I ditched streaming services a while ago, because I was fed up with the lousy curation of their catalogues and the tendency for albums to randomly disappear and reappear based on licensing disagreements.
Now I'm back to a ~25K track FLAC library and a small collection of LPs for fun. It's backed up to a NAS, to a cloud storage account and to a portable drive I keep in my locker at work. Nobody gets to take the music from me.
I've moved to purchasing music only on Bandcamp, where I get the option of downloading every purchase in the format of my choice (and offers artists an 85/15 profit split!).
And, after one adverse incident, I am very diligent about exercising that download option. Turns out, artists can withdraw themselves and their music from the platform at any time, which leaves customers without access... mostly. For some reason, I still have access to that music on my phone, though I haven't tested whether that's only thanks to the local cache.
I do the same thing, download as FLAC and store locally.
There are two options for artists/labels on Bandcamp if they want to remove an album from sale, for whatever reason.
One is to deactivate the album, which removes it from public view, but keeps it in the backend, so people who bought it still have it in their collections.
The other is the "nuclear option" of completely deleting the album everywhere, which also takes it away from the people who bought it.
While I can understand why they need to have the latter option, probably for legal reasons, I do find it troubling that something I've bought can just be arbitrarily taken away from me.
It really should be impossible to completely delete content from Bandcamp, without contacting them first. It should not be an option directly in the artist/label control panel.
Completely opposite of the nations foundations, I had no idea the concept of property being theft was actually entertained as a feasible concept
"America's Founders understood clearly that private property is the foundation not only of prosperity but of freedom itself. Thus, through the common law, state law, and the Constitution, they protected property rights"
The concept of private property advocated by America's Founders is mostly based on Lockean ideas of "labor mixed with natural resources creates property". But as Benjamin Tucker pointed out, that doesn't justify absentee ownership (either as landlord or as employer), since you're no longer there actually mixing your labor. And landlords and employers are exactly the roles who Proudhon and other anarchists see as illegitimate, not the small farmer who tills his own land.
Of course, as large absentee owners themselves, the Founders were only too happy to let that consequence of Lockean theory slide, just as they were able to write "all men are created equal" while keeping men in slavery. But that merely shows that Upton Sinclair's quote, cliché as it may have become, still holds an inescapable truth.
Slavery has always existed and does to this day. We are all slaves to the banks who create currency out of thin air and loan it to others. The irony of calling the US a free country with the number of incarcerated is obvious.
The fact remains property is required to exercise any right. I wish the US would go back to only landowners being able to vote. Would realign society IMO
No, I think we incentivize poor people to not work. ( I have been poor and the benefits you get are better than many jobs right now)
I also believe the corporations having rights of a human without the punishment is a problem on that side. If a corporation breaks the law they should put the C level and the board in jail just like they would any other person.
Things are imbalanced on both sides and the concept the US is not a Republic but is a Democracy is being sold so propaganda machines can manipulate the public.
Term limits on congress, remove the ability of congress to vote themselves raises and get bribes via lobbying. Eliminate the poor from being able to vote themselves other peoples money... things like this would set is off to a better direction.
1. Property is theft is an anarchist position. While libertarians (as you cite the Cato Institute) and anarchists have an overlap of some positions, they are greatly at odds in others.
2. Whenever somebody starts telling me what the Founding Fathers thought I expect some BS which is only there to support their opinion and is so lopsided that it might as well be called a lie.
I grew up far away from anywhere and I've had the complete opposite experience - tech has enabled me to do everything I ever wanted, I have a life that most are envious of and I have independence and autonomy in ways that were unimaginable 30 years ago - autonomy that I built myself. Try wanting something, and seeing if you can work hard to get it. It might just make that misery disappear, quite quickly.
There is so much tech in life, it’s hard to know where to even begin. Seems like every time you want to do something it starts with a google search on the best way to do it. If you don’t, you risk wasting a lot of time or money, and then people will call you an idiot for not googling it first, and sometimes the person calling you an idiot is your own self.
Life has become nothing but a series of google searches and finding the best tech for the job, while finding the most efficient way to pay bills.
I think this is an example of where books are powerful. A (good) book on a subject is far superior than pages of different articles that anyone could write. With a book you know that time and effort has gone into it. If you want to learn about something, invest in the right book.
Spend a few dozen hours finding and vetting "best" lists, deeply evaluating their quality. Read Web forums. Construct spreadsheets with meta-rankings derived from the lists and posts you've found. Form strong opinions about the correct ranking of the books. Argue on Web forums about the books. Post your own best list. Argue about it with people who are clearly idiots if they can't see your list is correct.
I've found one good tactic to be the 'reading lists' that some of the arts/science subreddits have in their wikis/sidebars. It's a good way to find solid entry points to a given topic that are at least respected by a good number of people who know what they're talking about.
I'm guessing you want me to say Google. But I'd actually use Amazon. Or even just walking into a good book store and reading a few! What have you got to lose?
I was thinking that when buying books, people often take notice of recommendations from Amazon or random sites through Google or discussion sites like this one, but a recommendation from someone I know or interact with is preferable when I can get it. And it's not necessarily preferable because of a higher quality recommendation: a recommendation from a person implies some degree of meaningful interaction with them that contributes to an overall sense of.. meaningful-ness even if the book turns out to be awful. Plus if it turns out to be awful, I can discuss it with that person further and possibly get a better recommendation. Plus whether or not it's awful, I can talk with them about it after reading it for additional meaningful interaction.
I think that kind of loss of meaningful interaction is a pretty small thing, but it can add up over time and have a greater impact with high usage of services like Google that automate things that previously generally involved more human interaction. And sure, no one's forcing anyone to use Google or Amazon instead of talking to people, but it's a fairly subtle opportunity cost that comes with using those services. And those kinds of services are convenient and useful enough that it's quite easy to make a habit of using them, and habits aren't easy to change.
Well, pre-internet, my city had three bookstores. None of the people working there read anything besides the popular trash; they couldn't tell you who wrote The Metamorphosis without looking it up. The store selection was based on catalogue recommendations by the publishers.
I think many easily turned to the web for recommendations because as wholesome these kind & knowledgeable book and movie human recommenders are, they simply weren't available to a lot of us.
Amazon book recommendations and keyword search are garbage. Sometimes even a direct search for title and author name will put the result halfway down the list. The two good things Amazon has going for it are the huge catalog (great for finding the right ISBN), and reviews dating back to the 1990s. Makes it easier to decide whether or not to purchase the book from a more ethical retailer.
Out of all the online bookstores, Thriftbooks has the best recommendations in my experience.
The best ways to find good books are still bibliographies and large public and university libraries - browse the shelves, ask the librarians. Online library catalogues usually beat online retailer catalogs for keyword searches.
Seems like you're stuck in the first step. The second is to realize none of that tech really fits your needs exactly, and to take advantage of that wealth of information to build something that does.
That sounds like a big quality of life improvement to me, not a disadvantage. Search engines make it much easier to know where to begin with things - including non-tech things.
And people around you had relevance. Your librarian was relevant as a gatekeeper of information. Now we are isolated and even if we do get the best information, we are somehow not satisfied. People are becoming dumber as information is becoming more available, a paradox.
Meanwhile, we are centralizing these institutions and therefore power brokers are being more disparate from the powerless, using the technologies that were supposed to give voices to the masses. Now the masses can enforce you to only speak in lock step with them.
Vonnegut wrote about how various technologies have removed the community value of moderate talents by enabling the best of the best to reach everyone with ease, all the time, any time. Being an OK musician, for instance, has gone from having pretty good social value and maybe even non-negligible economic value, to very little.
That effect has broadened to new areas and increased in degree, with the rise of ubiquitous mobile Internet.
Also the constant comparison... and constant advertisements convincing you how you should be. We used to be able to just live and commercials were contained in commercial breaks and billboards. Now the content we consume is mixed with commercials in imperceptable manners.
> Now the content we consume is mixed with commercials in imperceptable manners.
Product placement goes back to the 19th century. Remember the candy brand in E.T.? It was chosen because the company paid $1M to get them eaten by the short green man. Then there was payola, wherein the music you heard was actually a commercial paid by the record company.
Well I think the comment is just pointing out how the ability of tech that can do anything makes the act of doing anything mundane... Which is sad, but may not be a serious psychological issue
Being miserable because "there's no point in doing anything" is definitely a sign of depression if it's persistent and starts interfering with your life.
Not saying technology does or doesn't factor in here.
