KaiReeve

What you see in the news and on social media doesn't paint a true picture of what daily life is like here for people. Most of Trump's supporters aren't the hateful bigots that the Internet makes them out to be, they're just convinced that he's the lesser of the 2 evils. This is why you see that his rallies are empty and he's still polling at ~47%.

Most of the deepest Trump cult fanatics live in communities where that is more prevalent, like rural Alabama, so if you don't live where they live, you just don't really encounter them. And if you do live in those areas, you're already used to the rampant racism because it's always been there.

So me and my immigrant wife will still go visit my pro-trump uncle for his annual pig roast, because he's not a bad person, he's just a moron. I'll still call my conservative mother every week because she's not threatening to kill me for voting blue, she's just consumed too much anti-Kamala propaganda. My religious sister is still welcome to visit because even though she's an idiot, my nieces are freakin adorable and I love them.

I don't think anybody here is siding with ISPs. We're just happy to hear that they're having difficulties policing piracy.

When I say individual rights I mean any and all rights an individual has or should have. In the case of piracy, an individual should have a right to entertainment media at a reasonable cost. The more corporations increase the cost of media access, the more piracy proliferates. In the case of AI, an individual should have the right to earn a living. Corporations are using the works of individuals to ultimately increase their own profits without due compensation to the individual.

I don't know how you got to pro conservative capitalism from a single anti-corporatist statement, but it likely took you several leaps of logic that I'm not going to even try to follow.

It's almost as if the people here favor individual rights over corporate profits.

You never know. Someone could make a time travel movie with it one day and then collectors will pay an arm and a leg for the left door.

Goldeneye - the squeezing scene

Anaconda - regurgitated people

Congo - when they throw his brain

Mercury Rising - "Mother, Simon is home"

Peewee Herman - Large Marge

The truly harrowing experience I had as a kid was the Alien Encounter ride at Disney Orlando. I was 8 and it was a field trip so the peer pressure was high. Nightmares for weeks after that. I still remember it breathing on me in the pitch dark.

Thanks for the tip. The line break works, but the stanza spacing doesn't seem to be taking. I'm on Jerboa so that may be influencing the formatting.

But they were all of them deceived, for another chip was made. In the land of Texas, in the labs of Neuralink, the Dark Lord Elon forged in secret, a master chip, to control all others.

One Chip to rule them all,
One Chip to find them,
One Chip to network them all,
and in the TOS legally bind them.

I am not operating under any such premise, but I am tired of arguing. It avails us not to continue this discussion.

How many people would you estimate use the internet? I'm paying $100 per month per person on my household. If you multiply $100 per month times the number of people who use the internet, I'm sure you have enough for servers, infrastructure, programmers, and plenty left over for content creators.

Sally and I work for the same company. The company pays both of us. The customer pays the company. If the customer already pays the company, should they have to pay Sally extra for her involvement?

I'm not saying Google shouldn't get paid. I'm saying that there are standard Internet services that are used widely enough that they could be bundled with what we already pay. We pay enough already to have those basic services included.

So we pay the ISP, the ISP pays the service provider, and the service provider pays the content creator. We pay enough to the ISPs that we shouldn't have to pay extra for these basic services.

Oh? So my understanding of how Google profits off user data is incorrect? My belief that the ISPs are profit-driven entities is inaccurate?

If the harvest and sale of user data had been made illegal in 1993 would Google have progressed the way it did? Would they be forced to charge a fee for their email and video hosting services? Would that have incentivized them to maybe make a deal with the ISPs to be included with the monthly payments we already make?

What if local government owned and maintained all the existing internet infrastructure? Would we have been able to choose which ISP we preferred all these years rather than essentially having to pick between coax or satellite? Would ISPs then have been incentivized to pick up additional services like email, video, and image hosting in order to gain more customers?

Are we experiencing the best possible version of the internet, or could it be better?