And? Doesn't everyone deserve that kind of safety net? Should we take away people's 401ks, pensions, life insurance, etc. because other people don't have them?
I think I'd rather focus my energy on making sure that more people can make sure their families are secure if something should happen to them, not less
In the US, it's a pretty common situation to have some kind of retirement plan through your job, like a 401k, or if you're very lucky a pension. And if you die, in a lot of cases, that retirement plan gets paid to your spouse or children in some fashion. That's a big part of how people plan for their families in case something happens to them. It might help to cover funeral expenses, or settle debts, or legal expenses, or just to make sure their spouse or children can afford to live if they die.
If you're an independent artist though, you may not have that. Ideally you'd have some kind of life insurance, IRA, etc. to help fill that same role, but art is a fickle business, not everything sells well or is an instant classic, and sometimes it takes a while for something to get popular.
Let's say I write a book and get it published, and it's reasonably successful, but not exactly a bestseller. I probably got a nice little payment for selling the rights to the publisher, but I'm also expecting to have more money trickling in for at least a few years as long as it stays in print and keeps selling. And in the meantime I'll hopefully get more books published, more payments, hopefully bigger, from the publisher, and then have even more money flowing in from book sales. If I'm really lucky, maybe one or more of those books will really be a hit, if not, hopefully I'll at least have enough moderately successful books published to have a steady income from them, be able to save up some money, keep food on the table, save up for my kids' college funds, my retirement, etc. it's a long-term plan.
But instead I keel over and die. My spouse is now a single parent.
If I worked a normal job, hopefully some of those benefits are kicking in to help my spouse take care of herself, my funeral arrangements, and our kids. Survivor benefits from my pension start payment out to them or they get access to my 401k, maybe I even had some kind of life insurance through my job.
But since I didn't work a normal job, all they get is that trickle of money from my book sales.
And you want to cut even that off for them.
And then to add insult to injury, now that I'm dead and it's in the public domain, maybe my book gets turned into a movie which becomes an enormous hit and makes millions of dollars for some Hollywood studio, and my family doesn't get a penny of it.
Yes, ideally we'd have better social safety nets in place to help people out in those kinds of circumstances, but we don't, and until we do this is what we're stuck with.
For an independent artist in the US, I think their lifetime +25 years & 9 months.
It's something they made, they created it, they deserve to profit off of it.
Why the +25 years & 9 months?
Independent artists may not have a more traditional retirement plan with a pension/401k, health benefits, etc. They work for themselves, their income can be inconsistent, sometimes their work may not become popular until years later or even after they pass away.
But that work is how they're providing for their family, their children's care and college funds and such, funeral expenses, help their spouses along after they pass, etc.
In the US you can usually stay on your parents healthcare up until 26, so I think it's fair that we should allow their family to profit off that copyright for that long after their death.
If I were an artist, and immediately after getting my wife pregnant, keeled over dead, I'd want to know that I've left behind something that will help them along at least a bit hopefully at least until my kid is hopefully old enough to stand on their own since.
And sure, not every artist is going to be leaving behind a pregnant wife, but most people are going to have some sort of family who are going to be stuck with funeral expenses and other legal bullshit to sort out, and I think that 25ish years is a reasonable enough timeframe to keep the copyright tied up before releasing it to the public domain.
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For works created by/for a company (or owned by one if an individual creator sold it to them,) I think it can get a little murkier.
A lot of people cite the old 14 years + one 14 year extension that was the original US copyright law. And I get it, that sounds reasonable enough I guess.
But a lot of things have changed since then, companies are bigger, things like video games exist now that didn't back then, and some things have gotten a lot more complex.
Let's look at the MCU, just the main movies have come out over 18 years and is still going for the foreseeable future, and with spider man and Deadpool sort of tying in some of the pre-MCU movies into the shared multiverse, you can even argue that it's 26 years at this point. Hell, Marvel and DC have been doing their thing since the 30s. New Star Trek stuff has been trickling out since the 60s. Mario first appeared in Donkey Kong 45 years ago. Skyrim came out in 2011, and the next elder scrolls game is still probably years away. We just didn't have franchises like we do now back in 1790, I think it's fair that the laws should reflect in some way how long-lived some franchises can last now.
I think it might be fair at this point to allow a company to hold copyright on something indefinitely (please put away your torches and pitchforks) but
Bridging parts 4 and 5. Let's say you wanted to post a whole movie on YouTube. If your channel isn't monetized you're totally in the clear, you can do that. However YouTube might still make a profit off of it being there due to ads and such. So YouTube can either
A. Not allow copyrighted material in their TOS, and must take it down when (and only when) requested by the copyright holder.
Or
B. Choose to pay the appropriate licensing fee to stream that copyrighted material, which again would be a fixed, reasonably low rate set by the government. It might be worth it to them to pay that fee because it means increased traffic to their site.
If your channel is monetized, you would have to pay that fee. Again, these fees are going to be fixed and kept fairly low. What those fees are is probably going to depend on how it's used. Using, let's say, a clip that's 30 seconds or less of something in another video might be a one time fee of $5, but if you're posting the whole movie, maybe that deserves some percentage of what you earn from those views unless YouTube decides to pay for the streaming license for that movie (if you then owe anything to YouTube for that and how much would be part of whatever monetization agreement you have with YouTube)
Deciding exactly what those licensing fees for 50+ year old media should be is well outside of my pay-grade.
EDIT: There's a lot more to intellectual property than just copyright, trademarks, patents, etc. so this is really only scraping the surface, but hopefully this kind of shows where my head is at with these kinds of matters.
I'm a little unclear on how this whole vote by mail process works, I've always voted in-person because I haven't trusted Republicans to not pull shit like this to fuck with my vote.
But how exactly does the postal service have the ability to do this? They're not the ones tallying the votes, they're just delivering mail. You put something in the box with correct postage and they take it to the address on the envelope. I don't really get where they have the discretion to say "no" to doing that.
And hypothetically, let's say they do refuse to deliver what looks like election mail. What's to stop you from taking your mail-in ballot envelope, stuffing it into another plain, nondescript envelope addressed to wherever your ballot is supposed to go and mailing it that way? I'm pretty sure they're not supposed to be opening up mail to see what's inside.
Genuinely asking and trying to understand.
NileRed on YouTube has done a few interesting things like turning plastic gloves into hot sauce through different chemical processes.
It's more of a fun science demonstration than anything meant to be even remotely practical to create food from waste, and there are some pretty nasty chemicals involved in some of them that really have no business being anywhere near food
But it does I think drive home the point that everything is basically made out of the same stuff and it's a matter of figuring out how to break it down and put it back together in the right way to be useful.
You are right, I admit that I'm Americans so I'm used to thinking in football fields and bananas as my units, so grams don't inherently mean much to my brain. Not sure if Google steered me wrong with the weight of mosquitoes or if I missed a metric prefix or didn't move a decimal point somewhere. Don't have time to go back and fix my math right now but I did throw a little disclaimer in my comment. I'll try to fix that later.
Just kind of thinking this through
EDIT: my math is wrong. I think I didn't move a decimal point or missed a metric prefix somewhere, don't have time to go through and correct myself right now, but go ahead and double check that.
A typical beer is around 5%, so about 25x higher than the concentration in your blood if you're at .2
A Google search tells me a mosquito drinks about .001 to .01 milliliters of blood per meal, let's just go with the higher number. Just gonna assume the density of blood is close enough to water which is a nice 1:1 conversion, so that's about .01g of blood.
A mosquito weighs somewhere in the neighborhood of 2-3grams
So after eating, a mosquito has drank about 1/200 to 1/300 of it's body weight in blood.
Gonna mix units now, sorry science people.
1 pint weighs around 1lb. If you weigh about 200lbs, and have one beer, you've drank about that same ratio of beer to your body weight in terms of just how much liquid youve drank.
But again, the concentration of alcohol in a beer is much higher than the concentration in your blood.
So 1 mosquito bite is roughly the same in terms of volume to one beer, but in terms of alcohol content, it would be more like 1/25th of a beer.
So if a mosquito really gorged itself and drank 25x the normal amount of blood at once, it might start feeling a tiny buzz, but that might just be the fact that it's a mosquito (because they buzz, get it?)
So that's sort of drinking a whole case of beer but only one of them actually had alcohol.
If you're a hardcore alcoholic you might be able to double that BAC to about .4%, which is about where most people would be unconscious and possibly have some significant medical complications.
But that would still only get the mosquito to about 2 beers worth of alcohol if they drank way more than they normally would in one meal.
This is all assuming mosquitoes process alcohol similarly to us, things don't always scale up and down so nicely and mosquitoes are of course different animals than humans, so that could throw things off quite a bit.
It may look like a beat-up old pair of hiking boots, but in fact it's a pair of beat-up old hiking boots with new soles, lining, heel-counters, shanks, hardware, laces and one hell of a cleaning and reconditioning job.
Around 4 years ago I bought this pair of Danner Lights. They were worn fairly close to daily, and have some hard miles on them hiking and backpacking.
Sent them in to Danner for their recrafting service. 4-6 weeks and a couple days for shipping later I just got them back.
They're just the tiniest bit snug because of the new lining, but otherwise these are unmistakably my boots that have broken in to fit my feet, but the soles still have treads on them.
Also, Danner customer service was great to deal with. When I shipped my boots out to them, I got the notification that they had been delivered, but after a day or two I hadn't gotten the email from Danner to confirm they received it. I wasn't exactly worried, I figured it would probably take them a couple days to open the box and get my boots checked in, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to give them a call anyway.
After a reasonable number of rings, my call was answered by an actual human.
And one with no heavy accent, who didn't mumble into the phone, and had no attitude problem, and most astoundingly, actually worked for Danner at their office.
But so I asked if there was any way he could confirm that my boots had been delivered to the right place. He took my tracking info, looked it up, and was able to tell me that yes, they had them, because he knew the guy who signed for them.
And then he gave me a direct number to the recrafting department in case I needed to follow up with them any further (I didn't feel any need for that, but after recently going through hell trying to get in touch with anyone at the local delivery hub for a company that was supposed to deliver some new appliances for me with no luck to figure out what the hell was going on with repeated delivery delays, I really appreciated that)
It's kind of sad that I'm so used to automated menus, outsourced call centers, and customer service reps who clearly want to be doing anything else but helping me (not that I blame them, I don't want to work either) that that's all it takes to make a customer service experience feel great.
If I have any complaints at all about my experience, it's that the white stitching around the soles was replaced with brown. I thought the white looked pretty sharp, but these are hiking boots they're just going to get dirty anyway.
But anyway, I'm really happy with my experience, and I'm looking forward to hopefully another 4+ years with these boots.
I mean they're cool, but they're not that cool.
They're only rad-ish.
I have a 6 year old malinois (possibly a mix, she didn't come with paperwork)
When we got her, she was crate trained, never gave us any issues going into the crate, happily went into it and let us close the door and leave. My wife and I work different schedules, so normally she was only in there for maybe about 4 hours, if it was much longer than that we always made arrangements for her to stay with my parents or at least to have someone stop by to walk her.
However, she's too smart for her own good, and at some point she figured out that she could escape the crate, and there was no putting that cat back in the bag. No matter how we tried to secure the crate she figured out a way to squeeze out. We got worried that she'd hurt herself trying to get out so we started leaving her loose.
And at first everything was fine, she maybe got into the trash a couple times but overall we had a few good years of her being loose by herself in the house without any major issues. After a few months of having free reign of the house she never really went into the crate anymore and found other "den" areas around the house, so we packed up the crate.
Lately though, she's been getting bolder, stealing things off the counter (she pulled the whole bread box down the other day,) she got into a bottle of vitamins (that was a fun vet bill) etc.
She's not being destructive otherwise, not chewing up the furniture or anything, she doesn't even always eat or try to open any food and such that she steals (I came home to a fully sealed bag of tortillas on the bed the other day, she absolutely could have torn that open if she really wanted to)
And she does get a lot of walks and playtime, nothing has really changed in our routine that I can think of that would account for this change. It feels a lot like she just let the intrusive thoughts win one day to steal something from the counter and it's just snowballed from there.
Right now we're doing what we can to secure anything that seems like it might be tempting to her or that we're especially worried about her getting into before we leave, and we're providing her with some longer-lasting puzzle toys and treats to distract her when we leave.
So far that seems to be working, I feel like as long as we can keep her busy for the first 20 minutes or so after we leave, we're probably ok.
But we're also considering the possibility that we may need to start crating her again in a more escape-proof crate.
So in case it comes to that I'm looking for advice from anyone who's had to do something similar.
So what I'm hearing is that this moron didn't learn his lesson about fucking around with vehicles after he got hurt just a few months ago.
Few years back I decided to go back to the original concept and do turnips for my Jack O'Lanterns, and what can I say, I love the little guys.
They also fit on my windowsill a lot better back when I was in a small apartment without a proper front step/porch to put them.
Sunny is a 6 year old Malinois, as her human companion I'm pretty sure I'm obligated to start off with that so you don't call her a German shepherd.
We had a chance to go camping with some friends on their property over the weekend and she did great.
The first night temperatures dropped below freezing. I'm a firm believer that there is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate gear, and we managed to stay warm and cozy together in our tent overnight.
She got to spend almost the whole weekend off-leash, a rare treat for this suburban pup.
Her herding and guarding instincts got a bit of a workout, when some new (to her) friends arrived, she gave them a good barking-at until I caught up and greeted them, at which point Sunny saw that they were ok and immediately rolled over for belly-rubs.
The whole weekend Sunny would position herself around camp to make sure that she could see all of us, and if anyone wandered too far away from the group, she would go with them to make sure they were safe.
My friends' property is large, remote, and provides some safe natural backstops to set up a shooting range. Sunny has never been the least bit bothered by fireworks or thunder, and I'm happy to report that she showed no signs of fear at the gunshots (from a hearing-safe distance) but was a little annoyed at it disturbing her midday nap, so we cut our shooting short. I'll be getting her some hearing protection if we ever try that again.
On the ride home, my check engine light started flashing and my car went into limp mode on the highway so I pulled over and called for a tow, I've never been happier to have that premium AAA towing package. Sunny was not a fan of the tow driver strapping our car onto the truck, but again warmed right up to him. Unfortunately she was not allowed to ride in the cab with us and had to ride in the car by herself until we could catch up with our friends off the highway to transfer her into their car. She didn't seem too bothered by that and I think she appreciated the higher vantage point. She got to ride the rest of the way home with her new friends and behaved very nicely in their car while I continued with the tow truck.
After an exciting weekend of hiking, meeting new friends, and new experiences, she spent most of the next day in our bed catching up on some missed naps, and I got to pay for new spark plugs and ignition coils.
When I took my state's required hunter safety course, one of the instructors was an older dude with grey hair and a ponytail who wouldn't look out of place at a Dead & Company concert.
To point out the importance of wearing an orange hat during small game seasons, and also to "be sure of your target and what lies beyond it" he pointed out how much that grey hair and ponytail would look a lot like a squirrel if you only caught a glimpse of it through some brush.
Not saying that's exactly what happened here, the kid doesn't look like he was the grey ponytail type, but the article shook loose that memory in my head.
EDIT: not that I'm ungrateful, but somehow this is now my highest rated comment on Lemmy, and I'm just curious why this one in particular resonated to well.
I remember maybe a year or so ago, overhearing some of my coworkers who seemed to genuinely believe that schools were installing litter boxes for alleged students that identify as cats.
These idiots will believe absolutely anything, and it doesn't need to be even remotely anchored to reality.
But what were talking about isn't implemented a flawed system, it's improving one that's already flawed, and the result still wouldn't be perfect but it's better than what currently exists
And it doesn't prevent passing even better laws further down the line, but I think you know that creating new more comprehensive survivor benefits that would cover everyone is a much harder sell than a comparatively small tweak to copyright laws.
And if we remove those copyright benefits before those new systems are ready, you're leaving people in the lurch without any safety net until those new systems can be created (if in fact they ever are)