Remember when you said "the judge should rule on the 'right' thing instead of on the letter of the law and the facts of the matter?" This is the result.
No, I certainly never said that. I don't know anyone who has argued in favor of that. What you're talking about is the "liberal" tendency to oppose "originalists".
The problem is, even being an originalist requires interpretation. How exactly does 18th century copyright law apply to computing? There was no original intention for how it should apply to computing, because computers didn't exist. Absent a new law that is designed to apply to computing, an originalist needs to make a bunch of guesses and interpretations about how that law should apply.
But people who call themselves "originalists" are generally too dim to recognize that. They make arbitrary decisions that fail to recognize context or the subtlety of language. Others are simply dishonest-- they know they're making interpretations, but they're cynically using the concept of "originalism" to justify crappy judgements that suit their own political interests.
Apparently not. Apparently it's fine for you to take copyright protected material, post it to Twitter or Facebook. And it's fine for Twitter and Facebook to host it for you. It's just illegal for news agencies to report that you posted it.
Honestly, I don't know if news orgs should have to pay royalties. If someone posts something publicly on twitter, that becomes a statement of public record. As far as I know, news agencies don't have any obligation to pay copyright royalties to quote public statements. It gets a little tricky with the question, "Can a photo be considered a quote?" but in the context of a tweet, I think they should be able to quote the entire tweet with any content it includes.
Some guy copies the photo and posts it without permission on a site. That site happily hosts the photo and encourages the whole world to embed their tweets and treat them like news. It seems like, if anyone is violating copyright, it's either the guy who tweeted it, or the company who hosts it and publicizes it. It's not the news for reporting on it.
On the other hand, I might be ok with this. The news (and other sites) won't be able to quote, cite, or embed any tweets without opening themselves to copyright violation. Maybe this will kill Twitter (which I'd be fine with), or at least stop news organizations from treating tweets like they're news.
True. But I think the more important application of the idea is that "health insurance" in the United States isn't really insurance. To some extent, yes, it does protect you against an unexpected catastrophic illness, but it also covers normal things, e.g. checkups, chronic illness, long term medications.
When you have "insurance" that pays out all the time for regular predictable events, it's not insurance. Insurance socializes risk, but US health "insurance" socializes cost, which is a totally different thing. The system is really just socialism, but with handouts to private "insurance companies" tacked on, so the whole thing costs more than if we just straight-up socialized it.
People think that "health insurance" makes health care cheaper, but that's only because it's subsidized by the government. You pay more in taxes so the government can give tax breaks to employers to pay for other people's health plans.
... and all of this... I'm not even trying to make an argument for whether we should change it or how we should change it. I just think it's important to understand it.
Yes, not to go off into a tangent, but I think it's worth repeating/emphasizing: Insurance does not save money overall. That's the same whether it's health insurance, car insurance, or phone insurance. The average individual participating in insurance will pay more than they ever take out, and all of the people collectively will pay more than they ever take out. If that weren't the case, then insurance companies would be losing money, and wouldn't be feasible as a business.
The purpose of insurance is to socialize risk. Everyone puts in a little money into a pool, and then if someone participating falls into an unlikely disastrous situation, they are permitted to cover their loss from that pooled money. No more money can be extracted than is put in, and some percentage always needs to be paid to someone to administer the whole thing.
I think that assessment might be a bit generous to consumers. They only care about security after they've lost money. They only care about privacy after sensitive information has leaked. They only care about clarity when they start to suspect they're being ripped off. They only care about honesty when they discover they're the ones being ripped off.
What most people want from financial products is a fail-safe get-rich-quick scheme. They'll turn a blind eye to a lot of problems as long as they think they're getting rich.
I'm not much of an expert in finance, but I know a fair amount about IT, and I'd say it's a safe bet that crappy technology, legacy tech, and vendor lock-in is holding back a lot of efficiency and innovation.
I mean, technology in general is adding a lot of innovation and efficiency. For sure. But I see a lot of businesses depending on some weird custom-built application that was built in the '90s and doesn't support any OS past Windows XP. I see a lot of simple, common problems going completely unaddressed, while all the computing talent is focused on building the next crappy Snapchat clone. Microsoft seems intent on using all of their expertise on forcing advertising down everyone's throat. Apple is just making things thinner and lighter without making them more useful or reliable. The FOSS community is so wrapped up in everyone reinventing their own wheel, and so you end up with a bunch of half-finished clunky wheels.
It kind of makes me regret that I gave up programming, because maybe I could fix some of these problems. Of course, if I hadn't given up programming, I'd probably have just ended up being yet another person trying to develop a Snapchat competitor rather than fixing real problems.
Oh, don't blame the Catholics. It's crazy protestant fundamentalists that cause these problems. Sure, the Catholic church has its share of problems, but they're not the cause of the things you're talking about.
Even done perfectly, nobody would believe it was real, so it would be hard to argue that either Trump or Putin would suffer the kind of opprobrium associated with a porn video intended to deceive people into believing such an event actually took place.
It's also quite a nice day for the couple. Trump and Putin can finally release their sex tape without political ramifications, since everyone will assume it's a fake.
I don't think you understand what the whole "whoosh" thing is about. You're not supposed to post it when things go over your head.
Optical drives are being offered on fewer models every year, and when they're sold, they're largely going unused. Hence, it's likely that the trend will continue until it's not a default part of any models, and you'll have to get an external DVD drive. And then those will become hard to find. Eventually... well hey, when's the last time you saw a 5.25" floppy drive?
It's effectively become the streaming music analogue of Microsoft pushing people to surf the web with Internet Explorer.
That's misunderstanding either the situation with Apple Music or the situation with Internet Explorer. Apple isn't sabotaging Spotify and making it crash on Apple devices. As far as I know, Apple isn't actively trying to redirect you to using Apple Music with every update of iOS. Apple isn't pushing to have record labels to produce only music that works on Apple Music.
Plenty of people still like privacy. There's a big difference between, "I don't care if a particular company knows what music I listen to," and "I don't care if my emails are public."
If you buy your MP3s from Amazon or you buy the physical CDs from Amazon, they still know what music you own. The medium doesn't make a big difference in that case. Even when people bought their albums at brick-and-mortar stores, going to the same Tower Records and buying CDs with your credit card meant that the store could be tracking what music you'd purchased. People weren't only paying in cash or avoiding patronizing the same store twice out of fear that the store might compile a list of what albums they owned. People didn't care.
And that's all it is. People don't care if Amazon or Apple or Spotify know what music they like. They want those services to know, in fact, because one of the services they offer is music recommendation-- if they know what music you like, they can tell you what other music you might like. But there's still a wide chasm between that and "not liking privacy".
No, but they often come with DVD or Blu-Ray drives...
... and they often don't. More and more, manufacturers are making computers with no optical media drive, or where the optical drive is optional. More importantly, I'd bet that most of those optical drives are going largely unused, even when they're there.
That totally makes sense. If you really want physical media, CDs are pretty outdated. These days, you can fit an entire collection with several hundred albums on a single micro-SD card. And that's with a lossless codec. CDs are a waste of material and space.
Part of the appeal of CDs once upon a time was that they would last a long time. They scratch easily, but if you took care of them, they were supposed to last hundreds of years. However, things didn't really work that way. Instead the industry made cheaper CDs that only lasted a handful of years.
If we were going to stick with physical media, it'd be nice if someone were to produce a standard for cheap, compact, durable, long-lasting media that would be suitable for archival purposes. It seems to me that ideally there would be no moving parts, but also no physical connectors to wear out or break. Having enormous capacity and quick write speeds could take a back seat to redundancy and durability.
Basically, if I'm going to pay for data on a physical medium, I want a medium that you could throw out the window of a moving car, go swimming with it in your pocket, or just stick it in a drawer for 20 years, and still have a reasonable expectation that it wouldn't lose a bit of data.
Eh... well... Speech is regulated to some extent. Aside from the whole "yelling 'fire' in a theater" thing, there are various rules and controls on newspapers, TV, radio, and movies. There are some rules about the actual content, but even more importantly, there are rules about the way those businesses can run.
In may cases, there are regulations that are less about preventing people from speaking, and more about making sure the motivations are clear. To give a simple/obvious example, you can't make false claims in your advertising. It's a regulation on speech, but it protects against fraud.
I don't think there should be a law specific to Facebook, but there could be an attempt to regulate businesses like Facebook to require a certain level of transparency. Maybe when Facebook targets you with an advertisement, they're also required to indicate (1) that it is an advertisement; (2) who is paying for it; and (3) why you're being targeted. Instead of appearing on your wall as a news story, it could say, "This is an advertisement being served by HIPSTER_MART because you are classified as UNDER_40_YEARS_OLD and LIVES_IN_URBAN_AREA." And then maybe you should be allowed to set or remove your classifications.
I'm just making it up off of the top of my head, but my point is, there are forms of regulating speech that don't actually inhibit speech. They just make sure the audience has some understanding of who's talking to them and what the message really is.
That's not why, though. It's like saying "the reason the addict is clean is because he overdosed." Even if that experience motivated him to get clean, lots of other people stay clean without having ever overdosed. The addict could have stopped doing drugs at any time without overdosing.
In the same way, America could have been investing in better power sources and infrastructure, but we've just chosen not to. There's a segment of the population that's still insisting that we go back to coal. Until we figure out a way to get rid of these morons, we're going to fall behind. And to your point, it's possible that pursuing bunch of moronic short-sighted goals will create enough of a disaster that we'll be forced to learn our lesson. Performing genetic engineering willy-nilly might end up with us figuring out how to be more careful in the long run. It'd be nice if we could just not be moronic without causing those disasters first.
And fuck you if you're on your death bed, you're NOT ALLOWED TO MAKE YOUR OWN DECISION. It's for your own good!
It's not just for your own good. We don't really know what these gene altering technologies will do-- either on a technical scientific level, or on a sociological level. Lots of technologies seem harmless enough at the outset, and people ask, "What could possibly go wrong?" Part of the problem is, the things that go wrong are often not things we even suspected might go wrong.
It's not a "no true Scotsman" fallacy to note that some things are legitimately not Scotsmen. A rock from Africa is just not a Scotsman, and that's not fallacious reasoning. Similarly, most people would not consider buying video games a financial investment. You can say, "I had fun, so to me it was worth the time and money I invested in it," and that's fair enough. But still, by conventional terms, "fun" is not considered a financial return on investment.
If you know how to do it, then it's a way to make money.
Whether there are any people who know how to do it depends on what you mean by "know how to do it". It's gambling. There are people who think they have a system for playing the slots, and they can win for a while, but they don't actually "know how to do it." On the other hand, there are people who know how to play blackjack and can win by counting cards, which is generally considered cheating. There are people who know how to play poker and can siphon money off of the other players who don't really know how to play poker.
In the same way, there may be people who "know how to do it" in the sense that they're gaming the system or knowingly participating in a pyramid scheme and hoping to time their exit before it crashes. Everyone else "knows how to do it" in about the same way that people know how to play the lottery.
Blackjack and poker can make plenty of money in a casino.
Yup. Still, again, by conventional terms, playing blackjack isn't usually considered a legitimate form of financial investment, let alone a wise one.
Meh... I'd still say no. All kinds of crap pops up all the time. Some catch on and become fads that you can make money from, some not. You're thinking that it's a good investment because "I could do it with my CPU, which is free!" But it's not really free. It takes up your time to investigate, to look into it, to think about it, to make sure the software you're running doesn't do something shady (shadier than mining bitcoins). And then it doesn't take long before mining bitcoins required buying better video cards, using more electricity, etc. The smart bet is on it all being a waste of whatever time and resources you put into it.
And yeah, the "smart money" worked out to be wrong in the short term. Just like every pyramid scheme, there's money to be made, just so long as there are still new people taking the bait. That doesn't make them wise investments.
Fun? Ok, maybe you'd have fun. Gambling in casinos is fun. Sinking money into expensive hobbies is fun. Those aren't really investments.
1) Your post is a little ambiguous. Do you want an explanation as to why people get upset that 1% of the population owns 50% of the world's wealth? Or are you just asking why those people who are upset also like bitcoin?
2) I'm not sure it's the same people. That is, the people who are upset about the disparity in wealth distribution are the same people buying bitcoin, at least not exclusively.
3) In either case, I doubt that they're buying bitcoin in response to being upset about the disparity in wealth distribution. At least not directly.
4) It's really not the same thing anyway. Complaining that a small percentage of bitcoin owners have 40% of bitcoin is a bit like complaining... maybe it's like complaining that a tiny percent of airplane owners own a large percent of all airplanes. That's not a perfect analogy, but the unequal distribution makes sense-- i.e. few people really want or need many airplanes, whereas everyone wants some form of wealth.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember when you said "the judge should rule on the 'right' thing instead of on the letter of the law and the facts of the matter?" This is the result.
No, I certainly never said that. I don't know anyone who has argued in favor of that. What you're talking about is the "liberal" tendency to oppose "originalists".
The problem is, even being an originalist requires interpretation. How exactly does 18th century copyright law apply to computing? There was no original intention for how it should apply to computing, because computers didn't exist. Absent a new law that is designed to apply to computing, an originalist needs to make a bunch of guesses and interpretations about how that law should apply.
But people who call themselves "originalists" are generally too dim to recognize that. They make arbitrary decisions that fail to recognize context or the subtlety of language. Others are simply dishonest-- they know they're making interpretations, but they're cynically using the concept of "originalism" to justify crappy judgements that suit their own political interests.
Apparently not. Apparently it's fine for you to take copyright protected material, post it to Twitter or Facebook. And it's fine for Twitter and Facebook to host it for you. It's just illegal for news agencies to report that you posted it.
Honestly, I don't know if news orgs should have to pay royalties. If someone posts something publicly on twitter, that becomes a statement of public record. As far as I know, news agencies don't have any obligation to pay copyright royalties to quote public statements. It gets a little tricky with the question, "Can a photo be considered a quote?" but in the context of a tweet, I think they should be able to quote the entire tweet with any content it includes.
Some guy copies the photo and posts it without permission on a site. That site happily hosts the photo and encourages the whole world to embed their tweets and treat them like news. It seems like, if anyone is violating copyright, it's either the guy who tweeted it, or the company who hosts it and publicizes it. It's not the news for reporting on it.
On the other hand, I might be ok with this. The news (and other sites) won't be able to quote, cite, or embed any tweets without opening themselves to copyright violation. Maybe this will kill Twitter (which I'd be fine with), or at least stop news organizations from treating tweets like they're news.
True. But I think the more important application of the idea is that "health insurance" in the United States isn't really insurance. To some extent, yes, it does protect you against an unexpected catastrophic illness, but it also covers normal things, e.g. checkups, chronic illness, long term medications.
When you have "insurance" that pays out all the time for regular predictable events, it's not insurance. Insurance socializes risk, but US health "insurance" socializes cost, which is a totally different thing. The system is really just socialism, but with handouts to private "insurance companies" tacked on, so the whole thing costs more than if we just straight-up socialized it.
People think that "health insurance" makes health care cheaper, but that's only because it's subsidized by the government. You pay more in taxes so the government can give tax breaks to employers to pay for other people's health plans.
... and all of this... I'm not even trying to make an argument for whether we should change it or how we should change it. I just think it's important to understand it.
Windows. As a practical matter, it's easier for most people to get a different phone than it is for people to choose a different OS.
Yes, not to go off into a tangent, but I think it's worth repeating/emphasizing: Insurance does not save money overall. That's the same whether it's health insurance, car insurance, or phone insurance. The average individual participating in insurance will pay more than they ever take out, and all of the people collectively will pay more than they ever take out. If that weren't the case, then insurance companies would be losing money, and wouldn't be feasible as a business.
The purpose of insurance is to socialize risk. Everyone puts in a little money into a pool, and then if someone participating falls into an unlikely disastrous situation, they are permitted to cover their loss from that pooled money. No more money can be extracted than is put in, and some percentage always needs to be paid to someone to administer the whole thing.
I think that assessment might be a bit generous to consumers. They only care about security after they've lost money. They only care about privacy after sensitive information has leaked. They only care about clarity when they start to suspect they're being ripped off. They only care about honesty when they discover they're the ones being ripped off.
What most people want from financial products is a fail-safe get-rich-quick scheme. They'll turn a blind eye to a lot of problems as long as they think they're getting rich.
I'm not much of an expert in finance, but I know a fair amount about IT, and I'd say it's a safe bet that crappy technology, legacy tech, and vendor lock-in is holding back a lot of efficiency and innovation.
I mean, technology in general is adding a lot of innovation and efficiency. For sure. But I see a lot of businesses depending on some weird custom-built application that was built in the '90s and doesn't support any OS past Windows XP. I see a lot of simple, common problems going completely unaddressed, while all the computing talent is focused on building the next crappy Snapchat clone. Microsoft seems intent on using all of their expertise on forcing advertising down everyone's throat. Apple is just making things thinner and lighter without making them more useful or reliable. The FOSS community is so wrapped up in everyone reinventing their own wheel, and so you end up with a bunch of half-finished clunky wheels.
It kind of makes me regret that I gave up programming, because maybe I could fix some of these problems. Of course, if I hadn't given up programming, I'd probably have just ended up being yet another person trying to develop a Snapchat competitor rather than fixing real problems.
in Catholiban 'Murica
Oh, don't blame the Catholics. It's crazy protestant fundamentalists that cause these problems. Sure, the Catholic church has its share of problems, but they're not the cause of the things you're talking about.
Even done perfectly, nobody would believe it was real, so it would be hard to argue that either Trump or Putin would suffer the kind of opprobrium associated with a porn video intended to deceive people into believing such an event actually took place.
It's also quite a nice day for the couple. Trump and Putin can finally release their sex tape without political ramifications, since everyone will assume it's a fake.
I don't think you understand what the whole "whoosh" thing is about. You're not supposed to post it when things go over your head.
Optical drives are being offered on fewer models every year, and when they're sold, they're largely going unused. Hence, it's likely that the trend will continue until it's not a default part of any models, and you'll have to get an external DVD drive. And then those will become hard to find. Eventually... well hey, when's the last time you saw a 5.25" floppy drive?
It's effectively become the streaming music analogue of Microsoft pushing people to surf the web with Internet Explorer.
That's misunderstanding either the situation with Apple Music or the situation with Internet Explorer. Apple isn't sabotaging Spotify and making it crash on Apple devices. As far as I know, Apple isn't actively trying to redirect you to using Apple Music with every update of iOS. Apple isn't pushing to have record labels to produce only music that works on Apple Music.
No one likes privacy anymore.
Plenty of people still like privacy. There's a big difference between, "I don't care if a particular company knows what music I listen to," and "I don't care if my emails are public."
If you buy your MP3s from Amazon or you buy the physical CDs from Amazon, they still know what music you own. The medium doesn't make a big difference in that case. Even when people bought their albums at brick-and-mortar stores, going to the same Tower Records and buying CDs with your credit card meant that the store could be tracking what music you'd purchased. People weren't only paying in cash or avoiding patronizing the same store twice out of fear that the store might compile a list of what albums they owned. People didn't care.
And that's all it is. People don't care if Amazon or Apple or Spotify know what music they like. They want those services to know, in fact, because one of the services they offer is music recommendation-- if they know what music you like, they can tell you what other music you might like. But there's still a wide chasm between that and "not liking privacy".
No, but they often come with DVD or Blu-Ray drives...
... and they often don't. More and more, manufacturers are making computers with no optical media drive, or where the optical drive is optional. More importantly, I'd bet that most of those optical drives are going largely unused, even when they're there.
That totally makes sense. If you really want physical media, CDs are pretty outdated. These days, you can fit an entire collection with several hundred albums on a single micro-SD card. And that's with a lossless codec. CDs are a waste of material and space.
Part of the appeal of CDs once upon a time was that they would last a long time. They scratch easily, but if you took care of them, they were supposed to last hundreds of years. However, things didn't really work that way. Instead the industry made cheaper CDs that only lasted a handful of years.
If we were going to stick with physical media, it'd be nice if someone were to produce a standard for cheap, compact, durable, long-lasting media that would be suitable for archival purposes. It seems to me that ideally there would be no moving parts, but also no physical connectors to wear out or break. Having enormous capacity and quick write speeds could take a back seat to redundancy and durability.
Basically, if I'm going to pay for data on a physical medium, I want a medium that you could throw out the window of a moving car, go swimming with it in your pocket, or just stick it in a drawer for 20 years, and still have a reasonable expectation that it wouldn't lose a bit of data.
They're more like a "frenemy", as much as I dislike the word.
Eh... well... Speech is regulated to some extent. Aside from the whole "yelling 'fire' in a theater" thing, there are various rules and controls on newspapers, TV, radio, and movies. There are some rules about the actual content, but even more importantly, there are rules about the way those businesses can run.
In may cases, there are regulations that are less about preventing people from speaking, and more about making sure the motivations are clear. To give a simple/obvious example, you can't make false claims in your advertising. It's a regulation on speech, but it protects against fraud.
I don't think there should be a law specific to Facebook, but there could be an attempt to regulate businesses like Facebook to require a certain level of transparency. Maybe when Facebook targets you with an advertisement, they're also required to indicate (1) that it is an advertisement; (2) who is paying for it; and (3) why you're being targeted. Instead of appearing on your wall as a news story, it could say, "This is an advertisement being served by HIPSTER_MART because you are classified as UNDER_40_YEARS_OLD and LIVES_IN_URBAN_AREA." And then maybe you should be allowed to set or remove your classifications.
I'm just making it up off of the top of my head, but my point is, there are forms of regulating speech that don't actually inhibit speech. They just make sure the audience has some understanding of who's talking to them and what the message really is.
Also, the "Macbook" is smaller and lighter than the "Macbook Air". It doesn't really make sense, from a marketing standpoint.
I mean, they could rejigger their lineup and change the names around, but as it stands, the Macbook Air is just a legacy device.
That's not why, though. It's like saying "the reason the addict is clean is because he overdosed." Even if that experience motivated him to get clean, lots of other people stay clean without having ever overdosed. The addict could have stopped doing drugs at any time without overdosing.
In the same way, America could have been investing in better power sources and infrastructure, but we've just chosen not to. There's a segment of the population that's still insisting that we go back to coal. Until we figure out a way to get rid of these morons, we're going to fall behind. And to your point, it's possible that pursuing bunch of moronic short-sighted goals will create enough of a disaster that we'll be forced to learn our lesson. Performing genetic engineering willy-nilly might end up with us figuring out how to be more careful in the long run. It'd be nice if we could just not be moronic without causing those disasters first.
Oh, that's not why. That attitude is why China, not us, are drowning in smog.
And fuck you if you're on your death bed, you're NOT ALLOWED TO MAKE YOUR OWN DECISION. It's for your own good!
It's not just for your own good. We don't really know what these gene altering technologies will do-- either on a technical scientific level, or on a sociological level. Lots of technologies seem harmless enough at the outset, and people ask, "What could possibly go wrong?" Part of the problem is, the things that go wrong are often not things we even suspected might go wrong.
Also, people can't just invent a new form of gold with new features and security, thereby making gold obsolete.
"No true investment....."
It's not a "no true Scotsman" fallacy to note that some things are legitimately not Scotsmen. A rock from Africa is just not a Scotsman, and that's not fallacious reasoning. Similarly, most people would not consider buying video games a financial investment. You can say, "I had fun, so to me it was worth the time and money I invested in it," and that's fair enough. But still, by conventional terms, "fun" is not considered a financial return on investment.
If you know how to do it, then it's a way to make money.
Whether there are any people who know how to do it depends on what you mean by "know how to do it". It's gambling. There are people who think they have a system for playing the slots, and they can win for a while, but they don't actually "know how to do it." On the other hand, there are people who know how to play blackjack and can win by counting cards, which is generally considered cheating. There are people who know how to play poker and can siphon money off of the other players who don't really know how to play poker.
In the same way, there may be people who "know how to do it" in the sense that they're gaming the system or knowingly participating in a pyramid scheme and hoping to time their exit before it crashes. Everyone else "knows how to do it" in about the same way that people know how to play the lottery.
Blackjack and poker can make plenty of money in a casino.
Yup. Still, again, by conventional terms, playing blackjack isn't usually considered a legitimate form of financial investment, let alone a wise one.
Meh... I'd still say no. All kinds of crap pops up all the time. Some catch on and become fads that you can make money from, some not. You're thinking that it's a good investment because "I could do it with my CPU, which is free!" But it's not really free. It takes up your time to investigate, to look into it, to think about it, to make sure the software you're running doesn't do something shady (shadier than mining bitcoins). And then it doesn't take long before mining bitcoins required buying better video cards, using more electricity, etc. The smart bet is on it all being a waste of whatever time and resources you put into it.
And yeah, the "smart money" worked out to be wrong in the short term. Just like every pyramid scheme, there's money to be made, just so long as there are still new people taking the bait. That doesn't make them wise investments.
Fun? Ok, maybe you'd have fun. Gambling in casinos is fun. Sinking money into expensive hobbies is fun. Those aren't really investments.
A few things:
1) Your post is a little ambiguous. Do you want an explanation as to why people get upset that 1% of the population owns 50% of the world's wealth? Or are you just asking why those people who are upset also like bitcoin?
2) I'm not sure it's the same people. That is, the people who are upset about the disparity in wealth distribution are the same people buying bitcoin, at least not exclusively.
3) In either case, I doubt that they're buying bitcoin in response to being upset about the disparity in wealth distribution. At least not directly.
4) It's really not the same thing anyway. Complaining that a small percentage of bitcoin owners have 40% of bitcoin is a bit like complaining... maybe it's like complaining that a tiny percent of airplane owners own a large percent of all airplanes. That's not a perfect analogy, but the unequal distribution makes sense-- i.e. few people really want or need many airplanes, whereas everyone wants some form of wealth.