What I don’t like about this argument is it feels like the government trying to pass off their own responsibility to someone else. Like, if guns are so dangerous in purpose that manufacturers should be fined for shootings, then government officials should just be regulating gun ownership to begin with. Like, imagine if instead of criminalizing tobacco because of its dangerous health effects, the government said that anytime a person is caught smoking it tobacco companies get fined. At that point you may as well just outlaw the company itself. Which is fine. I have no problem outlawing gun manufacturing. But this is just an unnecessarily roundabout way of doing that. What are we actually accomplishing if we allow people to be shot and then take action and milk money out of the situation? A responsible government isn’t trying to point fingers after a tragedy like a mass shooting and they certainly aren’t trying to make money off of it. No, a good government takes the necessary direct steps to prevent those tragedies from happening again, especially if it’s a common occurrence. No need to dance around a solution instead of tackling it head on.

That’s a common glitch on Lemmy right now. Subscribing to communities oftentimes gives you that message, but as far as I’m aware they’ll still show up in your feed like normal. I’ve heard if you click subscribe and then let it sit for a while it can resolve itself to show you as fully subscribed, but I haven’t had much luck with that.

I know my brain is like at least 70% memes, but nooo, it’s gotta be the horrors in sleep paralysis. Always gotta be the horrors with those damned things. How much funnier would it be to wake up to like a confused Travolta or a doge in your living room.

Aren’t human brains fun? So kind of our brains to show us everything terrifying that it can cook up and place into our lived reality just to fuck with us.

Ah, I tried deleting my comment pretty quickly after making it when I did some research and realized I was wrong. The deleted comment must not have updated properly with other Lemmy instances? Lemmy.world is not run by the same people as mastodon.social - you’re right that it’s run by the same people as mastodon.world. I was mistaken.

Do you have a source for Meta working with mastodon.social?

Do you have a source for Meta being involved with mastodon.social? That’s highly concerning because the same people that run mastodon.social also run lemmy.world.

You’re not wrong and I’m happy that piracy communities exist in spaces where access is easily cheap and accessible if only for the days that those industries get greedier. But for now, I’m happy to pay when it’s affordable and easy to access.

I half agree with what Gabe Newell said in regards to piracy being a service issue and not about price. I think it largely is a service issue. Access is the greater problem. Price is secondary as long as it’s somewhat reasonable. I don’t pirate video games because I can get them reasonably, but he is a smidge wrong insofar as I don’t buy the outrageously expensive games. Steam’s major success is having good sales that keep me away from pirating because the possibility of games I want going on discount at some point is realistic. It’s telling that the only time I did dabble in video game piracy was to relive my childhood memories of Nazi Zombies from the Call of Duty video games. I dabbled in it then because Activision is selling their decades old games for outrageous prices considering their age and their “sales” are weak considering the already overinflated price. I refuse to pay for that. And so I sailed the high seas.

The music industry is still affordable and accessible, so I don’t feel that pressure at all. Back when Limewire was around the pressure was there partially because I was a kid and didn’t have much money and hunting down CDs I wanted for the obscure music I liked was challenging. It was mostly an accessibility issue that Spotify fixed. If their prices move beyond my means then that relationship will no longer benefit me and the sails will raise once more.

What purpose does throwing someone in prison for ten years do though for something like forgery? Would it not be better if they were forced to do community service and lost access to the tools that led to them committing forgery? Why pay money to remove someone from society for a decade? Is it to teach any other potential forgerers a lesson? Is it to teach the forgerer themself a lesson? Is that really a lesson that needs to be worth a decade in a cell to learn? The world’s justice systems have generally erred too much on the side of retribution instead of rehabilitation. It’s especially sinister when you consider how much our capitalist systems place more value on things like capital over people’s lives and wellbeings. To be clear, I consider myself to be a capitalist, but a social democrat that believes in heavy regulations on our capitalist systems. I think our retributive, excessively pro-business justice system is a clear example of what happens when you let capitalism go unfettered and bleed into every aspect of our lives. Forgery is not violent. Most of the time it is not actively dangerous. Why don’t we come up with more creative and proactive ways of punishing people that would benefit people at large rather than ruin the criminal’s entire life? Even in a case where I am not on the criminal’s side I find myself pretty appalled that ten years could even possibly be on the table in a forgery case.

Seriously. Why the fuck is it even a possibility for ten years of prison over something like this? It’s crazy to me that a nonviolent crime could be punished so severely. I mean, why do we have prison? Is it to remove dangerous people from society? That’s certainly how I think it should be, but these sorts of punishments really show that it’s all about sating the bloodlust of victims.

It really depends on your field of work, but if it touches customer service (or even is just a job that will involve socializing with peers) at all then I think my biggest advice is to just be very friendly and approachable. Practice your regular conversational skills.

This is very true in my experience. My college expenses were slashed in half when I moved out of the dorm and into a tiny studio apartment across the city from my campus. It also really hurt my ability to study when I was so far from campus. It hurt my studies even moreso when I needed to take on a part time job to try mitigating the costs of my rent. It’s a really toxic system, because the parts of cities with universties tend to be the expensive parts of cities.