He's done well for the same reason most other terrible artists you've never heard of also do well: fraud or money laundering.

Her endorsement is about as valuable as shit in the woods. Ive's designs are not at all interesting or even that good.

Yes. They are. Not overvalued enough to turn *everyone* away. But overvalued enough that...

That this is true, hence the article we are commenting about.

Just because there are still enough morons in the world left to pay for such overinflated pricing on everything and, thus, make a profit, does not mean everything is not overvalued or people overpaid. Both things are capable of being true. Hence, the pirating at 'industrial scale'. If going to the game in person was cheaper more people would go, instead of watching. If watching the game at home or on the go, legally, was cheaper and easier (and came in decent quality) to access, pirating wouldn't be as high.

The fact of the matter is the general end user experience both in person and at home for watching sports is pretty shitty and expensive. Hell, the NFL wouldn't be turning a profit at all if it weren't for the selling of advertising and other media rights deals. If you took that away from them, the entire NFL would crumble because it's overvalued, overpriced, overpaid, and wouldn't know how to exist otherwise - because they have consistently focused on the completely wrong things. It's why viewership has been essentially stagnant for the last decade. Only diehard fans are willing to put up with the experiences now and it's hard to recruit potential new fans.

Because your online streaming prices are insane, the quality isn't good, and the various restrictions in order to promote overpriced in-person tickets or cable packages are stupid. Which, of course, all of that is because every single person related to the major sports is either overpaid or underpaid - no one is paid appropriately. NFL players cannot earn less than $800k/year. Head coaches earn multiple millions per year minimum. Specific coaches, like a passing coach, earns less than the people they are coaching - which is ridiculous.

The league and team owners significantly overvalue their own entertainment value while also significantly overspending on things or people that don't matter.

This isn't a "it goes both ways" type situation. I'm not saying they shouldn't have arrested him. He did a bad (stealing, not the piracy) and should go to jail. The article even points it out that no one seems sure why it took the FBI three years to arrest the guy. They had all the information they needed three years ago.

But anyway, back to your faulty counter, I would feel the same way... IF it took three extra years for what amounts to some loose pocket change. Employers do wage theft all the time in various ways and, most of the time, no one seems to care at all - including the cops. So, really, my response to employers who commit wage theft, especially if it is intentional or egregious, should have their business burned to the ground.

The whole structure of the business world is whack. Oh, let's pay you a flat amount per amount of time, despite the fact that during some time periods you might be working harder than others. Dumb. The top makes 1000% more than the bottom. Dumb.

The monetary value of a creator's work inherently cannot be determined by the creator itself. There are creative works that people have poured hours and days and months into, only for no one else to value, or want, it. You can, of course, set prices based on the cost of materials and what you think your time was worth, but that's a balancing act, especially for physical creative works. With digital works that can be effectively copied infinitely for next to nothing, it's much easier (and usually better financially) to allow people to pay what they think the value of the creative work is worth.

It doesn't. Nor can you effectively make the claim that it does. It may seem logical that if something can be obtained for free that everyone will try to get it for free, but that simply isn't true. Pay-what-you-can models work and tend to generate more money than setting the price yourself.

I don't give a flying fuck if ChatGPT is freely fed a copy of every single creative work in history, because it literally does not matter.

I see no evidence to support the idea that he was making money off of the leaks (other than wages earn working for the manufacturing company). Even if he did make some extra money, I doubt it was worth anywhere near the amount wasted by the FBI, not including time and salaries.

The FBI assuming, incorrectly, that each download equals a loss as always. The FBI wasted significantly more resources than any loss incurred by the studios for essentially no real payoff. Hell, just the court costs alone are more than any losses from pirating. Good ol' FBI wasting not only their own, but everyone else's involved, time.

Ubuntu and LibreOffice both suck independently already, so who cares?

Microsoft doesn't release a new version every year. Every year does not automatically mean that a major version change is necessary. Including the year in a minor portion of the version code, makes sense. Changing the major version to match the year for what ends up as a minor update is dumb as fuck.

Yeah. And it's an update, not a new major version. Not technically, but essentially, reads as 'Windows 11.24H2' - Windows 11 with the update from 2024 in the second half of the year. While not a perfect way to add the year into the versions, better than leading with the year as the major number.

That is their own stupid fault for trying to unify the name of the software running on the device despite having to branch it off into several different versions because of various hardware differences, instead of keeping the software to each hardware unique and building proper protocols for it to all talk to each other as if it were all running the same software.

Apple sucks at software development. They always have and always will. There is not one piece of Apple software that is actually well written. That's why they compensate with marketing and pretty looks.

Apple continues to get stupider by the day. Switch from one numbered naming scheme to a different numbered naming scheme that ultimately will use all the same numbers the original would have also used to the benefit of no one.

If a malware would come in and remotely corrupt every Apple device in existence, the world would be a better place.

And I don't use online brokerages for very good reasons (they're scams as is the entirety of stock markets in general). Neither of these entities need access to my height, weight, eye color or about half the other things on my ID. All they need to know is I am who I say I am, and sending a copy of an ID is not a good method of doing that, because they still can't verify the user is the same as the one in the ID. Giving these entities access to MORE of my personal information to "confirm" is not a valid solution. Making the user take a picture when you try to access the app is not a valid solution. None of these automated systems to confirm your identity actually works without being also easily bypassable.

No. My license has information they don't need to see. Plus bypass easily with photo of adult's license and photo of adult. There is no foolproof way to do this, and, ultimately, it will be faster and easier to cheat the system than it will be to go through the system.

Yeah, because retards. Faxes aren't secure. Faxing isn't even a good technology. If your business still relies on fax machines, your business is shit.

130miles of dedicated copper isn't secure and it's slow in a profession where delays in information is bad. A copper line should be the last resort for something like this. They'd probably get better service by using satellites.