People that enjoy listening to music -- audiophiles, DJs, music producers, musicians, etc -- often search out and download their favorite tunes, .flac and .wav specifically, simply b/c these formats have higher fidelity to the master mix. Granted, not everyone cares about high-fidelity audio, and that's ok too.
Why? They're complying with the license. It shouldn't be surprising to see them taking advantage of copyright law when it benefits them, then turning around and taking advantage of copyright law them it benefits them. It's quite a bit more benign than Disney making movies off of public-domain stories while lobbying to keep Mickey Mouse under copyright, since they didn't even lobby for it. The WordPress developers just gave them the code for free.
Free and open-source software isn't subversive. It's innovative, which isn't the same thing. It's certainly a new model, but the way you get a GPL violation removed from GitHub is with a DMCA takedown notice. Free and open-source software is a different and nicer use of the copyright system, but it's all still the same system at the end of the day.
And now that they've had a couple decades to get over their discomfort and they've realized that there's nothing subversive there, people who love copyright are totally fine with free and open-source software, because it furthers their goal of making money.
The issue here isn't legality but performance royalties. Music played over the internet is considered a performance. These royalties should be collected and paid out to recording artists, or whoever owns the master recording copyright, whenever that song is performed publicly. It's seems that FB doesn't want to pay artists these royalties.
"It's not so much the volume of interactions Black Americans have with the police that troubles them or differentiates them from other racial groups, but rather the quality of those interactions."
Not sure what "preferred narrative" you are referring too, but most black people think America has a "police problem". Define that however you like. Bunch of other polls from the same organization for those curious enough to dig deeper. Seek Higher Things friend.
Frankly, this kind of hubris is dangerous. The point here is not that financial instruments are 'fake' wealth or 'nothing more' than the value that people put on real assets, that is the entire crux of the matter. You literally require expertise in higher maths to understand the valuations. And even those with that understanding sometimes fail to manage the risk. The guys who literally wrote the book on modern finance bought the global financial system to its knees b/c of their mismanagement [0].
The systemic risks that these insanely complex valuations pose to the economy are real and matter. I'm talking about food, housing, education, infrastructure, health care ... real things the matter for long term growth. This concept needs to be thoroughly appreciated. The notional values here are important b/c they are powerful indicator of the impact of default on the real economy [1]. The impact is in fact so great, that the Fed is willing to print trillions and trillions of $$$ to save financial systems from their failure. But a maxim of economics is that "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." And right now our government is literally feeding the capitalists while watching millions of people go w/o food, housing, health care. It's egregious injustice and insult to people of Enlightenment everywhere.
The systemic risk argument is absurd. The risk posed by any financial asset is not distributed uniformly across the economy. Its impact on any party is proportional to their direct and indirect exposure to that asset, which is something that they control and have to take responsibility for.
In the absence of the government bodies that socialize the losses of irresponsible actors, those actors who take on imprudent risks would see the share of the financial market that they control steadily shrink at the expense of those who do not.
The suspension of this market feedback mechanism is what increases the risk of financial crisis.
For example, the FDIC has been found to stimulate risk-taking and thereby contribute to more systemic risk and more frequent and severe financial crises. [1]
For another example, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, well-capitalized players like Walmart, which was expanding its banking activity via its Sam's Club lending, were well positioned to replace the incumbent Wall Street firms as major lenders, but that was forestalled by Congress and the Federal Reserve socializing the losses of the major financial institutions with a bailout and prohibiting nonbanking parties from providing banking services. [2]
>>And right now our government is literally feeding the capitalists while watching millions of people go w/o food, housing, health care.
Agreed. The Central Bank is an engine for corruption and centralization of power. I disagree that the solution is more cookie-cutter rules that violate the freedom to contract and centralize power in the hands of powerful regulatory body subject to regulatory capture - which very well could have been the principal factor behind regulators stopping Sam's Club from expanding its lending activity, considering the banks' lobbying activity against it.
The solution is to stop creating moral hazard with a Central Bank that holds the exclusive power to create the national currency and allocate it to the private parties of its own choosing.
Sharing one of my favorite quotes on this topic that James Clerk Maxwell was said [0] to tell his students:
"In this class I hope you will learn not merely results, or formulae applicable to cases that may possibly occur in our practice afterwards, but the principles on which those formulae depend, and without which the formulae are mere mental rubbish. I know the tendency of the human mind is to do anything rather than think. But mental labor is not thought, and those who have with labor acquired the habit of application often find it much easier to get up a formula than to master a principle.”
+1 for Walter Lewin's explanations. I also can't say enough about the clarity of explanations and examples in Feynman's Lectures [1] and the HyperPhysics [2] tutorials.
I believe one can't appreciate the whole subject enough without knowing that the electromagnetic forces are how the atoms "work", also producing "chemistry" and everything we see.
To paraphrase Feynman, the electromagnetic forces also keep you from falling down through the floor.
For the start:
"If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied."
Google is not building a nationwide website, just a trial one for Bay Area:
"We are developing a tool to help triage individuals for Covid-19 testing. Verily is in the early stages of development, and planning to roll testing out in the Bay Area, with the hope of expanding more broadly over time. We appreciate the support of government officials and industry partners and thank the Google engineers who have volunteered to be part of this effort."
