vithigar

Nothing, and they don’t claim it is, they just use ambiguous wording.

“Enhanced ad privacy features”. The ads are enhanced. Privacy is just involved.

The police don’t enforce tax regulations. The IRS has its own people for that.

Would you expect an IRS auditor to pull someone over for speeding? Of course not, that’s ridiculous.

Plus there are plenty of people, like myself, who live in areas where the electricity comes from mostly renewable sources.

It is good, if the competing products/services are interchangeable and they need to compete on factors such as price, convenience, or reliability. For example, competing grocery stores, all of which offer by and large the same products. Or competing mechanics, all of which can perform service on your car.

Streaming services don’t do this. They have carved up the market and “compete” by making you choose which products you want more.

Imagine two grocery stores, one of which had all the ice cream, and the other had all the chocolate, and neither could carry things that the other stocked. That is what streaming services are doing.

Using ad blockers is piracy, insofar as you’re avoiding paying the price the content provider has set for that content. The price is watching the ads, rather than being something directly monetary, and you’re not paying it.

That said, neither that nor piracy are theft, and in both cases I gladly pirate because the prices in most instances have gotten away too high for what you get. Either in terms of subscription cost, or the time and quantity of ads delivered.

What? That piracy is fine and people should be honest with themselves about doing it?

It can certainly be both. A worse service might be worth a cheaper price. And people will pay extra for good service. That’s literally the airline ticket business model.

It was also 100% a payment issue back when I was a broke student and paying for things simply wasn’t an option. The fact that Steam offered a more convenient service than the pirates at the time was irrelevant because I couldn’t afford it.

This isn’t asking for nothing though. It’s asking for a very specific uniform thing. A better analogy to text generation would be asking for an uninterrupted string of nothing but repeated uppercase A’s.

During the height of the MeToo movement and the #NotAllMen thing, though, it really felt like society as a large, or at least the parts of it I want to occupy, viewed many aspects of my simple existence as villainous.

I just stopped bothering. My input was clearly neither desired nor welcome, so I stopped offering it. I’ll happily stay out of the way, but if they want active support I want to stop hearing that my opinion isn’t valid on any given set of subjects, before I even voice it.

It alters your gait.