You want me to pay someone to enjoy my kayaks? To play my video games? To sit and be relaxed in my mansion?
I enjoy my household, I just don't have time to do so. I enjoy the gardening, and the cooking, and the DIY renovations. I don't have time to do them.
You're suggesting what so many people suggest -- that I stop doing all of the things that make people happy, and instead I do the work that I'm really good at and pays way more than anything else.
That's great for the bank account. But it means that I do the same work 100% of my entire life.
Actually, I enjoy the crap that I pay to see performed live, and I also enjoy the crap that I've purchased and own.
You see, these are songs that I've selected out of reality.
You're not listening to crap that free services tell you to listen to. You're, instead, listening to the crap that paid services show to you. Congrats. Of the millions of songs in their catalog, you restrict yourself to, wait for it, the ones that they promote.
Doesn't sound too different to me.
But again, to be clear, music has zero monetary value. Typically, it's a nice background thang. It doesn't matter which crap it is. In an elevator, it'll be musac. I'm not interested in selecting my free or paid crap. I'm interested in just having some crap around.
They aren't working for me. They are working for the sender.
As has always been the case, delivery, rent, income tax, packaging, sorting, are all part of fulfillment. I'm not paying fedex, and I'm not paying those IT guys. Therefore, they aren't working for me.
I'm paying, in this case, spotify. Except I won't. Because I'm not interested in paying for delivery.
I buy lots and lots of music. I buy CDs or such from musicians directly, in support of their live performance in my local theatre -- for which I purchased one or more admission tickets.
Software has value to me -- it's a tool by which I profit.
Music is pure entertainment, and has zero monetary value. Zero monetary value usually means zero money paid.
I grew up in a world with free wireless radio, and free wireless television, everywhere. I've never paid to listen to music, and I've never paid to listen to news. I ain't starting now.
If you want to grow up in a world where everything costs money, then you are welcome to spend your own. You won't be spending mine.
I'd like to adjust that last statement of yours, into a discussion without gender.
I also think that it's pretty dumb to not let women work.
I do, however, think it's very dumb to have everyone in a household working a career. I think there's no such thing as a life-work balance if everyone works a job, and works to maintain a household -- there's simply no time left to enjoy the household.
So what if we "adjust" these other cultural norms to remove "men only" and replace it with "only one human per household can work more than 20 hours per week"?
In our culture, that translates into two things. First, it's your choice who works, so there's no gender bias. Second, the teeth would be massive tax on the second income, making it completely not worthwhile for the paycheck, but certainly doable for the experience/training/testing/discovery/entertainment/volunteering/shadowing et cetera.
It would also have the added benefit of not supporting dozens of adults per household, which is something that our culture doesn't prefer, and that is actually something that tears apart our culture in general. Have as many people in your house as you'd like, but you only really get 1 full-time income, so it benefits everybody to save for their own home -- thus basically encouraging the creation of new/additional households.
I'm happy working and letting my beloved care for the house that I get to enjoy. I'm also happy to have my beloved work while I cook and clean and garden for her to enjoy. I'm certainly happy with free money so neither of us works and we both enjoy the household. But I despise we both work, we get to buy more kayaks and tvisions and cars, but we have no time to enjoy any of it together.
To your statement, I guess my point is that I can respect the "men-only" jobs as a culture that simply defined which household adult should be put to work and which shouldn't. When it comes to judging them, if I'm being really honest here, I'm less upset about "women can't work" and more upset that "men must work". I'm a man. I don't want to be forced to work. Let my beloved have that option too.
And don't think that I don't fully understand the best option out there. I would love to trade-off with my beloved every five or ten years -- I'll work this decade, you work next decade. Now that's life! Never burn out. Try new things. Be supporting, then be supported.
I know what you're going to say -- that choice is one available to us today. Except it isn't. In a city where everyone works, there's no way to keep a job like that, or to cover costs like that, or to find a job like that. But in a world where only one adult per household has a career, well, think about how many more jobs would be available! How much better the pay would be given only half the workforce! How much more time people would wind up spending hanging out with their neighbours and enjoying their friends, families, and possessions.
I certainly would.
And maybe, just maybe, at the end of a long day or week or month, at least one of the two of us would be in a happy position to comfort the other -- as opposed to now, where it is commonplace for both of us to have a bad work day, and as a result neither of us gets much of any comforting.
Shelving, for the moment, the concept that I'm not going to pay forever to listen to music (because I grew up in a world where music was always entirely free to listen, and paying for it meant owning it forever), offering free music won't get more people to pay for it.
What it will do is get more companies to compete by offering their own free music. Leaving us with a system whereby ten companies each offer 15 playlists for free -- leaving me with 150 playlists for free -- which is plenty to never think about paying for more.
Add that I'm going to record those free playlists for later listening forever for free, and that they'll change the 15 from time to time, and I'll just say thanks for the free music again, sorry no one's paying your for something that really has zero value to 90% of your "customers".
I happily pay for live performances -- I pay people to work for me. I'm not going to pay for delivery of a digital product. And I'm not going to pay for you to use my purchased speakers to play your music. We're in a world with millions of songs, if I don't get your new song today, I'll survive until it's free five years from now.
Except you'll put it onto youtube for free almost immediately, where, once again, it's recordable forever.
I'm glad you're happy with your business model. Like my mother always said, and her mother before her, "if they have to wait for me to pay them, they'll starve to death first".
I agree with the last-on-the-list part. But I do think it's a technical issue. Forget pregnancies, I don't think that, as a man, I could every wait that long for a public bathroom. That's just insane. It's not a way to live.
There's just so much maintenance to the female biology. Let's go back to procreation.
Men can procreate from age 10 through age 80. It's easy for us. We produce 100'000 new lives every day, without even knowing. We enjoy resealing them. There's no pain, no effort, and no questions.
Women, on the other hand, can't create life at all, they can only grow existing lives. We give them thousands, they produce only one (twins aside), and it takes 7 months of grueling, horrible, daily agony! Their bodies go through vast efforts to prepare for procreation every single month, whether they need to or not. And then hours and hours sometimes days of painful painful labour.
I don't think you'll get men to treat women as equals until you can get either side to appreciate the huge difference in what some might call biological efficiency.
And then you can add that I don't know many men who can spend an hour every day "making up their face". I don't think I could look into a mirror for that long. I don't think I could care about my appearance that much.
Any two groups, be they by gender, by sex, by race, or by religion, who live such completely different daily lifestyles based on such deeply differing priorities will have serious challenges respecting each other.
How could an atheist believing in nothing, respect a catholic believing in resurrection? How could a fish breathing water respect a cow with three stomachs? A well-to-do household with money o'plenty respecting a household that can't afford meals. At some level, the other side's lifestyle is simply unfathomable.
I think that's a technical challenge. I don't know how to solve it. I do know it's there. To be brutally honest, I'm equally responsible. I don't understand how women live through their current issues. I don't even see most of those issues outside of anecdotes. I don't understand how people fight to find work; I'm an entrepreneur, I spent decades building a reliable career.
Obviously, I can understand everything cognitively. Between luck, support, safety nets, and health, I had a lot that others never did. But I watch people pass up opportunities for stability, in favour of momentary gains or just an aversion to risk of any kind. I also watch people refuse to accept help, even from me, in the form of those very same safety nets and support and luck that they routinely point out I had all along.
So, emotionally, I don't get it. And that's probably why I have trouble respecting them.
But hey, I've got my own problems. And I'm sure that others don't respect me for my problems.
Flying cars. Electric cars. Poverty. Unemployment. Women's equality.
Things simply don't change that fast. It takes a city five years to build a park. Twenty years to build a railway. You want to overhaul organizational systems just as quickly? Good luck.
And AI? We still don't have autonomous cars that don't slam into concrete barriers. We don't have computer vision that isn't pattern-matching nonsense. We don't have machines that can build a deck, or even chop down a tree.
You're not going to get rid of jobs just because there's an AI in a box. We already have chiefs, they require a whole lot of indians to actually do the work.
Find me a machine, in my driveway, that can go, travel, into a forest, find a twenty-foot-tall white pine tree with fewer than three birds' nests in it, cut it down, extricate it from the forest, and bring it back to my driveway. Pretty easy for a man with an axe and a truck. Even easier for two men, an axe and a truck.
But none of this matters. He's not saying this as a prediction. He's saying this to affect markets and investors in his general business favour.
Substitute your "string" that you said "is flexible and can be stretched out then measured" with a straight piece of elastic band.
You can say "THIS" elastic band as many times as you'd like. But "THIS elastic band" has multiple configurations. An infinite number of configurations. It stretches, it compresses, it collapses, and it breaks.
So, would you measure my elastic band at full extension? Full compression? Zero tension? The tension for which it was designed to be used?
I think you'll find that whenever you custom-order a custom spring or elastic -- commercially I mean -- there are a dozen specifications to choose. You'll find yourself ordering an elastic by four dimensions of length.
Your coastline is exactly the same. It can be measured by multiple dimensions -- right down to the length of the ripples it creates in the water.
I can measure it for you, but it won't be the measurement that you want. Tell which measurement you want, and I'll get it for you, no problem.
The problem of not being to measure it is your problem for not describing "measure" in a repeatable way. That's your fault, not the shoreline's and not mine.
When a client asks me to "build a web-site", it's their fault that I don't build the one that they want. It's not "difficult to build a web-site". It's difficult for them to tell me what they want. Again, that's their problem. And you'd better believe that I charge more for determining what they want than I do for actually building it.
It took me half of my career to learn that one -- that often just "figuring out what the client wants" is the work for which they are hiring me. It's not my lack of ability building web-sites, it's their lack of ability ordering web-sites. It's my skill that lets me walk them through the process. I charge for that. I charge a lot.
As usual, the question isn't specific enough to have an answer. Therefore, people think it's difficult to answer.
The answer is very simple, ask for what you want.
Maybe it's how far a ship would need to travel to get to any point -- ships take gentle curves. Maybe it's how long would it take to see it all on-foot -- humans take 1-yard-long straight lines.
Another stupid question: which came first, the chicken or the egg? Again, a language question. Define the word "egg" and it's easy.
If "egg" is any egg, then dinosaurs had eggs long before chickens. If "egg" is "chicken egg", then define "chicken egg". If "chicken egg" is an egg laid by a chicken, then the chicken came first, by your own definition. If "chicken egg" is an egg from which a chicken hatches, then the egg came first, by your own definition.
Stupid questions are questions that only exist because of the manner in which you formed the question itself.
As my associate likes to say: "the answer is 6. there. now, what are you going to do with it?"
Decide what you actually want to know -- that means how you're going to use the information. Ask that question. There won't be anything crazy about it.
How long is a shoreline? Tide in or out? At what depth -- does a puddle ruin everything? Footprints? What about waves lapping on the beach?
Hey, what about the birth from a river? Do we include the entire river? Where does the river become the ocean? Right, that's easy, it's where the fresh water changes to salt water. How do you want me to measure that, given that the river's "fresh" water has dirt in it. At what level of salinity does your version of "fresh" water become your version of "salt" water?
Arbitrary trivia is arbitrary from the start. Decide what you're doing. Are you designing battleships, or water-ways for salmon? I promise, the navy doesn't agree with the fish, and they don't need to.
Comparing it to cruise control is very stupid indeed. Cruise control isn't a driving aid -- it's meant to give your foot a break during a six-hour-on-the-same-smooth-highway-at-exactly-the-same-speed my ankle needs a moment to relax.
The thing of it is (and you hit the nail on the head of this) we all know what happens if cruise control fails. We all know that it can't really fail, and that we'll simply slow down or speed up if it does. It'll happen very gradually, or very obviously, and it's a seat-of-the-pants reaction to solve the problem.
Autopilot is a very different game. It works, except when it fails catastrophically. And we don't know when that will happen. And we don't know why that will happen. And it can be a bug in software, or a weird raindrop. And we have no way of knowing if it'll happen again.
Concrete dividers are weird. I'm sure if I were trusting of autopilots, and it beeped at me, and I looked, and I saw a clear lane ahead, I'd also let it be -- not assuming that it would miss the wide-open lane and hit an obvious giant concrete block.
So, my question is very much this. If autopilot isn't meant to work without an attentive driver, and autopilot knows when it needs help, then why doesn't it disengage completely, and gently apply brakes when it needs help? You know, the way just about any student or experienced driver does when something looks weird -- slow down and look longer.
When I say "pay-with-computer-cycles", I don't need to specify anything more specific, nor do I need to have something in mind. I think the future will include faster forms of transportation. I don't need to be thinking air travel, ground travel, sea travel, catapult, space travel, or stargate travel. I can think in general terms.
As for future laws, you're not going to suggest that the future won't have new or different laws. So don't look at things today and say that they'll never change.
That said, I will propose a new idea. There's also the concept of this type of data privacy no longer being an issue. It's not like companies take our data now for actual practical use. They aren't breaking into our homes at night, they aren't cloning our children, and they aren't even copying our living room layout or fridge art.
Companies currently take our data simply to sell our data. Next up the chain, companies buy our data simply to advertise to us narrowly. There's a very easy and super-obvious way to stop those from happening, without changing any laws at all.
Cultures can change from one year to the next. That kind of data wasn't commercially-practical thirty years ago. I feel that it will not be commercially-meaningful thirty years from now.
Except that everything you describe happened pretty much exactly as you're describing, for literally everything non-digital.
You pay for each and every piece of fruit that you eat. Every tissue. Every drop of soap. You don't trade, you don't eat for free in your friend's backyard. Your house wasn't built by you and your friends. When you replace your roof, it won't be you and your neighbours doing the work. Instead, you'll purchase each and every shingle, and you'll pay for each and every minute of labour to lay them.
Just because you can't think of a solution today, doesn't mean that we can't identify matching problems from the past.
In order to pay for every morsel of food, we had to invent the concept of currency and relative values for different goods. We had to invent cash, and banks to hold them safely. We needed laws to govern their transfer and enforcement to deal with their theft. We invented wages, because people needed to be paid in money -- as opposed to salt, meat, and metal. We added the concept of credit, and cheques. Need help from the entire community? We invented a stock market so the entire community can invest in your business, so you can pay for employees that don't care about your business otherwise.
Think about it. Think about the insane amount of infrastructure and change that was necessary in order to pay for food.
The idea that meaningless and inherently valueless cash could equate oranges with donkeys with cars with an hour of nursing would boggle any mind from that era. Bigger boats are understandable to a small boater. Airplanes are like big birds that you can ride, or like flying horses. Try to explain monetary currency to someone who's never seen it. It's quite abstract. We spend years teaching our children. Imagine teaching someone 50'000 years ago.
Stop thinking about digital goods as impossible to manage with monetary currencies. That's obvious. Instead, start looking for a different kind of currency that might suit digital conduct.
You don't need to look far to find imperfect attempts. Manual turk comes to mind, as does computer cycle donation (be it cryptocurrency or any of a number of scientific pursuits from a decade ago). Like modern currency with no inherent value, it needn't be anything real. It need only be something that tracks something else that's real -- i.e. your work hours.
If you can be "given" something (we can call it money, cycles, or points, it really doesn't matter), that can flow alongside your action (be they physical acquisitions, digital downloads, or actions of consumption), and can be more-or-less tied together as a documentable transaction, then we're done.
The idea, and to-date major failure, of DRM is to tie the action (e.g. digital download) to the payment (e.g. purchaser account). DRM keeps failing for all sorts of reasons. That doesn't mean there's no possibility of future success.
You can see many of those same failures in retail. What if it breaks? Or sucks? Well, we have warranties and return policies. So we'd need a DRM that lets me pay to read an article, then say it was mis-advertised, and get my money back. I've done so at movie theatres the same way. We've all returned purchased goods, and not always in working condition.
Not sure about your country, but in my country, admission tickets (movies, trade shows, whatever) all say "no refunds" right on the receipt. That's because it's perfectly legal to sell an admission ticket that says "no refunds" right on it. However, it is illegal to not offer refunds for such things in my country. So written or not, you can still ask for, and receive a refund.
We'll get there. Things need to be paid for. Advertising didn't work in the '80s, when they doubled it and called it eyeballs, it didn't work in the '90s when they focused on unique visitors to show a much smaller number. It continues to not work now that it's completely immeasurable. Eventually it'll be replaced by something thought to work better. Maybe it'll be paying for stuff. Netflix found some success at the subscription model. One day that too will fail simply because you can't have a larger library without charging more, and eventually more is too much.
You've added your own bias into this. There was no mention of cryptocurrency mining anywhere. Nor was there any mention of existing laws.
The OP fabricated a hypothetical future world where everything has DRM. I fabricated a mechanism by which payments could be made, and privacy laws could be enforced.
If you aren't operating within the OP's hypothetical scenario, then you aren't contributing to this conversation. You're contributing to some other conversation. I'm sure that if you start your own thread, you'll get contributors a'plenty.
This conversation is not based on practical solutions. You'll need to ask the OP how his hypothetical DRM works. For my part in this conversation, it needn't be original content. We know it's mine because you're reading it here. If this exact post has been written by another, you'll pay them when you read it there, and me when you read it here. You, as the reader, selected your source. You pay the store you're at. If you want to buy the same content twice, I won't stop you.
As for your "consumes" issue, you're obviously correct. But again, that's not the thrust of this. The OP said you pay to read. If you pay to read, someone gets paid because you read.
a) we're talking about creating in terms of consuming, not producing. If I write a blog article read by a thousand consumers, I get a thousand points, not one.
b) I am a programmer. I do program web-sites. Some of those web-sites receive a few thousand pageviews per hour. That's fairly typical of a medium business's web-site.
c) For a successful movie director's movies to be watched more times than he himself has watched movies is pretty logical. But we're not just talking about a man's movie watching. Maybe he also writes interviews but doesn't read any.
d) we're not talking about now. we're talking about the OP's highly hypothetical concept that I could own the rights for this post.
That presumes so much about how those others would behave. It doesn't happen in reality. That's why we invented money, and representational money at that.
You'll find that the return from sharing, as you've described, just doesn't materialize over the long term. Much like so many other economic systems, it works great when everyone is the same as you; it fails miserably in a diverse population where people's needs are very different from yours.
To be brief, when people prioritize their own family over "sharing-back", if we can call it that, then you wind up simply paying for someone else's family. It works in a group of ten or ten million families who all signed on together. ..for one generation until the next one is forced into a system that they didn't choose.
Look up "Nash equilibrium". What you're proposing, simply isn't.
Sounds like me about twenty years ago. It's easy to like connecting with people when you have few hobbies and lots of time. Fast forward to a time in your life when you have lots of hobbies, and little time, and plenty of people in your life.
I'm not interested in random people, nor in opinions, nor in new hobbies. I've got plenty in my own life. What I want is more time to enjoy the many hobbies and toys that I already have. There's no value otherwise.
I create more content than I consume. Sorry if you don't. But if you're consuming and not contributing, I'm totally fine with you not profiting. In short, if it's not worth anything to you (neither money, nor time, nor trade) then you really shouldn't be wasting your time with it. Spend that time with your family, you'll feel better.
I think most people forget that you post content too. Write a story, a good blog article, take a nice photograph. Wouldn't it be swell if you actually got paid for something that people make popular?
So let's take the recent pay-with-computer-cycles as a decent example of a future ubiquitous micropayments convenience. Download a jpeg? Pay by waiting through ten seconds of computer cycles. You'll survive with short wait times for things that you find interesting.
Of course, when thousands of others download your jpeg, you'll get the cycles in return.
That's a good thing, because the more times currency moves, the better the very same economy. Still-money isn't good for an economy, money-in-motion is a good economy.
The trouble with DRM today is that it over-complicates reasonable convenience. But if that complication were gone, then it simply becomes a standardized form of valuation.
It can be noted that physical sales have taken the same route, hundreds of years ago.
It was easier to just go into someone's yard, and eat the berries off of their trees. Imagine if every berry that you take required you to pay for it with the milk from your farm animals? Well, wait a minute, what if we make something and call it money, that we can trade for berries and for milk, so we don't need to carry around both milk and berries? And what if we make something called stores, and sell the berries in quantized packages, so it's not a per-berry compensation?
DRM is a modern problem. As such, we don't have a modern solution. The moment we devise a modern solution, DRM will become an old problem, just like everything else.
To sum up, the DRM problem is simply an issue of barter -- how can I trade value that I have, for value that I want. I want a digital file. I have this penguin. They simply aren't conveniently compatible -- because the web-site with the jpeg doesn't accept penguins in-trade. The web-site also doesn't accept cash, nor credit cards for simple jpeg rights, all because the mechanism of jpeg delivery isn't conveniently compatible with current mechanism for currency delivery.
That'll change. Give it time. Jpeg's weren't worth anything when they were low-res photos of cats, so we didn't care twenty years ago.
I can choose to spend or waste anything of mine. You can't choose to spend nor to waste anything of mine.
You don't get to borrow my lava lamp when I'm not using without my knowledge -- even though it costs me nothing. You don't get to park in my driveway when I'm not home. You don't get to lean against my car in the parking lot.
The consequences don't matter at all. It's simply not your decision.
And a good thing too. You don't know my value equations, and you don't know my risk assessments.
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You want me to pay someone to enjoy my kayaks? To play my video games? To sit and be relaxed in my mansion?
I enjoy my household, I just don't have time to do so. I enjoy the gardening, and the cooking, and the DIY renovations. I don't have time to do them.
You're suggesting what so many people suggest -- that I stop doing all of the things that make people happy, and instead I do the work that I'm really good at and pays way more than anything else.
That's great for the bank account. But it means that I do the same work 100% of my entire life.
No thanks.
Actually, I enjoy the crap that I pay to see performed live, and I also enjoy the crap that I've purchased and own.
You see, these are songs that I've selected out of reality.
You're not listening to crap that free services tell you to listen to. You're, instead, listening to the crap that paid services show to you. Congrats. Of the millions of songs in their catalog, you restrict yourself to, wait for it, the ones that they promote.
Doesn't sound too different to me.
But again, to be clear, music has zero monetary value. Typically, it's a nice background thang. It doesn't matter which crap it is. In an elevator, it'll be musac. I'm not interested in selecting my free or paid crap. I'm interested in just having some crap around.
They aren't working for me. They are working for the sender.
As has always been the case, delivery, rent, income tax, packaging, sorting, are all part of fulfillment. I'm not paying fedex, and I'm not paying those IT guys. Therefore, they aren't working for me.
I'm paying, in this case, spotify. Except I won't. Because I'm not interested in paying for delivery.
I buy lots and lots of music. I buy CDs or such from musicians directly, in support of their live performance in my local theatre -- for which I purchased one or more admission tickets.
Software has value to me -- it's a tool by which I profit.
Music is pure entertainment, and has zero monetary value. Zero monetary value usually means zero money paid.
I grew up in a world with free wireless radio, and free wireless television, everywhere. I've never paid to listen to music, and I've never paid to listen to news. I ain't starting now.
If you want to grow up in a world where everything costs money, then you are welcome to spend your own. You won't be spending mine.
I'd like to adjust that last statement of yours, into a discussion without gender.
I also think that it's pretty dumb to not let women work.
I do, however, think it's very dumb to have everyone in a household working a career. I think there's no such thing as a life-work balance if everyone works a job, and works to maintain a household -- there's simply no time left to enjoy the household.
So what if we "adjust" these other cultural norms to remove "men only" and replace it with "only one human per household can work more than 20 hours per week"?
In our culture, that translates into two things. First, it's your choice who works, so there's no gender bias. Second, the teeth would be massive tax on the second income, making it completely not worthwhile for the paycheck, but certainly doable for the experience/training/testing/discovery/entertainment/volunteering/shadowing et cetera.
It would also have the added benefit of not supporting dozens of adults per household, which is something that our culture doesn't prefer, and that is actually something that tears apart our culture in general. Have as many people in your house as you'd like, but you only really get 1 full-time income, so it benefits everybody to save for their own home -- thus basically encouraging the creation of new/additional households.
I'm happy working and letting my beloved care for the house that I get to enjoy. I'm also happy to have my beloved work while I cook and clean and garden for her to enjoy. I'm certainly happy with free money so neither of us works and we both enjoy the household. But I despise we both work, we get to buy more kayaks and tvisions and cars, but we have no time to enjoy any of it together.
To your statement, I guess my point is that I can respect the "men-only" jobs as a culture that simply defined which household adult should be put to work and which shouldn't. When it comes to judging them, if I'm being really honest here, I'm less upset about "women can't work" and more upset that "men must work". I'm a man. I don't want to be forced to work. Let my beloved have that option too.
And don't think that I don't fully understand the best option out there. I would love to trade-off with my beloved every five or ten years -- I'll work this decade, you work next decade. Now that's life! Never burn out. Try new things. Be supporting, then be supported.
I know what you're going to say -- that choice is one available to us today. Except it isn't. In a city where everyone works, there's no way to keep a job like that, or to cover costs like that, or to find a job like that. But in a world where only one adult per household has a career, well, think about how many more jobs would be available! How much better the pay would be given only half the workforce! How much more time people would wind up spending hanging out with their neighbours and enjoying their friends, families, and possessions.
I certainly would.
And maybe, just maybe, at the end of a long day or week or month, at least one of the two of us would be in a happy position to comfort the other -- as opposed to now, where it is commonplace for both of us to have a bad work day, and as a result neither of us gets much of any comforting.
Shelving, for the moment, the concept that I'm not going to pay forever to listen to music (because I grew up in a world where music was always entirely free to listen, and paying for it meant owning it forever), offering free music won't get more people to pay for it.
What it will do is get more companies to compete by offering their own free music. Leaving us with a system whereby ten companies each offer 15 playlists for free -- leaving me with 150 playlists for free -- which is plenty to never think about paying for more.
Add that I'm going to record those free playlists for later listening forever for free, and that they'll change the 15 from time to time, and I'll just say thanks for the free music again, sorry no one's paying your for something that really has zero value to 90% of your "customers".
I happily pay for live performances -- I pay people to work for me. I'm not going to pay for delivery of a digital product. And I'm not going to pay for you to use my purchased speakers to play your music. We're in a world with millions of songs, if I don't get your new song today, I'll survive until it's free five years from now.
Except you'll put it onto youtube for free almost immediately, where, once again, it's recordable forever.
I'm glad you're happy with your business model. Like my mother always said, and her mother before her, "if they have to wait for me to pay them, they'll starve to death first".
You'll want to remember why 16:10 existed in the first place. Movies were 16:9, and there needed to be room for professional controls.
16:9 didn't enter the computer space until computers were mostly used as entertainment devices instead of as tools.
Welcome back.
I agree with the last-on-the-list part. But I do think it's a technical issue. Forget pregnancies, I don't think that, as a man, I could every wait that long for a public bathroom. That's just insane. It's not a way to live.
There's just so much maintenance to the female biology. Let's go back to procreation.
Men can procreate from age 10 through age 80. It's easy for us. We produce 100'000 new lives every day, without even knowing. We enjoy resealing them. There's no pain, no effort, and no questions.
Women, on the other hand, can't create life at all, they can only grow existing lives. We give them thousands, they produce only one (twins aside), and it takes 7 months of grueling, horrible, daily agony! Their bodies go through vast efforts to prepare for procreation every single month, whether they need to or not. And then hours and hours sometimes days of painful painful labour.
I don't think you'll get men to treat women as equals until you can get either side to appreciate the huge difference in what some might call biological efficiency.
And then you can add that I don't know many men who can spend an hour every day "making up their face". I don't think I could look into a mirror for that long. I don't think I could care about my appearance that much.
Any two groups, be they by gender, by sex, by race, or by religion, who live such completely different daily lifestyles based on such deeply differing priorities will have serious challenges respecting each other.
How could an atheist believing in nothing, respect a catholic believing in resurrection? How could a fish breathing water respect a cow with three stomachs? A well-to-do household with money o'plenty respecting a household that can't afford meals. At some level, the other side's lifestyle is simply unfathomable.
I think that's a technical challenge. I don't know how to solve it. I do know it's there. To be brutally honest, I'm equally responsible. I don't understand how women live through their current issues. I don't even see most of those issues outside of anecdotes. I don't understand how people fight to find work; I'm an entrepreneur, I spent decades building a reliable career.
Obviously, I can understand everything cognitively. Between luck, support, safety nets, and health, I had a lot that others never did. But I watch people pass up opportunities for stability, in favour of momentary gains or just an aversion to risk of any kind. I also watch people refuse to accept help, even from me, in the form of those very same safety nets and support and luck that they routinely point out I had all along.
So, emotionally, I don't get it. And that's probably why I have trouble respecting them.
But hey, I've got my own problems. And I'm sure that others don't respect me for my problems.
Adding to the list, from today, the bank machine can't take three different-sized cheques as a single stack. No, keeps one, rejects two.
And then, asks me if I want another transaction.
Imagine if a human teller did either of those two things.
Flying cars.
Electric cars.
Poverty.
Unemployment.
Women's equality.
Things simply don't change that fast. It takes a city five years to build a park. Twenty years to build a railway. You want to overhaul organizational systems just as quickly? Good luck.
And AI? We still don't have autonomous cars that don't slam into concrete barriers. We don't have computer vision that isn't pattern-matching nonsense. We don't have machines that can build a deck, or even chop down a tree.
You're not going to get rid of jobs just because there's an AI in a box. We already have chiefs, they require a whole lot of indians to actually do the work.
Find me a machine, in my driveway, that can go, travel, into a forest, find a twenty-foot-tall white pine tree with fewer than three birds' nests in it, cut it down, extricate it from the forest, and bring it back to my driveway. Pretty easy for a man with an axe and a truck. Even easier for two men, an axe and a truck.
But none of this matters. He's not saying this as a prediction. He's saying this to affect markets and investors in his general business favour.
It's B.S. from the head.
You've missed your own mistake.
Substitute your "string" that you said "is flexible and can be stretched out then measured" with a straight piece of elastic band.
You can say "THIS" elastic band as many times as you'd like. But "THIS elastic band" has multiple configurations. An infinite number of configurations. It stretches, it compresses, it collapses, and it breaks.
So, would you measure my elastic band at full extension? Full compression? Zero tension? The tension for which it was designed to be used?
I think you'll find that whenever you custom-order a custom spring or elastic -- commercially I mean -- there are a dozen specifications to choose. You'll find yourself ordering an elastic by four dimensions of length.
Your coastline is exactly the same. It can be measured by multiple dimensions -- right down to the length of the ripples it creates in the water.
I can measure it for you, but it won't be the measurement that you want. Tell which measurement you want, and I'll get it for you, no problem.
The problem of not being to measure it is your problem for not describing "measure" in a repeatable way. That's your fault, not the shoreline's and not mine.
When a client asks me to "build a web-site", it's their fault that I don't build the one that they want. It's not "difficult to build a web-site". It's difficult for them to tell me what they want. Again, that's their problem. And you'd better believe that I charge more for determining what they want than I do for actually building it.
It took me half of my career to learn that one -- that often just "figuring out what the client wants" is the work for which they are hiring me. It's not my lack of ability building web-sites, it's their lack of ability ordering web-sites. It's my skill that lets me walk them through the process. I charge for that. I charge a lot.
Took me ten years to recognize that.
As usual, the question isn't specific enough to have an answer. Therefore, people think it's difficult to answer.
The answer is very simple, ask for what you want.
Maybe it's how far a ship would need to travel to get to any point -- ships take gentle curves. Maybe it's how long would it take to see it all on-foot -- humans take 1-yard-long straight lines.
Another stupid question: which came first, the chicken or the egg? Again, a language question. Define the word "egg" and it's easy.
If "egg" is any egg, then dinosaurs had eggs long before chickens.
If "egg" is "chicken egg", then define "chicken egg".
If "chicken egg" is an egg laid by a chicken, then the chicken came first, by your own definition.
If "chicken egg" is an egg from which a chicken hatches, then the egg came first, by your own definition.
Stupid questions are questions that only exist because of the manner in which you formed the question itself.
As my associate likes to say: "the answer is 6. there. now, what are you going to do with it?"
Decide what you actually want to know -- that means how you're going to use the information. Ask that question. There won't be anything crazy about it.
How long is a shoreline? Tide in or out? At what depth -- does a puddle ruin everything? Footprints? What about waves lapping on the beach?
Hey, what about the birth from a river?
Do we include the entire river?
Where does the river become the ocean?
Right, that's easy, it's where the fresh water changes to salt water.
How do you want me to measure that, given that the river's "fresh" water has dirt in it.
At what level of salinity does your version of "fresh" water become your version of "salt" water?
Arbitrary trivia is arbitrary from the start. Decide what you're doing. Are you designing battleships, or water-ways for salmon? I promise, the navy doesn't agree with the fish, and they don't need to.
Comparing it to cruise control is very stupid indeed. Cruise control isn't a driving aid -- it's meant to give your foot a break during a six-hour-on-the-same-smooth-highway-at-exactly-the-same-speed my ankle needs a moment to relax.
The thing of it is (and you hit the nail on the head of this) we all know what happens if cruise control fails. We all know that it can't really fail, and that we'll simply slow down or speed up if it does. It'll happen very gradually, or very obviously, and it's a seat-of-the-pants reaction to solve the problem.
Autopilot is a very different game. It works, except when it fails catastrophically. And we don't know when that will happen. And we don't know why that will happen. And it can be a bug in software, or a weird raindrop. And we have no way of knowing if it'll happen again.
Concrete dividers are weird. I'm sure if I were trusting of autopilots, and it beeped at me, and I looked, and I saw a clear lane ahead, I'd also let it be -- not assuming that it would miss the wide-open lane and hit an obvious giant concrete block.
So, my question is very much this. If autopilot isn't meant to work without an attentive driver, and autopilot knows when it needs help, then why doesn't it disengage completely, and gently apply brakes when it needs help? You know, the way just about any student or experienced driver does when something looks weird -- slow down and look longer.
When I say "pay-with-computer-cycles", I don't need to specify anything more specific, nor do I need to have something in mind. I think the future will include faster forms of transportation. I don't need to be thinking air travel, ground travel, sea travel, catapult, space travel, or stargate travel. I can think in general terms.
As for future laws, you're not going to suggest that the future won't have new or different laws. So don't look at things today and say that they'll never change.
That said, I will propose a new idea. There's also the concept of this type of data privacy no longer being an issue. It's not like companies take our data now for actual practical use. They aren't breaking into our homes at night, they aren't cloning our children, and they aren't even copying our living room layout or fridge art.
Companies currently take our data simply to sell our data. Next up the chain, companies buy our data simply to advertise to us narrowly. There's a very easy and super-obvious way to stop those from happening, without changing any laws at all.
Cultures can change from one year to the next. That kind of data wasn't commercially-practical thirty years ago. I feel that it will not be commercially-meaningful thirty years from now.
Except that everything you describe happened pretty much exactly as you're describing, for literally everything non-digital.
You pay for each and every piece of fruit that you eat. Every tissue. Every drop of soap. You don't trade, you don't eat for free in your friend's backyard. Your house wasn't built by you and your friends. When you replace your roof, it won't be you and your neighbours doing the work. Instead, you'll purchase each and every shingle, and you'll pay for each and every minute of labour to lay them.
Just because you can't think of a solution today, doesn't mean that we can't identify matching problems from the past.
In order to pay for every morsel of food, we had to invent the concept of currency and relative values for different goods. We had to invent cash, and banks to hold them safely. We needed laws to govern their transfer and enforcement to deal with their theft. We invented wages, because people needed to be paid in money -- as opposed to salt, meat, and metal. We added the concept of credit, and cheques. Need help from the entire community? We invented a stock market so the entire community can invest in your business, so you can pay for employees that don't care about your business otherwise.
Think about it. Think about the insane amount of infrastructure and change that was necessary in order to pay for food.
The idea that meaningless and inherently valueless cash could equate oranges with donkeys with cars with an hour of nursing would boggle any mind from that era. Bigger boats are understandable to a small boater. Airplanes are like big birds that you can ride, or like flying horses. Try to explain monetary currency to someone who's never seen it. It's quite abstract. We spend years teaching our children. Imagine teaching someone 50'000 years ago.
Stop thinking about digital goods as impossible to manage with monetary currencies. That's obvious. Instead, start looking for a different kind of currency that might suit digital conduct.
You don't need to look far to find imperfect attempts. Manual turk comes to mind, as does computer cycle donation (be it cryptocurrency or any of a number of scientific pursuits from a decade ago). Like modern currency with no inherent value, it needn't be anything real. It need only be something that tracks something else that's real -- i.e. your work hours.
If you can be "given" something (we can call it money, cycles, or points, it really doesn't matter), that can flow alongside your action (be they physical acquisitions, digital downloads, or actions of consumption), and can be more-or-less tied together as a documentable transaction, then we're done.
The idea, and to-date major failure, of DRM is to tie the action (e.g. digital download) to the payment (e.g. purchaser account). DRM keeps failing for all sorts of reasons. That doesn't mean there's no possibility of future success.
You can see many of those same failures in retail. What if it breaks? Or sucks? Well, we have warranties and return policies. So we'd need a DRM that lets me pay to read an article, then say it was mis-advertised, and get my money back. I've done so at movie theatres the same way. We've all returned purchased goods, and not always in working condition.
Not sure about your country, but in my country, admission tickets (movies, trade shows, whatever) all say "no refunds" right on the receipt. That's because it's perfectly legal to sell an admission ticket that says "no refunds" right on it. However, it is illegal to not offer refunds for such things in my country. So written or not, you can still ask for, and receive a refund.
We'll get there. Things need to be paid for. Advertising didn't work in the '80s, when they doubled it and called it eyeballs, it didn't work in the '90s when they focused on unique visitors to show a much smaller number. It continues to not work now that it's completely immeasurable. Eventually it'll be replaced by something thought to work better. Maybe it'll be paying for stuff. Netflix found some success at the subscription model. One day that too will fail simply because you can't have a larger library without charging more, and eventually more is too much.
You've added your own bias into this. There was no mention of cryptocurrency mining anywhere. Nor was there any mention of existing laws.
The OP fabricated a hypothetical future world where everything has DRM. I fabricated a mechanism by which payments could be made, and privacy laws could be enforced.
If you aren't operating within the OP's hypothetical scenario, then you aren't contributing to this conversation. You're contributing to some other conversation. I'm sure that if you start your own thread, you'll get contributors a'plenty.
This conversation is not based on practical solutions. You'll need to ask the OP how his hypothetical DRM works. For my part in this conversation, it needn't be original content. We know it's mine because you're reading it here. If this exact post has been written by another, you'll pay them when you read it there, and me when you read it here. You, as the reader, selected your source. You pay the store you're at. If you want to buy the same content twice, I won't stop you.
As for your "consumes" issue, you're obviously correct. But again, that's not the thrust of this. The OP said you pay to read. If you pay to read, someone gets paid because you read.
a) on a 2-year-old core i5. you can buy a f aster machine and spend less time, or a slower machine and spend more time.
b) the same thing that stops me from tossing ball-bearings onto the highway, or taking just taking your windshield wipers from a parking lot: laws.
a) we're talking about creating in terms of consuming, not producing. If I write a blog article read by a thousand consumers, I get a thousand points, not one.
b) I am a programmer. I do program web-sites. Some of those web-sites receive a few thousand pageviews per hour. That's fairly typical of a medium business's web-site.
c) For a successful movie director's movies to be watched more times than he himself has watched movies is pretty logical. But we're not just talking about a man's movie watching. Maybe he also writes interviews but doesn't read any.
d) we're not talking about now. we're talking about the OP's highly hypothetical concept that I could own the rights for this post.
That presumes so much about how those others would behave. It doesn't happen in reality. That's why we invented money, and representational money at that.
You'll find that the return from sharing, as you've described, just doesn't materialize over the long term. Much like so many other economic systems, it works great when everyone is the same as you; it fails miserably in a diverse population where people's needs are very different from yours.
To be brief, when people prioritize their own family over "sharing-back", if we can call it that, then you wind up simply paying for someone else's family. It works in a group of ten or ten million families who all signed on together. . .for one generation until the next one is forced into a system that they didn't choose.
Look up "Nash equilibrium". What you're proposing, simply isn't.
Sounds like me about twenty years ago. It's easy to like connecting with people when you have few hobbies and lots of time. Fast forward to a time in your life when you have lots of hobbies, and little time, and plenty of people in your life.
I'm not interested in random people, nor in opinions, nor in new hobbies. I've got plenty in my own life. What I want is more time to enjoy the many hobbies and toys that I already have. There's no value otherwise.
I create more content than I consume. Sorry if you don't. But if you're consuming and not contributing, I'm totally fine with you not profiting. In short, if it's not worth anything to you (neither money, nor time, nor trade) then you really shouldn't be wasting your time with it. Spend that time with your family, you'll feel better.
I think most people forget that you post content too. Write a story, a good blog article, take a nice photograph. Wouldn't it be swell if you actually got paid for something that people make popular?
So let's take the recent pay-with-computer-cycles as a decent example of a future ubiquitous micropayments convenience. Download a jpeg? Pay by waiting through ten seconds of computer cycles. You'll survive with short wait times for things that you find interesting.
Of course, when thousands of others download your jpeg, you'll get the cycles in return.
That's a good thing, because the more times currency moves, the better the very same economy. Still-money isn't good for an economy, money-in-motion is a good economy.
The trouble with DRM today is that it over-complicates reasonable convenience. But if that complication were gone, then it simply becomes a standardized form of valuation.
It can be noted that physical sales have taken the same route, hundreds of years ago.
It was easier to just go into someone's yard, and eat the berries off of their trees. Imagine if every berry that you take required you to pay for it with the milk from your farm animals? Well, wait a minute, what if we make something and call it money, that we can trade for berries and for milk, so we don't need to carry around both milk and berries? And what if we make something called stores, and sell the berries in quantized packages, so it's not a per-berry compensation?
DRM is a modern problem. As such, we don't have a modern solution. The moment we devise a modern solution, DRM will become an old problem, just like everything else.
To sum up, the DRM problem is simply an issue of barter -- how can I trade value that I have, for value that I want. I want a digital file. I have this penguin. They simply aren't conveniently compatible -- because the web-site with the jpeg doesn't accept penguins in-trade. The web-site also doesn't accept cash, nor credit cards for simple jpeg rights, all because the mechanism of jpeg delivery isn't conveniently compatible with current mechanism for currency delivery.
That'll change. Give it time. Jpeg's weren't worth anything when they were low-res photos of cats, so we didn't care twenty years ago.
I think you'll need to reread, not rephrase.
I can choose to spend or waste anything of mine. You can't choose to spend nor to waste anything of mine.
You don't get to borrow my lava lamp when I'm not using without my knowledge -- even though it costs me nothing. You don't get to park in my driveway when I'm not home. You don't get to lean against my car in the parking lot.
The consequences don't matter at all. It's simply not your decision.
And a good thing too. You don't know my value equations, and you don't know my risk assessments.
What I choose to do, is valued very differently than what someone else does in my name.
Any software that intentionally does something unexpected, and conceals it, is malware. The consequences don't matter.
I'd have spent I-don't-know-how-long trying to diagnose why my drives aren't sleeping.