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.

So I'm Gen X, which is important to what I'm going to say. My best friend from high school worked for the post office after graduating college and he retired a few years ago. USPS is essentially a government job and for those who don't know, US government employees are allowed to retire earlier than those who work in private industry do. I have to go to my local post office sometimes and the older employees are all gone now, having retired. Those guys cared. And it's not a case of "Blame the lazy Gen Zers" like everyone does now. The employees now are often Gen Y or Gen X and they don't care like the previous employees did. I see horrible delays all the time in packages both that I send and are sent to me. I ordered a CD from Amazon and they had it in a warehouse on the opposite side of the USA from me, so they used USPS to send it to me. It got misrouted to another major city in that state where it apparently sat for one month before someone could be bothered to find it and get it to me. I've sent documents via Express Mail which were said to be able to be delivered in 3-4 business days that in fact took almost 2 weeks to be delivered. I found out from tracking that one such attempt just sat at a local main post office for almost one week before anybody could be bothered to deliver it to the business it needed to go to. They aren't even trying any more. Yes, when private industry eventually takes over it will be horrifically expensive to send anything but I've used Fed Ex and UPS too and they also suck at times with unexplained delays in delivery and they cost a lot more than USPS does. It just seems like having anybody who can reliably deliver anything on time and at a decent price is an impossible ask.

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.

One of the lessons we've had as the Federal, multi-branch nature of the US governmennt has frustrated Trump is that the government may be fucking us over, but it's not doing it in *unison*. It's doing it piecemiel, on the initiative of many interests working against each other, just as the framers intended. The motto on the Great Seal notwithstanding, there are myriad roadblocks to consolidating power in the hands of a single individual. It takes time and repeated failures. This is why the second Trump Adminsitration is worse than the first; they've figured out ways around things like Congressional power of the purse, put more of their henchmen in the judiciary, and normalized Congress lying down and letting the president walk all over them. It's a serious situation, although fortunately Trump isn't long for this world.

It's worth noting that New York is run by the Democrats and North Carolina has recently been Democratic Party leaning. This is likely why they are targeted and Texas is ignored. Trump probably knows there is no real future in fossil fuels, but he'll be dead when nobody can deny that in the USA and his idiot sycophantic followers are huge "Drill baby, drill" people, so this plays well to their belief that solar and wind power are evil.

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.

While that's true, a responsible generation aims to boost the next generation to a *higher* level than the education they received. The world has become more complex and faster-paced, and even if that weren't true, the consequenes of aiming high and falling short are better than the consequences of aiming for the status quo and falling short.

So while I'm 100% onboard with skepticism that technology will magically make education better, I think the argument that "the education I got worked for me should be good for them" isn't a strong argument. What we need is a better ecducation that would have been a better education fifty years ago: stronger math, science, and language skills, general knowledge, and, I think critical thinking and media literacy. Possibly emotional intelligence -- it's kind of pointless to teach people critcial thinking skills if they are carried away by emotions.

There are no economic or security reasons to blockade Cuba, so that leaves *political*.

It used to be believed that bullies were low status individuals who are lashing out out of frustration. But research has shown that bullying is an effective strategy for achieving and maintaining social status. In other words it's a political winner. So the focus of research has shifted from the bully to the people around him who enable the bullying. The inner circle are the henchmen -- people without the charisma and daring to initiate the bullying, but join in when the bully gets things started. Around them are the audience, the people who wouldn't risk participating but enjoy the bullying vicariously. And around them are the much larger group of bystanders, who don't approve but are waiting for someone else to stop the bullying. Then off to the side are the defenders, who stand up to the bully.

Perhaps the least appreciated supporting factor in the phenomenon of the high-status bully is the silence of the bystanders, which is dependent upon the perception of widespread approval. Since you can't visibly see the the line between the approving audience and the apalled bystanders, the silence of the bytstanders is absolutely essential in sustaining the bullying.

Lot's of Americans are apalled at the idea of using military force to inflict suffering on the Cuban people. But that's only politically advantageous *because* of *them*. Tney are indistinguishable from the relatively small number of people who are thrilled when Trump announced he can do anything he wants wtih Cuba. The gap between actual approval and *perceived* approval is absolutely critical in establishign and maintaining any kind of authoritarianism. This is why would be authoritarian leaders are so focused on punishing and marginalizing any kind of expression of disapproval.

Well, my manager at a Fortune 500 company about 8 years ago assumed/believed that. He was a good manager and had real IT experience. He wasn't a paper pusher who got into IT management. I was floored when he told me he believed accessing stuff via an iPhone was much safer than using a PC. I told him my assumption was the exact opposite. I asked him why he believed that and he said he just assumed various app makers simply had to make their apps more secure because people were moving away from using PCs to doing everything on phones. I still don't agree with him.

Oh that part is really easy: Stop giving billions to AI startups.

Right now, the whole AI bubble is heavily subsidized by investor cash. Once the AI companies have to charge users the actual cost plus a profit margin, we'll see AI usage drop considerably. Because that shit ain't cheap.

does that mean the profits from his last scam are over, he needs a new job and has decided that honest work still is something for peasants?

Next week in these news: Companies who went to $random_startup_of_the_month found out that they now bought into being at the START of a five-year crusade to eliminate bugs, performance issues and usability problems.

That is the problem. "Right to read" was visionary and will really soon be reality.

Given how much capitalism insists on copyright and prosecution when it comes to THEIR works, how they get custom-made laws like the DMCA passed just to protect their rights... well, let's just say that if the big AI models weren't from the corporate sector but had been created by nerds on github, the copyright police would already have broken down our doors to arrest us all for copyright infringement.

So please, please, pretty please, let them have a dose of their own medicine. Heck, let the courts classify LLMs as "software" and find just one instance of the training data containing GPL3 content. Whoopsie, all your code belongs to us.