murph @murph@fosstodon.org

If you look way, way off in the distance, you can see a bit of the New York City Skyline. From Pyramid mountain park, Montville, NJ.

I've posted an update on my progress for GNOME 43: https://blogs.gnome.org/christopherdavis/2022/09/29/progress-update-for-gnome-43/

bangert's computers, jefferson street, burlington, iowa, 1988

Now over 17 year since Today with a Techie.

#hpr #hackerpublicradio #anniversary

Back in the 90s "what if your car had all the problems your computer has" was a common USENET joke and now we're living it

In destroying content libraries, Warner/HBO is using a publishing trick.

Because of the way intellectual property is valued and taxed across much of the English-speaking world, insufficiently profitable property is more profitable out-of-print than bringing in cash.

I could do this too. Here's a vastly simplified example.

Let's take my Prohibition Orcs. What's the value of PO? Well, there's the film rights, the TV rights, audiobook rights, branded fedoras... This is such an innovative property, for a few grand I can easily hire an outside evaluator to tell me it should be worth, say, fifty million.

I claim PO on my taxes as worth fifty million dollars.

PO fails to live up to that. Nobody even buys the branded liquor rights, even though that's a no-brainer.

So I take the product off the market, and write off a fifty million dollar loss.

"It can't be this blatant," people think. But it can. Every IP-related industry lobbied for these laws. This is part of why tech is so profitable, because surely the new game is worth top dollar.

The catch is, only a certain kind of person can do this and sleep well at night.

The tax system is Dungeons & Dragons, except the dragons wrote the rules.

This, by the way, is why publishers won't bring back so much of the out-of-print blacklist. Internally, they value all those vanished first novels at a bajillion dollars, and resurrecting them would require un-writing-off those losses.

Under current tax code, creators are more valuable dead than alive.

Some publishers/distributors play the game fair, and have deep backlists. But if it's a big conglomerate, like HBO or Randy Penguin? It's sociopathy all the way down. Remember, it's not about making money; it's about the quarterly statement, and massive deductions are a win there.

Even if you're heading to the afterlife, you're not making a left across traffic in Jersey. #NJ #NewJersey #bike @jerseyslide@democracy.town #fedibikes

A tribute to manual transmission cars, and to embodied technology:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/08/stick-shift-manual-transmission-cars/671078/

Of course I drive a stick shift 😃

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #SaveTheManual

Took a @bike ride in northern #NJ today. I guess the there ARE wheels heavier than mine. @mastobikes

If copyleft was worthless, corporations wouldn't put so much effort into propaganda to convince you it's bad.