The human tradition is storytelling. The idea that storytelling was something a company could own and other's weren't allowed to tell is very, very new in our history.

People write without any profit motive today. It's weird of the OP to think of writing in such a narrow space as commercialization.

As someone who was around during Reagan, you are correct. The turn happened in the 80s, and then rapidly accelerated in the 90s and 2000s, then rapidly accelerated again in the past 10 years.

I think a lot of folks are stuck on the idea that it's been a singular bad actor -- a Trump, or a McConnell or something. This "Great Man Theory" is almost certainly a very naive read of the systems that are leading to this moment.

You say this like it's related to the parent quote. We could absolutely compensate people and not charge for information. It's not that hard to imagine that we could feed, house, care for, and provide a small stipend to authors, artists, etc. and also make their work output free to everyone who wants it.

Does that require changing some other things? Absolutely. Would it be hard to convince people to try? Probably (I'm guessing HN crowd won't like this comment, considering it unreasonable.) Has it been a suggested way to organize society for almost 200 years with a long and well argued set of principles behind it? Sure enough!

Forests do net sequester carbon. But if you want to really sock away the carbon you harvest the trees and pyrolize it. It will give you energy (heat) you can use and elemental carbon (biochar). You could bury that a few feet under or innoculate it with microorganisms and work it into fields. Carbon in that form will sit in the soil for hundreds of years. Thousands or millions if you bury it.

I mean technically we already do this: renewable plantation timber is a widespread operation (also why I get kind of annoyed at YouTubers talking about how great the timber is in old homes - yes it's great because it was logged from 50 year old old growth forests and now they're all gone because we cut them down).

You can just buy engineered wood products that are much stronger than any old growth lumber. My family lake house built in 1970 has three gluelam trusss beams that support the roof. There are even better engineered wood products available these days.

> Carbon in that form will sit in the soil for hundreds of years. Thousands or millions if you bury it.

And what is the scale that global climate change works on?

Trees do jack shit for carbon on the scale that is important.

50 tons per acre, over 35 years (to grow the trees to a harvestable age) with an expectation that you can capture ~25-40% of that in long term storage via pyrolizing it.

The US alone has ~1 billion acres of forest land and could produce a lot more if needed. Over 35 years, we could remove 50 billion tons * 25-40%. Basically enough to offset a years worth of emissions during those years.

It's not enough, but it would be a significant amount of carbon removed. Combined with other efforts, we could put a lot of carbon back in the soil.

So a state (or municipality or anyone capable of making laws) has the ability to say, "You don't meet our local laws, take down your URL" now?

This is going to be a real problem when states start nuking whole parts of the internet from orbit. A state has a law against conversion therapy and starts to remove sites with that? A state has a law against trans people? Or abortion? Or medical misinformation? Suddenly we just start purging sites back and forth?

Battlegrounds end up as torn up, muddy, desolate places. Turning the domain registry into a battleground is a bad idea. Over the long term, no one wins if we choose to fight there.

No. If a site doesn't want to comply with the state, they can geoblock. That's what pornhub does.

In the US, if you used a US domain or registrar, this is possible. If you are Dutch and registered a .nl domain with a Dutch registrar, this is not possible.

I thought this was always the case?

But what people do instead is to disable access for people from that specific state.

This is a pretty clear violation of the First Amendment, but the current SCOTUS doesn't care about the Constitution.

Multiple conservative SCOTUS justices openly admit to taking bribes from parties with cases before them.

Porn is speech. This has been litigated several times by SCOTUS.

Obscenity is not speech.

It appears that in Texas, porn is considered obscenity.

Texas can't make that decision unilaterally. They'll have the First Amendment to contend with.

Besides, that's not even what this case is about. This is about access to pornography, not about the right to produce or disseminate it with or to consenting adults. Even if the latter rights are protected under the First Amendment, the courts have never said that Federal and state governments cannot restrict minors from accessing it.

Wrong. Porn is considered protected speech unless it is considered “obscene” (which is an incredibly difficult bar to meet), and even possession of obscene material in one’s home is protected.

C’mon, people, these issues are trivial to look up the facts about. There’s no excuse for ignorance here. https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/obscenity-and-pornog...

So nobody has ever gone to jail for possessing child porn?

Of course CSAM isn’t protected. This story isn’t about CSAM though.

Porn is protected speech, with the exception of CSAM and "obscene" materials. You do understand how exceptions work, don't you?

If you have further questions, ask an attorney who specializes in First Amendment law. I also recommend law school.

In Texas, all porn is obscene.

Says who? Please provide a legal citation or at least an allegation.

I mean the US works like this, it isn't suprising a US state also does.

If someone from the US does something illegal on your site (which is legal in your country), depending on how much they want you will end up in a US prison.

Before the US decided that betting online was OK, betting sites had travel advisories for their employees not to travel to the US.

According to this pornhub is blocked in 25 states including Texas.

https://mashable.com/article/pornhub-blocked-states-2025

You wrote this in the passive voice; it doesn't say who is doing the blocking.

Pornhub itself is doing the blocking; it uses geolocation and denies services to IP addresses from jurisdictions with age verification laws. The laws are usually not structured so as to require a third party such as an ISP to block noncompliant sites; instead, the governments of the states with those laws can sue the porn sites and their service providers (Verisign in the case of .com domains).

> You wrote this in the passive voice

I used the language of the link.

> The explicit tube site Pornhub is now blocked in 25 U.S. states

I had assumed that the states were blocking Pornhub but reading between the lines in the linked article it does imply it's not the states are not applying technical blocks.

The states have applied intentionally onerous requirements onto these sites with full knowledge that would most likely not comply making them de facto blocks. You wouldn't be fooled if a gangster said "that's some nice kneecaps you got there, it would be a shame if something happened to them" so I don't know why we are acting so naive about Texas and co.

I can't tell if it's Texas or Porn sites that are supposed to be the gangster in this metaphor.

> so I don't know why we are acting so naive about Texas and co.

It's a bad metaphor. I'm just saying they don't have to directly say what it is they want these sites to do to coerce them to do it.

They want them to stop letting kids in their state have access to their porn. It's up to Pornhub how to implement that and Pornhub decided to block all of Texas.

This seems like a reasonable ask and a reasonable response to me, so I don't understand who the bad guy is supposed to be here.

Right, because they complied. Which was easy for them to do.

Maybe we should be doing something dramatic about this global warming thing before it's too late, yeah?

Well, really, pick your poison I suppose.

We have wide belts of forests in the north that are warming and are potentially at risk for massive fires, which would make the problem significantly worse. So, before the taiga burns.

Or, before species reduction causes ecosystems to collapse, reducing biodiversity and ability to support humans.

Or before temperatures rise high enough that wet bulb temperatures in the summer are fatal to humans, causing parts of the globe to become inhabitable, creating refugee crises and conflict (and presumably mass starvation and death.)

Or before permafrost gets warm enough to start emitting methane, pushing our atmosphere past the point of it's ability to maintain homeostasis, putting us on a path to a Venusian atmosphere.

Or before we lose the beautiful parts of the world to decay due to increased pest pressure, decreased ability for plants and animals to survive, and general reduction in system health.

Or before we lose our ability to have wonderful winter sports in the parts of the world where skiing and snowboarding are popular.

Or before we damage the oceanic currents enough to fundamentally destroy the climate in regions like Europe and England.

Or before raising temperatures cause seafood stocks to plummet, reducing the amount of food we can harvest from the oceans (or leading us to depleting critical stocks entirely), reducing our capacity to feed ourselves as a species.

Or before fresh water becomes scarce enough that wars are fought over it, and people die unnecessarily.

I dunno. Before one of those. Or any of the other easily predictable, innumerable steps along the way to those.

The societal collapse and deaths that are about to happen.

Everything that's already happened

> CD sales surged 16% to 16.3 million units, soundly outpacing vinyl’s comparatively modest 2.4% growth.

Ok, but the lack of a unit on vinyl makes it very hard to have an apples to apples comparison here. If cds are selling 1000 units and vinyl is selling 1,000,000 units, those 16% and 2.4% numbers are pretty wildly different things.

Also, the huge increase is primarily driven by KPOP (in particular, BTS). CD sales growth was like 6% without them.

I don't know that we can draw a conclusion from that 16% except BTS can move physical media.

Re BTS, really it's just because there is a CD included in the box with all the other stuff you get when you buy the album. My daughter thought it was neat; that's when I realized I don't even have a CD player anywhere. I doubt many people are actually using these CDs

Yeah came here to say the same thing on the lack of absolute units.

Speaking as an older vinyl collector myself, with kids who have also gotten into it...it would surprise me if the total unit numbers were even within 2 orders of magnitude.

Vinyl just feels different. The feeling of holding the cardboard cover and the weight of the album on a turntable can't be replicated at all with CDs.

You've got it. Who makes the decisions? Primarily the folks with the most property.

And they decide that you'll pay a percentage of what they pay each other. Which you also have no say in.

This isn't sustainable. You really want every person who is dealing with this bureaucracy to manage negotiating between their insurance and their EMS? After they've just had a significant accident/health issue?

That seems needlessly cruel to do to people.