JGrffn

You can get 20tb seagate exos drives for ~$15/tb on ebay, sometimes on Amazon as well.

Surely you can see how this also isn't a fitting solution. Just... Go down the age brackets and see how increasingly uncomfortable it all becomes to tolerate this. There's already been cases of AI porn of highschoolers made by highschoolers. We can keep going down the victim age line, or up the perpetrator age line. It gets bad pretty fast regardless of how ubiquitous this might become in the future.

We can agree about piracy being detrimental for sure! We just disagree on how detrimental it is vs corpo's own actions.

Regarding the donations, it's "give whatever you want, even 0, and inly when I say we need new gear", so I wouldn't say it's lost revenue since barely anyone donates and it all goes directly to covering part of the cost of new hard drives. I've asked for donations twice so far, and none of the times have seen enough donations to cover for 100% of equipment expenses. Just thought I'd clarify on the "donations" thing :)

I'd have to give Amazon, HBO, Hulu, Disney, crunchyroll, etc. Donations as well since they're contributing just as much, if not more than, Netflix to my collection now👀

I'm personally dying to see the DMA do its magic. If there's even a dreamy chance of not having to have the big messaging apps installed on my phone in order to talk to people on these platforms, then I don't want to stop dreaming.

Honestly, even bad trips are good trips. The trip I reference in my post (500ug LSD + cannabis during the peak for added mindfuckery) was, by all means, a bad trip that left me with PTSD and on at least one occasion I had a panic attack during a work call, where reality felt a bit too much. Not something I enjoyed, but even then I could appreciate that it had changed me for the better. I got a lot of my shit together after that trip and I appreciate life a lot more than I used to. I was fat, single (and had been all 28 years of my life), had no aim in life, had no hobbies, no appreciation for leaving my room at all or interacting with people in real life. Today I proposed to my girlfriend of two years, I do photography as a hobby and actively try to go out and appreciate the world around me, reached my target body weight, vastly increased my social life, and I am paving the road to a life I desire to live. Not everything is perfect, and maybe I am attributing too much to the trip and not enough to simple aging and maturing through that time, but there was a stark before and after for me. As far as I'm concerned it's been the most positively life changing event in my life that I absolutely cannot recommend anyone in my life to ever try.

They're called donations for a reason, it's a contribution to keep the service growing (not going since I'm personally invested in keeping it going for as long as possible) and nobody is forced to give a dime if they don't want to.

At least for piracy of streaming content, I believe what should become apparent to everyone is that convenience drove down piracy and greatly increased gains for everyone, and once corporations got greedy and started rolling out new platforms and fragmenting content between them, everything started going down the drain. Even without accounting for piracy, convenience was lost, multiple platforms mean more fees to get the same content that was originally in one platform, so less people willing to pay. Less income per platform drives down investment in content and drives up cancelations of ongoing projects. Less income than was originally observed when a single platform had condensed content means there's greater incentive to drive ads and increases prices on all platforms, thus also potentially driving down users subscribing to said platforms.

None of that factors in piracy. If we do factor in piracy, it's a fact that before fragmentation, subscription rates were high, and after fragmentation, there's a lot more incentive to pirate content. In some instances, platforms shoot themselves in the foot even further by further charging rental fees or purchases of individual content, as well as region blocks and ads.

Piracy surely is a problem all throughout the history of streaming services (something that could still be argued as not actually something to worry about because those pirates were never going to be customers in the first place, and Netflix was still booming enough to incentivize other companies to roll out their own platforms), but it becomes a symptom of another problem later down the line due to lack of convenience. Even so, the current state of streaming platforms wouldn't be much different if piracy wasn't happening. People would simply consume less content due to budget constraints or due to being annoyed at lack of conveniences.

I personally hate depending on a platform that on a whim may decide to remove content I watch. There's specific songs that have disappeared from my Spotify playlists for no good reason (a lot for geoblocking reasons), there's shows that just get removed from Netflix, there's all of game of thrones on prime which I couldn't watch due to geoblocking and ended up having to pirate it even though I was paying for a platform which had the show. It's a lot easier, a lot more convenient, to pirate. The content is yours, instantly, until you decide to delete it from your computer. I didn't mind paying for Netflix for years, and since they incentivized account sharing, I shared the account with 2 other friends and we split the cost. It was super convenient. Now, I have a plex library nearing the 50tb mark with about 40 people watching content on it, everything automated and everyone can request whatever they want, and I simply ask for donations to buy more drives. It's still more expensive than subscription services due to energy costs, donations not being enough for the equipment needed to store content and run services, and costs of internet, static ips, and domain names, but I'm not planning to stop as it's overall more convenient, not just for me, but for 40 other people.

I'm not sure if you've tripped before, but that hardly explains the reality-obliterating hallucinations on all sensory inputs. There's feedback loops everywhere at that point. The moment there's hallucinations or synesthesia you could argue the brain is not operating to spec and, at least temporarily, malfunctioning, as in, you probably wouldn't usually be able to use your brain to overcome challenges it's been designed to overcome when operating normally.

Hey I'm all for it, you can argue you learn a lot about reality itself once your senses go out the door and your brain stops processing reality the way we normally process it, but it's still not how the brain has been designed to sense and respond to reality.

I don't know of a country there that allows private ownership of firearms

Well, we do allow private ownership of firearms, just, AFAIK, a very limited number of models provided by a very specific entity rather than just about anywhere. I wouldn't be surprised if most countries in the americas allowed some degree of firearm ownership (don't care enough to look it up).

I didn't mean that when I said "privately owned militias". I meant the banana companies which dealt with strikes by sending privately owned troops on privately owned ships to these countries in order to reign in their poorly disguised slavery.

Taken in measured, clinically understood doses, sure. Taken to meet Vishnu, I assure you, none of what your brain experiences is normal function. Not to say they cause damage, but your brain definitely operates way out of spec for a while there.

Putting aside for the moment the fact that psychedelics are essentially just causing your brain to [temporarily] malfunction, this description eerily resembles the post-trip phase of psychedelics. You come back from essentially getting your blindfolds taken from you, seeing the world in ways that make sense only during the psychedelic trip, and even then it's all overwhelming, only to come back and question just about EVERYTHING about reality. It's been 3 years and I'm still going down the quantum physics/cosmology rabbit hole (as well as the philosophy and metaphysics rabbit holes, thanks exurb1a), all due to a strong bad LSD trip. It's beautiful, it's expanded my knowledge of things, but it is, indeed, very much like madness.