FWIW, this is usually called buying either "life insurance" or a "life annuity," depending on whether you want to take a short or long position. The underwriters of such bets tend to be reticent about offering them to 3rd parties, though, for what are probably obvious reasons.
Not really a counterpoint, but interestingly there used to be a fairly widespread practice of corporations buying life insurance for low level employees. It was often called "Dead Peasant Insurance", and when the employee died the corporation benefited.
It never made an iota of economic sense -- if insurance underwriters are on the wrong end of that deal, they aren't doing their jobs very well -- but a number of large corporations would do it, and gleefully pocket the payouts when rank and file employees died.
For complex music, sure, but if I'm looking up a folk tune on, say, thesession.org, I personally think a plain-text format like ABC notation is easier to sight-read (since for some instruments, namely the fiddle and mandolin, I mainly learn songs by ear and am rather slow and unpracticed at reading standard notation).
But, Netflix did lose their content by choice! Way back in the 00s, you could pay Netflix something like $5 a month, and they would mail you physical DVDs of almost any movies you could ever want to watch. In fact, my recollection is that the physical library was generally much more extensive than the streaming library, at least through the early ‘10s.
Sure, they had the rug yanked out from under them with digital streaming, but they very deliberately put themselves into that position when they pivoted to streaming in the first place.
> In fact, my recollection is that the physical library was generally much more extensive than the streaming library, at least through the early ‘10s.
Because streaming licences are different from DVD licences for example. Hell, even 4k streaming licenses and lossless audio streaming licenses are different (and significantly more costly) than streaming 1080p and compressed audio.
> put themselves into that position when they pivoted to streaming in the first place.
As we all know physical DVD businesses are thriving
Expressing frustration at the pervasive tendency of technologists to look at everything, including art which is a reflection of peoples' subjective realities, with an "at-scale" lens, e.g., "let's collect ALL of it, and categorize it, and develop technologies to mash it all together and vomit out derivative averages with no compelling humanist point of view"
Well, that seems like a pretty reasonable thing to be pissed off about, thanks for taking the time to elaborate.
I think the overlap between the bureaucratic technologies developed by people who, by all accounts, are genuine lovers of the subjectivity and messiness of music qua human artistic production (e.g. the algorithmic music recommendation engines of the '00s and early '10s; public databases like discogs and musicbrainz; perhaps even the expansive libraries and curated collections in piracy networks like what.cd), and the people who mainly seem interested in extracting as much profit as possible from the vast portfolios of artistic output they have access to (e.g. all of Spotify's current business practices, pretty much), should probably prompt some serious introspection among any technologists who see themselves in that first category.
I read an essay a number of years back, which raised the point that, if you're an academic or researcher working on computer vision, no matter how pure your motives or tall your ivory tower, what do you expect that research to be used for, if not surveillance systems run by the most evil people imaginable. And, thus, shouldn't you share some of that moral culpability? I think about that essay a lot these days, especially in relation to topics like this.
We're very much trained to solve the most general case of any problem, for sensible reasons.
I first learned about this formulation of the rule from a case study in Alan Cooper's The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, where breaking the rule resulted in a much better user experience.
I think in that case, you, the hypothetical wage worker, got hoodwinked pretty effectively by the beancounters when they were able to get away with compensating you in contracts that are apparently worthless to you.
Do you think about the things you say, or is it just reflex?
Everyone working for a startup knows it may be 5 years to a liquidity event. We're all big boys, we work on uncertainty and expectation. If the government changes the rules halfway through, it's pretty brain-damaged to blame the beancounters for hoodwinking the employees, and not using their magic oracular powers to predict how the laws would change under their feet.
Do you not factor in the risk of government tax policy changing when you make large financial decisions? I certainly do (for instance, when I choose between traditional and Roth contributions for my 401k, or when I was purchasing a new car a few years back), and it doesn't strike me as a particularly difficult thing to do; I think I may have even done so the last time I was hired for a job which offered options (although that was quite a while ago and my memory is hazy).
More to the point, however, I think if 2 years is insufficient notice to get your tax situation in order w/r/t employee stock options, either your finances are enough of a mess, or you're frankly just so stupid, that you would not be helped much more with 5 years, or even 10 years, of advance notice. And at that point, you (the poster, not the hypothetical hapless employee) are just arguing that the government should never change its tax policy, which is just absurd.
I don't hang out in my hotel rooms either, but an iron, ironing board, and closet with hangars help me not look like a slob when I want to put on some nice clothes and go out for the evening.
It provides a nice interface for managing and editing tags that integrates well with other command-line tools and keeps your file system well-organized/up-to-date as you edit the tag contents. The batteries-included integration with datasources like musicbrains and discogs is nice, but, at least for me, beets is mainly a better tool for accomplishing the same tag and file janitoring I was doing with things like foobar2000 and eyeD3 a decade ago.
