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Rents are just amounts beyond what's needed to cause the thing to exist. At the point of copying something, it already exists.

So payments for the right to do so aren't payments required to bring anything new into existence at that point, save for the legal fiction.

Now you might argue that the future copy-licencing rents are necessary to bring the _original_ creation into being. But that doesn't make them _not rents_.

But I would say that's the second assumption you're baking in here.

As in, we live in a world where e.g. the movie Toy Story exists. Now, certainly Toy Story does provide some good or value to the world. But I don't think you can assume such things provide more value than e.g. open science, free transformation of works, etc.

I get that people enjoy our current IP culture but saying certain things wouldn't exist in an IP-free world is just an argument from consequences that doesn't even really compare consequences between the two.

You assume your premise. But plenty of "intellectual work" is already done without legal cover. It just typically attracts normal profits, rather than super-normal rent-seeking ones.

Only if you assume it's sustainable until you personally die. But that seems in constant question even now.

I guess it depends on the framing: a scam perpetrated on whom? It's not a scam on active investors if you lock in a bump from guaranteed passive investors. The active investors will see gains from that bump. But on the passive investors? On wider society?

If you spot the regulator looking the other way and try to sneak one past, is that legitimate, or sketchy? What if you recently had the influence to make them look the other way or be under-resourced?

You could argue 'treason' is a better word than 'scam'.

Why can't steel be recycled or taken by force?

I think they do, actually. They just have a disconnect about it. But e.g. removing the triple lock is unpopular not just among those of an age to be affected by it.

If there is a large war, those countries will prioritize domestic consumption and the UK will immediately stop being able to produce weapons.

Same with the iron we'd need to make our own steel.

And a current glut just makes it even cheaper for us to stockpile, vs spending on votes by propping up a failing industry.

Are they seeding it with incompetent middle management as a psy-op?

Don't most of these contingencies apply to steel in the first place?

Farming subsidies are one of the most criticized parts of the EU. My comment isn't in support of it. But even so, subsidy is quite different from compulsory purchase. The question is: why is steel special. Not in a no-action-vs-some-action way, but why so aggressive?

Ironically I think it's the same for both steel and farmers: they provide votes.

Steel comes from iron, which you can't grow

Right, and where is the iron coming from in the scenario where we can't import steel?

I don't really care for farm subsidies either, but even ignoring that: it's quite a different level of intervention than compulsory purchase. Same with the vaccines. We didn't respond to that crisis by nationalizing AstraZeneca.

My rhetorical point is just that steel gets special treatment probably because it's politically expedient. There are large, politically-relevant parts of the country that are still emotionally tied to the idea that we're an industrial nation. People under the age of 30 still go on about Thatcher and the miners.

There's no real shortage of steel around the world that I know of. We could just stockpile it instead, for example. And in the hypothetical tail-risk scenario this is all supposed to insure against... how do we even get the raw materials for making steel anyway?

You can make this same argument about a great number of things. Why is steel any more critical than food or vaccines or the like? Indeed we got caught short of vaccines recently, and had some nontrivial consideration of running a military op against NATO member over it.

Is there even a definition of "doesn't work" that exists for you with the NHS? How inefficient and ineffective does it have to be before it's considered "not working"? Because, technically, every healthcare system on the planet has some effect.

Same for the army.

Quite a few textbook authors I know are paid well to be part of the whole scheme (kickbacks, forced yearly repurchase for the 'online' component of books, etc). So I think it varies a lot.

If it works as AA seems to theorize, you'd need to:

  (a) work out how Google books exposes fragments of books, and see if there's a systematic way of using this to get whole books.  For example, a naive approach might be to find any fragment of the book by searching some exact phrase.  Then, you can search for an exact phrase from the start or end of the fragment it gave you, hoping it will show you the previous or next part of the book.  You can then just loop that to get the whole book.

  (b) once you have (a), you need a way of bypassing Google's bot detection/rate limiting.  I don't know what current state of the art is, but there may be a solution for sale out there.  E.g. you pay to receive a cookie or browser state, and use that to fetch the URLs from (a).  Or if you're good/already in the scene, you could do this part yourself.

Consumer hardware over the internet is not really suitable for this, AFAIK.

Aren't a lot of these purchases (a) locked in from contracts made pre-admin; and (b) otherwise largely related to anxiety over Russia? There are too many confounding variables here.

This assumes the same reward ratio also continues, but that's not the case. A cutting edge LLM is something much more valuable than a cracked copy of Word. Just like the LLM providers themselves decided violating copyright was an acceptable risk, it entirely depends on how people see the tradeoffs, rather than being a categorical decision.

Hm, can't really have engaging discussions with people who just don't understand what's being said. Can't force the information into their brains so we can do that either. Not sure which action you'd like me to take to improve this situation, then.

You seem to be saying that it's not a problem because you can just cancel your subscription if you don't like it. The fact remains that it's true. It's bad for goodwill in the same way Apple flipping $ -> £/€ is.

Fable seemed pretty good, but the thing is, even having access to test the next model _and see if it's worth switching to it_ is worth the marginal hassle/risk of doing the ID flow. A lot of things now do KYC, so we're not really talking about a categorical shift in me sharing ID info with any company vs not. It's just one more app.

I think you've failed to understand the words in question, rather than them being meaningless

Who said that words are meaningless?

I grew up on the internet, I doubt there's any level of textual depravity I haven't seen.

call your wife a fat sow everyday in earnest for a year and see if she isn’t granted a divorce for maltreatment.

Is this an appeal to the law or something? It's not a very good argument. Many things which are harmful are not illegal. Many things which are illegal are not harmful.

Also, that's not even how divorce works!

no one is claiming words are physically harmful

"speech is violence" is a position that some people hold.

if words had no power, we wouldn’t fight so hard to protect them from government abuse.

People fight hard for all kinds of nonsense. Historically, people have fought hard for things that didn't matter at all.

I get the desire to moderate your game, but how are words 'harmful' exactly? Especially random, throwaway internet spew. Harmful to your game's reputation, maybe. But to the people?

Nobody has noticed where I work. I'm thinking of getting a second job, actually.

Key factors for me:

  - Company is full of old school engineers who seem to hate AI and will scrutinize every command it runs.  Means that even though we're both 'using' AI, I'm still way more productive.
  - Said engineers have too much inside knowledge of the horrific system they made that management can't possibly get rid of them.  Helps that they're workers-rights minded too.
  - Company has enough revenue to keep up payroll indefinitely.

Now, does the AI write good code? Often not. But the codebase is already terrible, so it's no big difference.

Yes, the EU is a bit of a strange half-measure. I understand why the cultural barriers are resistant to change. But standardization of regulations across the single market has been incredibly slow. I'm not sure it will ever happen.

I wonder if the incumbents in each country actively lobby against it. I suppose it's easier for massive corporations to deal with cross border issues. The onerous regulatory boundaries are a nice price of entry for them that keeps out upstarts.

Europe lost religion and gained this instead.