I owe my entire life to piracy.

I learned all I know on pirated software, and all the jobs that I’ve ever held are entirely attributable to it.

Did I shaft the software vendors I pirated the software of? Absolutely. But! I’m also very well paid and I pay a lot of taxes thanks to my ill-gotten skills. So overall, I contributed to society as a whole orders of magnitude more than I stole from the individual software vendors.

Of course, I recognize that this sort of logic is self-serving and leaves the software vendors I shafted without any money. But… just sayin’. There’s more than one face to this coin.

As for media - music, movies and such, I’ve almost never purchased any. I bought a few LPs as a kid before my parents bought me a cassette player (and more importantly, recorder). After that, I never ever paid a single dime for any media I’ve ever consumed. Never. And I still don’t.

I make no apology for this: it’s theft pure and simple. The only weak justification I can offer is that if I tried to purchase music or movies, it would be inconvenient to procure, DRM’ed, force shit I don’t want to watch down my throat, like those stupid unskippable FBI warnings on DVDs, and the pirated versions of mp3s and movies are much more user-friendly and resistant to time and deprecation. But at the end of the day, I fully admit that I’m a shameless freeloader.

The only thing I pay for religiously is books. No particular reason why I respect writers more than musicians or film directors… It’s just like that. I want writers to get paid.

Aaw great, now Europe wants to have its own implementation of this scourge. Like American Big Data wasn’t nefarious enough.

Nah, no way. Their scam has been working great for over two millenia. Why would they give it up?

The Catholic church will elect another magical thinker in chief and he’ll carry on peddling magical thinking. What else could happen?

I can well believe that.

Whoever it was, it wasn’t Dubya, anymore than any of the shit Trump is doing was his idea: both are much too dumb to come up with any of this.

I left the US 24 years ago. I saw all this coming when Dubya shat out the USA Patriot Act.

The US has been a fascist country for decades. Just ask any Gitmo detainee… Now it’s official.

Except he doesn’t give a fuck. Haven’t you noticed?

I think that ship has sailed.
The country has been quite comprehensively fucked over at this point.

It’s okay. Yes, the megarich will become even richer, but it’s worth the sacrifice because the price of eggs will come down eventually.
Any minute now…

That’s the exact kind of messy migration I want to avoid.

Agreed. I wish I could transfer my SDF communities over here but it’s not possible, sadly.

Whatever they once were, they suck now.

Whatever it is, as a SDF member, I curse the day I decided to support them. I paid SDF because I believe in paying for what I use, and it turns out to be the worst service I use by a long shot. Why I didn’t open my first Lemmy account on a more reliable instance for free, I’ll never know…

A lot of Nazis who weren’t rich enough to escape denazification in Germany did very well in the US instead.

All dictators need declared enemies of the nation. Those unfortunate souls are Trump’s.

Nah. It’s gonna get ugly when they’re all interned in concentration camps with no due process of law for indefinite amounts of time and brought there by trainloads.

It really isn’t.

If Trump really did deport tens of millions of migrants this way, like he promised he would, it would bankrupt the country. Fortunately, it’s another one of his promises that will never materialize.

No, but he’s dumb enough to deport them to the USA apparently.

You mean New America, surely.