I mean Reddit; bastion of free speech or platform for hate speech? (they cracked down on that over the years) Dropbox; File synchronization and sharing platform or child porn exchange? Airbnb; Great way to find an affordable place to stay and / or rent out unused room, or platform for dodgy landlords that scam people with pretty pictures? Coinbase: Platform for libertarian wet dream crypto exchange, or platform for laundering your ill-gotten gains?
Just to name a few YC examples. Everything can be used for bad things and make the world a worse place, and they don't always do the right thing.
Anyway, everyone was cordial and professional and we didn’t really get into debate too much — and I was clearly the odd woman out, not a lawyer or in agreement with their position — but I walked away from the lunch with the belief that at least most of them absolutely believe they are fighting against what they see as abuse against copyright and ownership and that they see themselves as protectors of the industry, and to a lesser extent, artists. Now, I disagree that their tactics really succeed and would argue that ignoring the push of technology has hurt the music industry and especially artists, but I also accept that it is valid for people to have a completely different view from me. And it’s important to be exposed to that on occasion.
I’ll also say, as I was waiting for my Uber to take me to my next meeting, I saw valet bringing out $200,000 cars for many of the people I had politely been debating with earlier. I’m sure the money doesn’t hurt.
Not unlike my friends who work for tech giants that many of us find abhorrent but get $400,000 in stock grants a year.
Right, but the RIAA aren’t just making new abusable things, they’re actively abusing existent ones.
Personally, I do programming for psych research students & faculty at an undergrad institution.
It's not like working at a startup—or having money as your first, last, and only moral compass—is a prerequisite to post here.
A lot of people wouldn't be able to get any justice at all if it weren't for lawyers. Lawyers work for the ACLU and EFF too you know.
Sure maybe you could argue that Facebook and Google don't make the world a better place. Maybe a bunch of other FAANG companies.
But not everyone here works for one of those. I don't, and I'd say my work probably improves society in a certain sense (depending on whether web development/UX design/usability work does that).
Making society better requires actually making society better. You have to weigh the total societal positives against the total societal negatives.
Everybody has their price. For some people, it's low enough that they'll actually do the evil things and not lose sleep over it.
I don't work in food delivery, but I'd say getting a pizza from point A to B is a hell of a lot more productive than being a lawyer for the RIAA.
There is zero need for a multinational between hungry people and food delivery. Inserting them raises costs, lowers service quality, and lowers revenue to restaurants.
Off topic, but I would like to note this thread's congruence to Snow Crash:
There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza deliveryNonsense.
Everyone I live with went from not ordering any food to using UberEats weekly because it's so much more pleasant than interfacing with every restaurant directly, having to carry cash to pay and tip, having on easy way to answer "what's open right now?", etc.
All these restaurants are getting money they would have never received from me had the app never existed. And everyone I know uses UberEats and will sheepishly admit they use it way too often.
You should talk to people who use UberEats before you assume it provides zero value to anyone, not sure what else to say. Maybe you can do the same for Uber as well.
I'm sure it's the usual case of a large enough salary helps you to forgot what a piece of shit you are.
Of course they don't do only that, they also have to spend their time crafting abusive contracts and extensions in detriment of artists and in favour of big recording companies.
They made 820 million € in revenue, 128M€ are their "costs", 692M€ of that 15% are their fees, remainingnis split between labels and artists and artists got 316.5M€, thus a quite low fraction ... and in German law the creator is theoretically stronger positioned than in US copyright.
(Now this isn't 100% fair as analysis, as some of the payments to labels go to artits, as well and labels also do some marketing etc benefiting the artist ... and then there is this weird distribution mechanism where a successful artist gets over proportionally more ... but in the end: "small" artists only get a very tiny part of the cake)
It's a concept that's somehow always stuck with me whenever I hear about people who seem convinced everyone else is wrong.
[1]: https://webspace.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/spookrijders.html
The whole writeup is a tantrum on why you should stick to "well known" facts. Which sounds to me too much like asserting the truth of things without questioning them. Yes, there are a lot of fools out there whith a spookrijder complex that are a detriment to science. And I would assume a well-known professor would rightly get tired of their emails.
He only shortly adresses at the end that radical ideas are precisely what is needed for progress in science.
I do not think this dismissive mentality does the situation any good. If someone comes with a radical but stupid idea, you need to first recognize the merit in the idea, and then show why it is wrong. Bashing someone with "you cannot create free energy" will only encourage him to waste his time trying to prove you wrong.
I suspect a lot of these spookrijders are curious and fairly smart people, but who's ideas where offhandedly dismissed by a teacher one too many times.
But I think it tends to not work like this. Incidentally, the flat earth thing is mostly a myth; literate people have know the earth is round since the ancient Greeks figured it out. Columbus was ridiculed for thinking the Earth was smaller than it really is (his critics were right) and the only reason his trip didn't end badly for him is shear dumb luck in running into another continent in his quest to reach Asia the looooong way around.
Heliocentrism was a bit more debated but for good reasons. Early heliocentric models were actually worse than contemporary geocentric models to calculate the motion of planets.
All that to say that "everyone else is wrong" doesn't happen often in practice, at least not among educated people. And when that happens, either the evidence is solid and it is generally well accepted or it is not, and there is no reason for others to accept it. The burden or proof is for the one who makes the claim.
To go back to heliocentrism, the reason it is the prevailing theory right now is because the model has been refined and now, it matches observation better than older models based en epicycles. It is not because of some philosophical reason about our place in the universe.
And this is one of those rarer times that everyone is wrong who believes this myth, although maybe they are uneducated too.
All this is to say go team iconoclasm.
The joke here goes that on the radio there is an all-bands emergency announcement about a ghostrider on A2, the main artery of the country, between Amsterdam and Utrecht.
In one of the vehicles on that road someone mutters 'A ghostrider? Bloody idiots, there's thousands of them!'.
At least I could find several articles talking about ppl going the wrong way after searching for it + wrong direction.
I'm not a native speaker however
If asked, a majority might say that (though IMHO nowhere near 99%). Their actions indicate otherwise, however, and a person's beliefs are better judged by their actions than by their words.
Amoral Nihilistic Pirates would be a great name for a band.
Just sayin'.
As a matter of fact, the financial services sector thrives with such people
At least one way they could rationalize their actions is by taking an outlandish but not uncommon view of property rights: that no one would bother to create anything without being able to profit from ownership of it, and the more they can profit the more they'll create.
There's also the even more outlandish view that whatever the market does is good for society by definition, so if the market pays you to do something you can assume it's beneficial to society.