designguybrown

Meh. Seems emotional and sentimental. If you are placing your content on the web, you are practically posting it on the street for general view with absurd hopes of pennies trickling in on some desperate fancy rather than through proper business channels with an effective strategy of legally protecting and promoting yourself - childish. Most people who do such art that they may avoid other types of structured paid work - what do they expect when they treat their skill set as a hobby - likely not wanting to work for others on a structured gig - if that's even around much? What's even the issue here - not getting a piece of the trifling leavings of scrapers and edu-content pedlars? pedantic. Art needs to stop being a vague creation-vocation of the rando people and grow up. Successful society is based on complex businesses and legal structures requiring serious people acting seriously. Creativity is a real skill and needs focused training and  a hierarchy of knowledgeable people to propagate it through society. Sorry, but I have little symp for the dilettantes and dabblers hoping to otherwise avoid the soulless cubicle, construction site, and assembly line.

I suppose a lot of companies have hidden 'forced obsolescence', upgraded-yet-back-incompatible data connectors, and 'for your own good' security and protocol updates under the intention of maintaining solid and recurring bought-upgrade cycles along with subscriptions that should have simply been version purchases. It is frustrating to see endless technological orphans, especially when so many try to create large eco-systems of products throughout their home they hope will last at least a decade, inter-functionally. Along with right-to-repair and right-to-reasonable back-support, perhaps the EU needs to clamp down on shallow and unnecessarily pointless operating and hardware upgrades - a 10-YR anti-obsolescence regulation with all connectors, protocols, and systems support covered. Quality over quantity updates. 

Of course, this goes way beyond prices for consumers. Supply lines on-shored and all the piles of subsidiary parts, designers, and assemblers that would sprout up - there could even be districts of consumer digital products' companies within various cities. I would work there for below minimum wage, 60 hours a week, as a high school or college co-op/ summer job. The local schools, JCs, and colleges would be collaborating with the various design, manufacturing, and industrial processes as part of their curriculum. What people don't realize is that bringing back the manufacturing sector is not about returning to your gramp's 1970s blue-collar smelly factories, but re-engaging with a mostly-automated but high-end process that requires great skill to design, construct, and maintain, albeit at 90% less staff, -- good, solid first-world work with endless multiples of community economic spin-off. If TSMC can make a go at it in the US, all top manufacturing can integrate as befits their profits - but it won't be a 4-year process.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Whole-heartedly.
I have always wanted someone, something, somewhere (not behind a paywall or subscription) to blow the lid off the truly useless and counter-productive internet-ad ecosystem that turns our websites into a morass of poorly-sourced, arbitrary, and distraction-zoos of mediocre products and services, many often fake or bait-switch-types, splashed onto otherwise content-rich news and entertainment sources.
I get it. I hear that more than 50% of websites have no real business model or self-sustaining source of revenue, relying on ads to keep their random assembly of content going. Many of the staff and workers and owners have no real job to support themselves entirely, just an endless string of gigs and fluffy content-mill situations driven by ad-brokers who push eye-ball numbers based on influencing-blaring content and half-truth and distraction. I suppose with television and hard-print industries collapsing, a huge gob of company promotional budgets had to be spent somewhere; obviously prized by the predators at Outbrain, etc. Are these companies who throw ad dollars at these rando ad-brokers not seeing the total lack of return for these shot-in-the-dark ad placements? Or Is the cost per ad placement so low, that they can afford to spam, deluge, smother, and distract the vast range of sites with its near-seizure-inducing garbage -- it brings up that famous scene in Ready Player Go with the CEO talking about 80% visual-area ad placement, just enough to avoid liability from creating seizure. I welcome Apple's attack on this monstrosity of eye-pollution and a start to hopefully implement a more sane web business model -- exposing the ad-brokers as simple charlatans, promising impossible returns to desperate businesses seeking any kind connection to the public.

It's a computer science/ engineering/ hyper-tech firm filled with Lone Wolfs, narcissists, and the support/ managerial staff which herd and wrangle them. Being in HR or 'People' Manager must be one of the most difficult and unfulfilling jobs in such as an environment. What you do? Mother them? Let them fend for themselves? They are anti-thetical to community and forced socialization. An effective organizational chart for such places has yet to be designed.