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More of a "Bitcoin-Backed Protection Racket", presumably?

And from the study linked, that framing/suggestion would be incorrect (at least for the numbers given). "the 12% are not the same every day" is an accurate interpretation. They asked about what people ate _yesterday_...

He’s right though - indifference to corruption or malfeasance begets corruption and malfeasance. Holding your government and companies to a higher standard of behavior is both possible and necessary for a functional, durable nation. Sure, you can enforce corporate morality via regulation or governmental morality via the courts or ethics committees, but that completely ignores the concept of soft power. Laws can be broken faster than they can be enforced.

The world must be so tidy for you. Who needs actual science when we have your facile hunches?

Well put. Whoever asked this question is undoubtedly a nightmare to work with. Your data is the engine that drives your business and its margin improvements, so why hamstring yourself with a 'clever' cost saving but ultimately unwieldy solution that makes it harder to draw insight (or build models/pipelines) from?

Penny wise and pound foolish, plus a dash of NIH syndrome. When you're the only company doing something a particular way (and you're not Amazon-scale), you're probably not as clever as you think.

I'd go further to say that rules without any verification aren't really rules. You don't make a rule without the suspicion that it'd be more efficient to break them, and if you're not verifying their adherence to those rules, your rule is meaningless.

This is the iterated game that morally bankrupt manufacturers (IE the vast majority) play to insulate themselves in these sort of scandals: - First, they get caught doing A,B,C, so they pass rules about A,B,C - Then they outsource to someone who is willing to do A,B,C, then they get caught outsourcing to violators - Then, they impose rules about A,B,C on these firms, but do no verification of the firms adherence to those rules. It insulates them of liability without ever increasing costs (because the firms still get to break the rules and the company gets to say "I'm Shocked! I told you not to do that!")

The total pie has absolutely grown. There were a little under 1 billion US album sales in 2000 (the peak of CDs). Spotify alone paid around $3.5B in royalties in the US last year (with similar #s for apple music and a bit less for YT music).

I suspect the disconnect comes from a) a big increase in the # of artists b) artists trying to compare apples to oranges #s as though every stream would've been an album/MP3 sale c) the timeline of revenues: an album sale is a big cash flow shortly after the album release, but streaming revenue is a slow trickle as users gradually discover the album, listen, re-listen, etc

I think it's worth distinguishing that 'most creators get paid a pittance' is only true on a per-view basis. The total outflows to creators is higher, but the total viewership is massively increased due to the leftward shift in where we live on the demand curve. There's no 'money for nothing' solution where everyone just accepts higher prices and continues consuming at the current rate.

I think the broader point is that improving societal utility is rarely the north star of a startup, not that every business needs to last a century.

You get the climate apocalypse you deserve

The point to my post was that there's no dissent allowed from the party line of 'this is definitely kosher'. If you thought the agency was overreaching in its interpretation, you better keep that to yourself, because it was a near-heretical opinion that would be eyed with suspicion, and it's not like you, a lowly rank-and-file employee, were ever going to sway things on that front.

Well, I left for exactly that reason. I imagine those who stayed took an 'ends justify the means' stance that I couldn't abide. The organizations themselves are insatiable - there's no way that, left to their own devices, any three-letter-agency would ever say "Oh, this is beyond our scope, we shouldn't be allowed to access this.", and that combined with rubber stamp 'checks' allowed this surveillance creep.

When I worked at a certain three-letter-agency, much of the annual legal training amounted to "Here's our incredibly tortuous interpretation of every relevant term in the letter of the law. Don't like it? There's the door."