I’m not really against age verification, the problem is that I’m very, very against having a government backed database of all porn I visit. Nobodies really assured me that current implementations aren’t doing that.
Plus, at the rate we’re going I’m not really sure how much longer porn will be legal, free speech rights be damned. Both the right and the left and the younger generation seem fully invested in ‘save the kids’ mentality these days.
I mean it’s kind of classic issues with unions. It doesn’t work if only place is doing it, but the more that do, the less market they have access to. Europe is a pretty decent sized market, so it may still hurt. And if they do leave, well China certainly has a lot of their own homegrown solutions, so that’s not an entirely unreasonable option.
I’ve never repacked a console in its original box, even when I’ve had it.
Organized crime would have dedicated bureaucracy offices dedicated to illegally filing titles, deeds, tax returns, etc. Basically launder all their money in a single night.
Yeah. There was a post the other day about a CEO that got a 1.2B payout and then gave her staff a first class ticket and $10k in cash. The cost amount to less than 1% of the payout for selling the company that those same staff helped make successful.
And everyone was arguing about how the CEO didn’t have to give anything at all, so complaining about any of it was just being greedy. Totally ignoring the fact that there’s no way the CEO represented 99.5% of the effort to make the company successful.
They don’t even see it as a problem and seem happy with whatever minor crumbs the rich are willing to hand out, totally ignoring that what they’ve been handed is a tiny fraction of what was stolen.
Piracy is somewhat similar to vigilantism to me. My ability to consider it a negative is directly related to how fair I consider the legitimate methods available to be.
If similar efforts were focused on consumer protection laws as we do IP protection, I don’t think pirates would have much leg to stand on, and they’d be seen in more of a negative light.
But since consumers are regularly fucked by corporations, all I see is two sides both doing bad shit and I’m not feeling all that charitable for the faceless megacorp. I also dislike pirates who pirate from small time creators. But that’s about as far as I can care given the state of things.
We should be focusing on stronger consumer rights to truly fix the problem for all sides.