• 0 Posts
  • 75 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 6th, 2023

help-circle
  • Even if we assume there’s an achievable rate of growth that can consistently outpace owned plays at any given time, as with every business, there will come a day when growth slows. And at that point, they’ll be forced to solve the problem.

    And then there’s all the questions of, can I download my tracks to play offline? What if they go out of business? How many artists/labels are even going to agree to this? What about tracks I buy outside of their platform? And what does “own” actually mean given that you never “own” music you buy physical media for, you don’t have any copyright, you can’t play that media for profit, you just have a license to listen to that copy personally. By default the artist “owns” their art. But do they have to give that ownership up to the co-op?

    It’s going to be tough to convince people who don’t care to switch away from spotify, and there’s no reason for someone who can self-host to use it unless it’s somehow more effective at funding musicians than just buying their tracks directly.

    I wish them luck making the idea work, but I think they have their work cut out for them.



  • I would need to buy a lot of CDs at this point and I’m not doing that anymore.

    This is how the music industry is screwing artists.

    Think about it. Hollywood is union, which ensures money and jobs make it down to every blue collar worker involved in every Netflix-funded project. But music isn’t union, there’s just a bunch of random bands, and middlemen who will gladly take everything. The record labels and streaming services turn a profit, pay their execs, and get away with sending fractions of a cent per play to the artists. Most artists don’t post to streaming services for the money, they do it just for the convenience of fans.

    Giving money directly to an artist in exchange for their tracks or merch (CDs, Vinyls, etc) is the best way to fund an artist. Bandcamp is another middleman that enables this, but at least they have Bandcamp Fridays periodically, which is where they waive their cut and give the bulk of your payment directly to the artist.

    IMO buying tracks on Bandcamp Friday + self-hosting Plex/Jellyfin + using Plexamp/Finamp on mobile is the best way to support music right now, and also future proofs your library.








  • We’re talking about an eink tablet. I assume none of them are running X, so there’s no “desktop” involved here. I have a remarkable 2 which runs Linux. I can ssh into it to rsync files to it, back things up, and make customizations. There’s no package manager, it seems to be an embedded system. It has python, so i’ve written some python scripts to do custom operations. Everything i do on my remarkable 2 is stuff I would expect to also be able to do on an android based tablet.





  • If this were 2016 I might agree with you. But the reality we have needed to accept for a while is that most Trumpers are also on hard times. They’re just new to the relegated-class party as the middle class disappears, and they backed the wrong horse to solve the problem. Yeah there is a vocal minority of extremists in their mix too, but the vast majority of Trump supporters are just rural simpletons who saw their manufacturing jobs leave, see their tax dollars disappear, and are too busy working to keep food on the table to have any time to learn about the lies they’ve been fed about socialism and trickle down economics.

    They saw a populist dark horse candidate say all the things they were feeling, and voted for him in 2016. And then in 2024 when inflation hit a bunch of millennials and zoomers, they did the exact same thing.

    Until a critical mass figures out we’re all complaining about the same root causes, we’re going to keep getting a demagogue elected.


  • It’s an uncomfortable truth that doesn’t align with their reality. They would have to accept that they’re wrong

    I disagree that that’s what’s going on in their heads. I think it’s more like being Catholic and finding out a priest is touching kids. You are able to convince yourself that that behaviour is the act of an individual, and has nothing to do with your beliefs. This is the power of religion over skepticism: it’s able to convince a bunch of people to put blinders on, and only focus on the common goal. In Set Theory terms, it lets the group focus on the intersection of their beliefs, not the union. All the good parts are where we agree, any bad parts are peripheral and irrelevant.

    This is the part that “both sides” do. Like it or not, this is just inherently human behaviour.


  • That’s the theme that MAGA just doesn’t get, and why the “both sides” arguments never hold water. I don’t like anyone in the mega-wealthy class who believes the law is for sale, including the Trump family. MAGA claims to have the same distain for the “elite class”, but always makes a special carve-out just for Trump and his loyalists. I don’t get it.

    It kinda mirrors the difference between monotheism and atheism: if you made a list of all the gods both groups don’t believe in, the lists would look awfully similar, differing only by one. But good luck making that argument to a god-fearing Christian.