When my daughter was about 5 years old, we made an entire dessert dinner for April fools. We made mashed potatoes and scooped them onto the plate like ice cream, and a gravy that looked like chocolate syrup. We made meatloaf in the shape of candy bars, and there was some kind of vegetable thing to but I forget what it was.

It was awesome. When her mom feigned surprise, she let out those deep belly laughs that little kids do.

I'm sure some of you toxic, horrible people don't have fun on April fools, but the rest of us are crushing it.

Maybe it's just my lemmy app (jerboa ftw) but I like how your post got read as a markdown list item, like this is the 27th thing you had to say on the topic but the other 26 got deleted.

It does make me very curious now. They do make a living, so they must be influencing somebody.

That's not actually a necessary conclusion. It means someone(s) THINKS that influencers are positively impacting sales or whatever, but advertising roi is difficult to actually calculate.

Some influencers ask you to use codes that will associate your purchase with them, so there's there. Plus, I get the sense that at least some of them don't get paid unless people make a purchase with their code, so, pretty low level investment for a company.

I'm not sure I understand the problem. Is the problem that they're not using matrix? Or do you prefer that it was still all on IRC? I don't hate IRC but it's definitely way less user friendly.

What's the duration? 6:30 until....

Holy shit that's brutal... And also disgusting.

This is digging into pretty legal territory and copyright law is (arguably unnecessarily) complex -- but licenses are things that you use to let people use your patents. I think that's what they were initially and mainly; but then software and the copyleft movements kind of detached the concepts of licenses and patents.

The fediverse protocols could definitely be patented and licensed, but, like you said (or implied, really), that's... sketchy af. Like, anyone we could trust to patent it would probably refuse to do it -- Linux Torvalds would probably curse me out for even suggesting it, and the lecture rms gave me would probably never end.

WE GOT BALLISTAE FOR YOU TOO, BUDDY

First off, I was specifically addressing your concern about the car & it's physicality. Value of physical objects is directly related to the scarcity of the resources; digital content pricing is skeuomorphic (sp?) at best and absolute bullshit at worst.

Surely the sale of that copy of the movie has value

Secondly (and thirdly in a sec), this is the fundamental misapprehension that surrounds piracy. Each instance of piracy does not mean one lost sale. In terms of music (I read a study about music piracy a few years ago), this is rarely the case, and in fact, it was the opposite: the study found that the albums that were pirated more resulted in more sales, since the album's reach was extended.

Thirdly, one of the core issues with the entertainment industry at the moment is that the streaming services have no way to gauge the draw of a specific show, movie, or song, since subscribers just don't approach their subscription that way - you don't subscribe to Spotify because your want to hear Virtual Cold by Polvo; you subscribe because you want to have access to their entire collection, as well as all the other awesome 90s noise/math rock - even though, let's be honest, you really just listen to Virtual Cold over and over.

As a result of this clusterfuck, streaming services can't correctly apportion payment to their content - they do an elaborate split of the profits. So - the best way for the "content providers" (ie copyright holders) to increase profits is to reduce the amount of content on the streaming service - so the profits are spread over fewer titles.

This is massively hurting the production companies - please note none of these fuckers are getting any sympathy from me, this is just an explanation - they're having a hard time finding a balance between how much they can spend given that half of their productions' profits are pennies. (Oops, forgot one element: because of streaming tech, no one buys films in tape or DVD or whatever - which was half of a film's profit.) Do they make a bunch of huge budget action movie sequels that fill the theater seats? Or do they make smaller-budget films with smaller profit margins?

It's a shitty situation, and I don't know what the answer is - but I know that the answer isn't whatever the fuck this is. And, until they figure their shit out, I'm just going to step outside the market for a bit.

I'm not living in some dream world where piracy doesn't reduce profits. I know that the underground bands that I like are usually supportive of piracy because it helps them more than it hurts - and when it comes to film and TV, when those companies complain about piracy , it's just like those bullshit shoplifting claims - attempts to turn their "line not go up" on poor people. Piracy is a grain of sand in the Sahara - they have way bigger problems than that - though I do think increased piracy metrics might help encourage them in the right direction.

Anyway, if you got this far, I appreciate your time.

It's got nothing to do with whether it's physical. Cars are different from movies because the movie can be reproduced infinitely without resource cost (or, very minimal). If you steal a rental car, they have to buy a new one. If you pirate a movie, they haven't lost anything.

Fwiw I used to live in a mostly-glass building in Chicago and the sun the winter made it so that we basically never turned the heat on. Summer heat, on the other hand - we needed A/C

Edit: I suppose it's probably relevant that while the outside was glass, the inside was concrete....

Really, my ess cue ell? I say mysequel 100% of the time. But I'm trying to get into the Primagen's My Squeal pronunciation