Counterpoint: When Louis CK (prior to being outed as a sex pest) released one of his comedy specials on his website DRM-free for $5 he became a millionaire almost overnight.

https://boingboing.net/2011/12/22/drm-free-experiment-makes-loui.html

Price point matters, too.

It also jives with early Steam Sales when Valve would cut titles like Left 4 Dead Counter Strike down to 90% off, and they would sell so many digital copies that they were actually making more money off the lower price.

https://www.geekwire.com/2011/experiments-video-game-economics-valves-gabe-newell/

Now we did something where we decided to look at price elasticity. Without making announcements, we varied the price of one of our products. We have Steam so we can watch user behavior in real time. That gives us a useful tool for making experiments which you can’t really do through a lot of other distribution mechanisms. What we saw was that pricing was perfectly elastic. In other words, our gross revenue would remain constant. We thought, hooray, we understand this really well. There’s no way to use price to increase or decrease the size of your business.

But then we did this different experiment where we did a sale. The sale is a highly promoted event that has ancillary media like comic books and movies associated with it. We do a 75 percent price reduction, our Counter-Strike experience tells us that our gross revenue would remain constant. Instead what we saw was our gross revenue increased by a factor of 40. Not 40 percent, but a factor of 40. Which is completely not predicted by our previous experience with silent price variation. …

Then we decided that all we were really doing was time-shifting revenue. We were moving sales forward from the future. Then when we analyzed that we saw two things that were very surprising. Promotions on the digital channel increased sales at retail at the same time, and increased sales after the sale was finished, which falsified the temporal shifting and channel cannibalization arguments. Essentially, your audience, the people who bought the game, were more effective than traditional promotional tools. So we tried a third-party product to see if we had some artificial home-field advantage. We saw the same pricing phenomenon. Twenty-five percent, 50 percent and 75 percent very reliably generate different increases in gross revenue.

I’m having trouble finding a link to substantiate it, but I remember in the early 2000’s a group of artists having to sue their record labels because of the lawsuits on file-sharing users. The record labels said they were doing it for the artists, but the artists had to sue the record labels to even ever see a penny from the fruits of those lawsuits. The record labels were just pocketing the money for themselves while saying it was “for the artists.”

Anyway, long story short is that kind of behavior from the recording industry made me want to give money directly to the artists and cut out these selfish middlemen who did nothing but claimed all the profits.

Devil’s Advocate: Many pirates would have not paid for access to that media so to say it takes away from the creators profit isn’t exactly true since one act of piracy does not equal one lost sale.

Devil’s Advocate Part II: There is s significant amount of research that supports the notion that pirates actually spend more money on media than the average person.

I personally am an example of part II. I pirate a lot of music but I refuse to use Spotify because of how little it pays artists and I have also spent significant amounts of money buying music from artists I enjoy via Bandcamp or buying from the artist directly because I know they get a bigger cut of the profits that way.

A lot easier said than done for most of us.

Do firefighters and police own the means of production??

Someone doesn’t know the definition of socialism. At best these are social services.

Also police literally have a long history of violently putting down unionization efforts despite having a union themselves.

The Opposite. The opposite of every instinct.

George Costanza wasn’t wrong.

I know you’re out there somewhere Nicole

lmao, The Fediverse Chick!

But you can’t self-host it??? Blaspheme! /s

Just kidding, nice to know there’s something out there.

There’s also Duolicious which is similarly free and without ads but there was literally no one within a hundred miles of me and most of the people using it were about half my age so it felt fruitless to pursue.

EDIT: same with Alovoa… nobody within 100 miles…

You’re welcome, I’ve just actually been waiting on an opportunity to share this info lmao

Plentyoffish mostly stinks but still has a free tier where you can message one person a day.

Also, on the page where you look at people who have viewed/liked you, the photos are blurred but if you use the Web Developer Inspection Tool you can see the unblurred photo:

Right click on one of the images of who you want to see and in the dropdown menu click “Inspect”:

The Web Developer tools will pop up and should auto-locate you to the image in question. In Firefox you can just hover over the image location and view a preview of the image. You can also right click on the image location and “Open Link in New Tab” to view it.

From here, you can usually find them in your list of potential matches, in your “meet me” swipes, or in the recently online list. This way, if someone swipes right on you, you can find them without paying and can decide to match or message.

Cheers and good luck!

I remember the days of high quality fansubs by people who were just doing it for free because they loved it.

Those still exist and still give you a better consumer experience than these fucking dogshit streaming services.

The soundtrack is still one of my favorites. I loved early Jean-Pierre Jeunet films like Delicatessen and City of Lost Children, so I was skeptical of the film at first because it seemed so normal in comparison. Turned out to be his best film by far.

The OG caked up MILF.

Or the police procedural mystery deadpan comedy A Touch Of Cloth!

Amélie Poulain

It’s rooted in all that “American Exceptionalism” propaganda crap, for sure.

This isn’t so much what I think will happen but what I hope will happen.

A lot of CPU’s are moving to on-die RAM so the RAM is closer physically to the CPU, reducing the time it takes to travel between the two, increasing RAM speed.

The downside to this is you can’t upgrade your RAM and there will be less on-die RAM than traditional RAM.

Currently, with traditional RAM, computers use a portion of hard drive space for something called “swap” which is space for when RAM runs out of usable address space to offload some data to until it needs that data again.

I’d like to see the rise of on-die RAM along with traditional RAM where traditional RAM becomes more of a “swap” for the on-die RAM. This allows for upgrade-able RAM to still exist while also leveraging the speed of on-die RAM.

Should have checked the weather before planning a picnic, duh!

Don’t blame yourself. Viral spread happens and even condoms aren’t 100% effective, depending on the area it is presenting in. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s something to be ashamed of. The shaming aspect of disease needs to stop, I would have thought we had learned that with HIV. Shame does nothing but harm the communities already affected by these problems, and the treatments get better and better all the time. While some aspects (like potential long-term effects) may be nerve-wracking, they are never a guarantee of that outcome, as there is only correlation and no specific proven causation (that I know of).

The common cold is a virus. Viruses are trickier than bacteria in some ways. The main thing is to remind yourself that while you may have made mistakes, the existence and spread of viruses is not entirely your fault. It is nothing to be ashamed of and anyone pushing shame on you for it is not worth associating with. It would be like someone shaming me for having cancer. It’s absurd.

It may take time to come to terms with and work through your depression, and it may help to talk to a therapist who is familiar with the virus and the shame-culture built around it. The first poster in this thread is right on the money that the stigma came from an advertising campaign promoting antivirals for it. Which, if you are insured, the antivirals are often covered. They will prescribe them based on the frequency and severity of outbreaks

Good luck!

Some people have more outbreaks and more painful outbreaks than others. It’s helpful to take an antiviral that suppresses the outbreaks. When there are no outbreaks, chances of transfer are low but not zero. It’s tends to be higher risk for the penetrated party rather than the one doing the penetrating. Since she never had an outbreak and the penetrated party is less likely to transfer, this may be why.

Frankly, though, like all viruses, long-term effects can be kind of scary, like the evidence of a correlation with higher rates of alzheimers and dementia in patients with HSV-I/HSV-II. Viruses do a lot of things to the body long-term that may not be readily obvious or related directly to the virus itself, much like human papillomavirus is correlated with higher instances of cervical cancer and throat cancer. Long-COVID is another example.

While transfer probability is low, it’s still valuable to try to stop transmission by using prophylactics.