touchofevil

It's not a question of whether FCPX is a good value. If an EU citizen pays a one-time fee for a lifetime license of FCPX they are supposed to be able to resell that software according to the Oracle vs UsedSoft ruling. Apple has not built a mechanism into their App Store to allow users to transfer licenses to one another, which means they are not complying with the EU ruling.

This applies to every software product in their store (and Google's Play Store) that is bought for a one-time fee in exchange for a lifetime license in the EU.

If you want to learn about a really interesting aspect of the "first sale doctrine" and how it applies to software, you should have a look at "Vernor vs Autodesk" in the USA and compare it to "Oracle vs UsedSoft" in the EU. Basically, in the USA the courts determined that if a company sells you software, but in their terms & conditions claim that they are merely granting you a license, then you can't resell the software b/c you aren't considered to own it. In the EU however, if a company sells you a permanent life-time license in exchange for a one-time fee, the courts determined that you aren't merely licensing that software, you own it and you are allowed to resell it.

I think these different rulings haven't been fully appreciated yet. For example, if you buy Apple's Final Cut X for $299, you should be allowed to resell that software if you live in the EU, but there is currently no way to transfer licenses between users, preventing users from reselling it. It seems to me that by preventing users from reselling their software, Apple (and the Google Play Store) are probably violating EU law on this matter.

+1 for CDBaby created by Derek Sivers. You can find his interviews discussing the creation of CDBaby at sivers.org His interviews with Tim Ferris are great.

+1 for this. I think the idea of hiring a small team to replace yourself is the way to go OP.

As an extremely dedicated procrastinator, the most insightful idea I have found regarding this topic is something called "The Procrastination Doom Loop"[1]

I'd also highly recommend a book called "The War of Art"[2] which was written by a procrastinator who eventually made good.

I'm still struggling with procrastination, but my personal feeling is that the key is probably to create a routine where you just execute your productive work during a set block of time everyday, much like a job. This is just so you don't have to decide whether or not to do the work "now" which will break the procrastination doom loop. Good luck!

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/08/the-pro...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/War-Art-Through-Creative-Battles/dp/1...

True, but if anyone has a lot of dollars it's Alphabet.

If Alphabet really wants to mess with Uber, why don't they just buy Lyft and offer lower ride pricing/higher driver pay for as long as it takes to put Uber out of business?

I've worked in the VFX industry and I find the subsidy situation fascinating. Canada and England have provided large subsidies to movie studios on visual effects work in a (successful) attempt to create visual effects industries of their own. Visual effects production is technically very complex and the artists who work in that industry often have years of training, so it's a bit disturbing to see that an entire industry that was created in the US can be uprooted pretty quickly simply through a government subsidy.

I'm actually surprised Canada hasn't tried this strategy with tech. One other interesting note about this situation is that the WTO (World Trade Organization) has rules that appear to be violated by these subsidies, but it seems doubtful that a case will ever be brought forward because VFX workers aren't unionized/organized and powerful movie studios have a huge financial interest in keeping these subsidies going.

Save up some money, get an offer at another company that you think will enjoy (even if for less money), and bounce. Life is too short to work somewhere you hate.

That's really scary. I hadn't heard about it affecting slaughterhouse workers, but that totally makes sense. I hope the slaughterhouses will stop these sorts of AMR practices.

I did a bunch of research (googling) back in the late 90's or 2000s when the mad cow disease outbreak first happened mainly in England. I thought it was pretty terrifying and I wanted to know what the hell was going on. I read about Kuru all the way back then and the take away was that people shouldn't eat the brain and nervous tissue of other people or Kuru could result. But also it seemed that mad cow disease was occurring because cows were being fed the ground up remains of other cows and that included cow brain and cow nervous tissue. So basically what was happening with cows was the same as what was happening with people getting Kuru.

I also recall learning that in order to get mad cow disease you would need to eat cow brain or cow nervous tissue. Of course, you would probably assume, as I did, that you are safe because you don't eat cow brains or nervous tissue. Well, you could be wrong about that. There is something called AMR (advanced meat recovery). As I understand it, when the meat processing plant removes the spine and skull from the cow there is still some meat stuck to the spine and skull. The AMR process entails blasting off that meat stuck to the spine and skull with some kind of high pressure for use in ground meat. But the result is that some nervous tissue from the cow can get mixed up in ground meat created with the AMR technique and that is one way that you could end up eating cow nervous tissue. After I did that research, I swore off ground meat.

Big pharma is allowed to run ads b/c they aren't advertising recreational drugs which is different from cigarettes and the proposed recreational drugs we are discussing.

I assume that the same rules that prevent cigarettes from being advertised would also apply to legalized drugs.

I'm not sure where you are getting your estimate that 10-20% of the population would be addicted to morphine if most drugs were legalized in the USA today. If you look at the stats on Portugal, you'll see that drug use and drug related deaths have declined since the country legalized all drugs[1].

Also, morphine was only invented around 1818 and its addictive properties were not understood until much later[2]. For example, "...initially morphine was also marketed as a non-addictive cure for addiction to both alcohol and opium..." That was happening in 1853, nearly 40 years after the invention of morphine.

In the article you linked to, the author states that many of the morphine addicts of the 1900s were people in rural communities who were sold "elixirs" by traveling "doctors" and these potions were often 50% morphine. Which causes the author to state: "...if you look at drug addiction in 1900, what's the number one way in which it is different than drug addiction today? Answer: Almost all addiction at the turn of the century was accidental."

If drugs were legalized, consumers would not be getting accidentally addicted to morphine as they were in the 1900s, because they would be able to know for certain what drugs they were buying and ingesting.

[1] https://mic.com/articles/110344/14-years-after-portugal-decr... [2] http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/09/invented-mor...

It seems like the real problem causing the overdoses is that fentanyl and carfentinal are getting mixed into the heroin. At the minimum, the US should provide a program where heroin addicts can get heroin from government clinics, which is what they offer in the Netherlands[1] where addicts can get heroin three times a day and apparently rarely overdose presumably because the heroin is pure. But at this point, I'd rather see most drugs legalized and the tax money poured into addiction recovery programs, government clinics for supervised drug use, and drug use prevention.

[1] https://news.vice.com/article/only-in-the-netherlands-do-add...

Does anyone use Keeper? How is it? I need a password manager that supports Linux so it seems that LastPass, Keeper, Enpass, and Keypass are the only options. https://keepersecurity.com/

The social aspect of the game was definitely the best part for me as well. I met great people who were outside of my usual social circle through the game and that was fantastic. I never touched Magic Online, thankfully.

I was always trying to come up with some new combo or some deck that had never been tried before and because of that I had a tendency to think about the game a lot. I liked the mad science aspect of deck building, but that took up a lot of time. I don't play anymore, but I'm always right on the brink of getting back into the game and I follow the current competitive decks. Just the other day I spent several hours designing decks after I realized that you could exploit Key to the City by tapping it with Pacification Array in standard. After spending about 5 hours going down rabbit holes coming up with decklists, I realized I had just wasted most of the day and that I would have to commit further time to actually playing one of those decks at a FNM tournament. I was hit with a familiar feeling of regret for wasting time. That feeling often gnawed at me after having played Magic when I was younger. I guess you could say I have a love/hate relationship with Magic.

I played A LOT of competitive Magic: The Gathering from about age 14-21. We used to call it "cardboard crack" so we all understood that the game was addictive. I had a lot of fun and met some great people, but even back then I knew that I had a problem with the game and that I was addicted to it. This was before people talked about gaming addiction and I don't think American society understood that it could actually be a serious issue. I knew people who got addicted to EverQuest (aka EverCrack) and watched them go MIA for six months at a time from the Magic scene and drop out of high school to play EverQuest for 12 hours a day. This was back in 1999, so gaming addiction definitely isn't new.

I found that gaming addiction becomes self-reinforcing once you start putting a significant number of hours into gaming. Once you spend enough time gaming you'll end up not having enough hours to fulfill your real world commitments, like studying. Not fulfilling your real world commitments will cause you stress (failing a test) and you'll seek relief by going back to gaming. This can become a vicious cycle quickly as the more you game to relieve your stress, the more stress you end up creating for yourself by having even less time to fulfill your real world obligations.

The kids I knew who had the most unstable families were the ones who paid the highest price for their gaming addiction and ended up not graduating from high school. So I'm not surprised that unemployed young men who have unstable professional lives are getting hit hard by gaming addiction now. I hope they can break the cycle. I burned off a lot of hours playing Magic and I do sometimes wonder what could have come of that time if it had been spent elsewhere.

I recently saw a youtube video of a lithium battery in a laptop catching fire randomly in a home and I started to think about all the laptops that get brought on planes. This article is about batteries in a pair of headphones catching fire, but it's the same idea. It seems like statistically all these batteries getting brought on planes is bound to eventually cause incidents like the one in this article. It's a little worrying...

I love that backblaze has added the ability to back up a server or NAS for $5 per TB per month. I just convinced my friend at a media company to replicate their 30TB backup server offsite to Backblaze and the cost is only $150 per month. That's just crazy cheap compared to colo-ing your own offsite server and drives.

You poor soul...a 2+ hour commute each way is just mind-blowing. I worked with some people who did those kind of commutes and I don't know how they did it (especially because we were doing minimum 10 hour days). I would spend or sacrifice pretty much any amount of money not to do a 2+ hour commute.

The traffic in LA is soul crushing. I just finished a job where I commuted about 18 miles each way and the drive would take 50 minutes each way. That might not sound unreasonable, but nearly the entire commute was freeway driving, which should have been much faster.

I don't know if tolls are the answer, but it's probably worth a try. Also massively expanding the metro system would be fine with me. LA needs to try whatever it can to solve the traffic problem. Traffic makes living in LA a huge drag and I found that friends often wouldn't bother to get together even on weekends because the traffic and parking are just so unpredictable.

My favorite on is by Uesugi Kenshin. "Even a life-long prosperity is but one cup of sake; A life of forty-nine years is passed in a dream; I know not what life is, nor death. Year in year out-all but a dream. Both Heaven and Hell are left behind; I stand in the moonlit dawn, Free from clouds of attachment."

I have found these samurai death poems to be pretty interesting when contemplating one's mortality.

https://www.samurai-archives.com/deathq.html

Right, you can add GPUs in the external chassis, but not CPUs. CPUs are important for compressing video.

I've spent the last several years working in the visual effects industry in Los Angeles, and I've seen the international subsidies (mainly from Canada) basically completely kill the feature film vfx industry in LA.

I've often wondered if the same thing might happen with coding. Will Canada one day decide that they would like to start their own Silicon Valley and offer a large subsidy to tech companies that relocate to Canada?

So sad. Incidences like these will undoubtedly occur more frequently due to the Trump administration scapegoating and demonizing immigrants and "the other" in their rhetoric.

Yeah, Adobe Premiere or Avid. Premiere is a lot like Final Cut Pro 7.

It's true, you could add an external ThunderBolt chassis, but when the trash can Mac Pro first came out I recall that not many companies were making the chassis and they were pretty expensive maybe around $1000 from Sonnettech.com (which was added to the already very expensive Mac Pro). The expansion chassis prices have dropped now. But the expansion chassis won't allow you to add a second CPU which is very helpful when compressing video.

The only thing Apple has left going for it at this point in the pro video market is the ability to encode video using the Apple Pro Res codec, which is an amazing codec. But other than that, they have totally abandoned the pro market. Final Cut X was not up to the job of professional editing when released. The trashcan Mac Pros are terrible for pros because you 1) can't install internal PCIe cards like BlackMagic Decklink cards 2) can't install desktop GPUs, 3) Can't install multiple internal hdds. PCs are just so much cheaper / more powerful / more expandable and Adobe Premiere is basically a Final Cut Pro replacement. There's not much reason to use a Mac for pro video anymore.