With a half-hour commute, you're dropping at least $250/mo on gas (more if you use proper mileage calculations and include car insurance costs) and spending an additional 32 hours of your time in unpaid travel for work. If your hourly rate is $15/hr, that means another potential $380 in earnings a month out the door.
Since that $15/hr brings you in $2600 before taxes, that means in this scenario you're spending roughly 10% of your gross income on travel expenses, and losing out on a potential income increase of 14%.
This is why, despite the fact they were a great company I had thought about joining for years, last year I turned down an offer that was a 50% raise from my previously held position.
I got the same amount in an offer from a separate company that enabled work from home, and when I did the math, the value between the two was striking - it was the clear winner, despite the fact that the first company only wanted me to travel across town.
I don’t think this is even the full picture, though. The cost savings from working remotely for me have been largely unnoticed (but objectively there).
The real value, for me, has been increased autonomy and freedom from the office culture and overbearing bosses. It was amazing how my managers were suddenly ambivalent about my work performance once they weren’t able to constantly observe me at my desk.
Definitely - the personal benefits go far beyond the cost savings. Just pointing out that at the end of the day, what they're doing when they ask you to return to the office is asking you to take a very real pay cut and add unpaid hours to your daily schedule.
Also more of you count in car maintenance and potential babysitting for slightly older children who can be alone for a couple hours after school, but are too young to truly be alone.
I also feel like people just get back a lot of time to themselves by not having to commute. My husband gets another hour at least with me and our children every day, maybe an hour and a half. Instead of only seeing them for a quick dinner and getting them ready for bed, they actually have that time to hang out and play. It’s things like that, that are invaluable.
The only way they win this battle is if they cover travel expenses per mile. I’m supposed to spend money to keep your stupid shitbird company afloat? Yeah, get fucked.
Traveling has become rather cost-effective. It’s alright if it gets covered but what really should get covered is the time it takes to travel. I live relatively close to work, but if I went to office that’s an extra 1-2 hours a day I spend specifically for work purposes. The cost of time, at least for me, is significantly higher than the actual cost of travel.
It seems like some people are finally starting to wise up to the fact that work begins not when you arrive at the workplace, but the moment you stop doing what you want to do and start doing what you have to do in order to perform the job. That means it starts before you walk out the door, as soon as you start ‘getting ready for work’.
The simplest metric is this: would you be doing it if you were on vacation/weren’t working? If yes, then it’s not work. If no, then it’s work.
My company is 8 to 5 and on the days I go in office i just spend so much more time doing the unpaid mandatory things that it’s just not worth it even for much more pay. Not to mention it’s far more exhausting and worse for my mental health to be in an open office surveillance ward rather than a home office
Just an example number for the math. And actually my company has a bunch of customer service reps that work from home at that rate when they start. It's more common than you may think.
Steve in support would like you to know that he wishes to make 15 an hour after a few promotions. And that if you just think about it, getting 50 bucks worth of more services is smarter than cancelling your account.
My company paid over 10 million dollars for Infosys to implement oracle cloud.
It has been 3 years of complete abject torture, misery, and failure.
Infosys is an army of completely clueless, unqualified, and incompetent people on a revolving door.
It's like they make it a point to NEVER meet the requirements. They always find some convoluted round about lengthy manual process for everything they do.
I have gotten to the point where any time I am roped into an Infosys project, I will do nothing but ask to see the code, and therein is the problem, even their most "seasoned senior developer" can't produce the code because it doesn't exist.
They use janky point and click applications to "write code" for them, shove the code I to the oracle instance, break all of the existing code doing so, and repeat.
My company is a few years into an Infosys partnership. From the first meeting, we had people disappointed. All this time later we're behind on every project, and spend more time arguing about payments and KPIs than actually getting work done.
It's easy to say your KPIs are green when you don't measure anything of value, and really easy to say we owe you for services when you have no proof of services rendered.
To learn they're pretty anti-human and profit driven from the top down is just icing on the cake
Having attempted to set up a paid infrastructure on Oracle and not being able to because their backend systems are shit and the support people there are idiots, I’d have to agree. I couldn’t get my tenant ID associated with a support contract, even after a continuous week of exploring every support option and talking to support rep after support rep on phone and chat. I just wound it up and moved on.
At this point I would consider a return-to-office mandate at my job to be a massive pay cut. It’d be the equivalent to spending an extra 2-3 hours a day working (because that’s what the total commute would be), plus money on vehicle upkeep. If they weren’t willing to couple it with a ~40% raise, or with letting me reduce my hours worked by 10-15 per week to compensate for the commute time, I’d quit before the change in policy went into effect, no question.
But people still overwhelmingly prefer at least a few days per week at home, arguing that physical office presence is more trouble than it’s worth and is rarely necessary to complete a task.
If that required data and research to realize, they’re simply out of touch or stupid. More likely this is just an excuse for not realizing they couldn’t bully people as effectively as they’d hoped.
It’d be the equivalent to spending an extra 2-3 hours a day working (because that’s what the total commute would be), plus money on vehicle upkeep
Maybe this is one of the reasons I actually prefer going to the office. For me, it’s only 15 minutes by metro.
No additional cost, very little wasted/lost time, and I actually enjoy being able to draw a line between work and life by putting them in different physical spaces.
Perhaps it also helps that my managers encourage people to work from wherever they feel they’re the most productive. It’s nice to know that I have the option to work from home without having to explain myself.
what WFH has really brought to light is how miserable car-dependency and suburban sprawl is.
The problem isn’t going to work, the problem is that for most people going to work entails needing to drive a car for an hour, and it’s actually insane that people have just blithely accepted that until now.
Nah, being at work was driving me towards a nervous breakdown. Open office + management that liked to just drop in at my desk uninvited and without a heads up had me an absolute wreck.
I did not handle the panopiticon well.
You could place me next door to the office, and it would have been the same.
A few years ago 1 Ruble = 0.015 USD this was pretty consistent for a while. Now 1 Ruble = 0.010 USD this has fluctuated pretty wildly.
The fluctuation is far more important than the actual number. Nobody cares if 1 Ruble = $1 or $1000 as long as you can rely on it to be that next week and next year. But the fact that you have no idea how far down (or up) it will go means that people aren’t going to want to rely on holding any currency in Russia.
No one wants to hold Rubles when the entire Western world is deploying extreme sanctions against Russia, especially when the West created, dominates, and manipulates the global financial system.
Vladimir Putin’s luck may be running out now that the ruble plunged below one cent, the lowest level against the U.S. dollar since the early days of his war in Ukraine.
The Russian president, who briefly faced down a coup attempt in June, could long point to the resilience of his currency in the face of sanctions as a propaganda victory that proved just how impotent Western economic reprisals were.
More than 500 days since his army invaded Ukraine, it looks as if Moscow’s highly respected central bank governor can no longer perform miracles for her boss.
The ruble that Elvira Nabiullina manages crashed through the psychological support of 100 to the U.S. dollar and on Monday is now worth less than a penny, the first time since March 23 of last year.
“They’re laughing at us,” scathed Vladimir Solovyov, Russia’s most well-known state TV personality and a chief Putin ally, already last week.
The war hawk demanded Nabiullina explain herself to the population now that currency has lost roughly a quarter of its value against the dollar since the start of this year.
On Sunday, images were shared online of a small symbolic protest mounted in western Siberia: A building’s chyron kept repeating the message that “Putin is a dickhead and a thief,” calling the ruble’s exchange rate “crazy.”
Her institution, meanwhile, has countered by arguing a softer ruble does not present risks to the country’s financial stability. Nonetheless, Russia’s central bank decided to freeze purchases of foreign currency on the domestic market through the remainder of this year to restore faith in the sliding ruble. Russia’s currency strength handed Putin a PR victory
Following a brief collapse in the initial aftermath of last year’s Feb. 24 invasion, which saw Russia’s fiat tender plunge to a record low of 120 to the dollar, the ruble rebounded to trade at one point at highs not seen since 2015, around 50 to the dollar.
This gave the Kremlin an important PR victory by suggesting Russia’s economy was strong enough to withstand anything the West threw at it.
This in turn prompted soul-searching among Ukraine’s Western backers while bolstering critics alarmed more at the cost of soaring food and energy prices than at Russia’s empire-building.
“It’s slightly more valuable than it was on the day that Russia invaded Ukraine. The economic situation in the United States by contrast is deteriorating fast,” then Fox News host Tucker Carlson, a chief critic of U.S. aid to Kyiv, said last April.
<span style="color:#323232;">The clearest signal that Russia is losing this war? #Russia Ruble weakened beyond 100 per Dollar for 1st time in 17mth, extending a slide that threatens to stoke inflation in an economy that has been kneecapped by Western sanctions. Ruble has fallen 27% vs Dollar YTD & 23% vs… pic.twitter.com/cr763vz21E
</span><span style="color:#323232;">— Holger Zschaepitz (@Schuldensuehner) August 14, 2023
</span>
Nabiullina was celebrated for cleverly steering her financial system through the worst of the turmoil by placing a range of capital controls that quickly stabilized the currency and prevented mass outflows.
“They were a quick fix for the ruble in 2022, but are counterproductive in the long run,” wrote Janis Kluge, senior associate at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, last week.
The fresh signs of economic weakness come at an important juncture in the war. The Russian army is attempting to defend large swaths of territory seized in the early months of the invasion against a Kyiv counteroffensive boasting modern Western military equipment.
Any material losses on the battlefield could further undermine Putin’s authority, already weakened following the challenge made by Wagner mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin in June.
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Russia’s central bank decided to freeze purchases of foreign currency on the domestic market through the remainder of this year to restore faith in the sliding ruble.
You will believe in the ruble by force! lol
Their interest rate is already at 8.5%, and their talking about raising it to 15%-20%. That paired with a a labor shortage. Not only that, they halted sales of corporate shares and government bonds by foreign investors last year. This is nuts. Why would anyone want to do business with or in Russia? Russia is literally a buddy economy. If you’re buddies with the dictator, you’re good. If not, you’re fucked. An economy like that will never succeed in the long-run because it’s based on social relationships and not actual production. It’s like wtf.
Whole Foods doesn’t want employee uniforms to make a political statement.
Bet every single person here would be pleased if this was about banning Trump masks. I’ll give you a crisp $20 bill if those are allowed. Or any other sort of political speech.
While I would agree that it is political, it’s because it is a movement and has become political. The organization was created after the movement and does not necessarily reflect the will or intentions of the actual movement. It’s like if back in the day there was an org called Women’s Suffrage. It doesn’t mean the focus of all people who want women’s suffrage are part of an organization named that after the movement started.
The statement itself shouldn’t be political in its sentiment, but obviously the organization exists and it has its own policy positions, events, advocacy, and I can go to their website to donate. I think it’s fairly obvious which one Whole Foods would be concerned with.
Ah, so if I wear a hat at work that says “save babies” and then an organization pops up called “Save babies” and they start donating to politicians, should I no longer be allowed to wear my “Save Babies” hat?
If the company you’re representing would prefer you didn’t, then sure.
Let’s use another example, if someone was a big supporter of fascism and was wearing a hat or mask that said, “save fascists”, would you prefer the store couldn’t prevent them from wearing that?
How bad would the phrase have to get to change your mind?
I’d say the difference comes down to choice. You choose to be a fascist. You choose to be a trump supporter. You don’t choose to be black. You don’t chose to be an infant.
Examples. If you wore a SPLC clothing article, I think the employer would be allowed to object, but if you wore clothing showing support for women, or indigenous people, then they should abide it.
“Black Lives Matter” is not a statement that merely means “I exist”. It’s a statement borne from a social/political movement, and it’s disingenuous to suggest otherwise.
On its own it’s not, but it definitely is in the current political and cultural context. There’s no getting away from that. It’s going to provoke a political reaction in any conservative and there’s no point in pretending otherwise.
That’s an indictment of Conservatism. What are they trying to Conserve and when was America great? Cause it was not great for folks of color or queer folk back then, and we wont go back.
The fact that there is an organization of the same name does not mean they own the slogan. People using the slogan almost never do so in reference to this organization nor are necessarily even aware that such an organization exists.
BLM is more of a human rights statement. Anything is “political” if the right choses to whine about it. An example is putting pronouns on name tags. It’s a great idea to ensure employees are addressed correctly and frankly shouldn’t be any more political than a name tag containing your name, but the right choses to view them as political because they need a constant culture war.
So Black Lives Matter is not a political slogan, let alone an organization? Saying Black Lives Matter means nothing to anyone except by taking it literally? Nothing to do with politics whatsoever?
These kids are so blind by the hate bandwagon they can’t see what this is. Don’t try. On top of that BLM as an organization is trash. Started out as something good, but it’s become nothing but another organization that exploits who it proposes to stand for.
If this thing was a fight to wear “Make America Great Again!” masks, these people would sing a different tune. And some ass will be along to explain how that’s totally different…
The whole notion of BLM is political. In the same sense that no one denies making America great is a bad thing, no one denies black lives matter. Yet they are political slogans, end of story. Whole Foods does not want employees wearing controversial political slogans.
I’ve supported the idea of BLM from day 1. Even dumped a right-wing buddy I was slowly turning around. I have zero patience for the haters. Zero. But if I owned a business, employees would not be wearing anything that even smelled of politics.
These children can’t get their emotions untied from facts.
This is like saying “Trump has Little Hands” is a political organization because some guy wants to copyright “Trump has Little Hands” to sell on merch. Absolutely ridiculous take and it clearly show where you stand on these sorts of issues.
BLM is a movement concerned with police brutality against minorities
There is a political organization called BLM, but nobody but right wing whack jobs gives a shit about that organization
There is also the Bureau of Land Management that is also refereed to with the acronym BLM,
Somehow you know BLM on a mask doesn’t refer to the Bureau of Land Management but you’re being deliberately stupid it referring to a political organization and not the movement.
Jeff Bezos isn’t going to give you any money no matter how wide you spread your asshole for him.
You are really jumping through some hoops to prove that the saying, “Black Lives Matter” has nothing to do with politics. Say it out loud for us. Say it’s not a slogan and has no ties to political views.
Not accepting facts contrary to your position? How very conservative of you.
No matter how far left I am, there’s always assholes like you pushing people back to the right. I’m not going right because a bunch a angry teenagers are… angry. But you’re not doing the liberal cause any justice here. In fact, you’re actively hurting it.
Where is the debate on the statement “black lives matter”? Please argue against that statement.
No what you’re saying is that the statement has been politicized by bad actors. But those are the politics of the bad actors, not politics around the statement itself.
Should the depiction of the Earth as being round be banned as well? There is controversy around that, by idiots and grifters of course, but how is it different about the controversy around BLM?
Maybe I would if I bash my head into a wall enough to cause enough brain damage that I don’t understand that “all lives matter” is part of the politicization effort by bad actors.
See there is an actual real world where people did things with motives that are very well understood. If your “logical” arguments are completely dependent on ignoring specific realities, it’s not really a logical argument at all. Demanding someone ignore reality so you can have a big “aha! I proved you to be a hypocrite!” kind of moment is rather silly isn’t it?
You are arguing in bad faith. BLM came out of police brutality targeting predominantly black communities. Period. End of story. If you don’t understand that, that’s because you’re willfully ignorant of the world happening around you.
No. Because they are in bad faith inverting the wording of the phrase to sound like “muh common sense” but in reality are just reactionary contrarians that are communicating their social conservative opinions.
Some more for ya: The fine started as a 50k fine, but then doubled every day it wasn’t paid. So it only took them a few days to actually pay it to stop the fines.
Which is honestly how I’m starting to feel all corporate fines should be. You want to slow walk a solution or request for a few days to feel big, you can do that for a few hundred thousand or more (that’s free money baby, and it should be put towards the public). You want to actually play hard ball? You will be staring down the barrel of complete financial ruin.
Now if we can just add more opportunity for criminal charges I’ll be happy.
That’s good to know! I was initially confused about how you double a $50k amount and get to $350k, but I’m guessing it works as an additional fine every day and is like:
To be fair he did climb the corporate ladder to the top already, so he doesn’t need to go to the office any longer, no? Now let’s hope he falls off that ladder
Which was set up by the rich to deflect the heat they should have taken, but don’t worry; your generation will be vilified by the following ones as well, and the rich will still profit.
Don’t be so cynical! I think we’re really going to see some change in the government now that we got a guy in the white house who has… uhh… held a political office since 1973.
Because downward trends in rent affect real estate futures, which affects lending rates, which could cause the artificially inflated property values to collapse.
A lot of apartments in my area do first year discounts. The reason for that is a lot of cities have rules about how much you can raise rent in a year. Discounts are a loophole since they can raise it based off the non-discounted value. Also moving sucks and a new place has a chance of being terrible (and you’re stuck for a year). So people are more willing to pay an increase once they’re already in an apartment they tolerate.
The point is that his voice is being used without his permission, and that companies, profiteering people, and scammers will do so using his voice and the voices others. He likely wants some kind of law against this kind of stuff.
Artists aren’t being scammed. They’re being replaced by automated systems. It’s the same thing that happened to weavers and glassblowers. The issue isn’t that their job is being automated. It’s that people replaced by automation aren’t compensated. Blame the game, not the players.
It’s much closer to having glass blowing artists designs, perfectly replicated in an automated fashion, and at scale— and without compensation to the artist. I would argue that it is tantamount to being scammed.
In this specific case, it’s more like a bunch of glassblowers were being paid to make designs on behalf of a company. Then they went on strike, and the company decided it would be cheaper to replicate their designs with an automated system than to meet the workers’ demands.
The strike came after the jobs began to be replaced. They can currently mimic a few glass blown designs, and the strike is aimed at making sure that glass blowers don’t give more ammo to the animators.
I don't think it's a particularly odious mental challenge to understand that we're not upset about the general concept of doing things at scale, and that it depends on what the thing in question is.
For instance, you'd probably not be terribly upset about me randomly approaching you on the street once - mildly annoyed at most. You'd probably be much more upset if I followed you around 24/7 every time you entered a public space and kept badgering you.
It’s emotionally charging to hear your own voice saying things you did not. Dismissing a victim describing what happened because they’re emotional about how they were wronged doesn’t make sense to me.
It’s not copyright infringement. You can’t copyright a style, which is basically what a voice amounts to.
This is something new. It’s a way of taking something that we always thought of as belonging to a person, and using it without their permission.
At the moment the closest thing is trademark infringement, assuming you could trademark your personal identity (which you can’t). The harms are basically the same, deliberately passing off something cheap or dodgy as if it was associated with a particular entity. Doesn’t matter if the entity is Stephen fry or Pepsi Max.
It is, as a matter of fact. When Fry recorded his voice for those audiobooks, they were copyrighted. Reproducing the contents of those works as they have is, arguably a violation of copyright.
And when you compare Steven Frye to Pepsi Max, that’s a false equivalence, because you’re comparing a copyrighted material to a trademarked brand which are two different things.
Still, to your point of theft, nobody is taking anything from anyone. They are using something without permission, and that still falls squarely as copyright infringement, not theft.
When they reproduced Fry’s voice with an AI based on what they captured from the copyrighted audiobook, that’s precisely what happened. Just because you refuse to understand or admit it, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
That’s not reproduction of content so isn’t a copyright violation. Not shouldn’t be. Literally right now is not.
The whole reason people are so up in arms about this is that we do not currently have laws or even standards that accurately police this kind of thing.
So, like, arguing against the letter of the law, in order to defend a morally bankrupt practice in defense of profitability for large corporations, to rip off artists work.
All that it’s proof of is that you don’t understand what you’re talking about.
There are laws and standards which govern this usage, it’s called the digital millennium copyright act. While there does exist currently an argument for AI to co-op current works for what the DMCA refers to as “fair use“, whether these works would be regarded as “Derivative works” or unauthorized infringement is up for the courts to decide, not you.
This isn’t the first time technology and copyright law have crashed into each other. Google successfully defended itself against a lawsuit by arguing that transformative use allowed for the scraping of text from books to create its search engine, and for the time being, this decision remains precedential.
Please explain, in your view, the substantive differences.
That’s not the same thing as this case. Google did not use the information it scraped from a single specific work to create another specific creative work. These two things are different, and the fact that you used this precedent to defend this practice in this context, shows your lack of a grasp of the material at hand.
The AI doesn’t scrape words, in context. It scrapes morphemes and pieces them together. That’s how voice AI works. I work with voice AI as part of my job, and learning to feed it morphemes instead of full words is often important, because the AI trips up on some of its inflections.
It’s weird that you still think I’m defending this usage after this many posts. What are you missing?
I’m not missing anything. You’re very clearly missing a full comprehension of US copyright law and are stubbornly resisting any attempt at having it explained to you.
Yeah me and the Harvard Business Review are wrong about existing precdent because you have very strong feelings.
Guess the SAG strike should end then, since this is all settled!
Fun fact: by your current interpretation, since movie companies own the likeness of characters within movies, they can reuse those characters, and potentially even those actors in some instances (since they can claim they are representative of similar archetypes) forever and the movie stars don’t need to get paid. Writers are flat fucked so long as the studios train AI on prior scripts they own.
As I said, you’re conflating two different things that aren’t the same because you don’t understand the law despite it having been explained to you repeatedly. Now you’re devolving into straw men fallacies and ad hominem personal attacks because your arguments have failed over and over.
Since you’re clearly incapable of having a rational, adult discussion, I’m gonna leave it here. Have a nice day.
You don’t know what ad hominem means if you think I’ve attacked you at all. Idk what you think a straw man is, but maybe just leave those words for another day when you know what they mean.
Your points are wrong on their own merit, and you have no case law to back you up. Quite the opposite.
If you made a painting for me, and then I started making copies of it without your permission and selling them off, while I might not have stolen the physical painting, I have stolen your art.
Just because they didn't rip his larynx out of his throat, doesn't mean you can't steal someone's voice.
You’re also not causing da Vinci to potentially miss out on jobs by copying it. You’re also not taking away his ability to say no to something he doesn’t want to be associated with.
Not to mention with billions of people walking around is anyone’s voice really unique? I have met hundreds of people in my life who sound so much alike it is hard to distinguish them.
We’re getting into samantics but it’s counterfeit not stolen.
It would be more like if you made a painting for me, and I then used that to replicate your artistic style and used that to make new paintings without your permission and passed it off as your work.
No, the use of words matter when having a debate. "Theft" is an emotionally charged word that has a lot of implications that don't actually map well to what's going on here. It's not a good word to be using for this.
Seems to map pretty well. I’ve looked up a handful of definitions of theft and looking at it from an emotionless perspective it seems to fit. To take something without permission or the right to. I don’t really see where the removal of a finite resource is required.
Thats why I figured that comment was just a dad joke.
When you steal something the person you stole it from doesn't have it any more. That's why copyright violation is covered by an entirely different set of laws from theft.
This isn't even copying, really, since the end result is not the same as anything in the source material.
Lots of people may want it to be illegal, may want to call it theft, but that won't make it so when they take it to court.
“When you steal something the person you stole it from doesn’t have it any more.”
Idk “identity theft” is a crime but you don’t actually remove the persons identity from them either. And also digital reproduction like in the case of piracy doesn’t remove a copy from the author but that is also illegal and is also considered theft. So I’m not really sure where you’re getting this idea that something isn’t both considered theft and a crime if it doesn’t remove a copy from the original owner, there are multiple examples to the contrary.
And also digital reproduction like in the case of piracy doesn’t remove a copy from the author but that is also illegal and is also considered theft.
No, it is considered copyright violation. That's a crime too (well, often a civil tort) but it is not theft. It's a different crime.
If you want something to be illegal there needs to be an actual law making it illegal. There isn't one in the case of AI training because it isn't theft and it isn't copyright violation. This is a new thing and new things are not illegal by default.
Calling it "theft" is simply incorrect, and meaningfully so since it's an emotionally charged and prejudicial term.
You skipped the identity theft part because I guess it kinda takes all the wind out of your argument lol.
Even then, “Theft” isn’t a single unique crime or law that’s distinct from copyright infringement, it’s an umbrella term. What you’re thinking of as the crime of “theft” is “larceny”, which actually does refer to taking physical property specifically. But Stephen Fry didn’t use the term Larceny here.
Copyright infringement when dealing with the theft of intellectual property is a type of theft. And since the rights to your voice and or performance is a thing you can own, it can easily be considered theft. It doesn’t need a new law, it’s just a new way to commit an old crime.
You skipped the identity theft part because I guess it kinda takes all the wind out of your argument lol.
I skipped it because it's not related to what's going on here. "Identity theft" is fraud, not just impersonation. People impersonate other people with no problem, eg this Dolly Parton impersonation contest that was the first hit when I went googling for "look-alike contest". You could perhaps use AI voice emulation as part of an identity theft scheme, but the crime is in how it's used not in the emulation itself.
Copyright infringement when dealing with the theft of intellectual property is a type of theft.
No, it is emphatically not a type of theft. That's the fundamental point you keep missing here.
Judges have explicitly and specifically said that this is not the case. In Dowling v. United States the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that copyright infringement was not stealing. This is a legal matter, which is not subject to personal opinion - it's not theft. Full stop.
The fact remains that in the case of identity theft, it is not the case that the thing being stolen must be a singular finite thing that is removed from your possession, which directly contradicts your original statement, which your entire argument depends on. You claim that it isn’t theft because his voice is “still where he left it”. Well in the crime of identity theft your identity remains right where you left it. This is the point you keep missing.
As for the Dowling v. United States ruling, it’s not the case that the judge held that copyright infringement isn’t theft, you’ve misinterpreted it entirely. What was held was that “Copies of copyrighted works cannot be regarded as “stolen property” for the purposes of a prosecution under the National Stolen Property Act of 1934.”
That is a very narrow ruling that clarified the definition of stolen property only as it applies to potential prosecution over law unrelated to copyright infringement. Like I said, there are different types of theft, and this ruling simply solidified the difference between crimes of the nature of theft, and larceny.
So, do you have a ruling somewhere that states that copies of copyrighted works can be regarded as “stolen property” for some other purpose?
No because those other related purposes are generally applicable to larceny specifically, as opposed to other crimes of theft.
Why are there completely separate laws regarding theft of physical property and the violation of copyrights if they can be regarded as the same?
The same reason there are completely separate killing laws, or drug laws, or property laws, or environmental laws. We’re not limited to one single law that covers an entire category of crime. State and federal governments pass new laws in existing categories every day. Thats why being a lawyer is hard, there are a lot of laws and the way they interact is complicated and inherently modular. Just like there are different kinds of those other crimes, there are different kinds of theft, so you need different laws for each kind. Larceny or larceny-theft, embezzlement, fraud, identity theft, copyright infringement. All theft, different definitions, requirements, circumstances, punishment, interactions with different laws (Receiving stolen properly, transporting stolen property across state lines etc.). You’re just latching on to larceny-theft, one very specific kind of theft, and mistakenly assuming that it is the only theft related law we have on the books.
He’s losing work and the effectiveness of his strike. Either they want his voice and they’d pay for it if he wasn’t striking, in which case his literal voice is working against his figurative one against his will, or they just need a voice and there was no fucking reason to steal a real person’s.
You have to prove that in court. And no he’s not losing work cuz theres no one paying in the first place. Chatgpt didn’t get a job over him. No one said oh we don’t need him to do this voice-over we have ai.
Also Remember we are not talking about replicating his voice we are talking about training an AI with it. Technically different subjects.
He has to prove it in court if he wants accurate compensation, but that’s not really on the table atm.
Did you read the article? I’ll quote the relevant section.
During his speech at CogX Festival on Thursday, Fry played a clip to the audience of an AI system mimicking his voice to narrate a historical documentary.
“I said not one word of that—it was a machine. Yes, it shocked me,” he said. “They used my reading of the seven volumes of the Harry Potter books, and from that dataset an AI of my voice was created, and it made that new narration.”
I use DDG as my primary search engine, but I find myself repeating searches with Google so often, I wrote a userscript to add a “Search with Google” link to the top of the DDG search results.
I’ve seen a lot of chat recently about Google search quality tanking and it’s made me realise that I haven’t re-searched a DDG query in Google for a really, really long time. when I first started using DDG as my main a few years back, I would repeat searches in Google probably 25% of the time? but I honestly can’t remember the last time I had to now. Been at least 6 months!
unfortunately, I do that often. Even when using meta search engine which sources to google, Google UX and results are simply better but sometime feeling is just not rationale
regarding duckduckgo, it is simply too long to type and people rarely configure their browser, especially on mobile.
so yeah, in a sense, Weinberg is right. At the very least, a choice should be provided on first run but you can’t force people to be curious.
I agree. At least in my experience Google does a better job when it comes to search engine. I use DDG as well but when it comes to searching specific things Google beats it unfortunately.
Sure, but I think there’s still benefit to what the other person did. Search DDG by default, and then if you don’t see good results, it’s one extra click for the google search… vs mousing, clicking, 2 keystrokes…
I agree they need a union and fuck the studio’s for under paying them. After seeing the last Graurdains movie, that move was almost 100% green screened. Without the visual effects crew, there would be no Marvel movies.
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