If you read what I wrote again, you’ll see that no petty theft was brought before us. They waited until substantially more than that was stolen before they brought the person in. That was me warning you that might not be able to keep up what you’re doing, if your county works like mine does.

I was trying to do you a solid, but okay. Keep on doing what you do, I guess.

I didn’t say whether I indicted or not. I’m saying that just because you think you’re getting away with it, it doesn’t mean you actually are.

I served on a grand jury, and this is how a number of cases ended up in front of me. At least in my corner of the world, it is how it works.

The authorities have you on camera and are waiting for you to do this more times so that they can charge you with something more than petty theft.

I don’t even mind that there are so many different streaming services. It’s still a far better version of cable, where I can opt into ad-free for a few more dollars and sign up for or cancel a given service at will without having to have all of them. What sucks is when it’s the only legal distribution channel and I can’t make the choice that’s right for me based on my consumption, like buying just the movies and shows I want and playing them how I want. Demonstrated in the video, we still need what can most accurately be categorized as a workaround or a hack to even rip our own Blu Rays. All that plus the streaming services have raised their prices beyond the point where it’s an attractive deal.

Yeah, I’m aware. This is a problem that the movie and TV industry don’t appear to be interested in solving. And they seemingly operate as a massive cartel, so one studio isn’t about to break out on its own and innovate with a DRM free movie store.

My watch parties already basically dried up. The movie industry is crumbling in front of us for not being able to adapt to what their audience actually wants, and I end up just spending my time in other ways, because they’re offering me poor value and too much friction (VPNs and torrents) to get what I want, and that’s what my rant is. They’ll adapt or die. Right now, it’s looking like the movie industry will die. You’re making a lot of assumptions there about offloading my decision making to AI though…

Oh, I forgot the other part of my rant when it comes to acquiring the content. Brick and mortar doesn’t carry Blu Rays anymore. Maybe Walmart does, but I don’t have one near me. Target and Best Buy stopped. I have a functional mall near me, but not one store in it sells movies, and when I asked, they looked at me like I had two heads.

I’m all for this, but acquiring the media outside of streaming services in the first place is difficult, likely by design. There’s no GOG for movies and TV; there’s not even a Steam. My wife is basically permanently subscribed to Peacock because she loves Law and Order: SVU, to the point that she basically has the whole series on loop while she knits. I started looking this time last year into how to self-host all that, but I didn’t even get to the point of finding out what Jellyfin is before I realized that it was impossible to legally acquire all the seasons on Blu Ray or even DVD. They want me to either subscribe to Peacock or buy a “digital copy”, which is just rental streaming by another name. I’m not a skilled enough pirate to know that my ISP isn’t going to mind my activity, and being a skilled pirate isn’t even something I’m interested in being. Plus, my past experiences with piracy is that beggars can’t be choosers, and the bit rate could be awful, or it would have huge watermarks from whatever Canadian channel the pirate recorded from, and that’s not a great experience when it’s supposed to be a gift anyway.

Unlike the video author, I’m not even bothered by algorithmic recommendations for media. I actually like it. The main reason I want to self host my media is because I don’t watch so much of it that a subscription price makes sense very often. If my wife and I are just watching the same couple of things over and over again, why do I need a buffet of content I’m not going to watch at monthly subscription prices?

There are edge cases. Older ports, notably Total War and Civilization plus a few other edge cases I’ve found, will either crash when trying to talk to each other or refuse to do it. You can likely sidestep all of these issues by just running the Windows version via Proton instead. I believe the problems those ports had were something to do with underlying libraries and how they keep time, but I admit I don’t know for sure.

Isn’t it though? If my choice is to pay 200% of the value of the property annually or to not have insurance, why would I opt to have insurance? The best they could do is pay out less than I paid them.

If you don’t cap prices on something the insurer is expecting to be destroyed, wouldn’t they just set the price of the policy to be the price of the thing it insures, effectively making it worthless?

You’d pay about $12 on mass transit ($2.90 PATH and $2.90 MTA in each direction), and the reasons for the government to incentivize one versus the other are numerous, not the least of which are safety, noise, air quality, and efficiency.

It only takes one asshole in a crowded subway car to ruin it for everyone. I like to read on the subway, but they’re basically telling me that if I want to drown out their tiktok videos, I need to bring something with me with my own audio to listen to over headphones, just to not hear them.

It’s quite useful in the one part of the country where the service is good: the Northeast Corridor. It makes traveling by plane downright stupid in a lot of cases. If only more of country’s rail were even that good, which isn’t even a high bar to clear.

He’s asked all sorts of people to do all sorts of terrible things, and though some stood in his way, usually tendering their resignation in doing so, I think that’s reason enough to take it very seriously. There are supporters of his who absolutely seriously suggest instating him as president permanently, and with control of every branch of government, there’s opportunity to do so.

This community only believes the news when it’s bad.

Though he introduced a new rule against using a term he deems overly liberal: “cisgender.”

It’s so funny that the bias of plant based news can’t be detected by a media bias fact checker.