The internet was dead before you or I or anyone else even realized that it could die. We're just zombies stumbling around in this undead wasteland, going through the motions that we used to do when it was still alive. Ironically, the thing that killed it were the tools people employed to keep the robots out.
Once those were in place, no one could ever follow in Google's footsteps, which meant search could never work again not even in theory. And the same robots that people were murdering the internet to keep out were welcomed in through the service entry and started writing all the content: now not only could search never work again, but there wouldn't be anything worth searching for. And if all of that wasn't enough to really depress you, there's the fact that social media made it impossible to ignore that none of us like each other very much.
Look, if the robot can write so goodly that I get more updoots, then how is that bad? I can trade in updoots for money, cars, and condominiums. It's about updoots, and I know your ideas are bad because I'm downdooting them.
You could pick up a catalog from any of these places and find half a dozen different species of bees to cultivate for pollination. Blue mason bees come to mind. Anything that's even slightly domesticatable is being pursued. Some of these bees are loners too, perfect for the hipster crowd.
If you're outside of New England (and Kentucky), your state could still ratify it. The quantity of effort needed to do that is bizarrely small. A dozen people focusing on a single state legislator might convince him or her to bring it to the floor.
The last time this happened (in the 1990s), it didn't even take that much.
>Increasingly wishing for this from a fictional constitutional convention:
There's an interesting, one-time shakeup that we could actually accomplish. While it's true that there will never again be another constitutional amendment... there's already one out there that will never expire, partially ratified. Completely beyond Congress's ability to rescind it or cockblock it. Article the First.
Were it to be ratified, nearly immediately (whenever the next Census is), the House of Representatives has over 6000 seats. So many that the existing party apparatus wouldn't be able to vet candidates or manipulate. Lobbyists, even, would have a hard time allotting the slush funds to bribe them all.
And what would it take to do all of this? Maybe 10 or 12 people hammering (gently) on some state legislator in Nevada or Kansas. Convince him or her to pass the resolution to ratify. Nothing more than that. A single state even attempting to ratify it would start the ball rolling, and no one would be able to stop it.
3. Surveillance towards prosecuting negligent parents
4. Evaluation of conscripts
I think I agree 100%. It is exactly those things, even if I can't be so cheerful as you about it. That's why my children have never stepped foot inside a school.
>It seems like more and more people are moving back to physical media,
Your physical media should be hard drives. The 20tb drives are at my sweet spot, I don't feel like I'm wasting a bay to put one of those in it. haugene/transmission-openvpn in docker is bulletproof, you'll never get an ISP email. Stream it with Plex/Emby to any device anywhere, yours or friends'. Use RAID for some redundancy if you can afford it. Upgrade and expand. Build a library that will outlive you.
>Common-sense stuff like barring DRM on content a year after its initial release date,
That's just bad. How about a better take: if a work is ever released with DRM, in any market (globally, even), that work enjoys no copyright protection. It's immediately in the public domain. You can have copyright protection, or you can attempt DRM protection, but you can't have both and your choice in the matter has consequences.
Copyright in the US isn't "intellectual property". You don't own it, you just have a long term lease to exploit it... but the public always owned it and they will return to reclaim it at a future date. DRM is nothing more than an attempt to make sure that it cannot be reclaimed and is invalid on its face. Attempting to use it should be discouraged very harshly under the law.
I might even go a step further and define attempts to lobby for the repeal of such a policy as treason subject to the death penalty. Just to keep things fun.
>Eventually your NAS hardware will be outdated and you'll have to get a new one and migrate your files over.
I know. The little watchdog process on the NAS sees that it's 10 years old, and locks it so it won't work anymore. So annoying.
Or do you mean that you will have so many movies and shows that you yearn for more storage? Because these two things aren't the same. The latter is "this is so good, I want more of it". It's like telling someone to subsist on pumpkin seeds and rainwater because if they eat anything more flavorful they'll become gluttonous.
>Nothing like just having a disc that can last 50+ years if properly stored.
There are no commercial disks that last that long, and no one can properly store them. Cold, dark, climate-controlled, pure nitrogen atmosphere? Give me a break. And how many can you even store?
20 million years of evolution hard-wiring it into our primate brains on a genetic level, from every thrown rock and fall from a tree. That's what made it intuitive. But not everyone gets the same batch of genes, I guess..,
10,000 years of agriculture has given us profound instincts to want to grow crops and harvest them. But you don't need to, it's a waste of your resources when you can head to the grocery store. So you grow grass that you can't eat and dutifully harvest it once a week. To satisfy that itch.
>At some point people started making it into a SaaS, because
Wait. That's a thing? Like, there are drooling, mouth-breathing stooges out there that would trust not just one of their passwords to such a thing, but all their passwords to it?