Is the onus on the consumer? As much as I hate to say it I am pretty judgemental when it comes to people paying for subscriptions.
While its wholly negative to have this mind set in the modern world is it such a bad thing.
Like if we were all in a Lemmy community swimming pool and 80% of lemmys where pissing in that pool would I be unjust to be mad, my thought pattern here is by people supporting the subscription model will impacts everyone and it goes further than just more subscription only content, it impacts hardware where a lot of iot device and gaming device are less about serving the enjoyable media/useful features and more offering a portal to subscription services which impacts usabilities like rooting, custom ROMs, emulation, general tinkering, now every modern console, shady iot device has some kind of encrypted lock or circumventing that lock will also attract negative attention from corpos. At what point will consumer PCs start running locked down software with a locked bootloader.
Should we as consumers stop buying game pass, Disney plus, vibrating massarg rings, mill kits, cable TV. As to not incentives corporations.
I hope I’m not doom saying just general frustration and concern for what the future will hold. And I’d like to see what the general concus is on the subject
People when paying for a newspaper, professional journalism being absolutely vital to the health of the republic: Pfft fuck that
People when paying for a streaming service serving hot garbage direct to their eyeballs: Yay more Star Wars
Already burned by cable-TV’s massive surge in advertising, there was no way you were going to get the average consumer to put up with ads AND pay for an internet provider AND pay extra for content. Now that we’re also getting tracked everywhere by every marketer, it is increasingly hard to ask consumers to pay for content when the real money is selling eyeballs to marketers.
Who to blame? I’m going to blame legislators for reducing the upper tax brackets. In the 40s and 50s, the upper brackets were over 90%. That meant you could get rich, but not extravagantly filthy rich. As a basic philosophy, one could figure it as: someone making a massive excess in funds was probably exploiting something the government was either already providing or was going to have to pay for later, so… let’s just collect that revenue now. Note that during the same period, businesses were only taxed about 30-50% for the higher brackets, so if you owned the company, you might leave funds there, invest in the company itself (a write-off), and take a smaller salary since it would otherwise get eaten by taxes.
Anyway, if you have progressive taxes with extremely high rates on the upper end, then people (and companies) can’t amass the same power. They are less able to bribe and corrupt everything. The government has more funds for roads, schools, and enforcement agents for things like food-safety and port-controls. This does, of course, presume people have some reliable new sources that are reporting which government individuals are crooks and liars, and who has which of them in their back-pockets. Now that we’ve burned that all down, I’m not sure who is willing to give us a readable summary of what bills are being written, shelved, and voted on by whom – but we need that information to get in the hands of an educated populace who will vote for flawed-but-generally-honest people that will act on behalf of their constituents first rather than a handful of rich funders.
100% agree here. There is so much fud about taxes but if you look at our history, especially since reagan. tax cuts result in a worse economy and raising them improves it a lot for the modest increases we had.