All that’s happening here is a bunch of computer nerds have figured out how to get things for free

No, all that’s happened is that the state has convinced you that it’s reasonable to grant someone a monopoly on the expression of an idea that lasts something like 120 years. I bet you’ve never even stopped to question that, or that you even know what the length of the original copyright term is. I bet you don’t know the history of Hollywood, and how it ties in with copyright infringement. Or, how when the US was a new country it immediately ignored all the copyrights imposed by the British monarch.

Same thing as all the looters in California who know that they can steal up to $1,000 of merchandise from any brick and mortar store, with no consequences

Suuuuure… That happened. And now you’re conflating theft with copyright infringement again. They’re not at all the same.

and running out the door

Why would they be running out the door if there are no consequences? It’s almost as if there would be consequences if they were caught.

Is this the kind of world you want to live in?

You mean, the current world? The one that works according to the rules you’re advocating?

Steal what?

Movies, video games and music aren’t “products”.

If I want something, I need to pay for it. That’s how the world works.

Yes, it is. Isn’t that a shame? They’ve convinced you that that’s normal, when it isn’t. We could make the world a better place.

By “product” do you mean idea?

On one hand, sure, the British took a lot of things from other places when their empire spanned the globe. And, it sucks for places that had their stuff taken that it is no longer where it was.

On the other hand the British Museum is probably one of the safest places in the world for these things. The museum cares about preservation, knows how to do it, and has the funds to do it. And, while there’s undoubtedly corruption in the UK, there’s a very low chance that any of these things is going to disappear out of the museum and into some powerful person’s private collection.

Mohamed Salah is standing in front of a statue from Egypt, which was taken from Egypt to London. But, the British didn’t manage to take the Buddhas of Bamiyan from Afghanistan to London, and what happened? The Taliban blew them up. The British also didn’t fully loot Iraq when they controlled that territory, which meant that in the 2003 war the museum was looted but not by people who wanted treasures for a public museum. The poorer and less politically stable a country is, the greater the chances that their cultural treasures will be stolen or destroyed.

Despite the repression and corruption, Egypt is now probably stable enough that if any of these items were returned to Egypt, they would probably be well treated and put on display for Egyptians to see. The power of the military in Egypt and the level of corruption probably means a few small items would disappear from the museum, but the most important items would make it. But, is Egypt stable enough that the museum would be safe for another 20, 40, 80 years? I have my doubts. I do think London is probably safe for that long.

Maybe it’s just me, but I think the number one priority should be preserving these things for the future. Displaying them for the public should be a lower priority. If there are items like scrolls or clothing that are too delicate to even display behind a glass case, they should be stored away. I know that’s how they handle things at the Smithsonian, and I assume the British Museum is the same. Because of that, my bias is that the most important cultural items should be in the care of the richest museums in the world, even if it means that they’re not in the places they came from.

It’s a typo for YMCA.

Do you feel like YOU deserve to get paid for your work & effort & training & time?

No, I deserve to be paid what people have agreed to pay me. The work and effort and so-on is irrelevant.

The only thing media producers [Party A] is deprived of is a little bit of money

No, the media producers aren’t deprived of money, they’re deprived of control. They often do use that control to make money.

If hundreds & thousands of B’s are appreciating & consuming A’s media, the financial losses begin to add up

There are no losses. There may be missed opportunities to make sales, but that isn’t the same thing as losses.

A put so much work, effort, training, time, passion

Sure, “passion”. I’m sure that a lot of people pirate things passionately too.

As for how I’d feel? I’d probably feel bad if I depended on the current crooked copyright system to make money and then I wasn’t making as much money as I hoped. But, that doesn’t make the current crooked copyright system right. Similarly, if I were a manor lord in the middle ages and depended on peasants to work my land and the peasants ran away, I’d feel like I was being cheated. That doesn’t mean that that was a good system either.

Not sure why the North Atlantic matters to China.

Yeah, I’ve never checked it out, but a lot of content creators I like use it. I’d like to be able to support them with a subscription instead of using YouTube and blocking all their ads. For the moment, I can’t though.

But, I do wish there were a free video platform that competed with YouTube and that wasn’t controlled by a trillion dollar company. Because YouTube has no competition, they completely screw video creators when it comes to Content ID and copyright strikes. They also make the site suck for people who just want to watch videos, bombarding them with ads and so-on. The DMCA is a bad law, but what Google put into place on YouTube goes far beyond what the DMCA requires, and makes it way too easy for rich people / companies to suppress anything they don’t like, while making it difficult for their users. If YouTube had a real free-videos competitor, it would push both of them to offer features that users and/or video uploaders wanted.

Old-fashioned high seas pirating may have been stealing, but the modern copyright infringement form has never been stealing.

A key aspect of stealing is that you’re depriving the owner of some kind of property. While you have that property, they don’t, and they can’t use it. Copyright infringement doesn’t deprive the owner of anything. The only thing they lose is the government-granted monopoly over the right to distribute that “idea”. If copyright infringement is like an old fashioned crime, it’s like trespassing. The government granted someone the right to control who has access to some land, and a trespasser violates that law.

Spreading the weight around using toes doesn’t seem to be a useful strategy. It’s also not something that humans do. Human toes are not at the weight-bearing part of the foot. And, while I’m sure toes are somewhat involved in agility, having individual toes doesn’t seem to be. In fact, if you look at apes like gorillas and chimps, it’s pretty clear that our toes have been getting shorter and less important as we’ve been evolving as upright-walking creatures who don’t live in trees. Instead, the sole of the foot, which used to be much more like the palm of a hand, has been getting longer and sturdier.

If you have separate toes, you have multiple fragile things that can break or be torn off. If you have one mega-toe it’s going to be sturdy. That’s probably why the heaviest animals have the fewest / smallest toes.

Yeah, that’s fine. It’s just that in my financial position I can’t afford that.

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Except the price?

Depends on the state of your esophagus, doesn’t it? If it’s closed (which it mostly is) then your mouth and nose holes go to your lung cavity. Your anus is also part of a cavity that goes through your intestines all the way up your throat and stops at your esophagus.

Humans have multiple toes because our ape ancestors used their toes like fingers. Having multiple, separate toes is probably bad for survival unless you’re using toes to manipulate tools.

Animals that have distinct toes include apes, geckos, mice, raccoons and similar animals which need them to grip onto surfaces or to manipulate things. There are predators which have separate toes because they’re a place to mount claws: eagles, cats, etc. There are animals that have separate toes with webbing between for swimming. But, for a lot of animals, separate toes aren’t really useful, so they’ve evolved away: elephants, rhinos, giraffes, horses, cows, etc.

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I mean, humans run around on something that birds would consider knees, and stupidly try to support their entire body weight using only half their legs.

Or, just imagine what it says if they actually didn’t know about this last week. That would be even worse, it would mean that the team doing publicity and taking orders didn’t realize that they were half a year away from being done…

But, yeah, I can’t see how this doesn’t result in a disaster. They really do need to release something before then, something with this year’s DBs before they’re irrelevant. They could take the old game, update the DB and just sell it at half price. Or, they could sell it at full price but with a coupon for say 50% off the new game.

The November release date of Football Manager has always been awkward. The FIFA games all come out in late September / early October, right after the teams have been finalized. By the time Football Manager comes out, 1/3 of the season has already been played. IMO their best bet would be to release in the summer before the season starts and then do a post transfer deadline day patch. The initial release could use the squads as they existed at the end of the previous season – probably something a lot of people would want anyway because they could be in charge of all the summer transfers. In fact, I wonder if a release date of early June or something might be ideal.

My guess is that one major motivation for people to buy Football Manager is that they’re saying “I could do a better job of running my team than this bunch of idiots”. And, that feeling is probably strongest right at the end of a season. A Football Manager release at the end of the season might be ideal for people who want to spend the summer doing all the wheeling and dealing they wish their clubs would do well, as they wait for the season to start again.

If they think they can have the new Unity-based game ready and polished in March, just call it FM 26, release it before the season starts, and do a full update once the various transfer windows have all closed and the DBs are all updated. If they don’t do that, who’s going to buy FM 25 when FM 26 will have all the bugs fixed, the new season’s DBs, and is only a few months away?