Rex Hite

There did a video about this years ago. It has something to do with his Linus' links to William The Silent and by extension, Tiburge, Countess of Orange (Tiburge d'Orange) etc and through various ancestries to William Prince of Orange, Queen Anne, The Dutch Republic and, of course, Protestantism. A fitting of discussion given St Patrick's Day and the Wearing of the Green is shortly upon us. I'm pretty sure there was a video about this.

The audience for ad-supported entertainment is not bound by the commercial (pun intended) arrangements made by the producers and distributors. The details of those commercial arrangements are detailed, arbitrary and picayune. The notion that the audience has an obligation to those arrangements shows a disturbing slavishness to the whims and commercial interests of others in the name of some distorted idea of ethics.

What gets typed is more important than how it's typed. High speed drivel is no better than the two-finger variety.

The adblocker thing could all be settled if adblocking software was clever enough to spoof the content servers into recording that the ad was delivered, even though it was blocked. That way, everyone is happy. Delusions maintained all around. Kind of like the old days when I could go for a slash, put the kettle on and no one was the wiser. And apparently that system worked just fine. This is not an issue of theft or piracy (an asinine expression) or of ethics or morals but of technological capability to fine-tune ad delivery and targeting; not something I or most people should concern themselves with. Literally none of my business.

If a viewer, careful to play by the rules and not be branded a thief yet simultaneously trying to minimise their exposure to ad content, then they have to know the specific business arrangements that creators, distributors and platforms have all agreed to before an ethical decision on whether or not to consume and ad can be made. The difference between thievery and honesty, filthy pirate and upstanding citizen is apparently in the details of some contract made between other parties. This seems like a lot of bother and burden left to the hapless viewer to figure out.

Sure, technically, but not watching ads make me feel all bad-assed and rebellious. Not like those sheeple sitting there with full bladders, no tea and the faint yet growing sense of their own diminished self-worth.

I suppose I could be racked with guilt over leaving the room to put the kettle on or have a slash when the ads came on (not unrelated activities), and then I think of all the poor sods who bravely stayed and watched the adverts in their entirety, effectively subsidising my TV watching habit. But I'm not.

The blocker or combination of blockers and other privacy extensions in Firefox has been effective in my case, so far. The experiment has been invisible in my experience. I only learned of it from YouTube videos announcing it as part of the content. I think a healthy competition between blockers and YouTube may be a good thing but maybe emerging at the end of this war will be blockers that are worse for privacy than the ads are annoying. Because the only blockers that are really effective are ones that spy. And at that stage everything will be owned by the same corporations anyway.

As long as "Ownership" and "property" can be arbitrarily assigned, negotiated for, divided up, and fall under different categories of laws depending on legislated edicts,often by interested parties acting in their own interests, and when "sharing" can also be defined as theft, and when ownership may be the result of greed and exploitation or just offensive levels of excess, I say there may be plenty of justifications to subvert "ownership" and "property". And in exploitative regimes, even minor acts of rebellion against greedy ownership may not merely be justified, they may be necessary.

As long as the happiness is benign and doesn't harm others. I'll agree with America's founding fathers on this one; happiness may be freely pursued but happiness itself not an entitlement. This is important because if people are defining their own happiness then that means others will be forced to define its limits. And that includes the owners of mass corporately controlled entertainment. But as far as I am concerned the so-called 'piracy' issue around distribution is at most a civil matter but mostly a matter of conscience and circumstance. I don't believe content creators and distributors are owed more than their investment in protecting the content and not in their costs to create it; because I don't think criminal law should be used to protect their risk.

My experience living and working in poverty stricken and marginal places in Angola and Afghanistan for a few decades was that we had plenty of time to amuse ourselves and there was no need to access licensed or corporate owned sources of entertainment. A chess board, a backgammon set, some dice and a deck of cards, and books and magazines for quiet time was more than enough. I don't think licensed mass entertainment is some gold standard of recreation that should be aspired to, much less entitled to. But if that's what's needed to get through the day, then go for it.

On one hand, maybe people with lesser means to participate in the global economy needn't overly concern themselves with the business considerations of corporations in which they have no say. Perhaps the arbitrary rules regarding intellectual property and copyright are for businesses to enforce; but not necessarily for ours to follow. On the other hand, maybe people with lesser means should concern themselves less with engaging in any way with corporate owned entertainment and more with finding ways to be a people with greater means. IE, the pirated content isn't worth the effort and distracts from what ought to be done. And on the third hand, who's to say... difficult problems often require more than two hands to figure out.

Since this is a forum set up to discuss the activities of someone who chooses to make big deal out of his and his families recreational activities, the sentiment, "who cares" is counter to the intent of the forum and Linus' raison d'etre. If enough people take the "who cares" position, Linus soon won't be able to pay for his kid's game-playing. And then nobody wins! Apparently.

The stuff writes itself.

There's plenty of opportunity for video content.