Regards softwares and virtual content in general, piracy solves a big part of the problem, as it always did.
I've seen people calculating where I live how much you would have to pay in order to have access to every streaming apps, movies, music and every other digital stuff we consume daily, and they reached to the conclusion it would cost between 144,30$ - 180,38$ in a monthly basis. That is an absurd, considering minimum wage is about 270$.
And that is, to have access to old content people used to own on DVDs, for an example, and to subscription channels which display a huge number of ads along the day.
About everything else, you can still own your car, you can still own your house and you can still profit by renting it to someone else... The possibilities are many. Of course it's not easy and fast to save money, but we have to try making progress somehow. Don't imitate the masses. Draw your own way and avoid the technocrats consumerist's traps.
Yes. Absolutely yes.
When the legal option is half a minimum wage just to watch shows that used to be free with cable (which also sucked but at least you owned the box?) then piracy isn't even a moral question anymore. Piracy works for digital stuff because copying doesn't take anything from anyone right? You're not stealing a physical object. You're just refusing to pay rent on information. Which is good. I'm not arguing against it.
The problem is... you can't pirate a house. And the "own your house and rent it out" advice, maybe that works where you are but in most places I know the down payment alone is like 5-10 years of saving if you're lucky. And that's assuming rent, daily basis isn't already eating 60% of your paycheck.
So what happens is the people who already have things are able to use things to own more things. Everyone else is told just to be smarter about it. But what if the masses are trapped and the advice only works among people that were never really trapped to begin with?
Exactly, its the fact what happen in my country right now all becoming renters from land, water and anything we have some time easily claim owning by the country. Simple when your land have many potential from mineral, gold and oil if government get it become state property and you must leave without get return in accordance with the value and content in the land.
Ironic when imagining what happen right now, you have buy land most expensive price but one day later if government found the above kinds in your land easily you loss of ownership with your land. So need some one wake up and fight for bad regulation for the citizen how to make the government not easily claiming their ownership what have been the people ownership.
That is some bullshit, and in a way that I didn't even consider when I posted. I was talking more abstract about the whole rental economy thing but you're literally talking about the government just taking your land because they found something valuable under it.
How is that even legal? I mean I know it's legal because they wrote the laws to make it legal but how do people just accept that? What country is this occurring in? Genuinely curious because I'm wondering if this is one of those things that is going on everywhere but we only hear about it when it is somewhere else.
You're right, I have thought about this before. I live in a poor country where most salaries aren't enough, so most of my income comes from my online work. That's why this idea came to my mind: what if the internet were to go down one day?
I rent internet access from the government, which in turn rents internet infrastructure from another country or organization, which may then rent from a third organization and so on. In the end I'm an employee of the main company, and if they cut off the internet, all my income will cease.
This is just one real life example among hundreds of others ranging from the simplest aspects of our daily lives to much more complex matters.
You just made this so much more real.
Renting from the government who rents from another country who rents from... That's all the more bad because it's not just economic dependency it's geopolitical. There's so many points of failure. You are probably seeing the future better than people in places where the internet is more stable. Because it is not actually stable anywhere right? It's just some people haven't had it threatened yet so they think it's permanent.
I don't know if there is a good answer here honestly. Like what do you even do with that information? Diversify somehow? But, diversify into what when everything goes through the same infrastructure?
I get your point,indeed everything has turned to be on rent in this world, imagine countries with resources but still yet they don't have access or the control over where real money is been made. People work but value is being created somewhere else, that occurs on our daily lives also . Okay see the cars we're using, softwares and also the platforms we work with is all borrowed.
Why because all this don't belong to us, still yet people can't stop thinking on long term and I don't see reason why you build and make plans when you know that the rules will change someday and anytime? That's why decentralisation is an important stuff, that's not because it will make everyone wealthy but rather gives people the little knowledge of power over their career and future.
Yeah exactly this. The "knowledge of power" is actually the whole game. Because once you begin to see how it works you can't unsee it. And that changes everything even if nothing material changes.
Like you said why plan when the rules change. But the rules don't change for everyone at the same time. The people at the top know the changes are coming because they're the ones making them. They plan around it. They position themselves in advance of time.
The rest of us find out too late.
So decentralization is not about making everyone rich or putting everyone in equal power. That's never going to happen and anyone who promises that is selling something. What it does is to compress the information gap. You know when the rule changes closer to when they're happening instead of 6 months later when you're already screwed. That's not nothing.
Man, whatever you said, I agree with you. Because the idea of decentralization is giving power to every individual entity that is using it. But on the other hand, whatever we have in a centralized space is under someone else's custody, even though we own everything under this system totally. Well, sadly, our decentralized system is breaking down day by day due to changes in government regulations and rules. Now, you may wonder why i am saying this, so the reason is that you may also have noticed that governments are imposing tax on every person who is investing in cryptocurrecny or in bitcoin and to regulate in governments are asking exchanges about the users data and we know that they have to share it so that they can run thier service in these countris to make money from thier users.
Other than this, if we talk about the main point of this topic, then I used to think that in our country government started to impose taxes on every person who owns land and a house, and they have to pay taxes on each land and house. And I was thinking that it feels me like a rent what your topic title said.
Hold on though. You're right that crypto is being squeezed by governments with regulations and KYC and all that. But decentralization was never going to exist in a vacuum. Governments were always going to try and control it. That's what they do. That's their whole job.
If they are going to try, will they succeed? Land is physical. You can't move it. You can't hide it. The government knows exactly where it is, who's on it. So, yes, they can tax it, and if you don't pay they can take it.
But cryptos are slippery. Governments can regulate exchanges sure. They can dictate KYC at the on-ramps and off-ramps. But they can't control the protocol itself. They can't bring down a genuinely decentralized network. They can make it quite difficult to use but they can't kill it.
...Well, sadly, our decentralized system is breaking down day by day due to changes in government regulations and rules...
I don't think that's quite right. The centralized interfaces to decentralization are failing. Exchanges, custodial wallets, all that stuff. But the real decentralized infrastructure? Still running. Still outside their control.
Property tax situation is different. There's no escape hatch. You can't self-custody your land in such a way that it is invisible to the state. You're stuck.
With crypto at least there's still a choice. It's getting harder to exercise that choice but it's still there. Most people won't bother because it is an inconvenience. But the option is there.
