And when you get blocked by whatever anti-bot tech the site is running?
1,204 karma · joined August 26, 2025
And when you get blocked by whatever anti-bot tech the site is running?
The thing is even if you 'have' the equity share as an employee, you might never get liquidity. And (super obviously) most startups fail.
So even if you have a decent chunk of 'ownership', you really, _really_ need to believe in it to be working those hours. I'm talking the kind of belief built on your specialist and insider knowledge about why it's very likely to crush everything else. And even then you can get screwed!
> He convinced them the domain registered in my name and address really belonged to his club
Convinced how? Often such things are via "knowing things" about the account holder.
It's political, inherently, but it's not "only" political, or it's not necessarily political on the part of the host. As in, most practical hosts _have_ to obey US IP law. They don't _have_ to ban crypto or LLMs. The former only inconveniences or restricts me insofar as the host is unwilling to go to prison. The latter on their whims or personal views.
One benefits from the availability of alternatives and a healthy market regardless.
So payments for the right to do so aren't payments required to bring anything new into existence at that point, save for the legal fiction.
Now you might argue that the future copy-licencing rents are necessary to bring the _original_ creation into being. But that doesn't make them _not rents_.
But I would say that's the second assumption you're baking in here.
As in, we live in a world where e.g. the movie Toy Story exists. Now, certainly Toy Story does provide some good or value to the world. But I don't think you can assume such things provide more value than e.g. open science, free transformation of works, etc.
I get that people enjoy our current IP culture but saying certain things wouldn't exist in an IP-free world is just an argument from consequences that doesn't even really compare consequences between the two.
If you spot the regulator looking the other way and try to sneak one past, is that legitimate, or sketchy? What if you recently had the influence to make them look the other way or be under-resourced?
You could argue 'treason' is a better word than 'scam'.
Same with the iron we'd need to make our own steel.
And a current glut just makes it even cheaper for us to stockpile, vs spending on votes by propping up a failing industry.
Ironically I think it's the same for both steel and farmers: they provide votes.
Right, and where is the iron coming from in the scenario where we can't import steel?
My rhetorical point is just that steel gets special treatment probably because it's politically expedient. There are large, politically-relevant parts of the country that are still emotionally tied to the idea that we're an industrial nation. People under the age of 30 still go on about Thatcher and the miners.
There's no real shortage of steel around the world that I know of. We could just stockpile it instead, for example. And in the hypothetical tail-risk scenario this is all supposed to insure against... how do we even get the raw materials for making steel anyway?
Same for the army.