[–] 15 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

Just the other day I watched a neat video by the Feral Historian in which he argued the theory that the Mirror Universe is not actually a traditional "alternate timeline" that diverged at a particular point in history and just developed differently from there. He argues that it's a more amorphous psychoactive kind of place that is "recreated" whenever visitors enter it based on those visitors themselves. I rather liked it.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    As someone who utterly loathes Trump, I'm hoping he manages to get this eyesore built.

    America needs permanent, prominent reminders of what they did.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago (4 children)

    In a socialist system the "wealthy cunts" are not in charge. If they are then the label "socialist" isn't really correct any more.

    Though in some circles the label "socialist" actually corresponds to "a political structure or philosophy that changes based on context but always means whatever I don't like", in which case I guess go ahead and use it. I find this definition to be somewhat less useful, however.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 days ago

    If they're stored properly (locked in a safe, with the ammunition locked up separately somewhere else) then they're not particularly dangerous.

    I don't have any guns in my house, but if I did and they were properly stored I'd be far more concerned about someone grabbing a hammer or other tool from my workshop room and killing me with that instead.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    A mass migration won't happen until they actually do something tangible to drive it. And it'll have to be something pretty big, look at how services like Reddit continue to maintain their user base because for most people it's still working fine.

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  • [–] 26 points 4 days ago

    The original duration of copyright was a flat 14 years, with a single additional 14 year extension if the copyright holder applied for it. So 28 years in total. It turns out that after 28 years the vast, vast majority of copyrighted works have already earned essentially all of the money that they will ever earn. Most of them go out of print forever before that point. It's only a rare few works that end up becoming "classics" and spawning "franchises" that last beyond that point. We're sacrificing the utility of the vast bulk of what should be in the public domain for the sake of making those occasional lucky hits into cash cows. There's a great paper by Rufus Pollock, Forever Minus a Day? Calculating Optimal Copyright Term, wherein he uses rigorous economic analysis to calculate that the optimal duration of copyright for generating the maximum value for society is 15 years with a 99% confidence interval extending up to 38 years. So remarkably the original law hit the right duration almost exactly through sheer happenstance.

    In an earlier paper he also determined that the optimal duration of copyright actually decreases as it becomes easier to distribute work, perhaps somewhat counterintuitively.

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