Here’s my guess. Piracy provides a competition against the horrible practices of streaming and entertainment companies that doesn’t otherwise exist, forcing them to provide a better service.

Artists are just a single person making art and their service isn’t gobbled up by the capitalist machine and turned into something user unfriendly. They don’t usually make too much money, unlike huge entertainment corporations, either.

When it comes to piracy, individual content creators often don’t care as long as they get money to live. There have been people who work on video games or movies who say they don’t care if others pirate their work as long as others get to see it. But for AI, it copies and changes the work, stripping the art of its original watermark, and it sets itself up to be a replacement of the artist itself. It doesn’t just spread their work without having you pay for it, it replaces the concept of needing an artist altogether, but only by using their labor in the first place without paying them for it.

If piracy let movie studios replace the idea of needing individual content creators, writers, artists actors, etc then people would feel differently I think. As it is now, people don’t care about big studios, they care about the individual. Piracy currently only really harms the former and not the latter. AI is the opposite.

There’s no been proof that Tik Tok sends all the data to China or that China manipulates the algorithm. In fact, to appease the US before, they agreed to let Oracle and a purely US subsidiary look at all their code and data and content moderation. Oracle would spot check the data flows and where it goes. Tik Tok would report to Committee on Foreign Investment in the US on everything, even hiring practices. And a 2021 study found Tik Tok didn’t really collect data beyond the norm of other players in the industry, or beyond what it said it did in it’s policy.

Most of the claims by a Tik Tok whistleblower that alleged otherwise seem to be from one guy mad at being fired who’s made wild claims, like Merrick Garland instigated his firing, and he only worked there for 6 months.

All this scaring is literally just because politicians are scared that people in Gaza can use it to report what’s happening to themselves during the genocide, without the blatant censorship of American companies on the issue. Even Romney admitted that’s the reason. I don’t actually use Tik Tok and I think it’s algorithms are bad for our ADHD addled brains, but I would also apply that to YouTube shorts and Instagram stories. They should all be regulated, not banned. Hell, we actually could use more foreign companies that aren’t vulnerable to US censorship, not the opposite. This is especially important since reporters aren’t being let in Gaza and the ones who are are killed. And we’ll probably lose it once they finish their restructuring in Project Texas, although sounds like they’ll be banned before they do.

It’s the media’s job to make us angry at foreigners while ignoring and accepting our problems at home. They’re just doing their job.

Paying for a roof isn’t work. It’s not producing anything, transforming anything, or doing labor, and it takes no time. It takes 30 seconds to cut a check. And they’re using money I and other renters have paid them because we can’t afford a house, despite very much wanting to, because of how expensive housing is due to landlords buying up all the properties lol. You can tell it’s not a real job because a lot of landlords have full time other jobs. Or it’s why being a landlord is also a great way to get money for old people who can’t work and maybe haven’t saved for retirement nor have a pension.

I 100% agree that the problem is that housing is an investment. Real estate investors should not be buying homes to make a profit at the expense of available housing. I haven’t heard how the situation is in Germany, but that’s good. I heard Tokyo also does it right, where housing depreciates like a car, because they have so much.

My landlord doesn’t do that, they have a property manager that does that stuff. Ive never even seen my landlord. If the landlord does it, then they are not doing landlording, they are being a property manager and landlord, but they don’t necessarily have to, and one doesn’t require being the other.