this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
-24 points (10.0% liked)

Showerthoughts

32723 readers
595 users here now

A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. No politics
    • If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
    • A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS

If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.

Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Flagstaff@programming.dev 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Okay, finally, this makes more sense; I think you mislabeled the post as "cause and effect" when you're really talking about ownership of property. Now this we could talk about endlessly, since it's been such a hot topic with AI's copyright-dodging.

A good ethical example I think of is Adobe InDesign (if I recall correctly), which only trains its "AI" models on content that is specifically AI-crawl-approved. I personally think the only other ethical approach to "AI" is open-source models like Meta's Llama. All others are thievery.

Another example of endless debate is publishing houses or boards of companies, particularly of AAA games, as in how much money middle and upper management and the C-Suite should get for the hard work done by the developers. It's been tearing apart the video game industry over the years on an exponential basis.

Generally speaking, though, for physical media like the artwork you describe, the workers get their dues, though probably disproportionately (especially when it comes to apparel made overseas, phones...). This stuff is very relevant in today's politics with the tariffs going on; while they're unpopular and could certainly be executed in better, alternative ways (like providing subsidies to make things at home instead), overseas workers in China, India, etc. are tremendously, objectively overdue on their wages.

given the option to claim ownership, to assert that narrative where I profit, even though that narrative isn't really relatively strong, I will.

So you don't care to help fight this mindset and right wrongs?

[–] rainrain@sh.itjust.works 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yes, I think that the concept of cause-effect is inherently broken (tho useful, yes) and therefore the concept of ownership is broken. The game is broken.

I demand greater rigor from the latter because it is the system by which we run our society etc.

What is the proper approach to winning a broken game?

[–] Flagstaff@programming.dev 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I still contend that you're misusing the phrase "cause and effect" and that it's not "broken," because there is a clear cause: greed. Selfishness causes people to try to take ownership of goods or services to which they didn't contribute—and the effect is compensation not reaching its correct owners.

That cause-&-effect is very consistent to me. Nothing's broken there. The concept itself is fine; the problem is the abusers and manipulators using it in a negative way. So your real enemy is greed and intellectual theft.

I demand greater rigor from the latter because it is the system by which we run our society etc.

Sure, but you can't really enforce that demand since you're not a king of the land or something. You'd need to get into politics and stop lobbyists or something.

What is the proper approach to winning a broken game?

Counterpoint: why do you need to "win?" Why not fight with fairness, and do what you can to ensure that the producers around you receive what they're due, even if you may end up receiving less as a result?