SnotFlickerman

Counterpoint: When Louis CK (prior to being outed as a sex pest) released one of his comedy specials on his website DRM-free for $5 he became a millionaire almost overnight.

https://boingboing.net/2011/12/22/drm-free-experiment-makes-loui.html

Price point matters, too.

It also jives with early Steam Sales when Valve would cut titles like ~~Left 4 Dead~~ Counter Strike down to 90% off, and they would sell so many digital copies that they were actually making more money off the lower price.

https://www.geekwire.com/2011/experiments-video-game-economics-valves-gabe-newell/

Now we did something where we decided to look at price elasticity. Without making announcements, we varied the price of one of our products. We have Steam so we can watch user behavior in real time. That gives us a useful tool for making experiments which you can’t really do through a lot of other distribution mechanisms. What we saw was that pricing was perfectly elastic. In other words, our gross revenue would remain constant. We thought, hooray, we understand this really well. There’s no way to use price to increase or decrease the size of your business.

But then we did this different experiment where we did a sale. The sale is a highly promoted event that has ancillary media like comic books and movies associated with it. We do a 75 percent price reduction, our Counter-Strike experience tells us that our gross revenue would remain constant. Instead what we saw was our gross revenue increased by a factor of 40. Not 40 percent, but a factor of 40. Which is completely not predicted by our previous experience with silent price variation. …

Then we decided that all we were really doing was time-shifting revenue. We were moving sales forward from the future. Then when we analyzed that we saw two things that were very surprising. Promotions on the digital channel increased sales at retail at the same time, and increased sales after the sale was finished, which falsified the temporal shifting and channel cannibalization arguments. Essentially, your audience, the people who bought the game, were more effective than traditional promotional tools. So we tried a third-party product to see if we had some artificial home-field advantage. We saw the same pricing phenomenon. Twenty-five percent, 50 percent and 75 percent very reliably generate different increases in gross revenue.

I'm having trouble finding a link to substantiate it, but I remember in the early 2000's a group of artists having to sue their record labels because of the lawsuits on file-sharing users. The record labels said they were doing it for the artists, but the artists had to sue the record labels to even ever see a penny from the fruits of those lawsuits. The record labels were just pocketing the money for themselves while saying it was "for the artists."

Anyway, long story short is that kind of behavior from the recording industry made me want to give money directly to the artists and cut out these selfish middlemen who did nothing but claimed all the profits.

http://www.callbeforeyoudig.org/washington/

At least in Washingon there are free services to locate pipes and lines for this exact purpose.

Also, it's a legal requirement for anything deeper than 12 inches, and the 12 inch exemption is mostly for homeowners and road work.

https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=19.122

Finally, I'm pretty sure you'd have be using a backhoe or other industrial equipment to bust open a water main that affects a whole neighborhood.

Devil's Advocate: Many pirates would have not paid for access to that media so to say it takes away from the creators profit isn't exactly true since one act of piracy does not equal one lost sale.

Devil's Advocate Part II: There is s significant amount of research that supports the notion that pirates actually spend more money on media than the average person.

I personally am an example of part II. I pirate a lot of music but I refuse to use Spotify because of how little it pays artists and I have also spent significant amounts of money buying music from artists I enjoy via Bandcamp or buying from the artist directly because I know they get a bigger cut of the profits that way.

Honestly, that's what I'm thinking since I got no response.

Possible, but if there's one thing that's been shown about Trump during his life in the media, it's that he has a near encyclopedic knowledge of all the racist slurs. He pulls out some real obscure ones, and that was even before he even ran for office.

Already did that, and didn't get a response. 🙄

Now we just wait for Let the Bodies Hit the Floor or Dead Bodies Everywhere to rise in the charts again.

we all know he’s never read a book in his life.

That's what I came to say, too. Not only does he not read, but he's not smart enough to remember the character nor understand the implications. We know he hasn't read a lick of Shakespeare. So where the fuck else would he know this term from other than antisemitism?

This is amazing.

It's clearly to let people die.

Nah a non-insignificant amount of the citizens of the country suck too.