I'm inclined to believe that the decline of our education system is intentional. Certain people don't want the masses to be capable of critical thinking.
The number of people who buy tickets to sit in theater to watch movies is not a good measure of people's interest in watching movies or the success of the medium. Most people are streaming films and while streaming services continue to suck at very basic things you'd expect from a media player they're still very popular.
“profit motivated” means taking as much as possible while giving as little as possible in return. The ideal situation for a profit motivated company would be collecting all of the money people have and delivering nothing. Thieves are also profit motivated.
I have a 10 year old cell phone that still gets regular use. Works just fine for things like phone calls, texts, youtube (newpipe), termux, and note taking. Original battery isn't great at this point, but a new one is maybe $15. Zero reason to replace it.
> I get that asking a commercial website to be as basic/supported as that website is a big ask.
The trick isn't to get a commercial website to accept a site that basic, it's to get the website to test for capabilities and if it can't confirm them serve only the basic version. Websites should be every bit as fancy and obnoxious as they want as long as they fail gracefully.
> They aren't part of the executive branch, period. The president has no control over their pay or performance.
They are run by the comptroller general who is appointed by the president meaning that the president has total control over who gets paid anything at all. Right now ours is just an "Acting Comptroller General" filling in until the president appoints someone else.
A very small number of people are taking (and often wasting) the majority of the worlds wealth and resources and harming everyone else in the process. We could probably stave off that decline for a lot longer if we did something about the leeches accelerating our collapse.
> At some point widespread desalination is probably inevitable, but that requires a lot of energy.
We'll also need somewhere to put all that salt. It'd be best to stop the largest wastes of the clean water that we have. We have plenty of water for people and food. We just have to stop the wasteful practices of industry and force them to be more efficient and responsible even though it will eat into their profits.
> It's the corporation's job to advocate for favorable regulations
Bribery is not advocacy.
> the government's job to enact regulations that benefit the general public rather than special interests.
No argument there, but so far companies and corrupt politicians have conned a large percentage of the public into accepting that it's okay and that any constraints on what a company wants to do is a terrible thing. We're currently under a very pro-bribery admin.
> The companies that lobby for the DMCA are the media companies. They donate their share of money but by far the largest source of their influence is their ability to run sustained unfavorable coverage against politicians who cross them
I'm not entirely convinced that media coverage is more influential than bribes, donations, and the revolving door. That argument also only works for the media industry and not the other countless industries which bribe government. The oil and gas industry have been getting their money's worth https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2024/05/10/energy-indu...
Signal seems to be quietly warning people away from the service by refusing to update their privacy policy the very first line of which is a clear lie.
> the model was you go to an arcade cabinet and you get charged every time you died
Worse, some arcade games drained your health continuously while you played so no matter how good you were you'd have to keep plugging quarters into the machine.
> I can still play the games I bought on the nintendo switch 8 years ago.
If those were digital copies you might have chance, otherwise don't count on them to keep working for long. The carts Nintendo used were made with memory that degrades when just sitting on a shelf and people are already reporting that their DS games are failing. I've got an Atari 2600 that still works and plays games fine though. Never even had to replace the joystick, which easily beats the joycons which drift after 400 hours
Screw fraud, it should be considered theft punishable by time behind bars the same way it would if some junkie broke into my house and stole my games or movies off my bookshelf.
We should require companies to submit a DRM-free version of their product to the US copyright office in order to get copyright protection. If the company goes under, or the copyright term expires, the US Copyright office should then provide those files to the people free of charge.
Yes, the DMCA is a great example, but corporations write those regulations and bribe government to pass them. That's not really an example of evil government as much as it is an example of evil corporations, although it does illustrate how much work is needed to limit the influence of money in politics.
In my country more people are killed by corporations than by their government's "warplanes and myriads of armed enforcers". Corporations have literally poisoned you and your entire family already. They've contaminated every living creature on earth and every source of water. Even the rain that falls is no longer safe to drink. (https://phys.org/news/2022-08-rainwater-unsafe-due-chemicals...) No one has spent even one day in jail for it. You can't vote them out of power.