Seriously, fuck Excel.

I’m a bastard in both senses.

information should be abundant

Perhaps so, but isn’t that up to whoever creates the information? If you invent a story, why would you not be entitled to own it?

For much of human history, artistry of all sorts has been a profession, as much as a hobby. The idea of attribution and ownership over one’s art has been a core part of why that has worked and allowed creators to thrive. I would argue that the alternative of having no such system at all would ultimately lead to less art and information being created and shared at all, if the creation process is unsustainable at an individual creator’s level.

Your other points amounted to little more than “I own my computer, therefore I’m entitled to your computer”, and “free and not-free are the same thing”, which are both equally absurd and not really worth dissecting further.

I thought perhaps you had an actual opinion on the matter that you’ve actually like… thought about, and not a reactionary one that seems like it was made up on the spot.

Your argument so far has been “it’s new (even though it’s not) and I don’t like it”. If you wanna get extra pedantic, the idea of copyright has been floated since the 1500s, and the concept of owning art predates even that. It wasn’t until the late 1700s that our current “modern” copyright system began taking form.

Regardless, none of that changes the fact that it’s still a real part of our lives now. We don’t live 2.75 million years in the past, we live now. Presumably, you wipe after defecating, don’t you? Didn’t you know that toilet paper is a modern invention that we didn’t have a million years ago and only went to market 3 years before slavery was abolished in the US? It’s bad and we shouldn’t use it, right???

I still don’t get what any of this has to do with anything we’re talking about, though. I feel like maybe you’ve talked yourself into a corner by making up nonsense and then trying to defend it. This is dumb, just like every argument defending piracy; it uses sovereign citizen logic where you make up arbitrary rules and definitions that nobody else in society agrees with to justify bad behavior.

If you wanna pirate stuff, then pirate it. But just own it; don’t make up silly defenses for why it’s okay, because they don’t hold up under scrutiny.

There was no concept of owning a story or a song just because you told it first, throughout literally all of history until the copyright laws of the 20th century.

Brother, copyright has been around since at least the 1700s, you’re literally just making things up right now. Read a book.

I’ll feel phantom vibrations on my thigh when my phone isn’t even in my pocket.

Sometimes I’ll feel a buzz on my thigh, look at the phone on my desk, and then a new notification will come in. That shit freaks me out.

bzzvt bzzvt

“Knight to d4.”

I said it has no basis in human culture or history.

Not only is this incorrect, it would be meaningless even if it was accurate. What point are you even trying to make with this claim?

I don’t get your argument. So because it’s “new” according to your grand cosmic scale, it doesn’t exist at all?

You can say “I think intellectual property is a dumb idea” and I’d love to hear your arguments for that, but to act like it isn’t real just because we came up with the idea relatively recently, is just asinine.

Copyright has no basis in human culture or history.

It’s exited before any of us currently alive, so that’s a pretty absurd notion. Unless human culture and history ended ~300 years ago?

Unlike physical goods, information can flow and be copied freely at a fundamental physics level.

The electricity and silicon required to make this happen are not free, on a societal or physical level. There is a tangible cost to this transfer, even if you’re ignoring the social construct of copyright.

I think this issue comes from a misunderstanding of “free”, possibly conflating it for “trivially easy”.

Rather than develop a system that rewards digital artists based on how much something is used for free

Feel free to come up with such a system. I think you’ll find that a rather difficult task.

Its a scarcity based system

In what way?

but it is still not the same as stealing since it does not deprive the artists of their original copy.

The artist has ownership rights to all copies, not just the original; it’s literally in the word “copyright”.

Theft is more than just physically removing a non-fungible item. Depriving owed earnings is also considered theft, hence why piracy is considered theft because there is a debt owed for the pirated media. If you believe in wage theft, then you believe in IP theft.

I’ve actually seen this recently at some stores, usually just for the self-checkout section.

I love how all of this was just to avoid asking a family member “hey can I change some settings on your router to fix the Wi-Fi?”

The lengths I’ll go to just to avoid human interaction. 🤣

Sometimes you just need to do some good old fashioned percussive maintenance. :)

My example: I fixed a wifi interference problem by adding more wifi interference.

I’m currently staying at a family member’s house for a few months, and need to use their wifi to work from home. After moving all my belongings in, I soon realized that I wouldn’t be able to work on this network, because of how intermittent the connection was. My phone, laptop, and PlayStation would all disconnect about once every 1-2 minutes. It was so severe that it took me over 2 hours to play a 40-minute video due to the consistent freezing.

And I guess everybody living here just must not use the internet that much, and have just kinda accepted this as a fact of life and nobody’s tried to fix it. This would be something I’d normally be able to resolve by myself, but because this isn’t a network I own and control, I’m not going to go changing their router settings. And since I’m a guest in this home, I’m not gonna go drilling holes to run ethernet to my room, either.

Using a wifi analyzer, I was able to spot the immediate issue: There were about 30 networks in the area mostly with pretty weak signal, but all on channels 6 and 11. There were only 2 networks using channel 1, and they were weak. The router I’m connecting to is also on channel 11, and I can tell right away that if I can get it to switch to channel 1, I’d be all set. But, since this isn’t my network, I can’t just tell the router to use channel 1, even though it should’ve automatically switched a long time ago. But it’s just a crappy ISP-provided router, so I can’t really expect much of it.

So I hatched up a plan, and took an old router of mine and piggybacked it to the router here at the house. My router uses a web app to control its settings, so all I needed was for the router to get an internet connection via ethernet and I could control it. Once my router was online, I was able to log into it and force it to use channel 11, the same channel as the home’s router.

The sudden appearance of a very strong connection on the same channel (since it’s placed just a few feet away) caused the home’s router to finally switch itself over to channel 1, which was still largely free of any signals. Now the router is working flawlessly, and all my devices, and everybody else’s at the house, are staying connected seamlessly.

I agree. I think a big part of the issue is that going out to do things is just so expensive these days. There aren’t any “third places” for people anymore.