The intended takeaway from my post was speculating that "good for the economy" just really means "It's causing money to change hands, for example into the hands of banks, moving companies, and/or apartment management firms."

15k is the "average", for a "family", which usually counts as like "mother, father, and 2.14 kids" or something like that. ;) The average part means that for every family that spends $500 to move, there is one that spends $29,500. Trust me, I've done the scraping by bit before, and it's mind-boggling to think of how much more expensive things can end up being for people.

In your scenario, the cost of "everything else" that needs to be bought new would be counted as part of the cost of moving, since it is money expenditure directly caused by the move, even if it was not caused immediately. When you take into account "every expense that would not exist if you didn't move", it adds up surprisingly quickly.

When one is at one end of the spectrum, it can be hard to comprehend how much mass is at the center and the other extreme to make the arithmetic mean what it is. There are people out there who will look at "$5k for furniture at a yard sale" and say "OMG, this guy is super-rich! With $5k at yard sales I could outfit a mansion or four. I furnish for $200."

Maybe it's a matter of moving being good for the economy because it pumps so much money into moving expenses too?

In a house, there's the costs of bringing everything up to par to sell, the closing costs for a new mortgage (on both sides), the cost of moving services, inspections, fees, and tons of other one-time costs. Additionally, lenders get interest on the appreciated value of both locations rather than on the prior value.

For the massive number of people in apartments and other rentals, there's move out fees (usually cleaning and such regardless of how clean the place is left), move-in fees, deposits, etc. Again the cost of moving services (unless you're doing the Pickup Special).

As another commenter pointed out, moving is really expensive (They quoted $15,000 average for a family). It's also disruptive and stressful and has other costs involved aside from pure monetary costs, such as learning a new area. Fewer people have that much in savings, and fewer people have faith in continuing to have their job in a year or two, making the risk of the move not worth the value.

I also like the opportunity cost:

"I paid 2 BTC for my state taxes and I'm glad I did, because they'd be worth $10 now if I kept them."

"I paid 2 BTC for my state taxes and I'm sad I did, because they'd be worth $10,000,000 now if I kept them."

I'd surmise that it's a matter of improved tooling, accessibility, and so on. There are folks who make doughnuts by hand, but head to many stores and there is a system that drops proper batter rings into the oil, moves them along, flips them halfway through, pulls them onto a wire belt to dry, runs them under a sluice of icing, and so on. Even automatic rising assemblies for dough doughnuts. Both can result in exactly the same thing.

The person making them by hand may understand exactly how the temperature and humidity helps them rise properly. The one using the machine "DDE" (Doughnut Development Environment) will potentially have chaos if the rising chamber heater is not working and they don't know why things are going wrong. The DDE can spit out hundreds of doughnuts in a short time, and perhaps the hand-maker could as well, but with more effort. The person using the DDE would have a very hard time making the most excellent doughnuts, or different kinds of doughnuts, without knowing all the things that come into play with making doughnuts.

Both hand-made and DDE have a place and strengths and weaknesses. Both have purpose and reason for existing. Both result in tasty things.

I think I will go get a doughnut now.

QFT. As the IT Director of a K-8 school, my scope included...

• Computers
• Tablets
• Computer accessories
• 150 gallon aquarium (Because the pump plugged in)
• Network
• Overhead projectors
• Digital projectors
• Proximity card door access system
• Copiers and Printers
• 13-year old PBX phone system (replaced with new VoIP system)
• Stage lighting
• Stage sound and video system
• Microwave ovens

Generally, if it plugged in or had any relative complexity, apparently it was my job to fix it, and of course at the 800 student/80 staff school, I was the entirety of the IT department.

They want backdoors and keys into the things that they swear they will keep safe. Instead of affecting unpatched computers, a leak will affect every computer. But they pinky promise that there will be no leaks and they promise to feel bad if there is one even though it's probably somebody else's fault.

I appreciate dangling participles almost as much as I appreciate people who make them into jokes.

Lots of ways that could be speculated as to why it failed. In general, the only time it will take days is in the event that the request is not perfectly readable by the automated system. Like I said, my requests and such are acted on within hours, and if you can qualify for ContentID, it's definitely a very good idea to do so. "Why should it take hours?" Because computers are not instant. Even just putting a video up takes hours for it to be seen in all the places, days for it to get into search systems in certain ways, and so on. Get the waterfowl lined up and the system works much better for you.

It would be nifty if more ISPs allowed that. These days, the vast majority of major ISPs in the US don't allow people to run their own servers unless it's a business account. Here, getting a business account with Comcast for example would bump a YouTuber's monthly cost to $250 up from $35.

That's not the problem though. Safe Harbor protects -all- pipelines from -all- user content. Take it away from one and you take it away from all of them. This means that if somebody posted something on their own personal server, the rightsholders can sue the ISP for not policing that. The likelihood of ISPs allowing any kind of hosting at all becomes even more slim than it is now, and the cost of just getting a normal connection would invariably skyrocket to make up for the costs of lawsuits over people who could potentially cause problems. So it comes back to a Baby, bathwater, out you both go situation.

A question begs here: If many people (myself included) make more money off what other people would normally perceive as their creations being stolen, what prevents that from becoming the standard? Folks are upset to a degree because the big studios and a lot of small creators want to continue running things the exact same way and have it continue to work, not adjusting to the reality. Then if the reality changes, fight that change to continue making money.

Imagine what the world would be like if...

Paved Roads Cost The US Farrier Industry $100,000 in Lost Revenue Per Year, Study Finds

Analysts have released a study that shows that farriers have lost significant revenue as a result of paved roads. "All these paved roads are great, I mean, they get people places faster and don't wear down, and yeah, they make it so the horseshoes wear down faster and need to be replaced sooner. But we're finding that more people are opting to skip the horses entirely and get their transportation from these horseless carriages and automobile things. People are using the roads to play games on in quiet residential locations and these car things go zinging down them faster than horses and without pooping. We've gotten laws enacted to ensure things like any car that scares a horse must be immediately dismantled there on the side of the road, in order to help protect and encourage the use of horses. As farriers were are very interested in the transportation and work industry and we want to be certain people get to their travel destinations and have good ways to handle their fields, and these paved roads are just not helping. They protect from wagon ruts, but they also make it far too easy to drive a car down. We figure if all those new cars had to buy horseshoes like a proper horse did, we'd be making a lot more money."

That isn't meant to be an exact same thing, so no need to pick apart differences. ;) The idea though is that instead of adapting to what is reality now, it's all working on keeping things as close to the way they were as possible. Their way is making lots of money, but they are sure they could make much more if they could just put a listening computer on every ear and extract $1.25 directly from every human's bank account if they hear more than 10 seconds of a song. Market rules no longer apply.

Take your videos for example. Thousands of views stolen? People making money often work off hundreds of thousands or millions of views. Is the video made in such a way that it's trivial to do a tiny thing to make people think it's somebody else's? Can that be changed? Make it more challenging for anybody on YouTube to try to claim it's theirs without wrecking the experience for your viewers? How many videos are you talking about being stolen? Have you made a DMCA template? How many stolen copies end up out there? It takes a few seconds for me to find and verify a stolen copy, drop the URL into a template for the source video, and send that off, resulting in a takedown within hours or less. Sure, if there were thousands of stolen copies going up every hour, I'd fall behind. There aren't though, so it's fine. :) Without a clear idea of what you have, what you are experiencing, and what you are doing about it, I can't give direct advice. However I can say that when my novels are "stolen" for example, it puts thousands of dollars into my pocket. So if people can succeed in the current environment, it's possible for other people to also. Adapt to what is happening in the market rather than trying to make horseshoe wheels and no permission for anybody to post anything anywhere because all the companies that own routers that it might go through could be sued for the stuff you put up therefore you don't pay them enough for that risk.

Interesting situation. Actually I write and I have rarely done some video content, and also assisted some video content producers.

On the lines of the fourth group, it's an "if things are done right" situation still. In the situation you described, there is no safe harbor involved. If such a thing were posted on YouTube, for example, and they were taking payment via PayPal, YouTube is not the proper target. Rather, file suit and discovery against the entity that is directly accepting/charging money for the material. It's not a trivial matter. The material needs to be registered with the copyright office and such, which for some reason, even a lot of prolific smaller creators rarely do. Yes, there are things that can throw a wrench in the plans (out of country thieves), but historically I've had compatriots that were successfully making a living off nothing but lawsuit revenue from people who stole their otherwise-free work to sell.

I'm not certain what causes discrepancies in YouTube experiences. Really, we can only give anecdotal information. What we claim happened to us, or to somebody we know. So if we take it on good faith...

In general, a properly-filed DMCA takedown on YouTube will "officially" result in a removal of the infringing content within 72 business hours. In my experience, a perfectly-formatted DMCA takedown that successfully goes through the automated system will result in a removal within about 36 business hours and often within five. From personal experience (and again, anecdotal, so you'll just have to trust me or not as you see fit), the vast majority - or possibly all - of people I've spoken to who have not had success with takedowns encounter problems because they don't do it right. Mind you I don't believe that something made "By lawyers, for lawyers" is exactly easy to do right anyway. If I polled ten random people and said "Follow these directions and create a takedown notice", I'd expect zero of the resulting notices to be fully correct. The takedown has a very specific format, headers should be included, and information should be precise and verifiable. If a human needs to go into it to figure out the data, it slows stuff down.

If you can qualify for Content ID, that's generally the best. That system is automated and takes things down proactively, or allows you to monetize or fully-remove things that it discovers.

In general though, I've given up on giving advice. There's upsides and downsides to all the things and they are decidedly complicated. For a lot of people, the cost of registering pieces can exceed the revenue for example, but that registration can be necessary for certain actions.

For your situation specifically, I'd suggest looking at content type (Exclusive rights or no? Registered if so? Is it cost effective to do so? - Any "no"s? Then it might be an issue) and the filing process (Ducks. Every quacker in a row precisely. Zero quack-stacks.) because if filed "properly", no human ever looks at it and it's 100% automated, so you can't get a rep phoning it in. Start at this page on protecting your copyright on YouTube and remember that the initial learning is the hard part.

Aside from personal experiences and advice and such, really the main article seems to be more pointing to the fact that the big labels are trying to capitalize on experiences like yours to drum up support despite not really being on your side at all. They want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. For example, if YouTube lost Safe Harbor, chances are pretty high that you would never be able to put videos there. Nor would most of anybody else. YouTube would likely cease to exist, as would all of the other video sharing sites, because the moment somebody posts something that somebody decides is infringing, YouTube/Google get sued over it. It's not worth the risk, so, no more YouTube at all and every place that does accept video will likely require you to pay them to post your video there because if you post something bad, they get in trouble for it.

The fourth group doesn't exist if things are done right. They end up falling into the first three. The ones in group one find it and buy it. The ones in group two discover it's too much of a pain to buy/use/etc based on how it's sold. The ones in group three still are in group three. Take this from somebody who made tens of thousands from publishing a hard copy of a novel posted in its entirety and DRM-free online. Then the places that charge for it are not covered by safe harbor. Plus how can you tell if somebody would pay you for your song before they heard it if they found it on YouTube instead? (Generic "You") Of my published novels, every single one that was published officially without any free online version ended up getting existing-fan traffic only. As soon as I put a free version online, my sales skyrocketed and any time I had a surge in sales, I could easily find the repost that generated it.

Read the horror stories of people who have been wrongly hit with account loss for falsely-claimed infringement and you'll know that they absolutely do handle repeat offenders. Are you certain you're seeing the same account put your music back up after you have it taken down, over and over, more than three times? Or are you seeing multiple people, new accounts, and/or not taking the basic steps of filing the DMCAs (don't ask about them. Just file them and watch the results. Trust me, I've filed plenty on YouTube and the results are very swift.) and, if applicable, submitting your content to the music DNA system to look for signatures automatically and proactively for you?

I hope I'm not the only one who saw the driver name at the start and initially thought "Weapons of Privacy Destruction"

It's okay.

Cost for me for Internet (Very Fast) + Cable TV == $270 a month, plus $22 cable box rental plus $15 for HBO + $15 for Showtime. == $322 per month.

Cost for me for Internet alone: $150. $10 Netflix. $12 Hulu. $15 HBO, $11 Showtime. $10 one time OTA antenna of 3-day delay for CBS Online (Which is fine for me ), and of course Amazon Prime, which costs me $8.25 a month and saves me hundreds a year in shipping fees. But yeah, folks who like to watch sports are screwed, with NFL games online starting at $50 a month for four months and then getting worse.

Mind you, the vast majority of the people I've done the math for get things cheaper online, but that's not everybody. There will always be some folks who have no choice but to get the TV service.

...could also get their completely non-hacked, normal phone implicated in a crime, knowing that stingrays will be deployed to track it, and then lead them into an ambush.

This is an excellent point. Further, the subscription costs are nuts compared to what most people actually consume.

For example, if I had to pay, say, $4.99 a month for each site that I look at some things on from Google News, I'd be spending several hundred a month on news.

Let's take a look at the situation. If I don't block ads, I see about ten ads per page. Let's take a generous $10.00 CPM rate (I'll ignore any CPC because I'll be damned if I'm going to click any of that cruft). That means my viewing the article is worth "ten cents" to them. None when I block the ads. In a given month, I might look at five to ten articles from a given site, perhaps an average of seven from each site I view. Thus, if I'm paying more than $1 a month for their internet drivel, I'm spending way more than my eyes and private information would be giving them.

Since they won't deal with not accosting my eyes with ads in favor of a dime per article I view -at absolute most- (I'd be willing to toss in a nickle maybe honestly for most of this junk), they get adblocked instead and get diddly squat from me. Don't like my adblock? Too bad, I'll find the same article elsewhere, and when I post the link for people who don't block ads to look, it won't be yours. Chasing away my ad-blocking view means the loss of potentially hundreds of non-blocking views I'd drive their way.

I guess the real downside is that advertising is all about scamming everybody with their product anyway. The user's eyes are the product. The "articles" are just bait for the product, like we're fish. The advertisers pay for the product. The publishers then try to milk as much money out of the advertisers as they can with clickbait junk and a page crammed with dozens of ads. Then they complain that their bait is getting eaten off the line without hooking a fish as the fish are getting smarter. If they want the users to be their customers and the content to be their product, they're gonna have to have fish food, not bait, so to speak.