Talk about missing the forest for the trees. The bottom 50% saw a 0.2% increase (to just 21%) over 5 years. OK, this is technically more, but it is a paltry increase of a tiny base spread out across so many people. It is reasonably seemingly imperceivable to any individual in the group. The top 10%'s increase, on the other hand, was greater than this. A greater percentage increase on a slice of pie that was almost twice as big. In the larger context, this just shows greater inequality.
If people are saying they feel the squeeze, even in social media comments, they are probably being honest.
It seems like you're just adding more and more qualifiers until you can finally justify piracy to yourself. You can reasonably do what you want if you buy the disc. There's a good chance that's how the people you're downloading from did it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ok, how long do you have to rip & copy the content as you desire? It is still reasonably a forever version. Before you bring up laws around keys, first consider that jaywalking in front of your house is illegal too. Again, it is reasonably a forever version.
Setting aside works whose rights are in dispute, have been sold or whose creators are long dead, can you elaborate on this in light of what we know about, for example, Hollywood accounting? If you want to put money in the hands of your favorite living artists, there are more efficient ways than buying their work through a middle man and hoping they live up to their end of the bargain. Buy merch directly through them, for example. More independent creative types tend to have things like PayPal for this as well...
If your argument for piracy being unethical revolves around royalties, consider Hollywood accounting and how studios are actually screwing the creative types, regardless of sales: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
Also consider that the rights to works aren't necessarily held by their creators.
It's not going to reinvent itself when it is compromised of few, like minded people. Government would need to step in, but the current US admin is in bed with media, so we'll be here a while, at least.
If you don't think a checkbox saying "I am 13 or older" is adequate, with all the behavioral tracking available to say Meta, they can tell well enough. OpenAI talks about this too: https://openai.com/index/our-approach-to-age-prediction/
Knowing who someone is in general is different from having a photo of their face or government ID confirmation.
and If I need to use a service now, I will give them whatever they want to get past the hurdle and use the service.
Need or want? We need very few of the services looking for our government ID. Also, this should not be the only way of pushing back. We can support the EFF and politicians who are actively fighting against this or candidates who vow to. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/rep-finke-was-right-ag...
The landlord can divest themselves of the property. It's also ok if people lose money on investments. I don't think you have to feel especially bad for landlords.
It seems arbitrary. Surprise (genuine or feigned, it can be hard to tell) can be followed up with ridicule, excitement, encouragement, etc. That's what's actually impactful, surely...
Of course I've found some too good to be true auto listings on cl (so I stayed away), but this is a weird thing to fixate on when there are scams on Amazon, fb marketplace, newspaper classifieds, etc.
As an aside, I think getting involved in making people prove they live at an address to cl is not the right way to do anything, especially in the context of cl, where many listings may have many different people who live together at that same address.
The bit preceding this quote is pretty relevant to the discussion, specifically about BMR and generally making the right decisions using a data driven approach.
You try to stay under 2000 calories. Why? Is this number backed with data and helping drive you towards a specific goal?
Consider that the author's BMR might have been higher than you think.
The famous cheap (€1?) houses in Sicily (and other places with similar schemes) likely do not meet most of these criteria. It's not like real estate is cheap in Giardini Naxos...