upstream

Not OP, but “something else from another company” is the only thing that makes sense.

They do where I live.

All companies report salary and tax, all banks report income, debt, and interest cost, stock trades, unions report up to your deductible amount, etc.

Certain stuff you will have to fill yourself, but 50% doesn’t have to do anything. They can check and correct if necessary, but if they don’t do anything it will file automatically.

If you paid too much tax it comes onto your account a month or two later.

Too little and you get an invoice.

It’s not hard to do, but starting in 2023 and catching up is much harder than starting in 2000 and improving incrementally.

I suspect the cash was in the coats, not the gold bars. Although the headline can be creatively interpreted as that there was cash stuffed in gold bars. That would be kinda cool though.

I mean, it’s all fine on paper.

But… how… the… fuck… do…. we… get… there???

Communism is fine on paper. Fuck. Even capitalism is fine on paper.

However; through empiric data we can learn that humanity is full of shitheads who want to be in power and have control.

Sadly, as I see it, that is incompatible with any form of utopia.

I’m from Norway and we used to be fucking close to having an utopia for a short while. Politics were civil, the differences between low income and high income were low, and we actually pooled our oil money into a pension fund so that we would be wealthy when the oil age ended.

On top of that we were rich on natural resources and had abundant renewable electricity from harnessing our mountains (read: damming up valleys and putting rivers and falls in pipes) to create hydro power.

Combine that with a socialist government (“the Scandinavian model”) with free education for the masses, affordable housing, free healthcare, some of the best employee protections in the world, great consumer protection with the law basically granting consumers 5 years warranty on everything from cars to phones or TV’s.

Sadly, since everyone was feeling so wealthy everyone stopped caring. Housing is now anything but affordable. Electricity that we paid for by destroying beautiful nature is no longer a resource for the Norwegian people, but thanks to numerous new export cables to Europe and the fact that production is sold on a fucked-up “stock market” where the most expensive bid to produce electricity for any hour of the day sets the price for everyone, we now have extremely high and volatile electricity prices affecting inflation and reducing competitiveness of Norwegian businesses.

On top of that politicians keep getting caught with their hands in the cookie-jar at an ever increasing rate, and I think it must have been 20-30 years since we had a prime minister with actual work experience.

Call me cynical, but good things don’t last if we even get them at all.

The Romans knew it; the masses simply needs to be entertained by bread and circus and you can do what you want.

Social media is the best circus so far, and when everyone is busy debating pronouns or whatever flavor of distraction there is this week the political decisions that actually affect us gets made without anyone paying any attention.

Sincerely though, best of luck with your utopian society. I hope for all of us that we get what you describe.

I sadly suspect we will keep doing what we are doing until it kills the planet.

“Small business” are always being peddled out for things like this.

“Ironically” small business thrives better in countries with socialized health care and good social security safety nets.

Obviously I’m doing a poor job at getting my points through if you think I’m arguing for the current state of affairs.

It doesn’t mean I’m against copyright.

The principle of copyright is important, so is copy-left (eg. GPL).

Being for copyright doesn’t mean I am against artists being paid their fair share. These are not contradictory principles.

There are certainly huge problems with parts of copyright legislation, especially in the US, and in particular the DMCA.

I always recommend this TED Talk where Larry Lessig talks about the issues with DMCA, and even though it’s starting to get old now it’s still just as relevant and he is still just as on point:

https://youtu.be/7Q25-S7jzgs

However, the fact that you don’t care about how business works means you ignore the root of the problem - how business works.

I’m not going to argue for communism, but when politicians are for sale to the highest bidder the rest of us lose out.

Feel free to dive into other videos with Larry Lessig if the first one hits home.

I would particularly recommend these two:

https://youtu.be/mw2z9lV3W1g

https://youtu.be/PJy8vTu66tE

Your point of view needs corrective lenses.

Streaming (as a legal business model) is not violating copyright, but streaming changed the business model for a lot of artists negatively.

That’s because in the old days people would buy an album just to listen to a song or two. So basically you get paid up-front for an infinite amount of playbacks.

With streaming artists and copyright holders are paid after the fact, based on the amount of playbacks.

This means singles are much more important than albums, because people don’t really listen to albums like they used to, and if I really like a song and play it a lot it will take a long time before the artist makes an equivalent amount of money as to me buying an album.

It should be fairly obvious that the big record companies come out of this change of business model a lot better because they have a continuous stream of revenue across their played/consumed portfolio, but smaller labels face the same difficulty as the artists.

This has nothing to do with copyright law - which you decide to focus on.

But remove copyright law and no-one is getting paid for anything.

The problem you are complaining about is how labels are milking artists, in lack of a better analogy. A cow gets fed and cared for just enough to make sure milk production keeps going and the cow stays healthy.

A farmer doesn’t cry when a cow gets old and slaughtered, he’ll get a new cow to replace her. That’s just how the business works.

While musical artists are obviously more sentient than cows, record labels follow a fairly similar business model. Help them become creators and make money on the produce.

Obviously not a perfect analogy, but the discrepancy between what the label earns and the artist is nothing new and anyone who was around before streaming should know this.

Yup. Never meant to say bonds didn’t represent tangible value, but definitely see how it could read that way.

That said, I’m sure you can get bonds in companies doing crypto too.

Considering their business seemed to run in the negative - turning that around probably matters the most.

Welcome to modern CV-padding.

Write a blog post about something (basic) you did.

Never mind that you just did it to have something to write about.

Go to conferences to talk about the blog post.

And the next time you change jobs you can pad your resume with all this stuff as if it makes you special.

A lot of companies actively encourage this behavior to market themselves as to better attract candidates.

And then a lot of companies indirectly encourage it through both their hiring process and possibly even their job ads.

Now, don’t take this the wrong way; there’s plenty of good talks at most conferences. There are people blogging about worthwhile software projects too, but there is a high volume of low effort content which really doesn’t add anything.

I’ve even been on both sides of the argument I’m making. Stuck listening to someone who doesn’t really know the topic, and stuck giving a talk about something I don’t really know enough about.

At best they did, at worst this somehow comes off as “better”, because they anchored the “worse” alternative first.

https://www.pon.harvard.edu/daily/dealmaking-daily/dealmaking-grappling-with-anchors-in-negotiation/

Likely this price model is worth a lot to them anyway, because there likely some big fish that are stuck in, and who are better off just paying Unity than sinking all that development cost to switch to a different engine.

The small projects that go under or jumps ship is probably not worth that much to them anyway, but probably generates an ongoing support cost neither way.

Thus, cynically speaking, Unity is probably better off like this, and they even got some PR out of it. Wether good or bad.

It’s a common misconception that blockchain gives trust. If you control a majority of nodes in a Blockchain system you decide what the truth is.

This opens the door for illicit players to manipulate things their way.

Lack of trust doesn’t replace trust.

Central, provable/accountable, trust is needed for financial systems to work.

Everything else is “Wild West”.