There is more than one study and more than one way to look at it. Especially for streaming, having a catalog matters, especially for the smaller artists who will never have a charts-level hit:

"In 2024, nearly 1,500 artists generated over $1 million in royalties from Spotify aloneâ"likely translating to over $4 million across all recorded revenue sources. What's remarkable is that 80% of these million-dollar earners didn't have a single song reach the Spotify Global Daily Top 50 chart. This reveals a fundamental shift from hit-driven success to sustainable catalog-based income, where consistent engagement from devoted audiences matters more than viral moments or radio dominance."

https://cord-cutters.gadgethac...

Also don't forget that many studies such as DiCola's "Money from Music" focus on the superstars and the big hits. That is true, the charts pop music generates 80% or so of its income within the few weeks it stays in the charts and then drops of sharply.

Honestly, I don't care about the charts and superstars. They wouldn't starve if we cut copyright terms to six weeks. I do care about the indie artists that I enjoy. Who after ten years get the band back together for another tour through clubs with 200 or 500 people capacity. I'm fairly sure they would suffer if the revenue from those albums disappeared. And disappear it would. Maybe fans would still buy the CDs from the merch booth, but Spotify would certainly not pay them if it didn't have to.

Have you ever heard a single person, including plumbing professionals, call them "copper-phosphorus pipes"?

No. Because that's not how the English language works. You're the one who is too lazy and ignorant to figure out how people actually communicate in society.

Hint: The systematization your mind wants to apply to everything is not absolute. You need to figure out when to relax the formal logic rules when they start to result in absurd outcomes.

I don't know if it's still strictly true, but they used to say that all of the antimatter that has ever been produced by humans has had enough combined energy to warm up a cup of coffee.

You win this year's Nobel Prize for pedantry.

So according to you, I can't call the water pipes in my house "copper", since 0.05% phosphorus was added to the material to accomodate brazing.

He's basically a newborn :-)

Yes, but there is an important difference: TV had to appeal to an average audience member. Meanwhile the social media algorithms are intentionally working against you, trying to specifically find and use your triggers.

That's quite a different intent there.

On the TV, parents could also check the program for what they thought was suitable for their kid or not. They could watch the same program, even if not in the same room. Social media is a lot more personal and a lot harder to track and filter.

Hard disagree.

Not everything is subject to hype cycles. A lot of especially the SMALLER musicians, for example, basically live off their back catalog. I routinely buy the entire collection of artists that I freshly discover and fall in love with. And I totally feel that it is right that I pay them for music they made, no matter when they made it.

What is an abomination is copyright terms of DEATH + 70 years. Or whatever Disney pushed it to by now. I'm ok with inheritance of creative work, but it should not put the children into "never have to work in their entire life" territory.

Then again, there are two aspects: Creative control and money. I think that the Tolkien estate did a generally good job of protecting the integrity of JRR's works. Well, if we ignore Rings of Power, I have no idea what lies Amazon told them to get the approval for that shitshow.

And let's not forget that coypright law is also what protects GPL software.

This is a lot of cope. Sorry - there's nothing historically or linguistically accurate about that paper. It uses liberal misinterpretation of the word 'regulated' to infer government control, and grossly over-extends how militias have been regulated and mustered for the 300 odd years prior to the Constitution, and for 150 odd years after. It's doublespeak, a reinterpretation and recast of original intent and meaning.

My guy... have you been on youtube lately?

Ignoring for a moment that militias were actively prosecuted and pushed underground during the 80s/90s/00s, "guntube" quite clearly shows that there are organized and well equipped (how we say 'regulated' in today's parlance) militias out there still. They're just not registered 501c3 organizations. When the founders wrote the US Constitution, "militia" was every able bodied male who could muster arms. This is well established historically from the English tradition.

It isn't that we think gun-lovers are going to go ape-shit and shoot everyone around them, it is that a proportion of gun-lovers will do this. Which ones? Why you just have to ask them.

Why don't you do that, then? And look at the shooting death and mass shooting statistics and demographics, while you're at it. It isn't the people you're concerned that it will be, at all.

Why does this change make sense? Because you can't plant a flag and wave your dick if you're up there in zero G orbiting a planetoid.

You have to be standing on the surface, and that is what China is on track to do in a few years.

Good point, and I'm not here to argue with you -- the problem when we talk about Costco is the Wing drone's max capacity of 5lbs. That's not a Costco trip -- that's barely a trip to a Costco food court :).

5lbs feels like not enough to really replace most trips to actually stock your groceries, unless you break up your shopping trip into multiple delivery flights. It's much better for impromptu consumption (though that said, I feel like most of my trips to the local hardware store are "oh crap, I need this one thing ... " which would be under 5lbs)

Apparently, people who don't want to be ominously "converted".

Why? We already have machine code. What could an "AI-optimized programming language" do that neither machine code nor current programming languages already do?

Uh, you can do that today. That "intermediate language" is any programming language that has enough stuff on the Internet that the LLMs have trained them.

Now whether or not that's a good idea or a recipe for desaster is an ongoing discussion. As a security professional, my take is simple: Thank you AI, my job is secure until I retire. Just when technical solutions like W^X or Rust's memory ownership to list just two of dozens, were eliminating entire classes of vulnerabilities.

The best part? I don't even need to learn anything new. AI has trained on insecure code, example code, "why does this not work" Stackoverflow questions and a whole lot of other stuff full of bugs and vulns. They're all showing up again in vibe coded slop.

Easily fixed, so long as the legislators don't try to overcook the law with too much complexity. The law should simply say, "You can have digital shelf price labels, but you can't change the price on those labels while the store is open to the public. If your store is open 24 hours a day, you can change the price between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m., but you must make a clear announcement to everyone in the store immediately before the change and every five minutes until the change is completed, in every language commonly used in your area, stating that prices are about to change and the price displayed on the shelf when you picked up the item may not be the price you will be charged at checkout."

It preserves the supposed benefits of the digital labels, and ensures that customers have pricing transparency.

I'd even allow a carve-out for goods customarily sold at "market price," so long as the list of such goods is controlled by the state and price changes are limited to when the seller's wholesale price changes and current stock is exhausted.

This is true, except in places like San Francisco, where self defense is effectively illegal if you're of a specific ethnic or cultural persuasion.