not resell it, you can only use it for the following purposes etc" I sure as hell wouldn't. But because they don't tell you that you are only buying a license, as they are not legally required to, they sell things at prices so ridiculously unfair that only a moron would pay them. And frankly, illegally made laws are illegal, to follow them would be supporting corruption, and I frankly don't give a shit. What reason is there to work within the law here? It will never change as long as the xxIAs pour tens of millions of dollars a year into lobbyists, lawyers and new methods to circumvent all laws and be evil irregardless of how fair the law is.
And yes, it is breaking the law. But I don't give a shit and neither does anyone else. It is like when peo
You are joking, right? Because if not, holy shit humanity sucks and all because of you.
You see, they are releasing data that shows banks have been fucking people over in more ways than the ways they have been doing it publicly. It is like unveiling evidence that shows a serial killer also happens to rape children, eat puppies while they are still alive and kicks kittens for fun, along with baby seal clubbing.
Banks own 60% of the property and wealth in the US. They have been publicly leveraging that massive wealth to drive up the prices of everything they own to sell off, like De'Beers does with diamonds except with shelter, and forcing people into homelessness. If that is their publicly known business model, aren't you curious to find out what they have been hiding?
YES YES YES. YES. OH GOD YES. OH YEA. FUCK YEA. Please, release this data soon. I want this so bad. Hell, considering how incredibly evil the bank and corporate system in America is on a public level, I am terrified and excited and horny to find out how evil they have actually been being this entire time.
1. The English language is so completely made of cultural memes generated by the entertainment industry and so sparsely touched by outside sources that without watching a substantial amount of iconic movies, a good 25% of conversation makes no sense. I know, because that was once me.
2. You did not interpret my intent correctly, I simply responded to your response before I realized you responded to something I never said, grammatically or intently.
3. Law is not a moral imperative, moral imperative should determine law. The idea that law is a moral imperative is one of the most profound logical fallacies in relation to freedom, and allows governments to become oppressive without opposition. It is sickening, disgusting, and flat out false.
4. Every single movie does have thousands of reviews. The problem is that every movie gets review ranging from "an hour you will never be able to suppress from your memory" to "the greatest movie experience of my life" and everything in between, all with great justifications of their position and backing. Adequately educated as to the potential quality of the movie still leaves you totally clueless about whether it is going to be worth it or not.
5. Selling movies second hand is illegal according to current copyright law, it is considered pirating and unless you are granted a resale license you can be imprisoned for up to 5 years and fined up to 100,000 dollars for such an offense. This has happened before, and will happen again. Understand why the copyfight over copyright is copyimportant?
6. My illegal download is still illegal if I donate the sale price of the movie to the organization that made the movie instead of the post production company that profits from it and passes on a negligible percentage to the actual workers. Even our fucking entertainment industry has become share-cropping, along with everything else outside of the financial markets and top brass management positions.
7. I have a pay as you go cell phone because there is a good chance I won't be able to afford the cheapest plan available when the bill arrives. This is not the kind of luxury I can spare.
8. I am not a local citizen because I haven't paid more than 10,000 in state income taxes, and I am ineligible for all state and local programs, such as libraries, even though I am a citizen of the country.
9. I am not playing the victim, nor am I trying to justify my actions. I am simply claiming that I don't give a shit about a corrupt system in which any money spent goes strait to sick bastards. To pay for a movie would be as morally degrading as punching one of the actors in the face and laughing at them while some old white guy in a suit eats ice cream coated in gold powder just because he can because he figured out how to corner a market on the transfer of goods from production to consumer. I simply don't give a damn. If the system isn't going to work in a morally acceptable way, or at least in a way that wouldn't make me feel like I just ate a raw baby kitten, then I won't abide by the rules of said system. As long as I have the ability to circumvade the system and as long as I cannot otherwise afford to comply with the system, I feel no need to contribute to it.
Think of it this way: it isn't a question of whether or not I am ignoring the law or not, it is a simple matter of I am going to do what I have to get what I want, and as long as the system is morally disgusting, i have no need to feel bad about it.
First of all, leaving a shit system in place where exposing your face by accident gets you stoned to death in the public square as a women is not much better than anything else. We are moving in to stop that kind of thing, and fix those systems.
One of the more secular religious fundamentalists is still a religious fundamentalist, and some oppression is still oppression.
Also, most of our forces are out of Iraq, we have some forces, but mostly support and training at this point, and they seem to be managing fine. As long as they can keep the peace and fight off tribes of extremists that arise from time to time they will have the peoples vote. The situation hasn't exactly exploded into violence sine we withdrew the majority of our troops.
Yes, and as a religious extremist who controls fear in a great way, what do I tell people my reasoning is? That which can benefit me the most if they eliminate the reason. Withdraw and bam, they have free reign with no force attempting to suppress them. If I were trying to turn public opinion in a representative republic (US), then what do I do? I tell them all they have to do is withdraw troops and I will stop. And the fastest way to do that: I blew you up because you are here. I will keep blowing people up until you leave. Anyone with half a brain knows it is a load of shit and that they would be blowing people up no matter what, hell, before we invaded them they flew two damn boeing 747 superliners full of fuel into the world trade centers, killing thousands and destroying a global symbol.
Really, the bull in that message could really use some work.
But in hindsight, we should have let the soviets have the middle east. Then the failed states in the middle east would at least be going after countries like China, North Korea and Russia instead of the US and Europe. Irregardless, it is a very unstable region, it has been for a long time, and it is about damn time somebody did something about it. And the US trying to install stable governments that know how to suppress violent tribalism is certainly a step in the right direction. What really should have been done is the elimination of the borders as drawn by Europeans, and replace them with borders along cultural lines. Then at least the fighting would be across country lines instead of internal, and that kind of war is a lot easier to handle from an international perspective.
Of course they don't have to, but this is the modern world. If you lack knowledge of popular memes because you can't afford movies, good luck connecting with employers and understanding bizarre aspects of our culture.
Also, I didn't say it was a requirement, I was saying that in order to watch it, they would have to download it because they can not afford it, not they have to watch it so they must download it. Clearly English is not your strong suit.
Plus, the current business model is broken. Nobody wants to pay 10-20 bucks for a dvd or 50 for a blue-ray of a movie that has a VERY good chance at being worth jack shit. On the other hand, I have bought a number of movie that I once downloaded in high quality so that I can enjoy them in a resolution greater than 800x640. And if I had the money I would see good looking movies in the theater. I managed to see inglorious bastards in the theater and it was worth every penny. Not so much on a 15" screen.
The problem is these companies screw over all of the talent, and give almost all of the profit, at least 95% to some white guy wearing a nice suit that weights 350 pounds and has four mistrisses, a wife and a dozen kids and goes to church every sunday.
And the matter of fact is that all I have to do if I want something is get on the webs and borrow a copy of it. The real question is, just because I got something for free, does that mean other people have a right to fuck me up the ass with a mega-dildo made of rusty iron? I don't fucking think so.
So get off your self righteous ass, learn english, get out of other peoples business, and stop playing the "poor people deserve nothing but boredom and suffering" bullshit that you think you have a right to pull just because you have the funds to toss around.
Oh, I still worked great when I get back to society, but I was fine with society to begin with. My point is that solitude drives you crazy very quickly. The effects only last until you get human contact again, but it only takes a couple weeks of minimal contact to drive you mad. Six months would be absolutely unbearable. Groups to the arctic and explorers travel in groups though, solitude is not an issue.
And sure you can live, and survival conditions are easier because they keep your mind under stress, but alone in an apartment and Dostoevsky's underground man is about as accurate as it gets.
Rehabilitation can be reliably done, you just need to employ counselors and make sure that they have some kind of skill to subsist on upon leaving prison. A big part of the problem is that if you only know how to survive one way, you only survive one way, even if that way is illegal. If we did anything at all to stop the revolving prison door, and the culture war of republicans and controlling culture by imprisoning those whose lifestyle they don't like, and the prison lobby, which makes millions petitioning for tougher sentences and more of them.
There are so many things wrong with that statement I would laugh if I wasn't so tired.
First of all, before we were there religious fundamentalists controlled the countries, literally all it took to become a big league terrorist leader is saying "I wanna kill people." Considering the improvement in conditions, removing the taliban from power and the extreme shrinking of al-Qaeda to something that is not much of a threat. Considering the numbers coming back, we have made substantial improvement. And right now Iraq is well on their way to entirely civilian police force. If it wasn't for our refusal to go into Pakistan, Yemen, or Somalia, we could be a lot further in fixing this mess.
Also, a lot of terrorist attacks are suicide attacks. I would love to know how you know what reasons these men gave, considering there is nothing left of them.
That, and it gives Republicans a means of controlling culture to their will, which generally means punishing anyone who can't hide their "immoral" discretions.
You are absolutely wrong about that. My neighbor had some serious issues after spending too much time isolated from people just in his apt. and that is with getting groceries every week. Over the past summer, I only saw people twice a week and was otherwise alone and I almost lost my fucking mind. I was well on my way in fact.
I would say total solitary confinement, you could drive somebody stark raving mad, without sensory deprivation, in 2 months, and that is for the strong willed like myself. If you want to know how quickly it happens, read the book "The Yellow Wallpaper" in all honesty, that is about how quickly it happens.
Extreme sensory deprivation only takes hours to get somebody into a panic attack, solitude takes weeks, but certainly not 6 months. You really don't think it would be that bad until you find yourself panicking for no reason and flipping out at the empty walls of your apartment, searching for even the faintest human contact, even if by chat-roulette.
But again, that doesn't fix anything at all. It just drives the person nuts and sends them back out into society. Something tells me that would cause more problems than it would fix, and something else tells me that rehabilitation would be much more effective.
Because if terrorists can destroy the peacekeeping efforts of the US in the middle east and destabilize the region, it means more terrorists again, except this time there would be a lot of them that know what they are doing and how to do it. That means danger for all countries.
National security is fairly important. Frankly, I think he should not be posting things that don't do the public any good, like response plans, stuff like that. On the other hand, "damaging diplomatic relations" is like saying we did some really terrible things and don't want other people to know about it. Documents that show proof of terrible actions of our own government should absolutely be published without a second thought.
sticking a wrench in automatic fucking of people too poor to buy movies. See, doing anything to fight the 'sacred' copyright monopolies who largely make money off of the work of others, is seen by the copyright legal society as so holy that to interfere with it should be punishable by torture and death. While this is all their crazy fantasy, it is what it is. Find a bullshit charge and place it.
But none of that really matters because firms of copyright lawyers buy up copyrights from the business after they stop making big bucks, and then sue the shit out of tons of people. Really, this is a case of business people profiteering off of the work of others, and making their living solely by destroying lives of people who were too poor to afford a movie and had to download it to watch it, and then threatening to take away what little they have and put them in debt forever, if not in prison. There is nothing even morally ok about that.
And in the vast majority of cases they make it all back and a shit-ton more in the first week it is out, because people like seeing movies on the big screen. It is entertainment, it is date time, it will make them millions even if downloading it illegally was common practice. Plus in this day and age, by the time something has been out two years it has long since been forgotten about. And regardless, they will profit off it for years, because it is a lot easier to buy a blue-ray disk than to illegally download a 25 gb movie. Most downloads could fit on a cd with room to spare, but are sold on DVD anyways as movie companies think it makes it sound like it is really better quality.
And really, a lot of those notices go out to people who don't even know what pirating is, much less partake in it. Anyone who doesn't have a secured wifi has likely gotten such a notice.
Plus, in all reality, they have the right to charge for the cost of the download, and no extrapolated social costs. They have the right to send you a bill for no more than the cost of the quality version of the movie that was downloaded - the cost of producing the packaging that the movie is sold in. If this were the case, they would get all of their money back when they send out requests, but instead they demand more money than anyone who has to resort to pirating even has the ability to pay, and threaten to destroy lives etc. I think you can see what I am getting at here.
And drive people stark raving mad in days. Which, just so you know, is more likely to cause suicide attempts and in most cases won't have any effect outside of making them very angry people.
Most crime isn't somebody just going out and saying "fuck other people, I want to be rich" it is about "I can't pay the bills, I can't get a job, the gov't has cut me off, I don't know what to do" and then going for a walk to clear their head and robbing someone, or someplace. Also, people who got addicted to drugs have a tendency to rob people to pay for their habit.
That consists of the vast majority of those in prison in America, of which an entire 1% of our population is. If instead, we worked on fixing the poverty problem and sent drug addicts to mandatory rehabilitation and counseling to get them clean and into a stable place in society, instantly the crime rate would drop by a good 50%, and repeat offenders would be much less likely, if not a rarity instead of a common thing.
The people you are talking about are the white collar criminals, the people who fuck and exploit others for their own good. This consists of about 99.9% of millionaires, and a lot of small time money launderers, etc. Right now, this is far less than.1% of people in jails. First of all, we need to make the legal system not care if somebody is rich or poor, as opposed to the present system where money means you are almost immune from jail time. Also, our country has embedded very strongly in its mentality that poor people are fundamentally dirty and terrible and need to be punished while rich people are fundamentally good in every way. This is a problem, because it is simply not the case. These people, who abuse others for profit and make their living by damaging society absolutely need to be imprisoned, and solitary confinement is not the solution, especially not welding them in. Health issues would be fatal, they would literally all go mad, people as a fundamental need of sanity require social contact. And taking intelligent, calm people and turning them into whack ass nut jobs then releasing them to the public is not going to solve anything, but will make a lot of problems.
Would you rather punish people or fix them? I vote the latter, prison is the former. And as it so happens, prisons tend to just make small time first offenders into hardened criminals with nothing to live for, as you lose pretty much any chance of getting a good job, living in a nice neighborhood, having friends outside of prison, after you have been there. We could instead rehabilitate criminals and help them get into social positions where continuing a criminal lifestyle would be harmful to them, instead of practically unavoidable.
Personally, I don't see the purpose in conviction for revenge. Shit happens, and when it happens to you, you need to get over it instead of spending the rest of your life watching another man suffer in what goes far beyond revenge. Punishment doesn't dissuade crime, wealth does. If we fixed poverty instead of fucking the poor as much as possible and ensuring that there are always more and more poor around, there would be a lot less reason for them to commit crimes. If you don't need the money to live, you are a lot less likely to steal it.
Or we could just be dumbasses and tell people to suck it up and not do bad things as if it will make a difference. The 'suck it up' mentality achieves nothing for society. The "hey, a problem, lets fix it" mentality does.
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I understood the crappy, incorrect points you tried to make very well. It is just that they were indeed crappy and incorrect.
Yes, people did buy houses outside what they should have been buying, but they were told, very explicitely, that they would be able to afford them. The banks made arguments for increasing wages and growing economies and told people they had nothing to worry about. Was it stupid of people to buy them? yes, but it is also stupid to fall for a scam artists trick, that doesn't make the scam artist any less guilty. Especially considering they played houses as investments, telling people that their house would increase in value, so if they were in danger of losing their house they could sell it and make a profit. Scam artists to the bone.
Also, look at the average home price per square foot from 1900 until 2008, and compare that to the increase in income from 1900 to 2008. The latter will be much smaller than the former, by at least a single order of magnitude, if not by two. If you don't understand the problems that causes, you don't deserve to be having this debate.
They absolutely can, the primary mortgage bank in my area is currently was holding 30 homes off the market last year, prices increased locally and they sold a couple of them at the increased price. It is easy to control the markets when you control supply, and in the area I live in right now most people have to walk to where they work to get there, so living further away isn't an option, they either buy the more expensive property, or they can't take the job. And building up in the city is extremely expensive and takes a large amount of capital to do, it is typically only done where property values are off the charts.
Yes, small towns have jobs, but very few compared to urban areas. There are far more businesses and industries in cities than in small towns.
Also, if you can't comprehend the expense of a higher education or training program for the average person, if you honestly believe it trivial, then you are more out of touch with the average american than anyone else in the top 5% of the country, and you aren't even qualified to give bigoted commentary on the subject.
Banks derive their power from ownership of physical capital. They have the goods, and they hate the goods in the location you need them to be at. You either buy from the bank, or you don't buy at all, and you either spend 50+ years saving up for a cheap house, or you get a mortgage. Banks have the power because they have the physical capital that you need, and you don't. If people had the capital, they wouldn't need banks and could get buy without them, but they don't, so they need to use banks for these things. And sure, you can get smaller places to an extent, but property values are ridiculous even for small houses and tiny apartments in some places, for example, a studio apartment in DC can cost you upwards of 1,000 a month, but where I live you can get a full 2 bedroom for half that, but of course I live a good 1000 miles away from there. To get an apt. under 750 a month, you would have to live at least 100 miles from DC, and even then it is a very slim maybe, and you then have to have a car you can rely on, and be able to afford gas, repairs , and parking.
Also, you don't lose your house on a mortgage until you haven't paid for two years, when it enters a state of default. Simple fact is that people need a place to sleep, shower, and store things like clothes.
He who controls the spice...
Exactly.
Well, it wouldn't have to be either if the FCC stayed the fuck out of content and only worked on making sure business didn't fuck over consumers by censoring data and overcharging to eliminate competition. Sadly, It seems it will be one or the other, and both are extreme. But business is going about it far more slowly that the FCC takeover will this month if it isn't stopped in time.
Now to get good 3d television and porn without those stupid glasses you will have to overpay for something you can't watch in a room that has natural light, as the glare would be insane (being an apple product) and will cost 15x as much as the equivolent would from any other company (being an apple product).
There is nothing to blame on the "other side" at all.
The simple fact of the matter is that the banking industry can remove enough houses on the market, keeping them abandoned, that the demand is extremely high.
And your argument totally ignores many fiscal realities, first of all, you live where the jobs are, the slightest change in housing prices has a dramatic effect on rental values, less than 10% of the country can afford the asking price on a house at any point in their life. You would have to save up for at least 15 years, and considering how housing prices have been rising in the past 50 years, the expectation is that in 15 years you would only have a tiny percent of the new cost.
Really, it all has to do with location, supply and demand. Demand is absolutely static, supply is controlled enough by banks that they control prices, and can force people out of areas and into others. Banks can affect negative social change, they can create ghettos, they can cause areas of low property value and dangerous neighborhoods to essentially remove people who aren't generally qualified to protect themselves in shitty areas out of the market for areas, their power is ridiculous, and the simple fact is that most of the property that isn't owned by banks is in the country, but the jobs are in the cities, where the banks own the vast majority of the property, giving them so much control over supply that they have more power over cities that local, state, and national governments combined.
I sure as hell hope so. Whats better, every last charge is extremely valid, no lopped on bullshit like the opposition uses. This pleases me.
In any important job, interviews are what matters. If a potential employer sees you as out of touch, that puts you at the bottom of the list. Especially important in times when the unemployment rate is so high.
First of all, modern copyright has nothing to do with protecting artists, it has to do with perpetually milking every cent possible from customers. Copyright was originally 2 years of protection, and meant to protect people from somebody going out and selling your work as their own. Now it has turned into "you are piggybacking off something related to us in some way, pay us millions of dollars or we will crush you with the full might of the law, even including copyrights up to 80 years old, that have nothing to do with protecting our intellectual property as much as it does profiteering from the fact that you are a part of culture"
The extent of the power a law holds is only as far as the people put into it. If a law by definition fucks everyone up the ass, it doesn't hold a lot of power. Think of what I am doing as downloading movies to distract me from my shitty life in my freezing slummy apartment with cluster headaches and stress out the wazoo. I don't need to justify violating an invalid law.
4. Yea, because I want to spend more time figuring out if a movie will be good than I will spend watching it
First sale doctrine has been irrelevant for years now. You see, you are never actually buying a movie, you are buying a license to use the movie under certain conditions, some of those conditions include not reselling the material with very strict penalties. Basically, as if copyright law wasn't fucked up enough, companies figured out that instead of selling the movie or the software, they can just sell licences to use that specific piece of data, and stipulate conditions in the fine print that nobody even knows about until they are sitting in a courtroom with the best lawyer their poor ass could afford, crying their eyes out as they watch their life be destroyed because they sold a copy of a movie they no longer like to a friend. This happens all the fucking time, especially with "bulk suits" by the copyright giants.
Also, renting and lending of movie is prohibited under the standard license you buy, only certain organiztions which pay large amounts of money for said advanced licenses get to rent them, and they, on top of the original fee they have to pay royalties. Like I said, this system is so fucked up it makes people with emotions want to jump off bridges, and it has made many actually do so.
I moved from one state to another. In order for me to receive the benefits associated with residency, I have to pay at least 10k in income taxes over the time I have lived here. Since all of that time has been spent in college and in agonizing pain from cluster headaches, I have not even come remotely close to this number.
9. Let me rephrase that. I don't respect those laws, and feel no need to work within them at all. All of the existing laws were flat out purchased through corrupt means, and are all ignored for more extreme contractual laws that are fundamentally damning. What kind of moron in their right mind would pay for software when the license says "we can remove your right to use it at any time without refund, you can not resell it, you can only use it for the following purposes etc" I sure as hell wouldn't. But because they don't tell you that you are only buying a license, as they are not legally required to, they sell things at prices so ridiculously unfair that only a moron would pay them. And frankly, illegally made laws are illegal, to follow them would be supporting corruption, and I frankly don't give a shit. What reason is there to work within the law here? It will never change as long as the xxIAs pour tens of millions of dollars a year into lobbyists, lawyers and new methods to circumvent all laws and be evil irregardless of how fair the law is.
And yes, it is breaking the law. But I don't give a shit and neither does anyone else. It is like when peo
You are joking, right? Because if not, holy shit humanity sucks and all because of you.
You see, they are releasing data that shows banks have been fucking people over in more ways than the ways they have been doing it publicly. It is like unveiling evidence that shows a serial killer also happens to rape children, eat puppies while they are still alive and kicks kittens for fun, along with baby seal clubbing.
Banks own 60% of the property and wealth in the US. They have been publicly leveraging that massive wealth to drive up the prices of everything they own to sell off, like De'Beers does with diamonds except with shelter, and forcing people into homelessness. If that is their publicly known business model, aren't you curious to find out what they have been hiding?
YES YES YES. YES. OH GOD YES. OH YEA. FUCK YEA. Please, release this data soon. I want this so bad. Hell, considering how incredibly evil the bank and corporate system in America is on a public level, I am terrified and excited and horny to find out how evil they have actually been being this entire time.
1. The English language is so completely made of cultural memes generated by the entertainment industry and so sparsely touched by outside sources that without watching a substantial amount of iconic movies, a good 25% of conversation makes no sense. I know, because that was once me.
2. You did not interpret my intent correctly, I simply responded to your response before I realized you responded to something I never said, grammatically or intently.
3. Law is not a moral imperative, moral imperative should determine law. The idea that law is a moral imperative is one of the most profound logical fallacies in relation to freedom, and allows governments to become oppressive without opposition. It is sickening, disgusting, and flat out false.
4. Every single movie does have thousands of reviews. The problem is that every movie gets review ranging from "an hour you will never be able to suppress from your memory" to "the greatest movie experience of my life" and everything in between, all with great justifications of their position and backing. Adequately educated as to the potential quality of the movie still leaves you totally clueless about whether it is going to be worth it or not.
5. Selling movies second hand is illegal according to current copyright law, it is considered pirating and unless you are granted a resale license you can be imprisoned for up to 5 years and fined up to 100,000 dollars for such an offense. This has happened before, and will happen again. Understand why the copyfight over copyright is copyimportant?
6. My illegal download is still illegal if I donate the sale price of the movie to the organization that made the movie instead of the post production company that profits from it and passes on a negligible percentage to the actual workers. Even our fucking entertainment industry has become share-cropping, along with everything else outside of the financial markets and top brass management positions.
7. I have a pay as you go cell phone because there is a good chance I won't be able to afford the cheapest plan available when the bill arrives. This is not the kind of luxury I can spare.
8. I am not a local citizen because I haven't paid more than 10,000 in state income taxes, and I am ineligible for all state and local programs, such as libraries, even though I am a citizen of the country.
9. I am not playing the victim, nor am I trying to justify my actions. I am simply claiming that I don't give a shit about a corrupt system in which any money spent goes strait to sick bastards. To pay for a movie would be as morally degrading as punching one of the actors in the face and laughing at them while some old white guy in a suit eats ice cream coated in gold powder just because he can because he figured out how to corner a market on the transfer of goods from production to consumer. I simply don't give a damn. If the system isn't going to work in a morally acceptable way, or at least in a way that wouldn't make me feel like I just ate a raw baby kitten, then I won't abide by the rules of said system. As long as I have the ability to circumvade the system and as long as I cannot otherwise afford to comply with the system, I feel no need to contribute to it.
Think of it this way: it isn't a question of whether or not I am ignoring the law or not, it is a simple matter of I am going to do what I have to get what I want, and as long as the system is morally disgusting, i have no need to feel bad about it.
First of all, leaving a shit system in place where exposing your face by accident gets you stoned to death in the public square as a women is not much better than anything else. We are moving in to stop that kind of thing, and fix those systems.
One of the more secular religious fundamentalists is still a religious fundamentalist, and some oppression is still oppression.
Also, most of our forces are out of Iraq, we have some forces, but mostly support and training at this point, and they seem to be managing fine. As long as they can keep the peace and fight off tribes of extremists that arise from time to time they will have the peoples vote. The situation hasn't exactly exploded into violence sine we withdrew the majority of our troops.
Yes, and as a religious extremist who controls fear in a great way, what do I tell people my reasoning is? That which can benefit me the most if they eliminate the reason. Withdraw and bam, they have free reign with no force attempting to suppress them. If I were trying to turn public opinion in a representative republic (US), then what do I do? I tell them all they have to do is withdraw troops and I will stop. And the fastest way to do that: I blew you up because you are here. I will keep blowing people up until you leave. Anyone with half a brain knows it is a load of shit and that they would be blowing people up no matter what, hell, before we invaded them they flew two damn boeing 747 superliners full of fuel into the world trade centers, killing thousands and destroying a global symbol.
Really, the bull in that message could really use some work.
But in hindsight, we should have let the soviets have the middle east. Then the failed states in the middle east would at least be going after countries like China, North Korea and Russia instead of the US and Europe. Irregardless, it is a very unstable region, it has been for a long time, and it is about damn time somebody did something about it. And the US trying to install stable governments that know how to suppress violent tribalism is certainly a step in the right direction. What really should have been done is the elimination of the borders as drawn by Europeans, and replace them with borders along cultural lines. Then at least the fighting would be across country lines instead of internal, and that kind of war is a lot easier to handle from an international perspective.
Of course they don't have to, but this is the modern world. If you lack knowledge of popular memes because you can't afford movies, good luck connecting with employers and understanding bizarre aspects of our culture.
Also, I didn't say it was a requirement, I was saying that in order to watch it, they would have to download it because they can not afford it, not they have to watch it so they must download it. Clearly English is not your strong suit.
Plus, the current business model is broken. Nobody wants to pay 10-20 bucks for a dvd or 50 for a blue-ray of a movie that has a VERY good chance at being worth jack shit. On the other hand, I have bought a number of movie that I once downloaded in high quality so that I can enjoy them in a resolution greater than 800x640. And if I had the money I would see good looking movies in the theater. I managed to see inglorious bastards in the theater and it was worth every penny. Not so much on a 15" screen.
The problem is these companies screw over all of the talent, and give almost all of the profit, at least 95% to some white guy wearing a nice suit that weights 350 pounds and has four mistrisses, a wife and a dozen kids and goes to church every sunday.
And the matter of fact is that all I have to do if I want something is get on the webs and borrow a copy of it. The real question is, just because I got something for free, does that mean other people have a right to fuck me up the ass with a mega-dildo made of rusty iron? I don't fucking think so.
So get off your self righteous ass, learn english, get out of other peoples business, and stop playing the "poor people deserve nothing but boredom and suffering" bullshit that you think you have a right to pull just because you have the funds to toss around.
Oh, I still worked great when I get back to society, but I was fine with society to begin with. My point is that solitude drives you crazy very quickly. The effects only last until you get human contact again, but it only takes a couple weeks of minimal contact to drive you mad. Six months would be absolutely unbearable. Groups to the arctic and explorers travel in groups though, solitude is not an issue.
And sure you can live, and survival conditions are easier because they keep your mind under stress, but alone in an apartment and Dostoevsky's underground man is about as accurate as it gets.
Rehabilitation can be reliably done, you just need to employ counselors and make sure that they have some kind of skill to subsist on upon leaving prison. A big part of the problem is that if you only know how to survive one way, you only survive one way, even if that way is illegal. If we did anything at all to stop the revolving prison door, and the culture war of republicans and controlling culture by imprisoning those whose lifestyle they don't like, and the prison lobby, which makes millions petitioning for tougher sentences and more of them.
There are so many things wrong with that statement I would laugh if I wasn't so tired.
First of all, before we were there religious fundamentalists controlled the countries, literally all it took to become a big league terrorist leader is saying "I wanna kill people." Considering the improvement in conditions, removing the taliban from power and the extreme shrinking of al-Qaeda to something that is not much of a threat. Considering the numbers coming back, we have made substantial improvement. And right now Iraq is well on their way to entirely civilian police force. If it wasn't for our refusal to go into Pakistan, Yemen, or Somalia, we could be a lot further in fixing this mess.
Also, a lot of terrorist attacks are suicide attacks. I would love to know how you know what reasons these men gave, considering there is nothing left of them.
That, and it gives Republicans a means of controlling culture to their will, which generally means punishing anyone who can't hide their "immoral" discretions.
You are absolutely wrong about that. My neighbor had some serious issues after spending too much time isolated from people just in his apt. and that is with getting groceries every week. Over the past summer, I only saw people twice a week and was otherwise alone and I almost lost my fucking mind. I was well on my way in fact.
I would say total solitary confinement, you could drive somebody stark raving mad, without sensory deprivation, in 2 months, and that is for the strong willed like myself. If you want to know how quickly it happens, read the book "The Yellow Wallpaper" in all honesty, that is about how quickly it happens.
Extreme sensory deprivation only takes hours to get somebody into a panic attack, solitude takes weeks, but certainly not 6 months. You really don't think it would be that bad until you find yourself panicking for no reason and flipping out at the empty walls of your apartment, searching for even the faintest human contact, even if by chat-roulette.
But again, that doesn't fix anything at all. It just drives the person nuts and sends them back out into society. Something tells me that would cause more problems than it would fix, and something else tells me that rehabilitation would be much more effective.
Because if terrorists can destroy the peacekeeping efforts of the US in the middle east and destabilize the region, it means more terrorists again, except this time there would be a lot of them that know what they are doing and how to do it. That means danger for all countries.
EXACTLY! Putting the same old shit in shinier cases, and really the tablet market doesn't mess with the laptop market at all.
National security is fairly important. Frankly, I think he should not be posting things that don't do the public any good, like response plans, stuff like that. On the other hand, "damaging diplomatic relations" is like saying we did some really terrible things and don't want other people to know about it. Documents that show proof of terrible actions of our own government should absolutely be published without a second thought.
sticking a wrench in automatic fucking of people too poor to buy movies. See, doing anything to fight the 'sacred' copyright monopolies who largely make money off of the work of others, is seen by the copyright legal society as so holy that to interfere with it should be punishable by torture and death. While this is all their crazy fantasy, it is what it is. Find a bullshit charge and place it.
I wish I still had mod points, because this should be rated insightful +10
But none of that really matters because firms of copyright lawyers buy up copyrights from the business after they stop making big bucks, and then sue the shit out of tons of people. Really, this is a case of business people profiteering off of the work of others, and making their living solely by destroying lives of people who were too poor to afford a movie and had to download it to watch it, and then threatening to take away what little they have and put them in debt forever, if not in prison. There is nothing even morally ok about that.
And in the vast majority of cases they make it all back and a shit-ton more in the first week it is out, because people like seeing movies on the big screen. It is entertainment, it is date time, it will make them millions even if downloading it illegally was common practice. Plus in this day and age, by the time something has been out two years it has long since been forgotten about. And regardless, they will profit off it for years, because it is a lot easier to buy a blue-ray disk than to illegally download a 25 gb movie. Most downloads could fit on a cd with room to spare, but are sold on DVD anyways as movie companies think it makes it sound like it is really better quality.
And really, a lot of those notices go out to people who don't even know what pirating is, much less partake in it. Anyone who doesn't have a secured wifi has likely gotten such a notice.
Plus, in all reality, they have the right to charge for the cost of the download, and no extrapolated social costs. They have the right to send you a bill for no more than the cost of the quality version of the movie that was downloaded - the cost of producing the packaging that the movie is sold in. If this were the case, they would get all of their money back when they send out requests, but instead they demand more money than anyone who has to resort to pirating even has the ability to pay, and threaten to destroy lives etc. I think you can see what I am getting at here.
And drive people stark raving mad in days. Which, just so you know, is more likely to cause suicide attempts and in most cases won't have any effect outside of making them very angry people.
Most crime isn't somebody just going out and saying "fuck other people, I want to be rich" it is about "I can't pay the bills, I can't get a job, the gov't has cut me off, I don't know what to do" and then going for a walk to clear their head and robbing someone, or someplace. Also, people who got addicted to drugs have a tendency to rob people to pay for their habit.
That consists of the vast majority of those in prison in America, of which an entire 1% of our population is. If instead, we worked on fixing the poverty problem and sent drug addicts to mandatory rehabilitation and counseling to get them clean and into a stable place in society, instantly the crime rate would drop by a good 50%, and repeat offenders would be much less likely, if not a rarity instead of a common thing.
The people you are talking about are the white collar criminals, the people who fuck and exploit others for their own good. This consists of about 99.9% of millionaires, and a lot of small time money launderers, etc. Right now, this is far less than .1% of people in jails. First of all, we need to make the legal system not care if somebody is rich or poor, as opposed to the present system where money means you are almost immune from jail time. Also, our country has embedded very strongly in its mentality that poor people are fundamentally dirty and terrible and need to be punished while rich people are fundamentally good in every way. This is a problem, because it is simply not the case. These people, who abuse others for profit and make their living by damaging society absolutely need to be imprisoned, and solitary confinement is not the solution, especially not welding them in. Health issues would be fatal, they would literally all go mad, people as a fundamental need of sanity require social contact. And taking intelligent, calm people and turning them into whack ass nut jobs then releasing them to the public is not going to solve anything, but will make a lot of problems.
Would you rather punish people or fix them? I vote the latter, prison is the former. And as it so happens, prisons tend to just make small time first offenders into hardened criminals with nothing to live for, as you lose pretty much any chance of getting a good job, living in a nice neighborhood, having friends outside of prison, after you have been there. We could instead rehabilitate criminals and help them get into social positions where continuing a criminal lifestyle would be harmful to them, instead of practically unavoidable.
Personally, I don't see the purpose in conviction for revenge. Shit happens, and when it happens to you, you need to get over it instead of spending the rest of your life watching another man suffer in what goes far beyond revenge. Punishment doesn't dissuade crime, wealth does. If we fixed poverty instead of fucking the poor as much as possible and ensuring that there are always more and more poor around, there would be a lot less reason for them to commit crimes. If you don't need the money to live, you are a lot less likely to steal it.
Or we could just be dumbasses and tell people to suck it up and not do bad things as if it will make a difference. The 'suck it up' mentality achieves nothing for society. The "hey, a problem, lets fix it" mentality does.