HN user
"Modern package management systems like APT spend a lot of effort installing and removing files, and they don't do it completely"
Well, there /is/ another way to do it.
STATIC LINK ALL THE THINGS
Which would work if licenses and copyrights didn't exist.
"but this is a realistic constraint given the difficulty and cost of recording a professional singer"
Just because a singer is professional doesn't mean they're any good. My wife copes with adversity by singing and she can sing "fuck fuck fuck shit shit shit" in soprano, on key, from the kitchen. The only thing keeping her from singing in public is her stage fright.
There are a /lot/ of people like her, that would answer an ad in the newspaper (or craigslist) that would like to /volunteer/ and contribute to a geeky project as long as they got credit in the paper.
At that point, the largest non-tech cost winds up being the studio rental fee, if you have one.
YES.
The great thing about the modern web is that ads are centralized (for various values of centralization) on ad networks. So it's damn easy to have an ad-free experience by dumping them to 0.0.0.0 in hosts.
It doesn't get rid of silly css and "too clever by half" javascript for the "content site" but dumping the ad networks makes a difference.
Every time I suggest this some ... person... says "but the ads pay for the Internet!" I just look at them as if they're wearing a suit made of dead kittens.
Yes, it's duress. I'm sure you having 10 years of your life locked up in an encrypted vault would put a cramp in your style.
transferring cold hard cash to them
So? If I go to the 7-11 and buy a soda, and the cashier has been skimming the till, I am transferring cold hard cash to a thief.
The difference you keep skipping over is mens rea and I suggest you read up on it before you sound more foolish than you already are.
Knowingly buying stolen goods is illegal because they are still not yours even if you 'bought' them.
Paying a ransom to get your own property back because it is yours is not even in the same ballpark.
Empathy does not seem to be an involuntary ability like eyesight or smell.
But my wife has accused me of selective hearing...
/rimshot
I'm here all week. Try the veal.
When you buy a BMW, you have an extra asshole installed.
/snark
But seriously, in my early 20s I did land surveying. I found that the richer the neighborhood, the nastier the neighbors were. I've had people be rude to me because they think "something is up" when we were simply trying to document how one neighbor can buy 6 inches from another to make a legal setback for a garage. And then I've had just random people offer me coffee on a chilly morning. I'll let you guess which was the upscale and which was the working class neighborhood.
The only thing that's changed is that in-your-face racism is acceptable to many whites because "Trump says what's on his mind." For a lot of people, dog-whistle euphemisms like "urban" aren't needed anymore.
People have become coarser and rude.
Just because we got a black president doesn't mean things are better for non-whites.
If you hit the 'stop loading' button early enough, the stuff you're talking about doesn't have a chance to load.
It's slow enough to do this because web pages load enough crap to run a Quake game.
I've seen the same stupid crap said about the japanese, koreans, etc., over the past 40 years. The story remains the same: Corporate US management sits on its hands and watches the rest of the world innovate. Because thinking is too hard and investing in R&D and capital equipment is too expensive.
"Things like land title, equity rights or non-expropriation (government's taking/buying private assets) are centuries old doctrine in the west. Those looking to invest billions into 'next-gen' manufacturing facilities want legal stability, stability measurable in decades. China isn't there yet."
There are stories in the news from time to time about situations where you have an old woman who's been living in the same place for decades (see the movie "Up" for a fictional example), and she's the last person on the land to accept payment for the land and move. The builders - either a company or the government, wind up having to build around. The way they do it is very passive-aggressive, but there /is/ law over there when it comes to land ownership. It's not all state property.
Further, do you really "own" your land here in the US? Nobody I know does. You either pay rent (taxes) to the government on the land or the land is taken from you.
There is no such thing as totally private land ownership.
WRT manufacturing plants:
Every new company in China has to be majority Chinese-owned. The government has smartened up over the decades and left behind the "everything is owned by the state, even your toothbrush" to something in between total private ownership and public ownership. So they have rules like the above which anger US investors, but are geared to the interests of the Chinese public.
They take care of their own. We used to do that here in the US, but it's all become "fuck you, the free market fixes everything!!!" wharrgarble.
OK, so let's say that a Chinese company moves its stuff to the US.
As a former toolmaker, (you can guess why) I have to say "why would they do that?" They would have to invest in training for people to be toolmakers, millwrights, etc. - the trades closely related to engineering (toolmakers do both design and machining, for example) that have gone stale in this country because there are no jobs and no apprenticeships for people to learn them. These are the skills needed to make tools for the assembly lines. And we don't have them any more. You need someone on the shop floor to debug the tooling and that person is still in China.
All the skill is now in China. It's not coming back. So neither is the manufacturing.
If you have a A.T. Cross pen, please chuck it in the ocean.
Yes, I'm pessimistic and angry. Because I saw an entire industry get gutted just so a few at the top can have more.