Yeah, if urbanism/centralization (of where people live and also the economy) increased over the same period, the raw figures may give a misleading picture of what things are really like. There are a lot or rural towns that have been shrinking over that time span, and cheap housing in those places doesn’t meaningfully offset rising prices in growing cities.
Sincere question - why not? It seems like the idea is that someone owning one cheap house in a rural community is of less consequence than another higher value home owned in a higher value market. And I'm sure some math could be applied in economic terms to bear that out. But looking at it from a human perspective, I have a hard time accepting that one is better than another.
It’s one of several factors that could mean the prices seen by the median person looking for a house are worse than that 4% median house price increase suggests.
To take it to an extreme to illustrate why this may matter, if one town gets abandoned and the houses all sell for $1 to a single family, while all the former residents move to another similar-sized town that sees prices more than double… you’d be best off ignoring or down-weighting the effect of those $1 houses if you’re trying to figure out how the housing market is looking to most people.
Though it’s possible the figures used for the analysis already account for that kind of thing, in some fashion. Are they actual sale prices, or asking prices? Do they only count sales to someone who’s intending to use the dwelling as a primary residence, or all sales? There’s a lot of room for the median experienced house price for a person just trying to buy a place to live to differ from the median on-paper, depending on how it’s handled.
My dad (high school diploma) blundered through his 20s with a series of gigs and barely-paying-the-bills solo businesses, had an expensive divorce (kids in the mix, too), a kid out of wedlock, then finally got his career going as he approached 35. Worked for a railroad. Started at the bottom, worked his way to upper-middle-management before the railroad sold, MBAs took over from career railroad guys in upper management, and they ruined his work-life with constant pointless meetings and having to put up with idiots who didn’t know how anything worked calling the shots, before ultimately “encouraging” him and a bunch of the other expensive career guys into somewhat-early retirement. FFS, he was literally raised in a barn—and not a nice one, and not one attached to hundreds of acres of valuable paid-off farmland or anything like that—they were a kind of poor that barely exists outside the homeless, these days.
My mom was about 30 when they got married. Junior college stenography degree. Never worked for pay again after getting married. Dad was a railroad man (working class, nothing fancy) and mom a homemaker.
They followed a playbook that’d spell doom today, but rode rising real estate prices and real honest-to-god pensions to a couple million dollars invested plus social security. We did a couple weeks of driving or (sometimes) air travel vacation every year. All the usual American Dream stuff.
Shit was simply different for the Boomers. Almost every plausible life-path got downgraded a couple notches since then, in terms of quality of life and retirement outcomes. Except now everyone gets a shiny gee-whiz slate in their pocket. Hooray.
The high home prices, inflated away wages, and poor quality of life for long hours worked, plus no fault divorce, the family court system, etc, may be contributing to the demographic issue.
The price of property in Australia has increased so much but the demographics aren’t there to support continued growth. Yes immigration is a thing but most immigrants don't move to Australia with $4 million(AUD) in the bank to continue fueling the boom.
There’s plenty of growth, it just isn’t going to the people who work for a living, even if they’re highly educated, highly skilled, and working long hours.
Back in the day on would get into the top 1% by getting a good degree and working hard. And getting a good degree and job was a function of who and where you were born.
Now that is even more amplified.
Most young people will become rich by inheritance in US.
Yeah, to be clear, I don’t mean that as a “them damned boomers!” post. They’re not to blame for circumstances conspiring to put life on (relatively) easy mode for them. If they’re guilty of anything (at least, many of them) it’s failing to appreciate how much harder it’s gotten to achieve what they’d consider a basic, unremarkable, ordinary, comfortable middle-class life.
Locally though there are areas that have grown quite a bit compared to others, the average misses nuance. LA has grown by a million people since 1970, while chicago has lost almost as much in that time. Are things more affordable than Chicago in Southern California? Certainly not, even if economically speaking the region is "more productive" by whatever measure.
Really what makes things cheap is a simple formulaic application of supply and demand to things like housing, which takes up the bulk of the American take home pay bar almost nothing else in comparison. Boomers had things cheap not because of riding off a population boom, but a home building boom, that zoning changes in the decades since have made impossible to replicate.
Same sentiment, closer to the actual concept of a nation state.
Or maybe, “my kids can’t have grandkids, so I’ll just adopt myself some.” The reasonable question you have to ask isn’t “how do I adopt more grandkids?” It’s “Why can’t MY kids have their own kids?”
You’re aware these people dealt with the draft, significantly higher crime, high inflation, 14% mortgage rates and the continuing tide of automation too right? Watch “Falling Down” to see what the silent generation thought of no fault divorce, computerization and the iron curtain falling down (yes, one of the reasons for the title…)
People of my generational cohort have it easy by comparison. The unemployment rate was < 4.5% when I graduated college. SPX (a big chunk of my own retirement) is up 65% in the last four years.
The great depression? My man we had 5% GDP growth last quarter after just seeing 15% unemployment 3 years ago. What the actual fuck are you talking about?
I think you're both talking past each other. We have it better now in many ways than our parents and grandparents did. But they had it better in other ways.
The necessities were more affordable then, as were the simplest pleasures. My mother's father was a milk man, and her mother was a gas station clerk. They had 3 kids, a house and 2 horses. But, calling the next town over was exorbitantly expensive, their siblings were drafted, their uncles and aunts had had polio, they couldn't get kiwi fruit or sushi.
My siblings can talk to anyone anywhere in the world real time for free, eat any food they can conceive of for relatively cheap, were never drafted, have an endless stream of stimulating entertainment, can read any book they like at a whim, diseases like measles are a fairy tale. But with 17 years of education and two salaries they can barely afford a house, a basket of groceries for a week costs them a day's labor, they're constantly bombarded with bad news, real or not.
Things are better for us, but the basics were easier for them. Something's not quite right, and we can all feel it, even though the measures all tell us it's better than ever. I think the real problem is that we mostly agree that things will not be better for our grandkids. Increased international tensions and drug resistant disease mean that the two main ways we are better off won't last, and on top of that, the basics are unaffordable.
I'm not even convinced the basics were cheaper or easier then, food spending as a percentage of the median income is near the lowest ever. People just had very few options and didn't know what they didn't have.
You can live the 1960's middle class lifestyle today, it's just considered lower middle to lower class. I think that's great, it means our country is becoming wealthier every year!
> Shit was simply different for the Boomers. Almost every plausible life-path got downgraded a couple notches since then, in terms of quality of life and retirement outcomes. Except now everyone gets a shiny gee-whiz slate in their pocket. Hooray.
My father-in-law didn’t do quite as well but had the same kind of easy mode experience – working as a letter carrier for years was enough to support a stay-at-home wife, kids, house, pension, etc. He upgraded towards the end by moving into being a supervisor and then the IT group - by virtue of having bought a PC in the late 80s, the regional postmaster knew him as one of the most experienced - and retired at 60.
There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but I feel it’s constantly hard for most people of that generation to understand how much different things are now.
None of what you are saying is supportable by any data or statistics.
The boomers had everything worse. When they were born, something like two thirds of them had indoor plumbing. And a third of them did not.
My parents, my grandparents, they grew up the same way everybody else did back then. They worked on a farm from the age of like 5 doing manual labor.
When you are talking about your parents, you are talking about the luckiest people in the country. Nobody got a pension back then. Maybe if you worked for IBM, but that was not the norm.
What you are saying, "every plausible life-path got downgraded a couple notches since then" is completely false. Every plausible life-path has been upgraded since then, the things you are saying just aren't true.
> The boomers had everything worse. When they were born, something like two thirds of them had indoor plumbing. And a third of them did not.
Yeah, I know, I’ve hand-pumped water at the well my dad used growing up. The ‘40s and ‘50s were rough for a lot of families—but their kids basically just had to not constantly fuck up for multiple decades to be on track for at least moderate success.
I think it’s why a lot of that generation (my parents included) assume anyone who’s not doing at least decent is basically not trying at all, or is astonishingly useless. For their relatives who didn’t climb out of poverty with the rest of the wave, that’s mostly true.
(YMMV for minorities over the same time span, of course—racist FHA policy and other measures meant e.g. black folks didn’t get such an easy on-ramp to the postwar-success highway, to put it mildly)
I clicked because I was excited to see the story of their unexpected interaction with the FCC and FAA (or local equivalents) due to putting out that much EM radiation in those spectra. But no. Still cool, though.
One normal human with 24 hours in a day losing 45ish hours a week to pull median income and another 8ish per day to sleep versus multibillion dollar companies hiring behavioral psychologists and marketing experts with collectively many thousands of hours per day spent finding ways to trick people—and their efforts demonstrably work.
The advertising industry’s a rabid dog the size of Godzilla and should be put down, whether it’s targeting kids or adults.
If one course of action that does not even add more options of products to buy, just pushes them in a different way, contributes to worse health outcomes across a population, and you know it’s doing so, yes, that’s super unethical.
Targets have a Starbucks selling 10x as much dissolved sugar 25 feet away from checkout aisles. Are those unethical? How about in a separate Starbucks building, but on a pad site in front of the store with a drive thru?
Seems like an arbitrary place to draw the unethical/ethical line.
This is not, cannot be, and shouldn’t be math. Yes, it’s all “arbitrary”. Unhealthy impulse-items at the checkout are going to be regarded as quite unethical, by a lot of people, for really obvious reasons. The approaches you’re trying to use to “disprove” that isn’t how any of this works.
Many things are bad. Some are worse than others. Ones that are intentionally manipulative, as the impulse-buy aisle is, and greedily pushing high-margin products that are also unhealthy? Yeah, that’s an extremely shitty thing to do, no matter how common. The motivation is 100% greed, not delivering a better experience (as simply making candy and soda available in some normal aisle might). And in the Year of Our Lord 2023, every person choosing to create impulse-buy areas knows exactly what they’re doing and the effects it has.
The Starbucks bottles in the checkout aisle are, similarly, bad. The Starbucks that you have to walk over to, look at the menu with calories printed right next to each item while you choose what to buy, then stand in a second line, check out again, then wait at to get the drink, isn’t bad in the same ways. It might be bad in different ways, and to a different degree! But it’s not the same, and you’re not going to be able to construct some proof that requires I condemn those equally or else condemn neither, because that’s nonsense both in the specific terms of what we’re writing about, and also because it’s not a useful way to analyze or discuss these sorts of things in general.
>But it’s not the same, and you’re not going to be able to construct some proof that requires I condemn those equally or else condemn neither, because that’s nonsense both in the specific terms of what we’re writing about, and also because it’s not a useful way to analyze or discuss these sorts of things in general.
I think it is useful when ideas about government regulation start coming in (like the poster who I responded to wrote). I do not want leaders to (completely) capriciously determine what is and is not allowed.
I’d happily pay $50/m for a streaming service with a single UI that had all the shit my piracy server does, and a guarantee that things won’t disappear (or at least a track record of that rarely happening). Hell, I might pay as much as $100/m. Maintaining the server and pirating stuff takes time, and hard drives cost real money.
It’s only the combo of money savings, higher quality (most steams are shit), unavailability of what I want (the best versions of several TV shows and movies are piracy exclusives, for one thing), and unified UI that make it worth it. Start chipping away at those, and it gets not-worth-it pretty fast. Apple tried with their unified streaming service UI on Apple TV, but several big players who hate their paying customers refused to implement it, so that’s a dud.
Hell, I in-fact still pay for like five streaming services despite all the above. I’d gladly pay one higher bill if it let me stop fussing with this crap.
> Apple tried with their unified streaming service UI on Apple TV, but several big players who hate their paying customers refused to implement it, so that’s a dud.
It’s not just that companies like Netflix didn’t implement it, but that it also shows you stuff you don’t have access to. I can’t count the number of times I get a notification about $sportsteam being in a close game, and clicking it, only for it to show me a link to subscribe to yet another “plus” service that likely will have the game blacked out anyway.
The “unified” Apple TV app has absolutely no idea what you actually are subscribed to, so it just shows you links to everything, and it’s a guessing game whether any of it will work. So it fails on both counts: it doesn’t show things you have, and it does show things you don’t have.
Lots of the genre TV shows these days—like the Netflix Marvel stuff, or most of the Star Wars or Disney Marvel tv shows—can only be saved by fan edits because of the absurdly slow plotting, used to stretch a bit over a movie of plot to fill three or more movies worth of time. The scripts and editing are beyond flabby, they’re morbidly obese. Even if you’re paying for the service, the best version of the product’s usually coming from pirates.
The ethical distance between this and littering is about as large as the one between littering and murder, though.
If it’s unethical, it’s somewhere around running a stoplight that’s plainly not registering your presence and hasn’t turned for ten full minutes, with perfect straight mile-long views either way and not a car or person in sight. Not really unethical at all.
I like the littering analogy because it's a kind of tragedy-of-the-commons problem. If everyone pirated, clearly there'd be a problem around capitalistic incentives for making intellectual property, similarly to how if everyone littered, there'd be a problem around environmental cleanliness.
But I don't think most people would argue that everyone should pirate IP.
That's a good follow-up question though; for those who believe pirating is ethical, do you a) believe everyone should pirate, and b) if not, what makes your pirating acceptable but other pirating unacceptable?
Littering is actually a terrible analogy. First of all, a place becomes littered, everyone there is affected. Piracy only hypothetically harms a select few who probably make more money you can imagine.
Furthermore, in a world where everyone pirates, everyone is still free to give money. You can pirate and buy a steam game or a bandcamp album. They're not mutually exclusive. Here the littering analogy breaks down again.
I don't believe "everyone should pirate", I think the model of ownership as archaic, it is trying to uphold an old model of material goods, through power alone, into a technological model.
If I make a ceramic cup, and you steal it, I don't have it anymore. I can't drink my tea or look at it and smile.
If you made an exact replica of it, if I find out and I'm petty maybe I'll be mad, or maybe I'll fantasize about how you were maybe gonna buy it from me, but I sure can't complain that you took my cup away from me.
Being able to reproduce media at virtually no cost is a new concept. As such, it deserves new mindsets, not old models based around material goods.
I believe this exposes that the new model should be one of higher trust, where customers use their money as reward, not to obtain.
In regards to b) I think it's pretty simple. A steam game currently could take 20% or 2% of minimum wage based solely on where you live. There's emulated games too, what benefit, what real consequence is carried upstream to anyone that deserves it, when I take my time to find a used copy of an old game, buy a used CD reader, and rip the game legally, as opposed to two clicks from a torrent site. Show me the real harm, where in that chain is anything of consequence being done? Is it just about performing the dance that the authorities tell you to do?
> That's a good follow-up question though; for those who believe pirating is ethical, do you a) believe everyone should pirate, and b) if not, what makes your pirating acceptable but other pirating unacceptable?
Pirating something, I see as gaining access to something when the official or preferred channel is either unreasonably expensive, or the product itself is unknown.
Piracy is an effective way to try before you buy, at your own pace. On one hand, sure, once you pirate something you don't need to buy it, but my own dabbling has resulted in MORE purchase activity, not less. I could buy games or movies or shows knowing I would enjoy them and be satisfied with my purchase.
There were totally games and whatnot that I downloaded, tried, and then ignored or deleted. Was anyone really damaged by that? I see that as the equivalent of window shopping. It's what you do after you try it that forms the ethical stance, in my opinion.
Are you a struggling student pirating AfterEffects or something else so you can earn money and then buy a real copy? Some might say that's ethical pirating because there's an intent to be legit about it but there are obstacles. "Don't buy or get it" one might say, and forever lock themselves out of opportunity.
Choosing to keep a pirated version of something is as much a social and political commentary as it is a technical violation of monopoly. Someone who can afford something they pirated, that they liked and kept, may be seen as a cheapskate.
But honestly, there are many games and music albums and shows I would never have tried out if I didn't have an easy and accessible means to just give'em a whirl.
So you could say I see no harm in "explorative" piracy, or pirating that then gets deleted when you find out you don't like it. In the rights-owner's world, that person should be out money, and disappointed in their purchase! Seems like more moral harm than making sure you like what you're buying.
The problem with that is, of course, the lack of consent from the property owner. This is the "entitlement problem"; the options are not listed by asking, "How will I obtain this content?" they're listed by asking, "How will the content provider allow me to consume their content?" Sometimes, the answer is, "There is no way to consume this content."
If the owner of AfterEffects doesn't want to allow students to use their software, that's their right as the property owner. Students have no entitlement to that software. Violating the owner's property rights is an immoral act.
And business has no entitlement to profit. Business models do not have to be respected, they must be validated through market success. And the intellectual property model is invalid. Copying an idea does not rob another person of that idea.
"But it's law", I don't care, law is religion for the ruling class and judges are essentially priests. They work on doctrine, adjacent to indoctrination. They operate with the attitude that the judge, and by extension the state, can do no wrong. That's already operating from a place of moral invalidity.
If I shared something to the world, even under license, and people copied it endlessly, I'd be told that I have personal responsibility, and what did I expect to happen when I shared. Victim blaming, essentially.
But the moment it's a business, the moment money's involved, suddenly we aren't entitled to anything and business deserves every last dollar they can squeeze.
The understanding is flipped. Businesses are second class entities to citizens. They deserve no more consideration than an individual, and indeed already enjoy too many privileges they've done nothing to earn.
So if a business owns something, it cannot contingently sell that thing to a person?
I'm not sure I agree with that. Businesses are ultimately owned by people, and in reality, a "business" sale boils down to one person exchanging goods for payment with another person. Sometimes those goods are digital, and sometimes those digital goods are only sold contingently. By agreeing to the contingencies, you're giving your word to someone that you will abide by the conditions of the sale.
Or are people not free to enter into contracts, in your view? I strongly disagree with that, but that's the only way what you're saying would work, based on my understanding.
Many contracts have illegal terms in them that explicitly also add durability clauses so that illegal terms in a jurisdiction are already thrown out but the rest of the contract stays.
That established, what business contracts are entered, executed, and completed ethically and with equal respect to the rights of the contracting parties? Very few, if any. In practice, the ability to enter a contract is the ability to go into moral debt and be slave to a document.
So no, I don't think contracts should be entered freely because most contracts are actually one-sided as fuck and generally have no room for negotiation.
If you don't think contracts should be entered into freely, then you have a problem with one of the core tenets of capitalism -- ownership of goods. I disagree with you, but capitalism has many flaws!
Indeed, I am against tenets of capitalism. It is a vehicle through which people commit exploitative acts and pass it off as merit. Money does not come from thin air, and profits to one entity means loss of value to another. Profit only comes when you charge more for something than it cost to produce or service, therefore the way to succeed in capitalism is to mislead, connive, haggle down where possible, and overcharge where possible. That's quite a list of moral hazards that, when cast out into an aggregate, results in social decay.
Ownership is also an illusion; government can confiscate anything it wants and there's no recourse. They can even take your home if the right boxes are checked. So how exactly is that tenet being respected?
On some level, yes, I see that there should be respect between an object someone works for and them. The issue is the value of each person's labor is completely subjective and up to the opinions of owners. There is no benefit to being working class, for example. There is only benefit for owners under capitalism, and even that gain comes at the cost of screwing over your neighbors.
It is not a system that can take the entirety of a human group and raise them up. It picks a handful, plays "Some of you May Die", shrugs, and leaves the citizens to themselves to fight over resources.
Freely enterable contracts mean one-sided contracts will be allowed. That's not a freedom worth protecting, because it invites exploitation. Just the same, allowing endless exclusive ownership means the owners control everything, and will create ways to block entry to their class or other efforts at equality. Capitalism does nothing to address its weaknesses, and were it not for extreme sacrifice from the working class and token placating acts of regulation from government, it could not function as a legitimate economy or way of life. It rewards the worst in humanity, and then has somehow convinced most of society that it's okay to fuck each other over.
My argument for sure collapses once you don't accept capitalism, so fair enough! There are problems with capitalism, and property ownership has a lot of downsides.
Following the example from the original comment, I would argue that if the content is otherwise unavailable for purchase or rent, then yes, it is ethical for anyone and everyone to pirate it.
Conversely it is unethical to retain the rights to shared cultural artifacts and _not_ provide a way for people to access them.
I'm papering over some grey area where if it's not available for purchase but you could get it from the library, maybe via inter-library loan, then maybe in aggregate it's better ethically to do that.
Weren't we talking about the situation where there's no way to buy? Piracy there isn't going to undermine the incentive to create.
If everyone litters in public areas where trash cans are reasonable to expect, but have not been installed, a likely and good outcome is that trash cans get installed. (But in a more accurate analogy, the trash cans would cost negative money to install!)
That's a problem, however, because it presumes an entitlement to content. Maybe there is no way to buy, and that's on purpose. You don't have an inherent right to consume content; that ought to be up to the owner of that content, even if they decide to arbitrarily limit access to their content.
It's up to them, and when you take that decision away from them, you commit an immoral act.
Again, that depends on what you think the purpose of copyright is.
If you consider public domain to be the default, then you do have an inherent right to consume content. The limitations placed on this right are done for a purpose, to promote more creation via sales. And if sales won't happen, then there's no reason for the copyright.
This doesn't account for the fact that someone can hold a copyright (or a physical item) and decide not to sell it at all. After all, they either hold the rights to it or they don't. It's not only theirs if they manage it "well".
It doesn't really account for that, true. But copyright isn't the only control. If you've never distributed something, that generally falls under basic privacy.
But if you've already put 50 thousand copies out into the world, it should stay available in some reasonable form.
Nope, I'm talking about the agreement you consent to when you purchase access to media.
Mass market sales are not a public distribution, just a wide distribution. You must agree to the terms of the sale in order to access the media. You give your word you will not violate those terms, when you purchase it.
Morally speaking, either you believe someone can control their property, or you don't believe that. Sometimes that control involves letting many, but not all, people access that property. If you believe media moves out of someone's control without their consent merely through distribution, then you necessarily do not believe in ownership.
Which is fine, but there is no quasi-ownership concept. Either a person owns and thus controls something, or they do not. Besides, does private property become "public" just because millions of people go there? Does a rental car suddenly become public property once it's passed 100 renters? This concept cannot exist alongside ownership.
> You must agree to the terms of the sale in order to access the media.
Plenty of media doesn't have terms, it just has default copyright. And that's a good thing.
> Morally speaking, either you believe someone can control their property, or you don't believe that. Sometimes that control involves letting many, but not all, people access that property. If you believe media moves out of someone's control without their consent merely through distribution, then you necessarily do not believe in ownership.
Without their consent? Of course not. They have to consent to the distribution.
I believe in limited ownership for ideas.
I'll mention the public domain again, because you haven't addressed that. If you make a movie, eventually it's going to become owned by the public. That's not negotiable.
> Either a person owns and thus controls something, or they do not.
Fair use is also a restriction on the ownership. A big one. So if it's this simple, then "they do not" must be the correct answer for how the world already works.
> go there, rental car
Those are physical items. They don't act like IP. If we apply physical rules to IP, then anyone can copy anything because it doesn't affect the original.
(1) when media has stipulations attached to its distribution that you agree to when you purchase access to the media (specifically the stipulation that you're unable to share the media with others), and
(2) both breaking agreements you've made as well as knowingly benefitting from someone else breaking agreements are immoral,
(C) you must therefore agree that piracy of content with said stipulations (most mainstream content) is immoral!
When 1 and 2 don't apply, C doesn't apply, sure. But when 1 and 2 apply, C also applies.
I believe that any restrictions added on top of copyright, for a normal media sale, are themselves immoral.
And I believe that sometimes copyright goes too far, and that breaking it in those cases is not immoral.
So I definitely don't agree with your first postulation, and I might not agree with the second one depending on how that's interpreted.
In particular, a rule that would stop me from watching a movie with friends should never be enforced or enforceable. So a flat-out "no sharing" is not a moral rule. And a rule that stops me from sharing the movie contents when copyright has lapsed is also immoral. I feel like the average person would solidly agree with me on those two statements.
And then on top of that, I suggest a situation where it would make sense for copyright to lapse without being immoral to the creators. And while under the current legal system it doesn't lapse, that's a legal truth that doesn't dictate the morality of acting like it lapsed.
If you believe that restrictions on use of property is immoral, then you necessarily do not believe in property rights. Either someone can dictate the terms in which other people use that thing, or they do not own that thing.
That's fine, but it's not very compatible with capitalism.
> Fair use is also a restriction on the ownership. A big one. So if it's this simple, then "they do not" must be the correct answer for how the world already works.
Ownership has restrictions, and ownership on ideas has the most restrictions.
Granted, however this doesn't solve your problem with ownership. Either a person can dictate the terms of how something is used (excepting "fair use" or whatever other exceptions apply) or they do not own that thing.
No version of what you've said supplies sufficient exception to remove a person's ability to stipulate conditional use of a thing.
> Granted, however this doesn't solve your problem with ownership. Either a person can dictate the terms of how something is used (excepting "fair use" or whatever other exceptions apply) or they do not own that thing.
Fair use is a whole category. And there's also public domain, eventually.
I could definitely frame my suggestion, for downloading when purchase is unavailable, as a type of fair use or public domain, or something in between.
If it's fair use, does that make it compatible with ownership?
I think it's compatible with ownership.
> No version of what you've said supplies sufficient exception to remove a person's ability to stipulate conditional use of a thing.
Are you familiar with the first sale doctrine? You are largely not allowed to stipulate conditional use of media you are selling.
You get the tools copyright gives you, and that's it.
You made the case of "knowingly taking something", that in the knowing that it was "unethically" obtained, there's wrong doing.
However I'd posit that media businesses "knowingly get into the business where it's easy to copy your content". If you don't want your content to be reproduced easily, then don't get into a business where it is virtually costless and harmless to make millions of copies immediately very easily. You're not entitled to put people in jail because you willingly chose to take part of a business that's at the mercy of technology.
To me this is like deciding to open up a grocery and then getting upset at the amount of produce you have to throw away because it goes bad when people don't buy it all, that's just a known factor of the nature of the business. If you don't like it, you're not entitled to shape the world to your liking. Get into blacksmithing or glass working instead.
My primary use of Docker is as an isolated-installation package manager that’s portable cross-distro and cross-distro-version with exceptionally well-documented and easy-to-test config locations and data storage paths (so much easier to be sure you’ve backed up everything you need to).
Docker minus the giant well-populated well-maintained image library would be almost useless to me.
[edit] one daemon improved immeasurably by Docker is Samba, of all things. The invocations are a little arcane, but once you’ve got them figured out it’s one extra option line to add a user, one line to add a share, repeat as needed. So very much better than relying on distro-magic to make it work, or, god forbid, trying to configure it manually with some config file that ends up inexplicably having no portability, or is silently ignored despite the claims of the docs, or doesn’t work at all because there’s some option commented out by default that definitely shouldn’t be. Docker forced them to finally make the “I just want to share a damn directory, to these users, either read only or read-write” use case, which is probably the vast majority of use of Samba, straightforward, concise, and reliable to configure.
