> Is it hedonism if a child-free adult gets fulfillment out of nurturing...
How many people in the developed world are really doing that? My social circle is largely child-free into our thirties and forties, and the big motivation is so that we have time for our hobbies and for travel. Almost no one is dedicating their time to altruism. Especially considering that I live in a long-running welfare state, where helping people in need is generally left to the state and private charity is rare (and often has dodgy religious-sect connotations).
Doesn't sound like you have actually been there. Military is a major employer, but in a territory inhabited since 1944 there are generations of people born there who didn't see a reason to live, the same foreign gastarbeiter as in any Russian city, etc. I.e plenty of ordinary people who could be inconvenienced.
I don't think you meant it like that, but Kaliningrad, or Königsberg is inhabited since a bit longer. For example Immanuel Kant lived and taught there.
Obviously. But since the Russian occupation infamously expelled the natives completely, when I talk about “inhabited since 1945” in the context of people living there now, I’m obviously referring to the Russian population.
Certainly not every people spoke the language of conquest. The high mountain ranges of the world are populated by peoples who escaped the conquering activity of their neighbors by moving upsteam into less and less easily cultivable terrain, land no one else wanted.
I never said "every people". I said "every major power or even near-peer power". Isolated mountain villages and their people do not fall into the categories I referenced: (1) every major power; (2) near-peer power.
Fine. But you then wrote “the language they spoke back then was conquest, and every nation and ethnicity spoke that language, and embraced it”, which seemed like a pretty umbrella description, hence why I replied with what I did.
Worth noting that some universities are giving up on the "quiet place" idea, perhaps because (like many public libraries) they think atomized society today desperately needs third places to socialize.
I travel to many universities for conferences and see firsthand that talking is now allowed in some institutions' libraries, with only a small room made available for readers who need quiet.
"For STEM, at least" is doing a lot of work there. In fields like history, archaeology, and linguistics a lot of important research is only on paper. For the last decade, colleagues and I have been scanning publications and uploading them to the shadow libraries, but we have barely scratched the surface.
> the main thing I use cash for in the US is to get quarters for the laundry machines in my apartment basement.
In Finland I was paying for apartment-building laundry machines with my phone in 2005. Mind-boggling that in the US, those still require quarters over two decades later.
If you want fake personas, view X on a desktop browser through Nitter, a no-bloat interface which allows you to quickly middle-click and open many new tabs. If you go through the history of accounts commenting under pundits' political tweets, you'll soon notice that many accounts claiming to be real, honest-to-goodness Americans have profile photos from This Person Does Not Exist, and their posts are clearly bot-like. The posts are often LLM-generated (before they were manually written, but with telltale mistakes the writer was from Eastern Europe or elsewhere abroad), they might repeat every few days, and they're often single-mindedly about a single issue or two that even a fanatic real human wouldn't be so fixated on.
As the other person mentions, much of the strident political stuff one sees online is generated by foreign state actors, so not democracy. But alongside that, a significant amount is generated by content creators in other parts of the world who realized they could cash in on America's internal problems. This has been well known since the reportage on North Macedonian content farms during the 2016 election. People falsely pretending to be from your country for profit-making isn't democracy, either.
When it comes to films, I torrent exclusively remuxes or whole Blu-Ray images. TPB hasn't been relevant for me for the last 15 years or more, since it never had a culture of such large file sizes, just small re-encodes. I wonder why, because obviously that data doesn't have to pass through TPB's own servers.
> it never had a culture of such large file sizes, just small re-encodes. I wonder why, because obviously that data doesn't have to pass through TPB's own servers.
We (the users) have to concern ourselves with how big the file is. And TPB tends to surface the most popular stuff first.
Usually a 1080p re-encode is good enough quality for me. And a lot of the time if I'm looking for a movie to watch right away I'd rather just get it fast so I can start watching.
They are not popular because with meager 20 TB drive, you can either have entire movie collection of all movies you actually like (and then some more), and visit again, or you can have 20x less content without much visible gain of quality (if you see it its either rare too complex scene, bad reencode or you are simply sitting too close to TV). Same goes for audio, even 2GB rips have good 5.1 or 7.1 tracks.
Its not hard to decide what to prefer. Even with 1GB/s optic fiber I just couldn't be bothered to download 20-40x larger files and then struggle to see any difference in 4k on 75" screen.
And lets be honest - apart from poor folks with OCD or similar trait, after 1 minute of watching I couldn't care less about audiovisual quality, heck I enjoy even 720p rip if its the only thing available.
Not only does TPB not have many remuxes, but it also has fairly few re-encodes using the modern high-quality codecs that you are talking about.
It’s funny to hear someone say that hard drive sizes are too small, and internet connections too slow, when RuTracker (a tracker whose core audience is former USSR, often shitty provincial cities) has a very lively culture of remuxes.
That depends on how many movies you watch. I could probably fit every movie I've ever seen (and then some more), as bluray remux if available at that quality and DVD remux if not, into 20TB.
Where do you find those? I use 1337 and dht search engines. Can't be bothered to fiddle with private trackers. Wondering if you found something better.
thepiratebay is fine they just don’t run indexes often so searches often fail for stuff just uploaded within last hour or two. Limetorrents updates indices frequently but uses ad providers that try to hijack your clicks and presses so it takes three or four clicks to get one click that isn’t hijacked. There is a bit of non overlap between those two sites.
Sounds like something that a browser like Brave was built to combat. I haven't visited the site in question but for a lot of the ad-heavy sites I do visit, I jump over to Brave to deal with the nonsense.
That’s not RARBG. That’s a quasi-domain squatter trying to lure people in with the name of a legendary community, but just showing the same crap results as any other public torrent aggregator and presumably loading it with ads (that I mercifully don’t see with Firefox uBlock Origin) in order to profit.
I honestly wouldn’t bother with public trackers. They work great for debrid services with something like kodi or stremio but if you want to “own” or build your collection you have much better options
1. Private trackers - people seed, they have rules on uploads and actually moderate
2. Usenet is still alive and thriving for this.
3. Libraries still exist and you can rent and rip media there
4.Internet Archive is a great resource for old stuff
5. Just buy physical copies and rip em. Can check eBay etc.
Generally a lot of them you can get an invite from someone on Reddit or discord. A lot also open up for a week or so allowing people to register every year or whenever a major tracker goes down so the refuges can join. you can check places like Reddit /r/opensignups.
A lot of mainstream stuff is ripped already, the “ratio” on some is more if you download a torrent, they want you to seed it for x amount of time or seed it back x amount to the community. I don’t know of any that expect you to be ripping and uploading that way, it’s recommended but a lot have groups for mainstream content.
There are a few “elitist” private trackers that require “interviews” and stuff, but don’t let that scare you off 99% of them are all just grab and invite or sign up and seed back to community for the week or so minimum (preferably longer) and your good to go!
I was looking for this european movie from 10 years ago only last month, could not find it anywhere on line, streaming or torrent. I'm pretty confident there is still a lot of stuff missing.
hey there's a project idea: a "todo list" for rippers that scrapes imdb and checks what's not in pirate bay (and then looks for dvd's on ebay / libraries)
Public trackers like the piratebay face a lot of issues with retention. If it’s not mainstream or recent people often don’t seed or maintain it. If you join a private tracker there’s ones dedicated to keeping older sources like that a live!
For really obscure content, internet archive, your library, usenet or even eBay are the go to!
SoulSeek was also pretty good for finding obscure music. I like collecting everything that was released (not live performances, though) and SoulSeek filled some, but not all gaps I had.
What movie was it? There’s a good chance I can find it.
If you’re in Reddit, there’s also a subreddit dedicated specifically to this kind of thing (requests for stuff that is no longer available) called /r/DHExchange
I did some searching. I assume you mean “Relics: Einstein's Brain (1994)”? If so, it doesn’t look like it was ever released on anything but VHS, so I only found a TV recording and a VHS recording.
Regarding seed ratio, generally by perma seeding. Many private sites either use seed time requirements instead of ratio or offer bonus points for seed time which can be exchanged for ratio. But also as new editions and formats are released, the library has a bit more turnaround than your music sites of yesteryear.
use their RSS feed + a seed box to automatically grab stuff as it’s posted some sites have ratio free for large files to get them seeded faster. at least that’s what I did a decade plus ago.
But good luck to see a live seed. I have a torrent from ~2010 which is stuck at 2%, so some seed did come online some years ago I was able to leech those meager bits from them - but not ever since.
Same for my own torrent on TPB from 2008, i tried to dload it in 2015 and wasn't sucessful in it despite it was 1st one for some years for that particular title.
I commented somewhere else already, but you can search directly from qBittorrent. Search by title, then filter by "Remux" or sort by size. Keep in mind tho that a blu-ray release must exist in the first place, and that some 4k blu-rays are just not very good to begin with (upscaling and what not).
For any query, just look at the file sizes (or sort by file size if the view allows you). Then you can see that there just aren’t many movie torrents on TPB larger than single-digit GB. A Blu-Ray remux will be minimum 14GB, and often much larger.
Whatever it is, it's the most known WhatsApp alternative in this part of the world and if WhatsApp will start asking again only 1 Euro (about 15 years ago) and enforce it this time, my bet is that people will switch to Telegram en masse.
How many people in the developed world are really doing that? My social circle is largely child-free into our thirties and forties, and the big motivation is so that we have time for our hobbies and for travel. Almost no one is dedicating their time to altruism. Especially considering that I live in a long-running welfare state, where helping people in need is generally left to the state and private charity is rare (and often has dodgy religious-sect connotations).
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