This chart from the OECD (if you scroll down just a bit) lists out which countries paid companies ("job retention schemes") and which had various direct pay-outs to the general public:
Orcocracy
joined 4 years ago
What is even is this chart? Lots of the countries had their own extra programmes and benefits in 2020 to the point where there was a growing body of "maybe we can just turn it into a UBI" discourse, even from many of our political masters. Well, until the billionaires and corporations who actually run our "democracies" said no. But this chart includes none of it. It's worth remembering that for a brief time across much of the world a quite different economic system was almost spontaneously born from the sudden shock of changes in global material conditions, until the established powerful structures in society wrenched us back to the zombified corpse of neoliberal capitalism.
I don't know if it even is "piracy" though. If you go to a library and ask to see today's newspaper or borrow that latest bestseller and to make a few copies with your phone or the library photocopiers they will just let you do it. Sure you could subscribe for way too much money to various online services and do this at home, but libraries do indeed let you have this kind of shit for free. Some libraries even let you borrow console games for free too.
But that's all physical media. All the rules about online digital media were written during the neoliberal period so digital copies of things are all extremely restrictive and locked down. Doing what would be considered totally normal and mundane just a couple of decades ago is now suddenly a radical act of "piracy".
This might not even be a real phenomenon, never mind the supposed causes. Several of those charts are very unclear about any relationships between the pre-Mao and post-Deng “elites” or other supposedly similar situations in the other regions covered. The definition of who “elites” are is also wildly different throughout the thread and fluctuates from income percentiles to “intellectuals” to feudal soldiers and beyond. This whole thing is dressed up as hardcore logic brainscience but is filled with nothing but shitty infographics that don’t say what the tweets claim they do, compare poorly with each other, and are used to justify a conclusion that is fucking eugenics. I don’t think there’s actually anything here except for a big stinking pile of bullshit.
I recently got a bunch of encyclopedia-sized cookbooks from a dead relative and they’re so much better than googling for recipes.
I think the answer is going back to books. The internet is over.
Hey everyone let’s quite literally judge this book by its cover
I like the shade of yellow in the text
Yes, all this drama over pointless twaddle.
“Community and solidarity”, “unified against a decision” - these words in this context give me nothing but despair. If only such energy were devoted to something that mattered more than this.
I don’t think they want to touch this hornets nest - Microsoft already forces people to create Microsoft accounts for lots of things. This is part of why the sudden outrage for Sony doing so is a bit baffling. Why this and why now? We live in a world filled with companies making us create accounts for all and sundry.
Yeah sure the entire US credit score system got owned a few years ago, but what if hackers deleted my DLC purchases?
Also lots of academic books printed on paper about the internet and society in pretty much every university library on Earth.