It made me wonder, is supporting an author on Patreon ever a "DONATION"?
If you derive satisfaction from a product, expect someone to produce it, and support that process, then it is a purchase regardless of what someone calls it.
You're completely correct. It's a voluntary tip, but it still counts toward a person's income. It's totally different than donating to a 501(c)(3) charity.
* $10.00 sale -> $0.80 Patreon + 0.59 Fee, $0.00 to Apple, $6.89 to creator, $1.72 to gov't [FED]
* $10.00 sale -> $0.80 Patreon + 0.59 Fee, $0.00 to Apple, $6.02 to creator, $2.58 to gov't [FED+10% State]
IAP + default price bump
* $14.50 sale -> $1.15 Patreon + 0.00 Fee, $4.35 to Apple, $7.19 to creator, $1.80 to gov't [FED]
* $14.50 sale -> $1.16 Patreon + 0.00 Fee, $4.35 to Apple, $6.29 to creator, $2.70 to gov't [FED+10% State]
Users who care about the cost increase will go to the website. The others will pay in app and be stoked that they can just go to one place to cancel any iOS subscription. If they use their Apple Card, they can literally click any transaction in the Wallet app to see exactly what sub they were charged for.
> stoked that they can just go to one place to cancel any iOS subscription
So much of these anti-console anti-appliance threads boil down to:
Value-adding experiences consumers want enough to pay for (such as peace of mind that anything bought here can be cancelled no questions asked) should be prohibited, because I don't want to offer that experience.
In reality it does often offer perks (seeing creative work before release, exclusive behind the scenes stuff, etc.) so I think you can see that as a purchase, no?
We probably should tax churches, since many churches require tithing and offer a pretty outstanding benefit for membership. It's hardly a donation when you're donating to an establishment central to your everyday life.
It's basically a social club that gets a pass on taxes because they believe in magic.
Isn't patreon basically always "pay in order to access (current and future) paywalled content"? And while there may not be (or may be) a promise of future content, there is current content.
If I give money to the apache foundation am I "buying" software or donating? Some of the artists I support post everything they make outside the paywall and just use patreon as a convenient tip jar.
That's how we do things with sqlitebrowser.org as well. The Patreon donations are helpful contribution from our users, paying for things like domain names, certificate renewals, new hardware (eg for development), and so on.
We don't gate anything behind the payments, and it's extremely unlikely we'd ever even consider doing so.
I'm under the impression that "post everything they make outside the paywall [simultaneously or prior to posting it inside the paywall]" is not the norm. I'm sure there are exceptions to the rule of course, but are they actually common?
A quick search doesn't suggest that the apache foundation uses patreon...
The semantics of the word "DONATION" are frankly irrelevant to the discussion.
Conceptually, why should a "donation" be any different than a "payment" in regards to the Apple tax? Regardless of their current legal agreement attempts to disambiguate these, they are conceptually quite the same. In one case you receive a good, in another you receive good-will.
Should Apple be entitled to 30% of these voluntary payments? Some of you will say "yes", but I'd bet pretty strongly the vast majority of the public would say "no".
And legislation will follow eventually, in my opinion, despite the US government/courts moving very slowly here.
Continued acts like these will only move up the timeline and increase the number of lawsuits which will eventually tip against Apple.
>Should Apple be entitled to 30% of these voluntary payments?
Apple believes so, because Apple is so arrogant as to think that the payment wouldn't have occurred had it not been for their hard work on the platform.
It's false, of course. It'd be like Bell Telephone asking for a cut of your profits because you negotiated a business deal over the phone. Or the cell phone carriers forcing you to pay them $7 for a 20-second ringtone.
Why would Apple have to do consider what another company makes? What's that got to do with anything.
Not trolling - and I think Apple is greedy here. Still I need pointing out how your arguments is not logical.
This is like saying you can only sell your product for a % of someone else profit.
Apple should be allowed to charge whatever they want - as long as they don't have monopoly on the process. That is the crux of the problem here. Monopoly is the problem not the percentages.
While Apple’s monopolistic practices should not be legal, it’s simultaneously true that Apple should not be able to inject itself into arrangements like this.
It should absolutely illegal for a company to tax your revenues like this.
Let's assume, for the sake of discussion, all parties involved voluntarily want to give Apple 30%. Why should that be illegal?
It seems it only becomes a problem when there is external pressure that where accepting the giving of giving 30% to Apple is seen as the best of a bad situation. But that's what anti-monopolistic efforts are supposed to avoid.
This argument is a poor foundation for legal reasoning. Suppose a guy wants to be a slave? Shouldn’t he have the right to be enslaved? Suppose a guy wants to sell his organs? Shouldn’t he have the right to sell his organs?
Well, no, society is much better off with these things blocked off. There are immensely perverse incentives created.
The main one here is just straight up collusion because there’s not many distributors by nature. It’s dumb as hell that steam takes as much as it does. It’s not helped by clauses about not charging less elsewhere even if the fees are lower which should also be illegal
Some of the things you list are probably illegal because it is challenging to obtain informed consent. Especially where the repercussions are irreversible so it is more about avoiding exploitation rather than imposing a standard of what is acceptable behavior.
It is challenging to obtain informed consent when a company acting as the middleman between you and your customers changes their terms even if it is theoretically possible try and convince your customers to change middlemen.
> Suppose a guy wants to be a slave? Shouldn’t he have the right to be enslaved?
Sure. Why not? Typically society would only be concerned with the servitude becoming involuntary. Thus the right to be enslaved would be expected to also come the right to end enslavement at will. That said, in most jurisdictions marriage dissolution is happy to uphold involuntary servitude so we're not entirely consistent here.
> Suppose a guy wants to sell his organs?
Likewise, society might take issue with it because of its once and done nature. Decide that selling your organs was a bad idea and don't want to do it anymore? Too bad. You are already dead. However, relatedly, things like the sale of blood often is legally accepted as you can stop providing blood at any time if you find the association is no longer working for you.
Aside from the monopolistic considerations, the 30% offer to Apple would normally be acceptable to society because, like blood, one can stop offering it in the future should they no longer find it to be desirable. If it were a contract that states that you will pay 30% and on all future transactions for the rest of your life, even if you stop liking the idea, then society would undoubtedly take issue with it. But that in no way has any relationship to what is being talked about here.
Now, the monopolistic considerations are not typically accepted by society, but, indeed, we have gotten pretty lazy in doing anything about it.
Like, the labour law? Volunteering to be a slave isn't labour. In fact, income is not even a concern of society. Look at income data sometime. A not insignificant portion of the population realize negative income. All perfectly legal.
It's not illegal. You can donate money to Apple whenever you want. The issue is not that you're giving money to Apple, it's that Apple can force itself as a middleman.
> it's that Apple can force itself as a middleman.
Sure, which it can do because of the monopolistic position it has entrenched itself with. If that were cleaned up, it would no longer be in a position to do that. But the other commenter doesn't agree with you. He says that is an entirely different problem.
It's not a monopoly, though. Strictly speaking, there are markets where Apple is far from a monopoly, and yet this is still true there. The issue is that Apple is weaponizing laws and limiting consumer freedom. Apple is being anti-competitive and abusive, even when it doesn't have a monopoly.
Well, then, don’t pay it. Pay yourself for the service instead. Nothing stopping you from being the service provider if there is no monopoly.
Is suspect you will soon find a monopoly, though, and that you’re merely confusing some external interpretations with what is defined within the context of this particular.
I technically could. Nothing stops me from self-signing apps or using websites only. It's just massively inconvenient, due to anti-competitive behaviours. In the strictest sense of the term, even by a narrow construction it's not a monopoly. The problem is really anti-competitive and anti user practices that makes competitors unfairly disadvantaged
> Nothing stops me from self-signing apps or using websites only.
That is clearly not the same thing. Why don't you do the exact same thing? I mean, other than the monopolistic efforts holding you back.
(I recognize that you are trying to bring your own monopolistic definition to the table, and while I'm sure it has merit as a better definition, I fail to understand what value you think there is in trying to change the subject? Why not just stick to the topic in progress like everyone else, even if you don't love everything about it? The rest of us probably don't love it either, but that's not a good reason to toss the ball to the side in an effort to disrupt play because it isn't the brand of ball you have a preference for.)
I'm not trying to use my own monopolistic definition. I'm using the generally accepted one, which cares about markets and where you can't narrowly define them, but you instead have to look at what services/goods are provided for what purpose. It's like saying that Sony has a monopoly on PS5 games distribution, it wouldn't really fly, though it might if there was a market where PS5 games were 80% of games.
The point I'm making isn't that Apple is doing good here - I absolutely hate it, actually. The point I'm making is that the issue isn't that there's a monopoly, strictly speaking, but that Apple engages in anti-competitive and anti-consumer practices which are harmful even without a monopoly.
> The point I'm making is that the issue isn't that there's a monopoly
I made the same mistake at one point, so I feel for you[1], but what was actually said was "monopolistic". That is not the same as a monopoly. One can act in a monopolistic manner without actually having a monopoly.
[1] But I don't feel for, and frankly find it incredibly strange, that you are now doubling down on your mistake after it was brought to your attention that you were speaking outside of the context of discussion.
The top-level comment was talking about a monopoly, and you talked about Apple having a monopolistic position. In markets where Apple is in not in monopolistic positions, nor is it a monopoly, the problem is the anti-consumer and anti-competitive practices that enable it to put itself between market participants, not the position. Even if Apple doesn't seek a monopoly, the app distribution practices are the problem and would lead to the same undue value extraction.
I'm taking monopolistic position to mean a grossly dominant market position short of a monopoly. If you meant it as engaging in "monopolistic competition", that's another concept entirely that's irrelevant here. I also took monopolistic behaviour to mean behaviour seeking to monopolize.
Using the word "product" is begging the question. You could just as easily say:
"If you derive satisfaction from an series of artistic works, and you know the person who creates those artistic works, and you decide to send money to support that person..."
-----
edit: and this is closer to the reality, because plenty of people subscribe to someone's patreon (or donate to them in other ways) for "products" that they have already consumed, or because they want other people to consume those products.
For an example of the latter: when financing journalists with mostly or completely open newsletters on substack. People generally aren't paying journalists because they want to read exciting stories. They're paying journalists because they want certain stories and types of stories to be investigated and written. They're not people who are paying to consume.
when you donate, you are not the one who personally receives the benefit, right? if you donate a car, you are not also using that car every once in a while.
to me that is the main distinction, who is benefiting from making that monetary contribution
otherwise, it is just an issue of timing, did I pay up front or later after a tried and liked the product
> when you donate, you are not the one who personally receives the benefit, right? if you donate a car, you are not also using that car every once in a while.
If you donate to a church, you often also enjoy the perks that that church offers, paid for by donations.
If you donate to a public radio station, you probably also enjoy listening to that radio station.
I absolutely personally benefit when I donate to a web comic artist and they are able to continue making comics that I enjoy reading via my RSS feed. I don't consider this a purchase.
It possibly could be, if they were organized as a non-profit that paid them a reasonable salary (which is probably an overambitious goal for most authors). After all, IKEA is a non-profit.
Comparing almost any corporate structure to IKEA is like comparing a children's alphabet book to the tower of babel. IKEA is a non profit owned by for profits partially owned by non-profits owned by dutch companies that license IP from Irish companies (who license it from IoS (IKEA of Sweden) in a small Swedish village called älmhult) owned by non-physical, non-personal entities that are "legal residents in Switzerland" that might or might not be controlled by certain people named Kamprad (in non-exclusive partnerships with other interested parties that might be controlled by companies owned by said dutch companies). And after that we have the whole ROIG, INKGA, etc. structures.
Semantically, would The Church also qualify, (if it weren't already legally exempted)? You take yourself to the church, talk to the church people, they tell you things, you think and behave in Their mental framework, you feel better in your life, deriving satisfaction.
Oftentimes a 501(c)3's receipt will include a "fair market" value of whatever benefit the donor got. When religion gets reclassified as 501(c)3, I wonder how they will do receipts.
Officient salaries / (number of services * average participation) = FMV
This is an nuanced topic that might not be worth going into. The IRS automatically considers a church as tax exempt under 501(c)3. However, churches do not have to apply for that status (although some/many do), and do not have to follow IRS annual filing rules.[0]
Many times, I met people who genuinely believed they were super close and about to achieve a "huge" breakthrough.
In each case, the scientists themselves, in their minds, were absolutely convinced they were on the brink of unfathomable achievements: curing Alzheimers, or some cancers etc.
Particularly true for the scientists in biomedical startups - they were like Mulder from X-Files; they all wanted (and were desperately eager) to believe. Like Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, I think she completely believed her own exaggerations and BS - at some point, fact and fiction merge.
Thus I've become extraordinarily skeptical of articles like these.
The issue that people have here is whether being a pain-killer merely masks the disease temporarily and leads to people ignoring the problem and hence aggravating the disease even more. Pain is usually a signal of a real and valid problem.
I am merely explaining what the issue at hand is - I am not saying that is what the proposed medicine does. Another way to say it, is the compound treating the symptom or the problem - or perhaps both.
Imagine you have a hernia that hurts and you take medicine that masks that pain, do you still have hernia?
If a syntax such as f"{variable}" is already a feature - and turned out to be a popular one - why shouldn't we be able to add our own custom "f"s? Because that is what this is about. It might make generating output even simpler.
I applaud the idea and am pleased to see that Python keeps innovating!
What was wrong with the standard way to write function application?
Python is sufficiently dynamic that an implementation of greet(...) can look up one level to resolve {name}, right? That's why Python will forever run like a dog. Might as take advantage of it to build such capabilities in user space.
This crap is going to end up inside f-strings inside tag-strings inside f-strings inside... We have a language. Don't extend it to express what it's perfectly capable of expressing already.
Your reply appears to indicate that you do not properly understand the new proposed feature. It is most certainly not just about dropping two parentheses.
> Tag strings extract more than just a callable from the Interpolation. They also provide Python string formatting info, as well as the original text.
The feature is akin to moving print from a keyword to a function. That change also made a huge difference in that it unified the output stream and avoided having undefined objects like a "print" keyword.
Here, you can think of the feature as moving an "f" string from a hardcoded, predetermined definition to a generalizable and programmable behavior.
If "f" strings have become so popular so quickly it means they addressed a pressing need. It is logical to assume that a programmable version of an "f" string would be even more useful.
(PEP co-author here.) You've described it well. As the "How to teach it section" emphasizes, we'd like consumers of tag functions to just think of it as an f-string with other stuff that happens before evaluation.
From their POV, inside the quotes, what you know about f-strings, you know here as well.
Why could you not know these things without a language feature?
> ...other stuff that happens before evaluation...
A greet(string) function could parse the string and resolve the names itself:
parsed = parser(string)
resolved = resolver(parsed)
return formatter(resolved)
If you hate boilerplate, make the first two steps into a decorator.
A PEP introducing a grand unified theory of magic (tag strings) isn't inherently better than the status quo of some (f-string) magic. Less magic is better.
Frame hacks with sys._getframe necessarily imply dynamic scope not lexical scope. Dynamic scope does not work with nested functions, including comprehensions. See this issue with the htm library, https://github.com/jviide/htm.py/issues/11
Maybe that cost is low. I don't know, but putting out a number with no context seems to be for shock value only, not realistics.
How much would it be if they met doctors?
A new high school in the US costs 100 million dollars. It seems they build 200 such schools per year. All of a sudden we have a spending of 20 billion on just new high schools each year. Is that too much or too little?
The $15B isn't the cost of the visits, it's the nurses adding on extra billable diagnosis to the patients to bill Medicare outside of their doctor's reviews/knowledge. This was largely just a way to collect higher payments from Medicare.
> Sixty percent of UnitedHealth home visits generated at least one new revenue-producing diagnosis of a condition no doctor was treating, the analysis showed.
I don't think you are understanding the mechanism here. This is not costing $15B because they are consuming $15B worth of health care.
Medicare calculates what it costs to cover an average beneficiary by region, age, etc, and then private insurance companies can sell Medicare Advantage (MA) plans to people in place of standard Medicare coverage, and Medicare reimburses them for providing that coverage. Medicare is essentially saying "it costs $10K/year to provide standard Medicare benefits, if you guys think you can do it cheaper we'll give you the $10K as long as you provide the exact same coverage".
What are they reimbursed is also risk-adjusted so that if any given plan covers a sicker than average population, they get reimbursed more.
What is happening here is these plans are adding superfluous and questionable medical diagnoses to drive up that risk score and get higher payments from Medicare. The theory behind it is if having condition X means you cost an average of 10% more than an average beneficiary, and every person who buys an MA plan from a given company has condition X, they get reimbursed 1.1X the average. They are adding these dubious diagnoses to drive that number ever higher.
What this has led to in practice is MA costs the government much more than standard Medicare. And this is despite the fact that MA plans tailor their offerings to attract a healthier than average population, but then they goose the risk score so the financial effect is the opposite.
I admit I don't understand the mechanism - but this just sounds like they created an a flawed system that has nothing to do with nurses or patient or even health care.
An improperly devised system that can be easily circumvented.
It is not relevant to the subject matter of health care, it is not different than corn subsidy or whatever.
It's not a flawed system, it simply needs to be managed and rules need to be enforced. It may very well be true that private insurers could provide coverage for cheaper than standard Medicare. I have personally worked with health insurers who were able to outperform benchmarks by implementing care management programs, reaching out to insureds to make sure they are taking medications and getting ongoing care from their physician, etc. They can also develop close relationships with local providers, and/or have their own captive providers like the HMO model. It's not all free market dogma that there is potential for savings there, because standard Medicare is somewhat of a convoluted mess that needs modernizing.
But instead of doing that, they realized that they could just pressure providers to up-code and goose the risk score and make more money.
MA is relatively new. We needed many years of experience to see how the market would play out. But now we've known for a decade or so that it is clearly costing way more than it should and offering no additional benefits to justify the cost. Unfortunately we have not yet had the political will to fix it, and the handful of massive companies making bank on it will fight tooth and nail to keep the gravy train rolling.
The lesson from MA is that people will figure out how to game the rules, so we need to be reactive and flexible and able to update the rules accordingly. But because health care is a complicated and personal subject, people are wary of change, and we have very little political will to fix this. This will get even harder with the recent Chevron decision, which will serve to make it even harder for CMS to fix the regulation of MA without new legislation.
I'll simplify it for you: The government pays health care providers for providing healthcare. It is very easy to defraud the government by billing for fake work, so fraud is common and costly.
The actual details are irrelevant. There are some extra steps involved, but functionally it's the same as a nurse sending a bill that says "I treated patient X for condition Y" and the government going "Sounds good, here's some taxpayer money"
This has nothing to do with treatment at all. Quite the opposite in fact, it is merely a diagnosis, for the sole purpose of increasing the risk score. If the person had been treated for the condition there would be no need for the diagnosis.
United Health Care and others have figured out that if you go to someone's home, dubiously diagnose them with a condition that Medicare has deemed expensive to cover, Medicare will send them more money to provide health insurance for that person, whether or not they actually have the condition or ever receive treatment for it.
ETA to make it explicit with an exaggerated example: UHC gets say 10K/year from the govt to give you health insurance. Then UHC sends a nurse to your house who shines a flashlight in your ear and says "you have diabetes". Now UHC gets 15k/year from the govt to give you health insurance.
This is not bureaucracy, it is fraud. They sold it as a way to save the government money, claiming that private insurers could do it more efficiently than Medicare. And then what actually happened was it costs more, because they fraudulently gamed the system.
This is fraud, not poor regulations. Insurance companies are misdiagnosing for the sole purpose of collecting more income. These people do not have these conditions. Many of these conditions are very rare and Medicare Advantage diagnosis rates are far above normal.
As far as I know schools provide free lunches to children that need it.
In my area it is a school policy that a kid would not be denied food even if they had no money in their account - and every place I lived had organizations that would eagerly step up to address such a problem if and when it manifested.
For what it is worth, during COVID and a few years after, in my state every kid got free lunch in school regardless of their income.
I'm pretty sure the parents have to fill something for their children to have lunch, and I'm pretty sure the parents were too gone to care.
I met the teacher following a photograph who tried to document the opioid epidemic, crica 2018 (we were young and naive, video is probably the only communication medium that's worth anything when you're independent, photography is harder), while I kayaked/hiked/rafted/climbed everywhere I could for the two month I was there. I think she work for a magazine now. And I'm still convinced West Virginia is only lacking a huge lake or a sea to be the best place on earth.
Opinions about food are full of excessive generalizations that are of little help.
There is no logical reason to expect that seeds, in general—carrying the energy for new life, containing the most valuable and precious resources—would constitute the "worst" food ingredient known to mankind.
It's more than just personal preference. There are environments that make it easier to get some kind of physical activity, and others that make it very hard.
Weather, proximity to parks/recreational areas, convenient public transit, and dense neighborhoods can contribute to increasing physical activity without someone actually wanting to "like being active".
There are local/regional/national differences in physical activity and health that are not merely explained by personal preference.
Once you are an expert at any topic, you can figure many outcomes from very small amounts of information. That does not mean the outcome was biased or flawed etc.
Is it difficult to believe that a judge would be able to predict at least some outcomes from a single paragraph?
All it takes is to predict above random chance to have a statistically significant effect.
This reads almost verbatim as my conception of bias.
"Once you've abandoned principled, wholistic reasoning for your pet heuristics, you can figure out many outcomes from the inputs to your pet heuristics".
But in this case the testing is given different amounts of time.
The thing you think works gets less testing time than the thing you aren't so sure works.
Thus the thing you think works is more likely to pass, just because you are subjecting it to less tests.
Your bias (whether you think the thing works) is having an effect on the outcome.
Good testing, as with good judging should involve 0 preconceptions.
Yes it could be that the judge has a good eye for how long a topic will take, but leaving less time for the facts to come out, necessarily means the facts are less likely to come out.
Sorry to say, but I think you have put the wagon ahead of the horse.
Being able to predict an outcome has nothing to do with the process of deriving the outcome, and it has nothing to do with bias.
There may be many signals that correlate with an outcome. If you are out of shape and move ploddingly, you probably can't do a triple axel even though you believe you can. Is that prediction biased?
Bias would be if you could demonstrate that predicting the outcome has influenced their decision-making.
Your point is that there would be some things an expert would see, and then judge to be highly improbable.
While this point can inform our thinking, it is the lesser point that exists within a bigger issue:
First - This is a court of law, not the court of public opinion, or processes. There is an expectation of exactness, and of a fair, unbiased and attentive hearing of the facts.
Second- While I don’t know what a triple axel is, I have seen people who seem utterly out of shape dance with grace, and people who appear to be incredibly fit, turn out to be frauds.
In this scenario, I would say that the assumption that each case is similar, is not valid.
I will grant that it becomes human to behave this way though.
Developing that sort of expertise requires getting clear and—ideally—timely feedback on the quality of your decisions. Do parole judges get that?
I'm sure they get feedback on whether their decisions are consistent with what other judges would have decided, but that's qualitatively different from feedback on whether those decisions were fair or right. If anything, that is the kind of feedback that would propagate biases in the system! You would end up becoming an expert on making consistent, defensible decisions, even if those decisions were consistently and defensibly bad.
> Is it difficult to believe that a judge would be able to predict at least some outcomes from a single paragraph?
It's difficult to believe that the decision should be made quickly. When making decisions about the trajectory of someone's life, they should be made with care. Having a system that removes snap judgements and bias is important, and I would say that even a quick-scan and re-ordering of documents is a form of bias.
In general I agree with your attitude - however my sympathy is limited by my “lived experience” of interacting with those in the criminal justice system. Most of them belong right where they are - regardless of what the brain dead politico class has embraced.
1) Most people charged with a crime these day are usually guilty of it. The public has made it pretty clear they would rather see no one charged if the crime is a legit whodunit -- no one desires to see innocent people arrested and charged just to give the impression of safety. Prosecutors, and downwards (police) feel pressure to only file and prosecute cases that are legitimately believed to be of truth regarding the suspect. That said, you are innocent until proven guilty. The burden of proof is on the state. Even if we can mostly feel that you did it, if it can not be put before a jury to return a guilty verdict, you are not to face penalty in our society (mostly; ignore OJ's civil case... that's a pretty rare exception to be honest).
2) I understand why judges seem automatic -- but remember this: in a criminal trial (minus your option to do a bench trial), you are found guilty or not-guilty by a jury of your (location) peers. The judge has his own opinion, but he is restricted based on the guilty/not-guilty finding of the jury, and sometimes state/federal sentencing guidelines. Of course there are prick judges who SENTENCEMAXXXX people just to be an asshole - no one with an ounce of common sense will endorse that. In general, I trust and expect judges to apply their experience of both law and life in determining what is the appropriate penalty after someone is found guilty.
Well my experience is a solicitor pleading guilty on my behalf which isn't generally allowed in this jurisdiction.
So no trial, no presumption of innocence, and absolutely no interest in anything other that processing 'criminals' as quickly as possible.
So your comment
"Most people charged with a crime these day are usually guilty of it"
May well be true. the issue is that it is self reinforcing, most people are guilty, so the system treats you as probably guilty, so the people that aren't guilty don't get the protections theyre supposed to have the right to.
If you derive satisfaction from a product, expect someone to produce it, and support that process, then it is a purchase regardless of what someone calls it.