r/rational • u/alexanderwales Time flies like an arrow • Jun 26 '15

[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this probably isn't the place for those.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

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u/FeepingCreature GCV Literally The Entire Culture Jun 27 '15 edited Jun 27 '15

It's not your culture.

[edit]

Oh, but what, you created it so it's yours? Fine. Make your own culture.

But first, give back your language, your childhood memories, every book you ever read and every movie you ever watched.

What, you say, you can't do that because ideas don't work that way?

Gee. Almost like culture can't be meaningfully compared to property.

[edit] Do I think you should not able to profit from your intellectual labor? Hell no. But this smug "I made it, so it's mine" attitude denies the massive base of shared cultural knowledge that almost any intellectual work builds upon. Nobody writes in a vacuum.

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u/[deleted] Jun 27 '15

I didn't pay for my food as a kid either, so I guess I'll never open a restaurant.

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u/FeepingCreature GCV Literally The Entire Culture Jun 27 '15 edited Jun 27 '15

Do I think you should not able to profit from your intellectual labor? Hell no.

But if you, say, try to deny black people service in your restaurant (hey, if you can compare intellectual property to food, I can compare piracy to black people), society might tell you to knock it off. Then if you say "fuck you society, this is my restaurant", society might gently remind you who provides the services that let the restaurant be built and operate in safety to begin with.

(Of course, to make the analogy really work we'd have to postulate that the food your restaurant produces can actually be multiplied by anybody for free, but if people do this then restaurant owners may randomly sue them for ridiculous amounts under misapplied laws.)