plmu

I have netflix, but also a usenet server account and many TB of disk. I might cancel the first, if the added value becomes too small.

Excellent. I hope more and more people start to see how absurd and evil the concept of "intellectual property" is. It should be totally rejected and any form of keeping useful information for yourself should be shunned and tabooized. In todays world, many have been programmed to believe that the would could not exits without such immoral restrictions, which is horrible.

If impulse control is an issue for you, I think weed is one of the lesser issues. Alcohol or other substances or habits are much more of a risk for those with little self control.

Another data point here: 2 kids, the one who uses (a lot) of THC is more successful, got a physics masters degree and had a 40% side-job during most of bachelor/masters phase.

I can only assume that, just like "made in germany" in the 19th century, after a while the "made in china" will transform from a sign of inferior, into a sign of superior quality. I think we're already seeing that.

Also, the increased assertiveness also led to military agression (2 world wars). China seems to be copying that too, alas.

And the arguments in favour are often based on feelings and/or the vested interests of the current owners of "intelectual property". I think that basically it is immoral to prevent the progress of global useful knowledge of science and engineering.

If there are reasons to do so, they should be very strong and well proven, and be applied with utmost caution.

Today, it seems rather that IP law is blindly extended and strengthened besed upon fake arguments. The real argument is just protecting vested interests and locking out competition and innovation.

This excludes trademark law, which is not really IP but more to protect buyers against fakes and inferior copies. Therefore that can be necessary and useful, if not pushed too far.

Indeed, it is one of the proposed solutions as listed in the corresponding wikipedia article on the St. Petersburg paradox. There is a table with quite low expected values, mapping the wealth of the bank to the expected value.

Most European countries, including Switzerland, still have them. They do work with some limits. And they are absolutely necessary to prevent that, once you have made money, you can profit for the rest of your life including future generations.

If there is no form of weath + inheritance tax, a feudal society is unavoidable.

Even if difficult, we'd better try.

Google might be doing this to show the negative aspects of the current copyright system. Maybe they want to annoy enough people so that something might change.

Just use something else for your root file system, and zfs for the rest. I've been running Zol for 10 years (on arch) and had to recover a few times, but it was never difficult because of the totally standard setup except for the data disks.

It depends. Once the coronavirus is defeated, it will have accelerated the economic cycle downturn, we might see a very deep and long recession, maybe even one like we have not seen in recent centuries.

And since the world is progressing in a direction of depletion of natural resources, the next deep recession might be the last.

We have seen many recoveries after many recessions, but there is no guarantee that there is a recovery. Sooner or later the earth will be in such a bad condition, that it will be impossible to recover.

The US was and is one of the driving forces behind the UN convention, however.