Meanwhile on YouTube some dude in nowhere America has a set of videos showing how he can lift, rotate, leverage and pivot massive stone blocks and an entire house using stone-age technology… ropes and wooden levers… by himself!

Rogan appeals to people who want to hear that the world revolves around them. They believe and want to confirm that if they haven’t figured it out no one else has. They are literal morons, but too stupid to know it. They are extremely satisfied when Rogan panders to their narcissism.

Parts of Canada were 8C above seasonal norms today (!). That is very, very much warming.

Yah, I remember paying like $10-15 mid 1990s for a single CD album. And we liked it! Easily spent a few hundred bucks a year on music.

I swear if these stupid music labels just switched to 5 cents a song, no DRM, own it forever, global distribution, bill you once a month to manage transaction fees – they’d make more money than god.

Indeed! I introduced my kids to this through the example of our in-house Plex server, and it worked really well.

First they “get it” because Plex works like the streaming services they’re used to and they think “oh neat mom can do that too.”

Then they like it more because I show them how its streaming we can control ourselves - streaming home movies and pics really impresses this upon them.

And then they see that there’s no magic to where the content comes from – it’s a digital file on Plex just as it is on Netflix.

Voila. Free thinkers for life.

shady websites

There are no innocents here. There’ s a case to be made that nothing is more shady for consumers than the mass data harvesting, profiling, brokering and content shaping that flows from using Facebook, Twitter, Amazon or TikTok

shittiest possible quality

You’re doing it wrong

In the background as the deal gets worse and there is no alternative offering a good deal with a good consumer experience then piracy rises. It always does. Companies will always complain piracy hurts them and the artists but all they have to do is be more reasonable.

100% this

Yah, and before that SoundJam, an indy app which Apple bought and re-skinned into iTunes.

At the time it was all wonderful and intuitive. Drag and drop everything, beautifully curated collections, simple and dependable, and sitting right there on your hard drive / iPod so you always had everything.

Now it’s all a sewer of bullshit, annoying and alienating to use, it makes music a miserable experience. They wonder why people don’t want to pay for it. And use the law to beat us over the head until we submit to our own misery.

We really gotta update consumer laws for the digital age so there’s a reasonable balance between corporations and consumers again.