Yikes! I’ve never thought they were a charity. It’s always been pretty clear to me that they’re a for-profit business, but I wasn’t aware of all those shitty policies. As a shopper, they have a lot of great stuff for dirt cheap. I got a $1000 amp there once for $45. Similar deals all over my house. Oh, we got a $4500 high quality 6 person dining table for 40 bucks, and four chairs worth $600 each for 12 bucks a pop.
They are also the shit tier of thrift stores. They’re over-priced and their stuff isn’t as good. If you’re in King County, WA, Value Village is king. I’ve found so many great deals at Value Village. 90% of the stuff in my house is from VV.
Having control over things you paid for is not piracy, but the corpos disagree.
That sounds illegal.
That’s a great idea to use GitHub! I’m going to do that too.
I’m actually about to do this this weekend. I use Arch on my laptop and Pop on my gaming desktop. I’m going to switch my gaming desktop over to Arch. The only thing I’m going to keep is my docs folder. Everything else is getting nuked.
You can move your home directory to a different drive so that you don’t lose everything when you switch distros.
I own every d&d item I’ve ever purchased. But I never buy their digital crap. OG books & dice for me, man.
Spoons made me fat!
I’ve used Rufus to create a Windows USB from ISO and I didn’t see any options to remove telemetry, but that was years ago. There may be such options now that it’s known how much they’ve become a spyware company.
Windows is free now! No license required. They’re a data company now.
You’re correct. I actually did acknowledge it further down in the comments chain here: https://lemmy.world/comment/7277901
Yeah, by “they”, I meant the studios more than Netflix. Netflix itself was negatively impacted by studio greed, since a lot of them pulled their content from the platform so they can push their own shitty subscription service. It’s frustrating that these studios fought streaming tooth and nail, while Netflix pioneered the industry and proved a profitable streaming model. As soon as it was impossible to dispute that the model works, all the individual studios suddenly want to run their own streaming service. They fragmented the content across a dozen different services, and drove the industry back to unaffordability and inconvenience.
They had piracy all but beat. It was their insatiable greed that drove people back to the sea.
I SWIM was running Plex with Usenet and honestly, I SWIM was disappointed with the state of Usenet servers these days. I SWIM switched to Stremio, plus Torrentio, plus Real-Debrid, and it is amazing. You don’t need any storage capacity. You don’t need to set up any downloads or know what you want ahead of time. You just use it like you would any other streaming service, except almost anything you can think of is available. The only drawback is that 4k is rarely available. But 2k is almost always available, and that’s good enough unless you are going to watch something visual like Avatar, Way of the Water. If that’s important to you, then just rent those particular visual spectacular movies, and stream everything else. The best part is that Debrid is only about $2.80 per month, vs $15 for a Usenet server, and another $30/year for a search engine. There’s a good guide for the whole setup on Reddit. Something that might help you with the setup is knowing that it’s stored on the cloud. So you can set Stremio up on a PC where it’s easy, then install it somewhere like Nvidia Shield TV or Chromecast 4k, login, and you’re good to go. Hook it up to your 4k home entertainment center, and paaartay!
Check out Stremio+Real-Debrid+Torrentio. It’s honestly better than any paid subscription you can get from the studios. Install it on something like a Chromecast 4k, or a Shield TV device, hook it up to your home entertainment system, and you’ve got yourself a bonafide real solution.
The solution is so easy. Make your content available at a reasonable price, make it easy to use, don’t restrict it by geography, and let people watch it on any device that can connect to your service.
They had achieved this just a short time ago, and their subscriptions and profit reflected that consumers were happy with the offerings. But the studios wanted MORE, and now everything is fragmented across a dozen different services with increased subscription fees, and geo-locks so you can’t share accounts. I was paying almost $100 per month for subscriptions at one point, and then they fragmented it further and I said “fuck it, I’m out!”. I cancelled everything. They think they can endlessly exploit their consumers, and maybe there is a sub-section of them that will endure never ending fragmentation and price increases, but I’m not one of them. Bye!
You’re not allowed to buy the content anyways. You’re only allowed to pay for the illusion of ownership, until they decide they don’t want to host it anymore, and then you lose it. They’re such bullshit artists that they redefine common words like “buy” and “own” in their ToS.
Oh I forgot all about that. My wife got a Hermes leather wallet that cost $2,600 for like $5. It’s awesome when the employees don’t know what they’re pricing. Haha. We used to sell stuff from yard sales on eBay back when the 08 crash happened, and after we moved here we both noted how we could have been doing really well for ourselves if we had access to VV back then. We lived in a city where the thrift store was basically just a garbage dump though, so that didn’t happen.
It’s unfortunate that they have such shitty employee policies, because we really love what the store itself has to offer. Heck, it’s so good that Macklemore wrote a hit song about it!