I know some of the union leaders at UPW, including one of the Paizo writers that may have worked on the starter adventure (I don’t know for certain). They’re incredibly passionate about their work, and honestly would understand your frustrations about capitalism. They likely pushed to make as much as possible free, so folks in your position would still be able to share the joy of their work even if they can’t afford the starter adventure.

I know none of this will make your frustration go away, but I hope you know that they didn’t do it out of malice.

Because I don’t have the capital, and jumping into forming a large worker cooperative is incredibly risky. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to, but I’ve found my niche and it’s organizing unions within the tech industry.

I’m trying to reframe the point of the discussion, which is about IP. Nitpicking the example is counterproductive, because it’s absurd to assume that no one would ever pay for a piece of software.

If game companies stood to make no money, why would they bother with such a large production?

I’m a games industry professional. I would continue to do this work as an unpaid job if my basic needs were met on a societal level.

You think you’re asking a neutral question, but you’re not. Companies operating within capitalism will behave in the interests of capitalists. IP laws aren’t required for the AAA studios other than to domineer control over an idea. A game like Call of Duty is a titan made by 1000s of professionals. One of those games gets launched every year. By shear force of momentum, there are very few companies that could ever replicate it in any fashion.

Now imagine if COD was made by a company in which IP didn’t exist, all the profits went to the workers rather than shareholders, and that the workers have a say in the launch schedule. Would you be willing to pay for a game in that instance?

It’s illegal in the US too. That doesn’t stop them from calling me and everyone I know.

There’s an extremely common cold call scam where a VOIP calls you to notify you about your car warranty expiring, and for the low, low price of 100s of dollars they’ll give you an extended car warranty.

Cut the top off of a 2 liter bottle and put the bread bag through the neck, spread it around the neck, then put on the bottle cap.

Das Kapital described crypto before digital computers were even an idea. His work is still relevant.

Well there’s an episode in ds9 where a replicator is modified into a teleporter, so in the star trek universe they’re very similar. Replicators reconstitute matter from waste material, and seems to me to be far more likely in the realm of scientific possibility.

Screw teleporters, I want replicators

During the occupation, Kiara told dad jokes as a survival mechanism

I use the app opentask. Based on your criteria, it’s exactly what you’re looking for. It’s all stored locally on your phone, it has the ability to set recurring tasks, and you can create categories of preset and custom tasks. Deadlines can be set as far into the future as you need, down to the minute. It’s available on F-Droid.

Content moderators are superexploited. These employees primarily work from African countries like Kenya, so there’s a whole second layer of neo-imperialism that I won’t get into right now. They’re given poverty wages, sometimes as low as $1.30/hr. Because they’re content moderators, they have to look at images and read descriptions of traumatic events without respect for mental health. OpenAI, Amazon, and Facebook have engaged in aggressive union busting tactics for these workers as well, though workers were still successful in organizing one of the largest labor unions in Africa.

• https://www.medianama.com/2023/07/223-kenyan-workers-call-for-investigation-into-exploitation-by-openai-3/
• https://time.com/6296196/ai-data-gig-workers/
• https://futurism.com/the-byte/african-workers-openai-training

You’re probably out of luck trying to convince this person of your opinion. However if it comes up again and you want this person to walk away, I’d recommend mentioning the horrible working conditions that content moderators have to go through. Contrarians don’t like unassailable facts.

CVE-2022-2601 was discovered in 2022, but for unclear reasons, Microsoft patched it only last Tuesday.

I respect their journalistic integrity for not speculating, but it was definitely because the NSA was exploiting it.

Cool, now the state of Minnesota can sue him for the use of AI election disinformation starting next month

It’s a great balance between new and hot! You mostly see posts that picked up some interest within the first couple minutes of being posted

Kinda, it was only added a couple months ago

I’m pretty much always set to all, with hot being good for me most of the time. New and scaled are also nice ways to get some extra variety on slow days. I’ll rarely use active and top if I’ve been away for a while

My first car was a green buick lasabre that I got from a relative. It was held together by duct tape and redneck engineering, and wasn’t even supposed to make it through high school. As a condition for receiving the car, I had to continue calling it the green hornet. Ever since, my cars have been named after a famous movie vehicle. My current car is a blue civic, so naturally I had to name it the bluesmobile