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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • The problem isn’t that people aren’t willing to pay for their products, it’s the fact that you give companies the little finger and they take the whole hand. They want to have their cake and eat it to. They want you to overpay and to be satisfied with bad service. They re-capitalize on content that has already turned a profit 20 years ago. I’m sorry but if I pay the equivalent of a movie ticket for a subscription and have to watch The Godfather with JPEG artifacts, they can kiss my ass.

    Another keyword is “easily reproducible” which is the essence of digital data. If I steal something from the store, I stole a unique physical thing with inherit value attached to it. But if I am presented the choice between paying for lower bitrate movie or downloading the same movie for free in theater quality, I choose the later. Somehow the prices for subscriptions go up every year, but the amount of content and the quality decreases.

    Additionally all streaming services take the liberty of revoking your ‘license’ to a bought (not rented or leased) product at any time. If I buy a movie on Amazon prime, they don’t give you a .mp4, no you can only watch it on their app with their quality. They do not disclose that if I buy something with a one-time transaction, it is just a lease and I am in fact not owning what I paid for.

    Over the last decade I paid thousands of dollars for subscription services, but I haven’t gotten enough use out of them to justify what I paid. Hollywood made enough money off of me, so now I’m just helping myself to break even.


  • LouNeko@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldTeach the children.
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    10 days ago

    I remember Nord premium had P2P servers, but the speeds where horrendous. Somewhere around 10.000 Kbits. downloading something meant that all the other programs that required bandwidth were almost unusable. I just settled on watching stuff through streams in ‘meh’ quality. Plus, a VPN just obscures your traffic from your ISP. But almost all mainstream VPNs have at some point either been caught or, admitted to keeping and sometimes selling backlogs. They’re just as much of a leach on you wallet as any other subscription service.


  • LouNeko@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldTeach the children.
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    10 days ago

    The issue is that some countries punish torrenting copyrighted material harshly. Like from fines to prison sentence, harshly. Because its a P2P connection, you’re not only a consumer but also a distributor. And your ISP is fully obligated to give up your traffic data to the authorities, if asked. Almost everybody I know, knows a guy who had to pay +$3000 fines for downloading songs or movies trough torrent. The alternatives are hosting sites. But let’s be honest, a 1080p fully length movie is upwards of 2GB, and most hosting sites either limit you to 500MB per day or give you a download speed of 100KB/s. Of course you could pay for a premium account, but A, this will leave a paper trail, and B, there are more hosting sites than streaming services, and the prices are somewhat the same. So for people in these countries it is not viable to just pirate everything.



  • LouNeko@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldSelective rage
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    11 days ago

    Let’s not forget this simple aspect:

    Interesting character - Seasoned Actor

    Interesting character - Seasoned Actor

    Interesting character - Seasoned Actress

    Interesting character - Seasoned Actress

    Interesting character - Just some Chick

    In the end studios want money above anything else. And big names rake in bigger money.



  • LouNeko@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldSelective rage
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    12 days ago

    My issue is that we are pairing nationality with skin color or ethnicity here. Those are not mutually exclusive. There are 2nd or 3rd generation Asians immigrants in Mexico, just as there are Mexicans living in Ireland, and Irish people in India, etc… Somebody could be a fully integrated national but not part if the nations major ethnicity. Even saying AFRICAN-American is kind of pointless, like it matters where your grand-grand-grand-grand-parents came from. They’re as much American as anybody else. We don’t call everybody else European-American for comparison.


  • You know whats even scarier? Out of the thousands of devices produced I bet none of them have gone through proper quality control and testing (because it requires documentation, which kind of goes against the whole “covert” thing), which means the failure rates are probably through the roof. This means that there are most likely dozens of unexploded devices still around filled with plastique. This means 2 things, 1st you essentially gave away military grade explosives to uncontrolled civilians which can be harnessed and reused for other malicious purposes, and 2nd if a media illiterate civilian doesn’t know to chuck their device in a tar pit, they will continue to walk around with an unexploded bomb strapped to their leg for a long time.

    All in all, whoever came up with this Idea, should be gunned down in the streets like a dog. Or at least be prosecuted for every confirmed civilian death.








  • LouNeko@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlAI bros
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    1 month ago

    I find customer support service Chatbots useful, they tend to ask the right questions before connecting me to an actual human, so I don’t have to explain myself over and over. They also categorize your problem so you won’t be forwarded 3 times till you finally reach the right department. They’re essentially like the “press 1 to…, press 2 to…” shtick during a service call, except the customer support person has access to your chat history.



  • This is why I feel like the whole “body positivity” movement is a god damn joke. It’s mostly about women who love munching cake more than having unclogged arteries. In the last decade we got so many shows and movies where the characters can be morbidly obese and everybody should praise them for their bravery. We got even plus sized manikins in stores, wow.

    But I dare you to name a single character from a show or movie that is skinny (not jacked skinny, but skinny skinny) that isn’t a crackhead junkie, some psycho or a basement dweller with his eyes glued to a screen?

    Hell, just name a Hollywood actor that is skinny?

    I know one, DJ Qualms, who’s arguably most famous role is a disabled person. Great.

    I really don’t blame women for not preferring skinny guys, I blame Hollywood for 3 decades of horrible PR.