I love TechDirt. You should too!!! Or else.
I don’t know what they do in real life, but on the web, they talk about business and the Internet. Often they criticize media companies for outdated business models. Sometimes they praise media companies for creative business models.
They talk about how to make money off free products. Like digital copies of music or movies or books. Back in the bad old days, when these things were bound in material property, there was scarcity. Now that such things are translated into 1’s and 0’s, there’s no scarcity. No scarcity means lower prices, even free-ness. So how do you profit off free?
Some companies try to exert monopoly power to artificially inflate prices far above free. Copyrights and patents are monopoly powers granted by the government. Our entire old media system is based on monopolies. Old media companies are struggling with the new realities. They’re trying to get the government to increase copyright monopoly power. Mickey Mouse must never fall into the Public Domain!
And TechDirt talks about other stuff too. Sometimes they talk about how capitalism makes everyone richer by “growing the pie”. There’s more to go around, so more people are better off.
I think we do this by exploiting resources that no one notices. Some people call these externalities. After a while, these resources start to run out. Then people start to notice them. Then we switch to other resources. The very foundation of human existence is being undercut by using up all these different resources. As Harry Nilsson once sang, “Pretty soon there’ll be nothing left for everybody.”
Now they’re saying that the dinosaurs died off because a meteor crashed into the earth and upset the biosphere. Well, maybe. But I wonder, how could so many giant creatures like that survive for very long? They must have eaten tons! And when you eat, then other things tend to happen. And dinosaurs aren’t known for having advanced sewage systems. So disease must have been rampant. I bet they were up to their earlobes in dino-poop. And that’s just no way to live. So they didn’t.
TechDirt talks about dinosaurs going extinct almost every day.
