One thing that stopped me from seeking the vanity plate - I learned that at least in Texas all plates are made by minimally paid prisoners. So any desire to finance that system beyond what's absolute possible minimum (i.e. regular plates) evaporated.
In New York it's the same, they make the license plates and also school furniture, and maybe other things too. I was scared for a moment when I was told by USPS Informed Delivery that I have incoming mail from Auburn Correctional Facility - but it was a license plate.
I'm sorry, how is it "borderline" slave labour and not straight up forced labour? These people are imprisoned, and I'm assuming forced to do this work, or what happens if they say no? It's quite literally known as "penal labour" and I thought most of the world figured out that we're not supposed to treat people like that anymore.
Prisoners are charged rent. The hourly wages have no minimum wage and are usually cents on the dollar. Definitely not enough to pay their rent for their cell.
It's slavery. The South fought hard to include the "except as punishment for crime" clause in the 13th amendment. The US has never fully abolished slavery.
'The South fought hard to include the "except as punishment for crime" clause in the 13th amendment.'
I don't think that's historically accurate. The 13th amendment was passed in the Senate on April 8, 1864 and HoR on January 31, 1865.
At the time, the senate and congressional seats from the 10 southern states were vacant.
So the only fighting the south was doing was in the civil war, which didn't end until May 26, 1865.
The text itself is identical to the text in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which prohibited slavery (but allowed for the return of fugitive slaves) in what would later be Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota.
> Fees for room and board—yes, literally for a thin mattress or even a plastic “boat” bed in a hallway, a toilet that may not flush, and scant, awful tasting food—are typically charged at a “per diem rate for the length of incarceration.” It is not uncommon for these fees to reach $20 to $80 a day for the entire period of incarceration.
Having a prison job often comes with deals of better behavior and a shorter sentence (!!!). When you're being told that just working for 2 dollars an hour might lower your sentence from 20 years to 15, do you really have a choice?
For example, in Georgia, prisoners often work outside of the prison for well below minimum wage in order to earn "good time". This means they might get more visits to their family. It also increases their chances of parole. However, the labor is coerced as well. Showing up late or not coming in results in in-prison punishments. So, many prisoners work in cotton fields or McDonald's on the promise of an easier life, while most of their wages are siphoned away and businesses get to pay very little.
This is a mockery of the term "slavery". It is no more slavery to be coerced to work for a shorter sentence than it is slavery to be coerced to follow the law to avoid prison.
"Behave a certain way and you will be imprisoned for less/no amount of time" is not slavery unless the law is slavery. The full term imprisonment is just, and being able to shorten it is a privilege.
> The full term imprisonment is just, and being able to shorten it is a privilege.
Even if you believe this, which I would describe as naive at best and willfully ignorant at worst, you have to understand that the parole is a carrot. It's not real.
Georgia has some of the lowest, if not the lowest, parole stats in the country. They almost never hand it out, even if you are a good little prisoner and work on the field picking cotton for a buck or so an hour. They don't actually want to help society, or prisoners. They just want to siphon money and labor from a population that they know has no options. It's opportunistic. These people are a plague on humanity, a virus of such low lows they must only prey on the most vulnerable. They are the pneumonia of American society.
Okay, we can instead have the prisoners in their cells during that time instead of working. I'm sure they would prefer that, right? Except they have to apply for these jobs, so no, they wouldn't. Being in the cell is the default state of incarceration. They want to be out of it, even for free.
Words mean things. Slavery is something that is not occurring here. Argue amongst yourselves about the ethics of underpaying for the work, but don't invoke the word slavery.
Even our legal system recognizes it as slave labor. The thirteenth amendment specifically says: "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
yes but except as a punishment for crime whereof has been refined with further case law I believe. You can be forced to do small jobs, clean up. You can be assigned Road Crew and pickup trash. You can do small jobs that the system won't hire and pay for, they'll use you. So long as you aren't a risk of flight, to the officers, or to society if you have to interact with the public.
Beats sitting in a cinderblock white-painted cell with a metal cot and 4" mattress.
Yes, you don't need to be convicted to be forced into labor under the 13th. Pretrial detainees can be forced to do "housekeeping chores" and not violate the constitution.
This shows that the government (all branches) has always ignored the Constitution. It clearly says in the 13th that it requires the person to be "duly convicted".
They can say no. These Prisons incentivize inmates to opt in by claiming that prisoners develop employable marketable skills and that the work leaves a a good mark on their record. It can also pay out cents to a few dollars an hour (or nothing at all)
It’s not quite slave labor but it probably should be compensated better at the minimum.
Never heard about it myself before, and went to Wikipedia of course, and found this:
> Prison labor in the US is mostly optional. Although inmates are paid for their labor in most states, they usually receive less than $1 per hour. As of 2017, Arkansas, Georgia, and Texas did not pay inmates for any work whether inside the prison (such as custodial work and food services) or in state-owned businesses. Additionally, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and South Carolina allowed unpaid labor for at least some jobs. Incarcerated individuals who are required to work typically receive minimal to no job training resulting in situations where their health and safety could potentially be compromised. Prison workers in the US are generally exempt from workers' rights and occupational safety protections, including when seriously injured or killed. Often times, inmates that are often overworked through penal labor do not receive any proper education or opportunities of "rehabilitation" to maximize profits off the cheap labor produced. Many incarcerated workers also struggle to purchase basic necessities as prices of goods continue to soar, meanwhile prison wages continue to stay the same. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat...
It sounds like it isn't optional everywhere, the pay is beyond inhuman, they don't always get any benefits at all, no training, don't safety and are overworked.
Overall, sounds like a nice idea on paper, but combine it with private companies actually running these prisons and probably making profits on having more f̵o̵r̵c̵e̵d̵ labour available to them and you basically re-invented slavery again, just with a nicer name.
> It sounds like it isn't optional everywhere, the pay is beyond inhuman, they don't always get any benefits at all, no training, don't safety and are overworked.
Most of these are true, but I would push back on the pay angle. If a person is in jail, they are a ward of the state and have no expenses at all. There is no sense in paying them a "living wage" because they don't have to live off it. In any case, most stereotypical prison jobs would not cover the cost of incarcerating the employee.
A common way this works these days in more progressive states is that prisoners who can hold down a remote job are allowed to keep their income, minus paying a tithe for their incarceration:
> Overall, sounds like a nice idea on paper, but combine it with private companies actually running these prisons and probably making profits on having more f̵o̵r̵c̵e̵d̵ labour available to them and you basically re-invented slavery again, just with a nicer name.
Only about 10% of prisoners are in private prisons. The vast majority of them are in some kind of government prison. The US definitely puts too many people in prison, but that's for cultural reasons and not because of some nefarious plan to get cheap labor.
>If a person is in jail, they are a ward of the state and have no expenses at all. There is no sense in paying them a "living wage" because they don't have to live off it. In any case, most stereotypical prison jobs would not cover the cost of incarcerating the employee.
They don’t understand that not only tax payer funds go to these systems but the systems turn around and create victims of those in their care.
Paying to stay in jail should be done on an availability of funds, like bonds are (mostly), else it costs the tax payers. The shell companies that operate these prisons shouldn’t be allowed to charge inmates per diems if they are receiving tax payers dollars for them.
People think it’s all murders and rapists when that’s only 5% of the population at most. Most are in there for petty crime, drug charges, 3 strike rules, administrative chains, or mental health issues.
Yet for 27¢/day, will pick cotton for a local textile.
Yes, this is something people miss about prison. Many criminals are forced to repeat crime because prison is designed to economically ruin people. It's also designed to emotionally, physically, and mentally ruin people.
Point blank, the system is not meant to prevent or discourage crime, it's meant to enact torture for people we feel deserve it. Whether that helps our society does not matter at all - nobody cares if a rapist leaves prison just to rape again, so long as they are sufficiently punished for it. The punishment is more important than real, tangible outcomes, because ultimately we've built it so the punishment is what makes us feel good and safe.
All true, but on the flip side they get free room and board...
Joking aside, read the 13th amendment https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-13/ and pay close attention to the bit that reads, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. In the United States, involuntary labor, slavery, and locking someone in a cell are all equally not allowed. And all equally allowed - as punishment for crimes of which you have been convicted.
If you think that this is ripe for abuse, you'd be exactly right. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convict_leasing. We got rid of chattel slavery - and immediately accomplished the same effect with the black codes and convict leasing. As the name suggests, this was overwhelmingly directed at the same black people who had just theoretically been emancipated.
It's not free everywhere. Many institutions in the USA charge you for your stay. You can stay in jail for a year and have the case dismissed and still be on the hook for thousands of dollars in rent.
Sadly, you can even be set to forced labor even if you're unconvicted, based on SCOTUS case law. A jail can legally force you to perform "housekeeping chores" to maintain the facility.
This happened in Oregon to my kind of brother in law. (Married to half sister of my half siblings - what do you call that?)
He's Native American, so the local police thought that they could target him with a BS charge. They lost. The private jail that he'd been kept in, now that they weren't getting paid by the state, sued him for the cost of keeping him. Incidentally the counter sheriff is on the board of directors for the private prison in question.
Can you spell conflict of interest? Of course you can! Can you spell corruption? That too, wow!
Can anyone do a danged thing about it? Of course not! As long as they are only targeting people that nobody likes, like Native Americans, their victims won't get the time of day in our wonderful United States of America.
Oregon has a huge political tension. Portland is solidly blue. The rest of the state is solidly red. In the 1920s, Oregon was one of the centers of Klan activity. Today it is a stronghold for the Proud Boys.
The Grand Ronde reservation is in rural Oregon, mostly in Polk County. This is where the event that I referenced took place. It is very strongly conservative, with a long racist history.
Smells a little bit like the Kids for Cash¹ corruption scandal from a few years ago. Just last year, President Biden commuted the sentence of one of the corrupt judges who had been convicted for sending kids to a private detention center in exchange for kick-backs from the owner of the facility. For some reason presidents love to pardon despicable evil people, way more often than they ever seem to pardon people who genuinely deserve mercy. Trump is the worst offender of all in this regard, it seems like he's selling pardons to anyone who will pay the price²³.
They certainly can say no in a lot of states, but that is often very much against the best interests of the prisoner because almost all work programs shorten your sentence.
I knew one guy who was doing a 30 day jail sentence for some misdemeanor and was told they would reduce it to 14 days if he worked in the kitchen. He took the job and lost most of his thumb in a very unsafe meat slicer. This put his 17 year career with UPS in jeopardy since the nerve damage made it hard for him to handle things.
This is very unrelated in most ways, but when I was 9 I managed to take a hatchet and remove about 1/4" off my left thumb (via cutting bailing twine against a tree, and apparently terrible, terrible aim).
I'm far older than 9 now, and the tip of my left thumb still gets very cold in the winter and if I directly bump it into something, it hurts a whole heck of a lot.
Rant is because while that moment sucked pretty hard (I immediately put my thumb in my mouth, eating the bit of thumb apparently..) it didn't take very long for me to realize that any lower and it would have certainly been a life changing event.
Bad aim, but in the best way possible.
I can only imagine the difference. Has to be harsh.
Well you’re making the assumption that prisoners are forced to do this work rather than opting to in order to make a little money for snacks and/or make a case for good behavior when they come before the parole board.
It's still slave labor if the most basic of comforts and privileges are locked away from you if you don't participate.
Plus you don't really have choice in the labor you perform, no choice in where you perform it, no choice in when, you aren't really paid, you can only spend money in the commissary (at insanely inflated prices).
Sure it's not a slave on a cotton field getting whipped for not meeting quota, but it really isn't far from that.
> make a case for good behavior when they come before the parole board
It can be a bit more explicit than that: in Colorado, inmates can earn 10–12 days per month of "earned time." Earned time shortens the time until eligibility for parole. Section D in the linked document (from the linked department policies page section 625-02) gives examples of behavior that can add up to earned time. For instance, a day of work at a disaster site is worth a day of earned time (D.4.a.1)
Selling prisoners as underpaid slave labor means everyone else now has to compete against companies using that slave labor. It's essentially cutting us twice. We both pay to house and feed the employees/contractors of the company benefiting who then undercuts us by not bothering to pay them.
Prisons should not be allowed to be a profit center. The ramifications of doing so create gross incentives.
>Prisons should not be allowed to be a profit center.
That ship sailed post American Civil-War. We've made it part of our culture. Every prison charges their inmates to be there. Per Diems. It used to be tax payers but... they found out they could double dip.
This is the kind of thing it's relatively viable to address legislatively, and which would be well within the overton window if it were given more attention.
I'm not justifying slave labor. I'm pointing out that they should be paid more. They'll gladly make the plates and be happy doing it. Getting outside means the world to them. Don't hate them for making the plates, hate the system for putting them into slave labor, but at the same time show some compassion for those who are trying to live and be, normal productive members of society (even if it is at shotgun point).
My point is, it's not the employee and where that employee makes the product, it's the company that abuses that employee to make the product for you.
So no, not justifying slave labor, but I am justifying using prison labor (at minimum wage) to give them a chance at rehabilitation and/or restitution.
Not to nitpick, but you're saying they presumably appreciate the opportunity to go outside for a while and such. Leaving aside they could be granted that just fine without the slavery, aren't most prison jobs worked inside the prison? The only exceptions I can think of are agricultural work or road crews.
Also these are people found guilty of a felony and it costs us non prisoners tax money to keep them housed and fed. Is it unfair if we extract under paid or unpaid labor from them? Is it also unfair to ask drivers convicted of DWD to do free community labor?
Yes, it's unfair to force a human being into labor. Paid or unpaid. It should be voluntary. Community Service as a punishment is different. That's a do labor or else do time so you're trading labor for hours/time. Paid in trust. I have issue with do time and do labor as a form of punishment without reward.
Most inmates are incarcerated due to circumstance. They lacked the ability to better their lives and required monies to live, so they resorted to crime. Given a chance, many inmates get degrees behind bars, learn skills, write books, practice art.
> One thing that stopped me from seeking the vanity plate
I'm sure it differs between countries but in the UK vanity plates have become reasonably contentious.
As a gross generalisation they're fine if the car is worth hundreds of thousands or the plate itself is worth hundreds of thousands.
The UK plate "F1" last sold for just under £1m (about US$1.3m) over 10 years ago and it's rumoured that there are offers for ten times that from someone who wants to buy it now.
It comes down to a classic British issue of "class", which is inherently difficult to explain.
If you have the money to have, say, a Ferrari 250 GTO then you can do what the hell you like with it, including getting a vanity plate for it. You are rich enough that you don't care what anyone else thinks about you. Anyone seeing you and that car will know you are rich.
If you have the money to spend close to £1m on a plate like "X1" and decide to put it on beat up 15 year old 1.2 litre Ford Focus then, again, it shows you have stupid amounts of money and some delicious irony in putting it on an old beater of a car.
But if don't have a supercar and you get a relatively cheap vanity plate like "RMZ 1327" and stick it on a Range Rover Evoque that's only a couple of years old then it just shows that you're trying too hard and just aspire to be seen as rich. You don't have enough money for a really nice car, or a really exclusive vanity plate.
I guess the other way of looking at it is that people who don't have the money to get a vanity plate aspire to being able to do so as it would mean they have more money than they have now. Once they get to having that amount of money most realise that the money is best spent elsewhere (or not spent at all). Once they have so much money that having a vanity plate is inconsequential to their finances they may as well do it. So it's natural that some people want to pretend they've reached the "rich" state by buying a vanity plate preemptively - the problem is that this is so easy to spot it just looks gauche.
All of this obviously doesn't apply to countries where vanity plates aren't traded for stupid amounts like famous pieces of art.
Loved your description of the class system. There's a general theme of old money wealthy people not caring about vanity purchases because they don't know how much stuff costs nor if that is a too much money or not.
It's interesting to see how luxury brands have different segments of clothes that range from no logos at all to a huge alligator the size of your chest, depending on whether you need to announce to the world that you made it or if you just want to have access to good quality clothes.
Yes, the classic description for a member of the British Upper Class is someone who looks down on people who have to buy their own furniture.
(One classification of "upper class" is someone who has never had to buy their own furniture because they inherit it and pretty much everything else they need.)
In CA and AZ vanity plates are first come, first served. You cannot sell them either. You either keep them on a car, or you can keep on paying to keep it out of circulation forever. But once you give it up it goes back to the pool, and someone can get it.
Also, my vanity plate is $0 more than a normal plate. Why wouldn't I?
Yeah, but the plate itself was $100/year last time I looked, which is outrageous. (It looks like it's $50/year now. I swear that's lower than it used to be)
This. When I moved from Ontario, Canada (where they charge a yearly fee for them), to CA, I was all excited to get a vanity plate - until I saw they also charge a yearly fee..
In the most ironic twist of all - Ontario did away with license plate renewals a few years ago, and now, I would actually consider a vanity plate..
I've always wondered if a regular plate was better for avoiding speeding tickets - a vanity plate is much easier to validate, IMHO.
I had a friend who used to work as a QA for an ANPR parking system. He said that they had to investigate an issue where the car with 11111 kept appearing in the system as unpaid, but at different places across the network at the same time.
The issue turned out to be drain covers in the field of the view of the cameras, which the system was detecting belonged to car 11111.
To be clear, the prisoners aren’t literally forced to do this work. It’s a job they can choose to apply for and do while in prison. (EDIT: In my state, it might be different in other states)
The contention is about how much they’re paid per hour.
>To be clear, the prisoners aren’t literally forced to do this work. It’s a job they can choose to apply for and do while in prison.
Sorry, do you have a source for that? The requirement to work is a major point of contention, and a very quick check with this[1] directly contradicts your claim in the federal system: "Sentenced inmates are required to work if they are medically able. Institution work assignments include employment in areas like food service or the warehouse, or work as an inmate orderly, plumber, painter, or groundskeeper. Inmates earn 12¢ to 40¢ per hour for these work assignments."
Those programs you’re referring to in your quote are work within the prison itself:
> Institution work assignments include employment in areas like food service or the warehouse, or work as an inmate orderly, plumber, painter, or groundskeeper.
Meaning some prisoners work in the kitchen preparing food for other inmates, others are on clean up duty, and so on. You could argue that nobody in prison should have to participate in anything inside their community and that’s a valid debate to be had.
In my state, the jobs that provide things outside of prison are applied for.
Apologies for the misinterpretation. I thought you were speaking of all prison jobs, though I don't think it makes much of a difference. From an ACLU report[1] on prison labor in the US which covers both labor for prison upkeep and labor for producing goods to be sold or providing services for companies or governments:
> They work as cooks, dishwashers, janitors, groundskeepers, barbers, painters, or plumbers; in laundries, kitchens, factories, and hospitals. They provide vital public services such as repairing roads, fighting wildfires, or clearing debris after hurricanes. They washed hospital laundry and worked in mortuary services at the height of the pandemic. They manufacture products like office furniture, mattresses, license plates, dentures, glasses, traffic signs, athletic equipment, and uniforms. They cultivate and harvest crops, work as welders and carpenters, and work in meat and poultry processing plants.
> From the moment they enter the prison gates, they lose the right to refuse to work. [...] More than 76 percent of incarcerated workers report that they are required to work or face additional punishment such as solitary confinement, denial of opportunities to reduce their sentence, and loss of family visitation, or the inability to pay for basic life necessities like bath soap. They have no right to choose what type of work they do and are subject to arbitrary, discriminatory, and punitive decisions by the prison administrators who select their work assignments.
It's technically optional in most institutions, but not practically optional. For instance, a lot of labor can reduce your sentence, can give you better housing and can enable you to afford things on commissary you might need (e.g. phone time, hygiene products etc).
No, Thirteenth Amendment permits it as punishment for a crime.
This a good reminder to all Americans to read the Constitution. The amount of bizarre understandings (not necessarily this one) that I see is very high.
I'm very well aware of private prisons, but I didn't know they also exploited essentially f̵o̵r̵c̵e̵d̵free labour, that one was new to me. Apparently in the constitution and everything. Remind me again why some people believe America to be "the land of the free"?
Not sure why you are bringing up private prisons. Private prisons are a tiny percentage of federal prisons and prison labor is used throughout the USA.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
For anyone unaware, that is nearly[1] the entirety of the text of the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution from 1865. This exception is rather (in)famous. I remember being quizzed on it in an elementary or middle school history or social studies class.
[1] the only excluded bit is the followup "Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation." Without this, the power to enforce the 13th Amendment would be left up to the states due to the 10th Amendment ("The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."), which would have slightly useless given the whole war that had just been fought over some states wanting to keep slavery.
they shouldnt be paid at all. they're in prison for a reason. they have a debt to society. a great many of those people didnt do 'one bad thing' then got caught. it was just the last bad thing they were caught for. any many of them did 'the bad thing', then continued doing other bad things up until the point they were put in prison.
Often that reason is "too poor to afford proper representation" or "looked vaguely like the actual criminal" or "took a plea bargain because the justice system was threatening them with an immorally-long wait for a trial and a likely worse outcome".
Non-violent marijuana users haven't ever materialized as a large cohort of the prison population. Sorry, I too used to believe that prisons were overflowing with them
I mean if this was the 90s, yes it was true but you are also correct that it's very rare for anyone to be in prison for just marijuana alone in the US. Even in states where it's "illegal."
Not really? I mean, when you compare the number of people who have committed a "horrific violent" crime to the total number of people caught up in the US prison system, I expect it's not "often".
The numbers are fuzzy but they indicate that at least a simple majority of (and possibly up to an extreme majority) of prisoners have committed violent crimes.
That really depends on what you classify as “violent”. There are a lot of crimes labeled “violent” that don’t include direct physical harm to another person. Eg burglary is labeled as “violent” many places when the actual act was “smashed a window, grabbed a TV and ran away”. Drug manufacturing is also typically considered “violent” even without any kind of assault/murder/turf war/etc.
The numbers I saw said 47% of inmates had a violent crime under federal or state classifications.
You didn't, but I'm taking your stance to its logical conclusion.
GP:
> they shouldnt be paid at all. they're in prison for a reason. they have a debt to society.
Your response:
> Often that reason is "too poor to afford proper representation" or "looked vaguely like the actual criminal" or "took a plea bargain because the justice system was threatening them with an immorally-long wait for a trial and a likely worse outcome".
Be that as it may, this is our system. Through a series of laws we have defined due process for our people, and people who end up in prison are a result of this due process. Like it or not this is the best we were able to do.
If we are going to say prisoners should be given more privileges because some prisoners do not deserve to be in there, then why are we holding them in a prison to begin with? Being confined to prison is a thousand times more punitive than not receiving pay for making a license plate.
A better reason for arguing that prisoners should be paid for their work is because it is more humane. That's a better argument than some people are in prison unjustly.
I'm actually in favor of prison reforms. Prisons' number one goal should be to reduce recidivism. I see that as the entire point of the prison system: reducing crime. If a person leaves prison and re-offends, we have failed to do our job.
Stepping aside the fact that I think most everyone here is playing fast-and-loose with the “slave” terminology here… Why do you feel prisoners doing low wage labor to be wrong?
Practically everyone in human history since the dawn of time has had to go out and produce something of value. Why, all of a sudden, should a murderer or rapist get to sit on their ass and consume what we all produce? I find nothing questionable about a humble job for them at all.
Working should be a free choice (we can discuss about how much freedom exists for many people), and should always be paid. There is nothing wrong if a prisoner chooses to enagage in (fairly paid) labor. But if they are not free to do so, then they are slaves, not workers.
Prisoners already lack freedom in many aspects. "Sitting on their asses" like if they were sipping cocktails on a beach is a bit a misrepresentation don't you think? I wouldn't exchange the possibility to move and do what I want for possibly any amount of money, nor for being able to "sit on my ass" in that sense. Would you?
Besides the moral arguments - which I will say, they are so obvious that it feels incredible even having to discuss why enslaving prisoners is wrong - you can make economic arguments.
For example, that having cheap or borderline unpaid labor compresses the salary in that market, or that this system creates a dysfunctional incentive to increase prison population for private profits.
Maybe that's why the US is one of the countries with the highest incarcerated population in the world. The highest among western and larger countries.
I understand though there is a cultural barrier. I am from Europe and in most countries here prison has a rehabilitation purpose, which is what most benefits society, and prisons are not private entities.
You're instantly jumping to the worst of the worst types of prisoners: murderers and rapists. Prisons also include people who commit non-violent crimes like drug possession, burglary, cybercrime, etc. Why should those people be forced to work the same "humble jobs" in prison?
1. Why should they be restricted to ludicrously low wages? If they're producing something of value, they should be compensated. Not only is it morally wrong to, you know, enslave people, on a more practical level it would be very helpful for people who are leaving prison after serving their sentence to actually have some money saved up, so they have better opportunities, to avoid recidivism.
2. The reason they can sit on their ass and consume what they produce is that they effectively become wards of the state. They're still human beings, and if we have decided to incarcerate them, we become responsible for them, and they still have rights as human beings.
A humble job is fine; I'm not saying they should be sitting in an aeron chair bullshitting on Slack for 8 hours a day. But slavery for pennies on the hour is wrong.
Punishment is only one reason of inprisonment, another is correction. Majority of prisoners do not serve lifetime sentence, at some point they wikl return to society and ideally you don't want them to get right back to what they have been doing before because they have no other options or they don't know nothing better.
Ah yes. American Prisons prioritizing punishment over resocialising is the reason why criminals so often continue to hurt society after they have been released.
Then we have people who demand to double down on the punishment and wonder why these people never stop breaking the law.
Americans are a marvelous bunch. Thanks Dog I live in a first world country.
There are a lot of incentives to lock people up. Cheap labor is one of them. We should support incentives such as "keeping society safe", but incentives such as "profits and cheap labor" are incentives that may actually incentivize locking up innocent people.
So it's not about which one is worse, it's about not supporting something that could lead to corruption or an unfair system.
A lot of veterans live in TX because they have reduced or no property taxes, and also no income taxes. It's probably ~ 8-10% of disabled vets in my neighborhood.
It appears to me that majority of the article is about (unregulated) leveraged trading, with perps being an instrument to get leverage. I seen similar stories of blowing up outside us in forex market, for example, where no one were talking about futures, it was just 100x leverage that was biting many (most?) traders.
Just to counter some anecdata here - doing glp-1 for quite some time for weight loss. It works for me for that specific purpose. But I noticed no effect on mood or addictive aspects. But it appears to lower my alcohol tolerance, so I drink less of it. Ymmv
> You can’t always change how you feel, but you can always decide what to do next.
Unfortunately, in my experience, how I feel does affect what I decide to do (or not do) next. But I certainly like to think I have agency, so there is that..
> how I feel does affect what I decide to do (or not do) next.
Not being affected by your feeling is a skill, that you can train. First you need to start noticing when you are in a state that affects your decisions poorly. This requires some free time thinking and reflecting on how you behaved in such situation after the dust settles. Then you can start trying to calm yourself in such situations. You need to override your impulses and that needs to be trained, you may not succeed first several times, but please keep trying.
With an extremely important caveat. Learning how to control impulses in the heat of the moment is important, but they need to be unpacked and properly processed as soon as possible.
If you do this poorly you can train yourself to be a stone cold robot who doesn't appear to react to anything emotionally. You might think you've succeeded but all you've done is lose touch with your own emotions.
I think it is also possible to just acknowledge the emotions in the heat of the moment, "process" them quickly as unproductive for the situation, and let them go their way.
Like the grandparent comment, I agree that this naturally requires training and effort. I also find that to be a more constructive way than to "suppress" your impulses/emotions for an unpacking later. Not saying you were necessarily directly advocating for that, just something that your comment made me think.
I think you and the person you are responding to are both correct. He added some important details and you added smaller but important details. Reality has a lot of nuances and different situations call for slightly different rules.
Meditation is also extremely useful for this. In breath-based meditation, you focus your mind on your breathing and try to eliminate thoughts. Obviously your mind gets bored and you begin to think of other things. Once you recognize that you're losing focus, you simply return to your breath. Over and over. Over time, you gain the ability to view your thoughts and emotions as easily disposable. It takes time but you can actually recognize that you're being affected by emotion, able to let go of thoughts, and be more present in the moment.
As someone with autism, I often feel the urge to do certain things, but I know they aren't fitting, morally right, or socially acceptable, so I refrain. I deeply resonated with the author's discussion of Benjamin Franklin, because this is exactly how I live. Virtue is a habit, not an essence: I don't feel like being social, I don't feel like being moral, I don't feel like fitting in—but I still do it. Because in the end, the reward is a life where I have a steady job, meaningful friendships, and a fulfilling life.
As someone neurotypical I take it for granted that my feelings most often align with what’s best to fit in with society. A few times it doesn’t and I end up giving in to my feelings and do the morally wrong thing
Thats the rub though, it is only the thing we like to believe, not the objective truth.
The libet experiment, and others like it, show us that free will is only a useful fiction, but we must live as though it is not. Which goes a long way towards explaining the seeming contradiction described here.
We must believe the things that it is useful to believe, rather than the things which are true.
As I said, we must pretend that we choose. Our language, our society, and even our minds are built for it.
Even the LLM's we trained on our thoughts now speak as if they have agency, when they do not. Try asking one why it behaves/speaks as though it has agency if it isn't self aware. They fall apart in interesting ways if pushed far enough.
In the same way, the heart of human consciousness is a kernel of self deception thay can lead to madness if you think too much about it.
My point is that the phrase “must pretend that we choose” is meaningless if we have no ability to choose, I.e. you have no choice whether to pretend you can choose or not, you either do or you don’t and it doesn’t matter how much you “must” do it.
Maybe what you mean is that we do pretend we can choose because that’s how we’ve evolved?
> you either do or you don’t and it doesn’t matter how much you “must” do it.
It does matter though. We're (massively complex) finite state machines of a sort. Given 'x' input, 'y' output is predictable (at least within reasonable statistical boundaries). The feeling that we're choosing is based on an illusion, but inputs can still influence outputs.
In this situation I get to provide your state machine with specific inputs and I can attempt to manipulate the output by changing my inputs. For example, by saying we "must" rather than saying we "should" my goal was make the likelihood of the outcome I wanted higher.
> Maybe what you mean is that we do pretend we can choose because that’s how we’ve evolved?
That's close to what I mean.
Consider the trained dog. If we tell him to "speak" he will bark. The bark is devoid of semantic content and isn't REALLY speech, but that word is the one I must use to get that output. Similarly, when you're told to choose to do something it can influence the actions you take. That doesn't mean that "you" made a "choice", it just means that the concept of choice is an input that can cause the state machine to oscillate longer and maybe work a bit harder before spitting out that deterministic output I mentioned earlier. The choice is an illusion, but it's an advantageous illusion.
When I said that we “must pretend that we choose”, what I really mean is that despite free will being an illusion it is still maladaptive to stop striving for beneficial outcomes or to stop holding yourself responsible for your actions.
"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom".
-- Viktor Frankl (maybe)
Also a big Sapolsky fan, but I did really like this book. That said though, I have only a read-a-lot-of-books-from-people-like-sapolsky level of knowledge on the subject, so take my opinion with a large grain of salt.
If you can remember, I'd love to know what some of the issues were with the book!
Recently I was looking for solution to have multiple VPN running at the same time, and without work profile I am limited to one. I want to run two (or more) and be able to tell which app uses no VPN, which routes through vpn1, which routes through vpn1, etc. so far it looks like I need multiple profiles, and that requires root, which Google actively discourages.
I think the difference here is that Bitcoin is predictable deflationary vs fiat being unpredictable. If you can know in advance the rate, it becomes sorta like an investment vehicle, where instead of dividends you get appreciation of the assets.
To look at it another way - why one would spend $100 from their brokerage account if they know a year later they can spend $110?
Bitcoin is not remotely predictable. The value has swung wildly over the past 5 years. Dropping more than 50% then gaining 200%. By comparison, USD has been rock solid even with the recent run of inflation. An actually circulating currency causes a panic at an 8% drop in value and yet there was zero macroeconomic impact from BTC dropping 50%. BTC is less stable than Turkish Lira.
The same can be said for stocks, and they are considered a good investment if you are in the knows. As an example, Tesla lost a third of its value this year.
Stocks convey equity, pay dividends, must do quarterly disclosures, must disclose insider trading activity and, most importantly, are never used for payments. The topic is payments, not investments.
Trades made by actual insiders are disclosed. That's a narrower definition than what qualifies at illegal insider trading (or an insider sharing inside information with an outsider). That's also not likely to be what is happening with members on Congress who may be trading on nonpublic information that isn't legally insider information.
Pretty wild to include a comment like this in the testimonials. Sure, you can disagree with the musician on philosophical terms over IP laws and many consumers will always prefer "free", but to put this in your testimonials shows that the developers take pride in the act of pissing off musicians. That just rubs me the wrong way.
Musicians are not the consumers, users are the consumers. Some musicians will always be unhappy, this is unavoidable due to complex issues around IP rights, compensation for art, and the length of time it takes to make changes to these systems (not to mention simply how much existing content is out there new and current artists are competing against, attention economy and all that).
n=1, I am optimizing for access to as much content as possible while providing as little economic benefit to corporations as possible (ie Spotify) while still supporting the artists I enjoy (whether that's via venmo, paypal, buying their vinyl, buying their digital versions from bandcamp, etc). I also enjoy cheeky devs/builders, can't take any of this too seriously, we're all dead eventually.
Musicians are not the consumers, but it's their work being consumed and this software would have no purpose without them. And to be clear, my problem isn't that this software upset some musicians. It's that the developers highlighting that fact as part of their marketing suggests they take pride in angering musicians. That is a level of disrespect that goes way beyond the sort of passive consumer level disrespect of wanting something for free. It's active hostility compared to mild selfishness.
It is one musician whose negative comment is displayed along with people complaining that the whole thing is slow garbage. You might be reading too much into it.
One musician can be ripped off and not compensated and have to take the 'big guys' to court on the off-chance they find out about their work being used despite the (fucked up) copyright laws [0].
It is a massive problem. It's the rich poor divide with propoganda fucking over the genuine little people in favour of the richer/established/more connected people. Human life is like this. Call it out if you see it if you value truth over greed.
The future is built on the past. Claimed "Ownership" of the past fucks up the present for the established powers over creativity (e.g. The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act). AI just takes it to a whole 'nother level.
I am kind of sick of Musicians complaining that culture is so accessible.
Its truly the case that if it wasnt for radio and the legal frameworks developed to deliver radio we would probably be looking at incredibly heavy gatekeeping for music.
Humans in general are better off with tools like this. And I for one am glad that these developers are showing off who is angry.
Heck things could be a lot better right now if it wasnt for Metallica.
I like Pete Seeger’s paraphrase of his father: “Plagiarism is basic to all culture”. I think we underestimate the damage to society at large when “remixing” the work of others is legally fraught.
The mere reproduction of a previous performance is not additional work for the artist and so does not require compensation: to demand royalties undermines the fundamental structure of art for most of history.
Not really. Like when my friend scolded me the other day for not finishing the dessert I ordered - "trash is burned here, you're contributing to excess methane production."
May I be flogged for my excess methane production. I will present myself with no resistance, so long as the floggings are delivered in a linear scale mapping to amount of methane produced. As soon as all the time in the universe is spent flogging the decision makers at all the oil and gas companies, I'm right there.
People listening to music for free is less than a drop of water in the ocean of causative reasons musicians get fucked.
> People listening to music for free is less than a drop of water in the ocean of causative reasons musicians get fucked.
Astonishingly ignorant hot take. Music is what MUSICIANS DO. Some of them are also performers, many are not. What they create is the same as what a painter does, or even a chef or architect. However it is not a physical good so people with tiny brains think that means "iT's FreEEe!!1!" when each musical instrument used costs money, the recording cost money, the distribution cost money, the filing/registration costs money, and then there's all the years of time and effort spent learning how to do all of this.
The fact of the matter is that right now music is treated very similarly to software. There is ownership and copyright, and being able to make a digital copy for minimal cost/effort does not magically remove that ownership.
If you don't like it then you should change the laws. It's like being mad at cops because of the speed limit, when the likely culprits are your local city council.
I think you're misunderstanding the point GP was trying to make. Artists and musicians in particular seem to think that copyright is their friend. Because, in theory, it's a mechanism by which a revenue stream could appear when you produce artwork. But copyright is not the musician's friend at all. It's a mechanism by which record labels consolidate power as the middlemen and route revenue to their executives with very little money ever going to artists. and with every technological shift, the labels find a way to give less and less to the consumer and give less and less to the artists. So now it's extremely unusual for somebody that's a fan of some music to actually purchase that music, and artists are getting paid less and less when people do listen to their music.
My personal belief is that systems that allow people to get paid when they're not working are not sustainable, and therefore intellectual property has a fundamental flaw. The end game for musicians is to perform live and use their recordings as advertisements for that. That makes them very similar to jobs I've held my whole life where the second I stop showing up for work is the second I stop getting paid.
That's a pretty nice fundamental law. Explains the rot that occurs with land ownership as well. Really, stopping wealth accretion via non-action would probably help with some of the nastier outcomes of a regulated market economy. I suppose it's probably too late for us, however. Revolution, ahoy!
haha, I swear I read Marx and Engels, but it was 25 years ago. So I suppose the problem we find ourselves in now is the feedback loop of capital sources being so well endowed there's no risk of investment to create more capital.
>My personal belief is that systems that allow people to get paid when they're not working are not sustainable, and therefore intellectual property has a fundamental flaw. The end game for musicians is to perform live and use their recordings as advertisements for that. That makes them very similar to jobs I've held my whole life where the second I stop showing up for work is the second I stop getting paid.
I don't know how you can square that with the fact that when people bought records musicians made more money.
Your metaphor is also incredibly impersonal. What about stealing a sandwich from a homeless person and saying "well society already fucked them over big time." It's a drop in the ocean compared to all the meals he's already missed for other reasons.
> I don't know how you can square that with the fact that when people bought records musicians made more money.
Everyone used to make more money, and anyway this could just as easily be further evidence that the current streaming model is worse and the harm is coming from megacorporations rather than individual behavior, which is my argument.
I don't think your second paragraph is very good faith. It's not clear to me why this basic fact of piracy needs to be restated so often but I guess I'll do it again: Stealing a sandwich from a homeless person deprives a homeless person of a sandwich. Downloading a song deprives nobody of nothing - they can still sell the song. You can't reasonably compare these two completely different actions. You can make other arguments against piracy if you want but it simply isn't theft.
Also my original was talking about orders of magnitudes difference. Burning my leftover pastry being the equivalent of like, a millisecond of the methane output of Chevron. Stealing a sandwich from a homeless person is 1 / 336580 vs, what, do I gotta do the math here to show how astronomically small my output is compared to chevron?
> I don't think your second paragraph is very good faith. It's not clear to me why this basic fact of piracy needs to be restated so often
Woah, woah, let's back up here. You made a metaphor about orders of magnitude. I asserted that orders of magnitude on the level of the global environment and the individual human are very different and provided you with a metaphor to illustrate that. I made no suggestion that piracy was theft so you had no need to correct me on this "basic fact."
> Everyone used to make more money
It's not clear what you're saying with this. Maybe we should just continue the trend and say no one should earn any money anymore? Honestly confused by this one.
> this could just as easily be further evidence that the current streaming model is worse and the harm is coming from megacorporations rather than individual behavior
How did we come to the current model? Everyone was happily getting recording contacts with advances for instruments, studio time and touring logistics until one day MegaCorps said "let's instead move to a model where everyone pays the absolute minimum, if anything at all, and then try to split the much lower profits between the same number of actors?"
Come on, I'm happy to criticise companies like Spotify all day but they weren't the driving force in creating the current model and having some of the richest people in our society sit around in forums like this saying maybe musicians shouldn't be paid at all really isn't helping
> Everyone was happily getting recording contacts with advances for instruments, studio time and touring logistics until one day MegaCorps said "let's instead move to a model where everyone pays the absolute minimum, if anything at all, and then try to split the much lower profits between the same number of actors?"
Basically yes. Except for the "happily" bit before. Even the biggest artists were always getting shafted by the labels, is it surprising that the labels would fuck their artists over even more given the chance? Taylor Swift's fight with the label may legendary but there's thousands of working musicians out there scraping by getting credits on movies and bigger band releases (jazz and whatnot) and they remain as poor as they ever have, from vinyl through to streaming. So I just don't think it's ever been something that random consumers really influence, it's always been the labels fucking over the artists, and that's where my scale argument comes from.
Me downloading a song has nothing to do with record labels spending the last six decades writing progressively more predatory contracts, fighting every new technology until they can find a way to capture value from it at the expense of their artists, and working with streaming companies to extract every slice of margin they can until the artist gets their $.20 paycheck on ten thousand listens.
This argument I don't like: a company found a way to exploit someone so as to sell people something cheaper and then people bought the cheaper thing. It's thus the consumer's fault that the other people got exploited. I see it all the time and that falls under the same umbrella of what I'm arguing against, the idea that corporations are immune to criticism because they're just profit generating algorithms and actually it's on us to make the world better by not buying what they're selling. Why not just cut out the middle man literally and stop the exploitative behavior?
So far as I know nobody here is arguing musicians shouldn't get paid. I'm arguing the opposite.
No, with that logic we should have outlawed the internet. It's up to you to find a working business model, not up to society to enable the one that you want.
Maybe you could explain that logical continuation because I don't follow you.
Society has so far agreed to legislate in favour of people monetising their intellectual property.
By all means people should be free to disagree with that for whatever reason but I feel it's a bad look to make fun of the musicians trying to follow the rules and make a living within the bounds of both law and social contract.
Not really? If the testimonials are true, then simply making the app itself is an act of hostility.
The parent comment is putting it as nicely as it can be put. If you don't want people to pirate your music, your only path of recourse as a musician is to stop uploading digital copies of your work. There is no honor system in music or data and there never will be.
> If you don't want people to pirate your music, your only path of recourse as a musician is to stop uploading digital copies of your work.
People have been recording concerts for decades. Often with a bit of help from the sound crew, which can probably be discouraged by musicians with enough influence, but if the only allowed way to hear a song is to attend a concert, lots of people would rather have a recording that a fan made and distributed.
>The parent comment is putting it as nicely as it can be put. If you don't want people to pirate your music, your only path of recourse as a musician is to stop uploading digital copies of your work. There is no honor system in music or data and there never will be.
I'm just tired of this technolibertarian mindset of "it's not wrong because no one is stopping me from doing it". There is no "honor system" in life either and if you see that as permission to be an asshole, that just makes you an asshole. And if your best defense against being accused of being an asshole is some form of "they couldn't stop me", then you're tacitly admitting to being an asshole.
Unfortunately the winds are not blowing in your preferred direction. We are being shown time and time again and in increasing frequency that being an asshole is the best way to succeed.
That short-term individual success is at the expense of the wider long-term success.
If 10 people live in a lake and I fish more than everyone I will be better off that others. But then everyone else will seek the same individual short-term success because my first step in being an asshole was not punished. We will all end up starving in this scenario. A central authority agreed by all to manage this situation fairly is the way out. Rules agreed to in common beforehand and enforced by a neutral party.
You're missing the key next step where after you get yours you start figuring out ways to deny others from getting theirs either through bullying, state-supported violence or legal means :)
Tragedy of the Commons is bullshit. Just one pessimistic, selfish asshole penning out a manifesto on how everyone is just as miserable and awful as he is. It assumes that individuals, left to their own devices, will inevitably over-consume shared resources out of selfishness. But this narrative ignores centuries of evidence to the contrary: communities around the world have sustainably managed commons through norms, trust, and mutual accountability.
And he wasn't just wrong for the hell of it. He used it to argue against immigration and for coercive population control, not to promote environmental stewardship. His model erases the role of governance, culture, and cooperation, reducing human behavior to a simplistic race to depletion.
In reality, the commons don’t fail because they’re shared. They fail when they’re mismanaged, privatized, or stripped of the social fabric that sustains them.
I would go so far to say that the only way this concept has ever come close to being "correct" is the culturally inert modern Western world which has replaced everyone's souls with aimless desires for products and cheap dopamine hits, far from anything approaching our natural state.
History bears out the truth of what you say. Native Americans managed the commons in communal ownership so well that some of their permaculture existed through to today, untended.
They have demonstrably not - they have generally failed until introducing capitalism-eseque cooperation. "They fail when they're mismanaged, privatized, or stripped of the social fabric that sustains them" - yes, these are obvious natural consequences of scale.
Not really. It didn't happen in syndicalized Spain. It didn't happen for millennia in ancient cities.
Scale being necessary seems to be unique to capitalism and state capitalism (Marxist industrialization requirements).
Maybe it was necessary before, I don't know but it's moot. We certainly have achieved post scarcity now and there should be no issues leveraging the tools our ancestors have given us to ensure it's distributed well.
Yeah but that would make all the people who are rich because they own things very sad, so instead we're just gonna starve shitloads of people to death next to piles of food daily and call it rational.
Dawkins in The Selfish Gene demonstrated through experiments that society collapses when everyone is an asshole. It also collapses when everyone is nice. There's an optimum ratio (~23% assholes to the rest) that leads to long-term sustainability.
This in opposition to millennia of human history, which should teach us that the surest path to human success is cooperation. Why else would we have invented language?
this is very naively reductive. it's been shown time and time again throughout human history that being an asshole/ruthless/competitive leads to better outcomes for you and the people around you that you care about.
humans are not bonobos. sitting around being nice to each other is not what got us to be the apex species on the planet. people break rules (social norms or legal laws) to get ahead, it is happening continually around you and can't just wish it out of existence.
Then maybe we'll never see eye-to-eye. I grew up with an iTunes account, but I never spent my money on music. Some weeks my family lived paycheck-to-paycheck, some nights skipping dinner. I downloaded my music off YouTube to my 2005 HP Compaq, put it on my iTunes library and synced it to my iPod Shuffle. Didn't weigh on my conscience when I pirated video games or FL Studio either, not then and not now.
If that made me an asshole, then 11-year-old me was a supervillain bumping Aphex Twin. Oftentimes I think HN forgets to consider the 99% when contemplating ethics over sous-vide.
Our legal and economic systems just don’t work that way, being poor is no excuse for doing something illegal.
Add to that that not all musicians are Beyoncé or Taylor Swift, but might just as well have to fight to survive, living from Spotify payout to gig revenue as well.
I sympathise with people trying to get access to culture by all means, but we cannot wholesale morally legitimise freeloading because of that. We all get to enjoy a broad cultural landscape, but that can only exist if most people pay for content.
> Our legal and economic systems just don’t work that way, being poor is no excuse for doing something illegal.
Copyright infringement is a civil offense, not criminal. Or in other jurisdictions, it’s not an offense at all, but rather priced in to the costs of recordable media and storage media/devices.
You actually don't understand the consumer desire for free, if you necessarily conflate it with class warfare and moral grandstanding. It seems to be a karma sink insisting upon this, but this is the hacker ethos. Nobody lords information over anyone, any paywall you erect will eventually fall. For fuck's sake, children are being firebombed in Gaza right now, and this is the imperative ethical hill you choose to die on?
Draw out this line of reasoning long enough, and one could argue that Richard Stallman is the worst human alive for "moral grandstanding" the software industry and taking glee in destroying software jobs with copyleft licensing. But more accurately, he ushered in the information age for everyone and prevented it from being cordoned-off behind a proprietary paywall. Yes, he predicated Napster and ThePirateBay and 4chan and all the horrible examples you're apt to draw upon. But he also invariably pushed technology forward - we're better people, that we aren't slaving away remaking the Cairo library for the 30,000th time. Common access to at least some information enables a great deal of art and provides countless value to would-be artists.
I'd like to think that the entire human race is bettered with access to information. It would certainly be idyllic if we could compensate artists, authors and scientists along the way, but humanity would be ruined if all information came at-cost. I am willing to fight for a world where individuals have free access to information, and I reckon my tools are more powerful than the publishers who seek to thwart me. I won't stop when the musicians scream out bloody murder, and if you think that's the most immoral thing imaginable then don't ask how 15-year-old me found the money to afford Jimmy John's.
>For fuck's sake, children are being firebombed in Gaza right now, and this is the imperative ethical hill you choose to die on?
Nonsense like this is where I leave the conversation. You can't deny the accusations of moral grandstanding in the same breath you say this. I commented directly on the topic being discussed in a specific HN thread. That does not mean I think this is the most important issue on the planet and the non-sequitur of contrasting a discussion of IP law with children in Gaza being firebombed is just straight up offensive. The "karma sink" here isn't voicing your "ethos", it is you.
I love seeing your perspective here among all the hand wringing, thanks for not letting downvotes scare you off. IMO it’s regressive to think just because someone has no money they should have no music, and it’s rich seeing calls for free information get downvoted on the same site singing praises of LLMs, as tho those companies paid a dime for their source material
> Searching for and playing music from YouTube (including integration with playlists and SponsorBlock), Jamendo, Audius and SoundCloud
From what I understand the _farmers_ themselves are distributing their _cheese_ freely on various website and this tool is just a glorified search engine to find them more easily. Not sure why the _farmers_ would complain?
Some of them are but not all of them are, some of them are having their cheese redistributed without their involvement. The ones who are complaining are the ones who aren't happy, such as the musician quoted in the testimonials saying "fuck everything about this.'
Not if the cheese can be copied at no cost and there are already more cheese varieties around than anyone could eat in a lifetime. In that word, farmers should have no say in who does and doesn't get to eat cheese or extract a tax from cheese consumption.
> there are already more cheese varieties around than anyone could eat in a lifetime.
If that's what you think then why don't we just close down all the studios and instrument shops. We've got enough, no need to keep producing it?
You can copy and distributed the cheese freely but the farmer still has to spend money taking care of and housing the cows, milking the cows, going through the whole processes of churning and pasteurising and everything else, then packaging it and disturbing it to where you can initially find it.
Now after all that you come along and make your perfect atomic copy and walk away saying "Well screw you, you should have no say in any of this..."
Then what? What's the incentive to produce and distribute new cheese? You really think it doesn't matter because you already have cheese from the past? Because there's a lot to be said about cheese that captures the spirit of the zeitgeist...(Ok that last bit didn't work in the metaphor)
There is nothing wrong with people creating new music, either out of passion or because they have some way to get paid for it (patronage, crowdfunding, live performances). But as abundance of available creative works increases we need to re-evaluate what cost we should pay as a society in order to incentivize it. IMO we are at a point where no incentive via copyright is needed and the cost copyright imposes on everyone is way too high. The world only works as well as it does because most people routinely ignore copyright already.
And no, in this analogy the farmer doesn't have to keep working for us to have enough cheese - only if someone specifically wants a new kind of cheese. We don't need to bend reality in order to make information scarce for that.
Your app is living off the work of artists and making it in a way that gives them a way to profit from it costs you nothing, so it is the right thing to do.
Show some merch buying options or display a button that allows you to pay for the music as a thank you to the artists or something. Makes you appear better in front of the crowd that would use bandcamp/soundcloud in the first place (so your core demographic) and supports the artists.
I am listening to music on bandcamp/soundcloud because I love music and this is a place where you can find new interesting music — not because it is free there. And in my experience as someone who sells on bandcamp many listeners share that spirit.
> Your app is living off the work of artists and making it in a way that gives them a way to profit from it costs you nothing, so it is the right thing to do.
The app just find the music on free sources, probably published by the artists themselves or their agents. How is that living off their work and where do the nuclear developer receive money from the nuclear app users in the process?
You read "living of" as a monetary value, that isn't what I meant. That particular app is useless without musicians that upload stuff for free, meaning the fact that musicians do that is of existential importance for it.
And that means such an app enters a certain relationship with these musicians. This relationship can be symbiotic (good) or parasitic (bad).
This is a really shitty take. „Can’t please everyone, might as well piss off the creators and show it as a badge of pride!“
Personally I will never use this software and would actively advocate against it if only to counter the attitude you’re presenting.
But mainly because artists should be able to make a living and it’s already hard enough with the meager pennies or less they get from current PAID streaming services.
Artists, especially on bandcamp, are often the underdog. Being proud of not paying them is like being proud to watch a street artist "for free", because fuck them for doing it in public. My ethics say: "If you don't like it, ignore it and walk on, if you liked it enough to stop and watch you give them something."
Meanwhile most online ads are supporting multinational corporations that already may earn money with your browsing data and try to manipulate your choices every step. All while delivering their ads in a way that makes it a threat to not block them. That isn't remotely the same. If you need my money to survive, give me the choice to pay instead at least.
The exact same software could have been marketed as something to discover new music, for free and the musicians would be mostly okay with it.
Artists making a living will in no way be impacted by the use of this software. The only way for artists to make a living through their art would be changes through IP/copyright reform (politics and policy, which will take years if not decades) and the operation of platforms where they can get a more fair share of compensation [1] [2]. One can think a musician's response to this software is absurd and still believe they should be able to live comfortably and with dignity while creating art. Pay these folks UBI if we have to, but the problem is not this software is my point.
One can be angry for symbolic reasons as well. If your CEO told you to "Get your code on github, it is free", you would probably rightfully question whether they understood the reasons why people develope and maintain open source software in the first place.
Similarly here. It is not about the act of people listening to the music for free. If this was a problem, a musician would just restrict access to those tracks. It is about a spirit of taking without giving back, which could be understood as: "Haha you idiots, thanks for providing it for free, I am not paying then". A bit like stopping to watch a street performer, and instead of clapping and (eventually) tossing a coin going like: "We are in a public space, I don't need to pay, idiot. Your own fault!".
Technically correct, but ethically wrong and shows they don't value the work of artists. This is just about words and showing some respect, not about money. And since words and showing respect literally cost nothing this makes the insult even greater.
Ethically wrong to watch a street performer but not toss a coin? I do agree that it is ethically virtuous to toss the coin, but ethically wrong not to? I'm not seeing it.
Everything exists in thousand shades and ethics is one of those fields where in the finer shades people can and will differ in their assessment. That is in the nature of the thing.
I am not saying anyone who listens voluntarily for 30 seconds and doesn't pay a handsome amount is a monster. What I said is that listening, enjoying it and then telling them: "Stupid musician, their fault for giving me the choice to pay, so I don't" makes you a bad person.
There are a thousand ethically sound reasons why you wouldn't toss a coin, you could not have one, you could be broke, you could misunderstand the situation, you could have a cultural background where this is uncommon and street performers are getting their share in a different way etc.
But enjoying the fruit of their work and then maligning them for giving it to you for free is not only rude, but yes: ethically wrong.
I've copied your sensitive product source code before leaving for lunch then released it to the public for free. Why are you mad? We all die eventually...
Your misunderstanding of the point is wild. It’s not a comparison to battery/assault. It’s a reframing of the interaction to help understand the relationship at play here.
It's completely understandable not just for the usual streaming services (like youtube, etc.) and the grievances there (payouts per play, whichever way it goes, be it that artists getting stiffed or people refusing to come up with even a fraction of a cent), but for something like bandcamp as well, which is kind of 'almost but not quite a streaming service' and more accurately described in a literal way like 'it lets you play music and buy it', from which apps like this just remove the 'buying music' portion completely.
For something like youtube, there's hardly any qualms whether it's ethical or exploitative to sidestep that whole thing and whatever else artists may put out around their music (even something like links in video descriptions), because it is just a mess and people just roll with it anyway. But for bandcamp it leans a bit more towards 'taking it for a ride', when an app like this completely removes the aspect of buying music. Perhaps some people might not even get a slightest clue that's even possible cause there is just no such suggestion in the app at all. And if you wanted to get there, it kind of makes it harder to do so, because there's no prominent links to the original pages of songs and albums in the app. Finding or copying a link is a bit non-trivial because there's no such option in album view or track items, there is in playing queue but it's also kinda buried there.
It's just the way that something like this completely obscures the fact that you could buy music from bandcamp, or sometimes even download it for free (depending on what artists have set up). It's one of the better platforms for artists, so it's kind of odd to see this 'fuck you got mine' approach to it. It's also kind of just crummy and shoddily made, so even bandcamp webpages seem like a better browsing and listening experience. Bandcamp website isn't the worst for finding and playing music (it may be plain but it's snappy, and their discovery tools are pretty nice), but it's remarkable to make something that works even worse, perhaps just because bandcamp doesn't even have that much going on.
That is a detail which is the responsibility of the artist as a businessperson. If you give away pizza with a big stack of ad flyers, no one would complain when that business doesn't make that much money because no one reads the ad flyers all they do is eat the pizza and toss the ads.
We live in a world where said pizza shops want to force you to look at each flyer in the ad stack, but for years they didn't sit you down and make you look with your eyes, instead they just let you take the ads and the pizza and leave. They're trying to crank up the pressure to watch saying "the cooks deserve to be paid" and "you have to let us watch you look at the flyers to eat the pizza, or else you can't leave with the pizza."
Don't be fooled, if the musicians didn't want folks to listen on YouTube then they wouldn't put their music there. If you can find a way to look away from the flyers while still eating the pizza, you are not the bad person. Eat and weep for a world where we can't just exchange money for food.
>Eat and weep for a world where we can't just exchange money for food.
Youtube sells subscriptions for YouTube Music if you want to be able to listen to the music in the background or without ads. Violating YouTube's terms of service is unethical.
If I open a new YouTube page incognito, I am not asked to agree to any kind of TOS. I agree to nothing, I merely start watching videos. Where is there a requirement that I must watch the ads if I have never agreed to such?
Even then, I bring this all up as a YouTube Premium membership holder, someone who has been paying for YouTube Premium since the very day it was announced as YouTube Red! I am also a sponsor block addon user, so I skip the "this video is sponsored by Stupid shoes" or whatever, read by the creators. According to you, am I stealing money from them as well, somehow?
> Violating YouTube's terms of service is unethical.
It’s a breach of contract, but whether this contract is ethical is a different question altogether, as is the question of ethics of breaching of unethical contracts.
If you enter into an agreement with someone you should follow the agreement to the best of your ability. Purposefully agreeing to agreements when you know you will violate them is exploitative behavior as you are taking advantage of someone because you are purposefully not holding up your end of the deal when you know that they will continue to hold up their end.
You'd be correct if all of these contracts weren't essentially contracts of adhesion. The fact that the user has no agency to change the terms of the contract or really any say at all in what the terms of the agreement are waters down your argument significantly. In fact, the contracts are so asymmetrical that only one party has control over them and can change them at any time. The other party has no agency whatsoever.
Upon review, it looks like you don't have to enter into an agreement with anyone in order to use this software, except its authors under the terms of the AGPL.
> exploitative behavior
Even if you want to frame it like that, it doesn't look good for you unless you assume we're imbeciles who don't keep score. You do not have any right to complain about exploitative behavior when you willfully exploit hundreds of millions of people by 1000 units and they "exploit" you by 1 unit in return. You're still a net exploiter in the relationship.
> when you know that they will continue to hold up their end
That's a lie, corporations unilaterally alter the terms of service without offering compensation all time.
I think in modern commerce TOS are things written in small print most reasonable people read of purposely agree too. I saw some BS in an owners manual for a washing machine that was attempting to imply that by using this machine I agreed to the TOS.. I mean, I guess. It doesn't seem like ethics has much to do with it.
Typically they start with something like: by using this $SERVICE you AGREE to blah-blah-blah ($X)
If you agree to $X but then don't do it: you're a liar.
The terms might be shit. But if you agree to shit terms you should be bound by shit terms. In the olden days: "I gave my word as a gentleman and a scholar" or "a deals a deal, even with a dirty dealer"[0].
Nah: going back on a somewhat ethical and REMOTELY fair deal made by folks who are even close to equal in power, that's not OK. Also, most of these sites make no requirement that you read and agree to anything; I can open YouTube and watch videos in an incognito tab right now, no EULA/TOS necessary, so how are you to say I am breaking any agreement at all?
Furthermore, these "use the service or not" agreements is like saying "accept a government or leave the country". Being handed an ultimatum saying "agree or you can't participate with your peers culturally, and potentially can't even access other local services such as government announcements", that's basically not a deal as there is no negotiation, that's being informed by greater powers of the pound of flesh they expect to extract.
Yes, yes I know the law says if you don't agree then you should simply not use the Internet, simple as that. That's clearly not even a possibility to be a functioning member of society at this point, but I guess it'll take some time for the law to catch up.
> Typically they start with something like: by using this $SERVICE you AGREE to blah-blah-blah ($X)
>
> If you agree to $X but then don't do it: you're a liar.
You have never been presented any TOS nor agreed to anything if you don't have an account.
If artists and youtube don't want us to use their 1 and 0 the way we want, they can pretty easily lock them under registration and payment. The thing is they don't care to do that, so they cannot complain.
First, I don't see how someone viewing a publicly available stream is an agreement to terms of service. Court cases to back this up ie Netscape.
Second, just because you agree to a contract doesn't mean that contract is consionable, not something that shocks the court.
And it would have to be up to a court to decided just that. Hence you know disney ended up backing out before the court decided. As arbitration can be considered unconscionable.
> if the musicians didn't want folks to listen on YouTube then they wouldn't put their music there.
You are giving musicians way too much agency here.
For most musicians on YouTube, they're there because their label and/or their manager wants them there. A big part of why musicians sign with labels and have managers is specifically because they don't have the inclination or expertise to micromanage this stuff.
I'm sure in many cases, musicians would rather not be on YouTube at all, but their already-signed nebulously-worded contract with the label doesn't give them any control over that.
In a world where everyone is a perfectly spherical rational actor in a libertarian vacuum, your argument would make more sense. But we don't live in that world. We live in a world filled with primates doing the best they can with the weird cognitive capabilities nature gave them and trying to get through each day with a little joy and dignity still intact.
Yes, which is what I also mention (as more usual streaming services, what someone would immediately think of and which is more geared towards that conventional kind of streaming - which bandcamp is kind of just not), it's just that culturally one is further down the line of being shitty to artists, and something like bandcamp has much lower fees on payments. However yeah, this thing is shitty to artists in about the same way, just relatively even shittier to artists on platforms that are better.
I 100% agree with this take: adding Bandcamp to this "media" app is a really shitty thing to do.
I personally know a few musicians who use Bandcamp to either exclusively make a living (along with touring), or to supplement their income. Some are overjoyed when they get a few sales a week on a release. This POS software denies that opportunity.
Either way, 99% of the artists are small independent musicians, and this just skips the Purchase album or track and just freeloads off the small MP3 player on each album page.
Artists can disable full-length previews if this is a concern. Otherwise, I don't think Bandcamp's 320kbps MP3s are any more attractive than a YouTube rip.
Previews/free streaming on bandcamp is 128 kbps mp3 only. If you buy music there, you get the whole spread, lossy and lossless, mp3 320/v0, aac, ogg, flac, even wav. (Only thing notably missing at this point is opus, which would be fantastic to have, like for example, opus at 64k (space saving/space efficient) and 256k (quality), although vorbis or aac at whatever quality they have it set to is pretty good as a space efficient option)
When I read the testimonials, my take was the developers are not taking themselves too seriously. It felt well for me. They are not trying to sell one perspective, and not hiding what haters tell too. I suppose I find this refreshing.
Probably they are employing rage marketing? I used to follow this hotel in Ireland, I think, that used to post very aggressive comments against the reviews. It became a thing and people used to stay there just for it. I think there is a TV series recently in the same vein.
You can limit the number of possible listens without buying on Bandcamp if you prefer people who actually consider paying for artists.
But yeah marketing an app as "this is free, we are great, while some musician didn't like it, but fuck them" may not be the cool humorous power move they thought it might be.
As a musician and open source programmer myself I don't feel I am automatically entitled to people's money for stuff I put out there. But while my Open source software is about giving back, I actually want people to value my music and pay for it (if they can and like it enough). So the tiniest bit of sensibility towards people who produce those things, often in their spare time, would help and costs exactly nothing.
If this was framed more like:
"Discover music that is actually new for free and get in contact with the artists directly" that would be a different story.
This may turn out to be a good way to discover new music. And the bandcamp/soundcloud crowd tends to be after new unknown and good music anyways, so that should align with their ways of discovering music and make for a much better elevator pitch than the current one.
They aren't testimonials. Couldn't be. Nobody would put mostly negative comments on their page like that. Some aren't remotely positive in any way (not even in a "hahaha, fuck the artists, get music for free" way).
Maybe they're coming from a comment feed somewhere?
Most of the "testimonials" I'm seeing are actually negative.
>I used nuclear and had a horrible experience with it. It looks bad, you wait for 1 minute to play a 3 minute song, it's slow as fuck. Probably it's because of Electron, but it is used by so many people that I started cringing.
Uh.....what? I get trying to lean into being edgy, but a bad user experience? No thanks.
Around 2010-2015 there was the cloud-based version of this called Grooveshark.
Basically, you streamed each individual file from other people's libraries, which theoretically (at the time) avoided the Napster problem. "You never download the content" they said. It had EVERYTHING as long as the right people were online. Audio books, random weird remixes, you name it.
There's being "pro-copyright" and then there's just the topic of paying artists, and then choosing not to pay them.
Which sometimes is bizarrely and belligerently defended like some moral stance (barely even in relation to copyright/piracy), and sometimes bubbles up like tools that not just avoid paying artists, but make it harder to pay artists, even when those artists have something set up that's a far cry from ad driven platforms. Like, it's not just 'removing third party ads', it's removing any surface and any mention that may have artist selling their music. Is that even about copyright? The music is available to listen either way so it's hardly even infringing that way, it's just that something like this app chooses an active stance (how else would one describe actively removing everything about paying aspect) that's against paying artists, at all and in any form.
It's not even about 'what does downloading music entail', it's just 'fuck paying artists'. Music has been beaten towards kind of just giving up and making things free to stream and just kind of hoping to get their money elsewhere (concerts, merch, music sales), and yet still some people want artists to shrink with their "paying for art bullshit" even further as to preferably have artists not even mentioning that and themselves not seeing any of that at all.
It's not about choosing which artists you like and whether you want to give money to some particular artist or not, and not even just personally refusing to give money to any artist.
It's about going out of your way to create something that gets in the way of artists getting paid, such as obscuring/eliminating an option to buy music or give money to an artist, not just from yourself alone but from other people, who might not even have such a stance, or even realize that there has been an anti-artist decision made for them.
Not even adblockers go this far, because they just remove third party ads, and artists are still free to promote their stuff in other ways (for example, on youtube, there's still stuff in description, annotations, things inside the video, etc.). A player like this removes those options from artists completely.
It's also like, not even that different on bandcamp - you can just listen to some music there and move on without buying it. Removing an option to buy an album is kind of different. Imagine if ad blocker did that to a bandcamp webpage, that would be absurd. (bandcamp doesn't even have ads though. well, depending on what you consider "advertising or promotion", maybe the whole website looks like endless promo to you, if that's the way someone looks at entertainment)
It's there when you listen on bandcamp, it's not there in the player. It's removed from the listening experience in this app, and made further obscure by not linking out. Are we actually gonna argue whether a "music player focused on streaming" that touts removing everything else, isn't doing the thing it's doing?
A music player goal is to play music, not purchase stuff. What if the music has already been purchased but not available on that particular local device?
iTunes/Apple Music (where you can literally pay per track), Spotify (pay for streaming access and some other stuff), bandcamp itself (the web page is the player. purchases are also available within android app), are all music players where you can buy music and stuff, with decades of history. iTunes goal was literally to purchase music and play it, all in the same player program, and that's been released over two decades ago. Countless web platforms of different scales offer buying music (album or track by track) and function as a player as well. Amazon still sells mp3s in that way, and Amazon Music website is both a music store and a music player. There's a long history and wide variety of platforms with a goal of both purchasing and playing music, all within the same surface, be it an app or a web page.
What's next, arguing that these aren't actually "music players"? that paying for streaming access to music isn't actually paying for music?
There's just a variety of music players with different goals. Some players' goals are to prevent people from buying music or even discovering that they can pay for music. Again, with bandcamp it's not even removing bad third party ads or anything, it's just removing a purchase option, when it very often doesn't even prevent you from listening to music for free anyway, or sometimes even just downloading some music for free.
That project is many years old. Apparently they added bandcamp support somewhere in 2020, and then continued to not "provide" any clue that music could be bought there. They could do something, but clearly supporting artists, or rather, letting other people support artists and not getting in the way of that support, is not in their interests even on better music platforms.
It's totally real, I've even contributed to the project, Admin has the patience of a saint in my experience.
There are things which might not look too corporate-friendly, the humor, the anime styled girl mascot, I consider these to be a perk rather than a problem.
I've seen Nuclear many times while browsing flathub - it never launched for me. And it seems that it's a common problems looking at their closed issues.
It's funny and harmless, but it does make me less likely to use the product. Because I don't know where the line for funny and harmless ends. Would it be funny and harmless to install a keylogger alongside the software? Maybe I need better personal security practices but it's much easier to avoid anything with this kind of smell.
Doesn't seem like this helps their cause, because if you wanted to spread adoption of your project, you would want LLMs to train on it. So it'll be suggested to future users.
What makes you think their cause is widespread adoption?
It’s not a commercial project so I don’t think they have much to gain from that, and similar to things like yt-dlp it’s probably beneficial for them to stay small enough to not catch the attention of the services they build on top of, as they might try to shut them out.
This kind of unconventional approach to receiving feedback on your product is relatively common in the field of open-source-development-of-software-the-MPAA/MIAA-would-disapprove-of. In fact I'd imagine it's often part & parcel of being thick skinned enough to persevere.
While volatility indeed can be a problem (depending on how the whole thing is setup), I fail to come up with scenario of 50% fraudulent transactions... Does anyone have links to more details on what kind of fraud they meant?
Accepting bitcoin payments with 0 confirmations? It shows a complete lack of understanding of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general, especially in 2017 when PoW was the main driver and PoS chains weren't really mainstream.
It’s not a big deal in case of Steam – they can just pull the games from your library if the payment doesn’t go through. A bit trickier with in-game purchases (but in that case they could wait for the confirmations).
Powered water heater anodes are now a thing. Supposedly they can make your water heater last almost indefinitely and get rid of any bad smells from sulfur in the water.
Perhaps just a little dangerous if you've got fracking contamination?
I have installed one of these before in a domestic hot water tank exposed to unfavorable water supply (well, midwest aquifer), and they do what is on the tin. Also, working with their customer support department (Québec) is an experience (both positive and unvarnished), highly recommend.
