Cue the 20-minute alley fight!

Invention and cultural development had been growing exponentially for centuries before IP laws - it was called The Renaissance. The creation of IP laws to enrich publishers didn’t start that. Pretending it did is a common false talking point.

My point is that “companies” don’t do bad things, executive decisionmakers do, and boycotts have little if any effect on those individuals. If anything they hurt the lowest-ranking people in the company who have absolutely no say in business decisions. It’s like beating up kids because you heard their parents were assholes. What works is laws that regulate business practices so the bad decisions can’t be made. Mob tactics do nothing but give people a false sense of accomplishment.

“I think they might tho” is a perfect example of meme-driven morality. Most people never actually check (I mean,. you didn’t). Nestle is the usual Hitler example (probably valid tho) that people use to justify the whole mentality of boycotts. But most of the time it’s more like they heard a CEO donated to Trump - for example my in-laws refused to shopt at Home Depot for that exact reason. Turned out their info was out of date - the guy they were thinking of hadn’t been involved in the company in like 10 years. Kind of reminiscent of the bogus 10-year-old WMD intel the Dubya administration used to justify invading Iraq. But who has time to look that shit up when we got scrollin’ to do! And as I said, boycotts hurt employees more than CEOs. If a company is actually hurting they relieve their pain by laying people off. IMO it’s a lazy way for people to pretend they’re fighting for justice when they really aren’t. “Shoot 'em all and let God sort 'em out” morality.

Platitudes don’t stop gangs of thugs from walking around beating you up and taking whatever they want. If nobody physically stops them everybody else ends up having to stay home and hide.

I buy what I need and don’t subscribe to, “Think like me or I’ll hurt you!”. Companies don’t do evil, individuals who work for them do. Boycotting a company might give you a nice warm glow of social justice, but it actually hurts lowest-level employees way more than CEOs. But why think about that when you can just downvote this comment as heresy, right?

Capitalism and government have always been works in progress. It’s useless to categorically praise one and condemn the other without acknowledging that they both have strengths and weaknesses. It’s pretty clear that completely unrestrained capitalism is neither the cackling villain nor the golden hand of prosperity many people see in it, and likewise government isn’t by definition tyranny either. We just haven’t found the right combination yet.

I agree that anyone is eligible for redemption - contrary to the zero-tolerance moral purity attitude that seems popular now. But a society where people were instantly forgiven for whatever bad things they did wouldn’t work, because those people would make life miserable for everybody else. The system needs a way to discourage those people so the vast majority can live their lives in peace. So the question you didn’t answer remains: how would you deal with horrible actions?

I agree with your attitude about IP. For tens of thousands of years humans freely imitated every good idea they saw, in a process known as “the spread of civilization”. But then somebody figured out how to make shitloads of money by producing copies of other people’s work and paying them a pittance, aka “royalty”, and suddenly copying and imitation became immoral.

A free society means other people are entitled to make a living even if I don’t like the way they think. I won’t “vote with my wallet” because that’s like saying a lynch mob is “voting with rope”.

Thanks, I’ll lookup pfSense. But straightforward host mapping has worked for me in the past with this router and others. It worked great on my old Cisco DSL router 25 years ago. So simple and straightforward, it should just freaking work. sigh

Wait I thought the deprecation of the deprecation warning was deprecated.

Too many to count. Foundation trilogy, anything by Heinlein, Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke or various other classic sci fi writers, any Conan book or story, any Jeeves book or story, The Mote in God’s Eye by Niven & Pournelle, Mary Lasswell’s Mrs. Feeley books (pretty obscure), anything by HP Lovecraft…

When somebody says they “just” reverse the polarity of the navigational deflector array and channel power directly from the warp core.

I can’t even get host mapping to work on my Centurylink router - the name is defined for the IP address but nothing else on my network can browse to it by name, only by IP. - software dev who has never understood networking.

I thought Reader’s Digest was for when the roll ran out.

How did those barbarians sit on the toilet without memes to scroll?

But as for the people who worked with horses, I’m pretty sure they found different jobs - it’s not like they were sent to a glue factory.

How did they answer the question about rock and roll being a fad?

Wow, in that way it’s almost like Linux is the same as every other thing.

“Edolf” lol. My pet name for Trump is Liddle Shitler.