If the movie is good, you should support it by making a donation to the strike fund of the unions that represent the artists that actually create the movies. You can support artists without supporting the amoral companies that produce these works.
I decided on my moral beliefs on piracy back during the days of Kazaa and Limewire. Back then the RIAA was shaking down teenagers, threatening them with statutory liabilities of a quarter million dollars per song, simply because the law allowed it. They would threaten low-income families with lawsuits in the millions and get them to settle for a still-ridiculous settlement of few thousand dollars. Even the settlements were far in excess of the full retail cost of purchasing these songs.
I decided then that if the law allows this kind of thing, then copyright law as it exists now is fundamentally immoral. And immoral laws are not worthy of respect.
I mostly take a pragmatic approach to copyright. Whether I pay for something is a combination of the quality of the work, the reputation of the company selling it, the customer service provided by the legitimate product, the probability of getting caught for violating copyright law, etc. An indie publisher that treats their people well? I’ll buy it. Mass market schlock made by criminally underpaid artists for rent-seeking megacorps? I’ll pirate that all day, every day.
But morality literally plays no part in it. I learned long ago that copyright law exists outside of the realm of morality. The decision to buy or pirate is an entirely practical one; morality simply isn’t a factor.
Meanwhile, your morality is just the bandwagon effect.
This is so incredibly stupid. Do you know what else you can create with a 3D printer besides the receiver for a ghost gun? That’s right - another 3D printer!
I could see legislators passing a law that required commercial 3D printers to include some sort of signature within their prints. Regular 2D printers already have these; they have a series of microdots that encode a unique identifier for any commercial printer sold. So if you try to photocopy money (and somehow get passed internal filters meant to prevent that), the money you print will be traceable to your printer.
In principal, you could require 3D printers to have something similar. A printer could automatically add insignificant defects to any print. So instead of printing a straight line of filament, it produces a subtly wavy line. You would make the imperfections so small you need to use magnification to see them. But within those imperfections you could embed a serial number that uniquely identified each 3D printer commercially sold. And if someone tried to print a ghost gun receiver on their commercial 3D printer, that would allow you to identify the source of the part. This is how in theory a 3D printer license could be useful. We license each printer, and any prints made contain unique identifiers making them traceable to those licensed printers.
But here is the problem. Unlike with 2D printers and counterfeit currency, It is possible to 3D print a 3D printer. You can make a 3D printer out of 3D printed parts and generic mass-market motors, computer chips, and aluminum extrusions. See RepRap. And if you have the 3D printing skills to make a ghost gun (which is NOT a trivial task), you also have the skills to 3D print a 3D printer. And while the plastic parts of that ghost 3D printer will have the security code embedded in them, the actual code running the ghost printer need not follow the law.
Sure, you can make it illegal to create such a ghost 3D printer. But it’s already illegal to make a ghost gun! It’s not like 3D printing a gun is the cheapest or easiest way to obtain a firearm. It’s far easier to just go buy one legally. No, people only print ghost guns if they specifically want to hide from the law and are willingly violating it. And if someone is willing to violate federal gun manufacturing law, going the extra step and making an illegal 3D printer isn’t going to stop them.
So by regulating 3D printers, you make the lives of every legitimate 3D printer user harder. And since criminals who make ghost guns can just first make a ghost 3D printer, you won’t actually improve the ability of police to trace the source of ghost guns. Really all you’ll do is be able to add the charge of “illegal 3D printer manufacture” to the long litany of charges thrown at anyone caught printing ghost guns. So they’ll get 31 years in prison instead of 30.
Making 3D printers requiring licensing would do nothing to actually reduce the spread of firearms, would severely burden every legitimate user of a 3D printer, and would do little other than providing minor increases in sentencing to illegal gun manufacturers caught using existing police tools and techniques. You could accomplish the exact same thing simply by slightly increasing the penalties on illegal gun manufacturing.
Did you know that actual historical alchemy was often banned by various kings and monarchs? They did so not due to superstition, or because alchemy didn’t work. Rather, they banned alchemy because it DID work.
We now know that you cannot use chemical reactions, however complex, to turn base metals like lead or copper into silver or gold. However, you can use alchemy to give these base metals the appearance of silver or gold. Alchemists could coat coins in durable coatings that would appear to be like silver or gold. Dip a copper coin in the right solution and it will take on the appearance of gold. And you can then take that coin out of the solution, clean it thoroughly, and the faux-gold treatment will remain. It’s not just a layer of paint resting on the surface; the upper layers of copper atoms have actually chemically reacted to produce compounds that give the appearance of gold or silver.
So, even though alchemy didn’t work to truly turn lead into gold, from the perspective of a monarch, that didn’t actually matter. Because when it comes to currency debasement, making a fake gold coin so good that it fools people is just as good as making real gold. The alchemists couldn’t turn create real gold coins, but they could create counterfeit gold coins that could be quite convincing in the right circumstances. They didn’t need to create a forgery that could fool a modern PhD chemist with a lab full of equipment; they just needed something that could fool an illiterate 12th century merchant at his shop. The process:
Take a mold or press a stamp of one of the king’s official gold coins.
Use the mold or stamp to cast, press, or forge coins out of cheap metals like copper or tin.
Apply an alchemical process to make the copper or tin coin look like gold.
Spend the counterfeit coin as a real coin.
Coins were a better target than bulk gold like bars. With a bar, you would notice that the “gold” has an incorrect density. But a counterfeit coin, mixed in with a larger number of legitimate coins? Easy to pass off as the genuine article.
Kings often banned alchemists from their realms. Practicing alchemy was often a capital offense. In terms of true elemental transfiguration, alchemy failed. In terms of the ability to create spendable wealth from nothing, alchemy absolutely did work. From the perspective of a monarch looking to protect their currency from debasement, alchemy was a very real threat.
It’s actually an open legal question. Actual legal scholars have argued both ways on it. Yes, there is was a deadline in the act Congress passed to send the amendment out for ratification. But the key is that they didn’t include that deadline language in the text of the amendment itself. Some other amendments have language in the text of the amendment that places a deadline on ratification. That is the crucial difference here.
A good argument can be made that Congress can only propose an amendment or not. They can’t attach a bunch of extra provisos to the amendment process. Congress can’t confirm a justice to the court and apply a bunch of conditions to that confirmation. If they want to have a time limit on the ratification of the amendment, the time limit should be in the actual text of the amendment itself.
Works have meanings beyond their surface-level detail and literal meaning. They also have themes and clear implications. And Idiocracy certainly has those. It has clear undertones of eugenics.
The first is the clear implication that population demographics require active management. In the movie, there was no mass government program to encourage births among those of low intelligence and discourage births among the intelligent. This situation developed entirely naturally through culture acting on its own. A viewer could only conclude that if this horrible future is to be avoided, that we need to start worrying a lot more about who is reproducing in what numbers. We either need government mandates or major cultural initiatives to encourage reproduction among the deserving. Idiocracy never outright endorses eugenics, but the implication is obvious. Writers aren’t idiots. They know the clear implications of their work. You don’t end up with a political movie that clearly implies the solution is genocide without realizing that’s the obvious implication.
The second is the theme that intelligence is something that can be bred or selected for at all through the social stratification we have now. Are those with PhDs really more intelligent, by writ of birth, than those that never graduate high school? Or it mostly about circumstances of birth, opportunities, personal choices, or even neonatal environmental pollutant exposure? Do we have any real evidence that intelligence differences within the species are something that can truly be selected for? Hell, what kind of intelligence are we talking about? Scholastic ability, emotional intelligence, executive reasoning, etc? There are many types of intelligence. And the very idea that the poor and those of lower educational attainment are of genetically lower intelligence is a key eugenics theme.
Yes, Idiocracy never comes right out and explicitly endorses eugenics. But the implications and themes are undeniably pro-eugenics.
Yup. For whatever reason (likely regulations), most dispensaries are set up a lot like traditional general stores. Everything behind the counter.
You sound incredibly pretentious.
I’m sorry, but I’m not talking about McDonalds. I’m not talking about engineered food products. I mean a good thick slab of fresh bread made from flour, salt, a bit of sugar, and not much else. Served with a big dash of butter. That is heaven.
The healthspan stuff? Completely irrelevant to my point. What is the point of a healthspan if you deny yourself all the pleasures of life? Enjoy all things in moderation. But I firmly reject this whole, “well…have a little wheat bread if you muuust…anything else is abusive.”
“Do you even know what real food tastes like?”
Well you clearly know what your own farts smell like. Jesus Wept! Your head is so far up your ass you can see the contents of your own stomach.
Your hair is the roof of your mouth.
If theft is this bad, these stores should just switch back to the traditional model used by pharmacies and general stores. Consider this photo of a traditional pharmacy:
Or this old general store:
This is what these businesses used to look like. In traditional pharmacies and general stores, most goods were kept behind counters or at the very least within direct view of those behind counters. A traditional dry good store might literally just be a big counter in the front with a huge warehouse in the back. You show up with a list of goods you want, and the clerk would run into the back and grab everything you wanted.
The model of a store with aisles that customers wander through is not the historical norm. As industrialization improved, the relative costs of goods lowered, while the relative cost of labor increased. So it made sense for stores to accept a higher level of theft and shopliting by offloading the item-picking process to their customers. They got the customers to do a lot of the work for them, but in exchange they accepted a higher level of theft.
Now they’re trying to have things both ways. They still want customers to do all the work of picking out their purchases from the shelves, but they’ve decided they don’t like the level of shoplifting that level of low labor cost business inevitably produces. They want the customers to do most of the labor of clerks, but they don’t want to accept the level of theft that inevitably produces.
I honestly wonder, is it illegal to simply unlock those things, if you have no intention of actually stealing from them? It’s not like they use particularly high security locks. You can probably buy some simple lock raking or cylinder lock tools.
Is it actually violating a law to unlock one of those cases if you don’t have any intention of actually stealing something?
You sacrifice and sacrifice, cutting everything out of your habits or diet that may bring you pleasure, only for the sake of extending your life. Then at the end of it all, you look back in dismay, in the dismal realization that despite your years, you have never lived at all…
This man needs to be sentenced to 10 years solitary confinement in a room with 100 electronically controlled vuvuzelas serenading him at all hours of the day and night.
Perhaps. But if that’s the case, then I’m pretty sure that makes Mac OS Eastern Orthodox.
What oddball OS would be Ethiopian Orthodox?
Linux distros are just the new “101 flavors of Protestantism,” complete with radical zealots who believe you will go to Hell for choosing the wrong one.
You’re thinking far too short-term in your economic analysis.
Imagine if everyone tomorrow just started pirating the works of the major video game and film studios. Will high quality movies simply stop being made?
Of course not. There are many ways to structure a film industry. Why are films made by big for-profit companies in the first place? Market conditions have simply allowed for that consolidation. But if we change those market conditions through targeted mass piracy, the current major studio model will disappear in favor of other organizational structures.
Why can’t films be made by collaborations of various worker co-ops? You could have an actor’s co-op, a videographers guild, an employee-owned animation studio, etc. And they could all come together to collaborate on projects for a share of the total profits. Or hell, there’s nothing preventing even a major film studio from being entirely employee-owned.
If everyone stopped buying things from the giants, then the film industry wouldn’t disappear; it would adjust. Companies would become smaller as the “evil megacorp” model became unprofitable. And more space would open up for more distributed production models and for employee-owned businesses.
Your vision and imagination are ultimately simply far too limited.