ExtremeDullard

The teacher is the one who's confused here. The kid is entirely correct.

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.

India probably could do without Israel's support.
Everybody could do without Israel's support, the same way no country wanted Nazi Germany's support 85 years ago, and nobody wants US support today.

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.

I have some cheap hi power magnifiers for close work.

We have those at work. Really useful. But the double-glasses thing is more for when I have to thread a need at home, stuff like that. And I always have a pair of folding glasses in my backpack, because you never know.

Have you tried some of the online shops like Zenni? They were half the cost of going to an optical shop, with the same features.

No, I went to my local optician, for one reason: I only had the lenses made to order, and the instructions for making them were rather precise because they're mounted in 3D-printed frames I designed myself. Also, I wanted Trivex lenses made specifically by Hoya and nobody else.

So my local opticial took care of ordering the blanks from them (you can't order direct from lens manufacturers, sadly) then having the blanks edged with my template tool and explaining to the shop how to use it. It's not that any of this is super complicated, but if anything went wrong, they were on the hook, not me.

I have progressives but they're getting a bit insufficient in the near vision zone. But they're still good 95% of the time, and considering the price of progressive lenses, every once in a while I don reading glasses over my regular glasses for precise work on tiny things.

Large social media cesspit connects with other large social media cesspit, can create giant cesspit.

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