This ignores that the inventor has less motivation to actually invent. Author have less motivation to create.

Tell me you haven’t read the entire book without actually saying you haven’t done much more than browse a few pages.

Businesses were innovative long before patents and copyright became a thing. In fact, evidence shows that society was more innovative without patents and copyright than with.

For your reading pleasure:

• Against Intellectual Monopoly

As someone with deep roots in the sciences, and good access to the latest data and evidence surrounding anthropogenic climate change, I seriously doubt that there will be much civilization left by the time I shuffle off this mortal coil. All indications used to point towards widespread economic, societal, and ecological collapse in the latter half of this century, well past my effective lifespan, but recent (and strong!) evidence has moved that up considerably to not much past 2035. So no, I am not worried in the least about “burdening” anyone with my collection. I seriously doubt that there will be anyone left who will care. The few who remain will be too obsessed with surviving another day to give two shits about books. I just want to live long enough to read most of them in relative comfort.

My mother

…WAT…

or sees a visible map of time in their head

Like how a day or a year is like a rollercoaster, coming down in the first half to rise back up in the second? It’s like a really odd sine wave for me.

eating hamburgers and hot dogs with flatware instead of on buns.

That sounds so German. I know the bun-less burgers as “frickadellen”, my own parents (both German immigrants who met each other over here) used to make them fairly frequently.

My goodness, I am so much like you.

I’ve been using a book tracker app since the iPhone 4s (2011) just to keep track of what I buy - I don’t track anything else - because even way back then I had trouble remembering if I had a book or if I had just browsed it elsewhere.

In 2018, various functions (search, sort, stats, etc.) took a permanent dirt nap just as I was nearing the 3K number of entries. And these are just the books I own.

The size of the DB backup file has nearly doubled since then.

Now granted, a number of books I get need to go straight into storage before I can even read them, as I have not yet built my library. It’s already gone through several redesigns to stay ahead of the size of my collection, and right now I’m looking at movable library storage stacks - the kind that roll on miniature railway tracks and have wheel-like dogs at their ends that a person turns to easily move them back and forth (opening and closing an access corridor between the stacks for access to the books). I’m hoping to eventually have almost half a linear kilometre of shelving in my library once it’s built.

I cannot imagine the horror of being even semi-illiterate, much less fully illiterate. I absolutely love reading.

Canadians are generally considered super nice and polite by Americans

That’s actually a common misconception. We aren’t really all that nice. We just do passive aggressive really, really well.

Sometimes criminals also shoot back at the police that come after them with guns.

In the heat of the moment, the only difference between a vigilante and a cop is the level of training, the assigned equipment, and the choice for the cop to follow well-established procedural rules. It’s only when you zoom out do you see the legal system supporting the cop. But when zoomed in and examining the individual incidents, nothing says the cop can’t come away with added lead, either.

Vigelanty justice only works when target deserved like the dead CEO, otherwise it just crime.

You clearly see the world in black-and-white, when it really is made up of shades of grey.

Which means that since you haven’t already gotten the point, all the crayons and construction paper in the world isn’t going to help.

The point I was making… Is that the article brought a red herring fact that has nothing to do with anything

Why did they bring it up?

It was not a red herring in the least, and it struck to the very core of my own criticisms: while some vigilantes may be very stringent about their own investigations and targets, others may not.

In this example, these vigilantes artificially engineered a target where none was likely to ever exist. They drew the target in using the profile of a perfectly legal 18yo woman, but then turned around and claimed that the target was actually chasing the profile of an 17yo - and illegally young - girl, when he was in fact not doing so.

This was a very clear situation of entrapment by false pretenses.

Who said there is anything wrong with this?

How is tbsi even example of pedophile rape? It is two adults.

that’s a weird thing to bring NYT tbh

Tell me you completely failed to grok my criticisms without saying that they flew clear over your head at 10,000m

I don’t have a problem with actual pedophiles that are caught in these dragnets.

My problem arises from the lack of rigorous and well-documented investigation into the target before shite starts popping off. As the article pointed out, there is nothing wrong with a 22yo dating an 18yo. And the problem here is a sense of vindictiveness trying to manufacture targets where not all targets are guilty of pedophilia.

So: you want to take a pipe wrench to warm over a pedophile? Make sure there is oodles of evidence that clearly and unambiguously makes the person a pedophile, and sure as shite I will look the other way. But the problem is that there is no self-reinforcing framework in place within the vigilante system to ensure and enforce this threshold of evidence. And without this system, innocent people are going to get hurt or killed.

Looks like I’ll finally be migrating my final workstation off of Windows 11.

I mean, I still have a while. The Dell T7910 still meets all of the Windows 11 Workstation 24H2 requirements, so Rufus only needs to modify that one part of the installer. And once I have Windows installed, I can do upgrades over Windows Update.

But once the machine gets too old for that…

At least OpenSUSE meets most of my needs.

Oh, absolutely! Still have mine in my desk drawer for any long-chained calculations. The Deci-Lon was the absolute GOAT in both its long and short forms.

IMHO the only slide rule that was consistently better was the Faber-Castell 2/83N.

You use a click eraser or a normal block eraser.

Only filthy casuals suffer one at the end of the pencil.

.5mm or .3mm for me, the only place I use a .7mm or a .9mm is with woodworking.

No K&E either. Which for any draftsperson, ex or current, is a heretical omission.

I find myself inordinately amused by the unsolicited vitriol of your comment. Sounds like you have a lot to unpack with that particular model.

The fact that Rotring, Staedtler, Faber-Castell, and K&E mechanical pencils are missing is deeply troubling.

I also have an emotional thing for the Pentel P200 series, and the Pentel Techniclick in black has been my absolute personal favourite for light-duty scribbling and note-taking/math since the 90s.