The digital copy issue is easy to solve. If you want to rent it temporarily, it's e.g. $10.00, but if you want to buy and own it permanently it's e.g. $500.00. It's not reasonable to expect those two to be priced the same.
Why would it be more than buying a physical copy? I have plenty of books that were sold to me as Epubs and PDFs that are permanently mine and can't be pulled.
I am also curious about the work/financial position that lets someone move from Austin to Phoenix because they don't like "the crowds". But without needing to sell their Austin house to finance it. And being willing to eat a $200,000+ loss to avoid crowds.
Nothing about that story sounds like something normal average people deal with!
Matt’s answer about Perez running for President is half baked. The best thing about being an ambitious House member is that keeping your seat isn’t really that important. Yes, Perez probably disqualifies herself from WA-3 if she runs as a partisan Democrat, but she could always move a couple dozen miles to a friendlier seat or become a lobbyist. The map will change in 2032 anyway.
The real structural weakness is that a House seat is a puny platform to launch a presidential campaign. The last career politician to become president having risen no higher than the House was Garfield — and he didn’t launch anything. He went to Chicago to nominate John Sherman, the convention deadlocked, Wisconsin threw him sixteen votes out of nowhere, and he took it on the 36th ballot. The one last a House member made it, it was an accident in a nominating system that stopped existing in 1968
Every time I read Matt these days, I come away thinking that it would be great if people just acted a little more Christian. We really need more people going to Sunday School class talking with each other and actually trying to persuade and BE PERSUADED. That willingness to become something new and not have to do it absolutely our own way.
I find the Shakespeare Festival model (most famous in Oregon, also here in Idaho and elsewhere) to be the most sustainable and enjoyable form of live theater. The foundation are classics that stand the test of time, but then there are additional plays that might be adaptations of recent works or the occasional avant garde play. I'd wonder if Matt would enjoy that better.
Even when progressives get the policy wins they want, get the political appointees they want, and concessions they fight for it’s never enough. Reading those comments from the NYT op ed MattY wrote is just so disheartening. Even providing a modest and nuanced critique and discussing pragmatic concerns or literal facts is forbidden.
Biden and Harris apparently were “neoliberal corporatist centrists” bla bla bla… and that is why Democrats lost in 2024. It’s like a reverse mirror of MAGA delusions about what actually occurred and what many many many people feel. It points to a weak foundation of beliefs. If all scrutiny and self reflection is forbidden, then those beliefs are not actually being tested.
Another big driver for animal habitat preservation is so there are abundant reserves for animals to be hunted. That might cut against the grain of animal welfare, depending on one's point of view. And there's also the question as to whether the habitat is preserved equally for all animals--see the question of wolves, which hunters tend to hate, but the real biggest foes of them are ranchers.
Traditionally, while creative works have always naturally been a public good, the delivery medium of the works were private goods. Excludability was of course artificially added via copyright law, restricting who could print out copies, and consumption was rivalrous--if I have a book, movie reel, or video game cartridge, that means you can't use that same one.
The upshot though is that it was perfectly legal for you to do with that private good as you wanted. You could give it to someone as a gift or bequeathing, you could loan it (libraries!), or even rent it out (Blockbuster used to be a successful business) or sell it (thrift stores).
But the internet and advanced computing have abolished all semblance or rivalrousness. As such, in order to at least preserve the excludability, regrettably I don't see much of a viable path beyond making them purely club goods that you can only "rent" on a subscription basis. One can of course still meticulously record streaming content they really like (I sometimes do) just like people recorded music on the radio on cassettes, or movies or TV off VHS or Betamax (thank goodness for Sony v. Universal, which almost came out the other way!) to play on their own devices, but there are time and effort tradeoffs from that, so most people just relent on not actually having their own copies of stuff these days.
I know audible (audiobook site) does provide access to books they can no longer sell to people that previously bought them—The Martian, for instance, was recorded by Bray, but then again by Wheaten once the movie came out. You can’t buy the Bray edition, but you can still download it if you’ve purchased it previously. Not sure if something similar can be constructed for movies.
Amazon did also get a lot of flack maybe a year ago for making it no longer possible to download kindle books to a computer.
As someone who does want to own things, but who has a good appreciation for how difficult it is to move a few hundred physical books/DVDs and the occasional failure rate of SD drives, it would be nice if this could be figured out.
>Do you support legislation preventing that from happening? Basically, if you purchased a digital copy, it doesn’t matter if they lose a licensing agreement, you get the movie forever.<
As I understand it, there are lots of international implications, multiple-jurisdictions and so forth involving the licensing of digital content, and for reasons related in part, I think, to all the different stakeholders who get a piece of the action (compared with music), movies and TV are challenging when it comes to hammering out customer-friendly agreements. That's why no video content "all you can eat" equivalent of Spotify has emerged — the global legal environment doesn't easily permit this. It's also why you might buy a movie from one of the various online marketplaces in the comfort of your Kansas City living room, only to find it won't play when you fire up your laptop in a Berlin hotel room (you've actually only purchased a geographically specific and time-limited license for the content in question).
I suspect your best bet if you want a "forever" movie is to purchase the DVD, and rip it. As it happens I'm a long and dedicated Spotify owner — I find renting my music works just fine. But when it comes to my *video* library, I strongly prefer to own outright.
I strongly prefer to own physical copies of films for similar reasons - permanent access without edits and often better image quality than can be streamed.
Licencing issues are a big problem in the video game space too. Plenty of games from c.20 years ago had soundtracks filled with commercial music which mean modern versions can't include them, for example. In other cases the IP rights have simply been split up in awkward places which make getting the agreements needed to do anything with a particular game or property too difficult (especially after several separations, takeovers, insolvencies etc.). There's can also be tricky regional certification issues too - many countries have significantly tightened age or obscenity related restrictions; and whenever these are updated any content available for digital distribution needs to be reviewed against them.
This seems like a problem though. Like imagine if when you buy a house, the guy that did the drywall gets to have ongoing royalties and has to consent to the ongoing sale, ditto for the architect, the guy who owned the land before you, etc. It’d be very hard to sell the house and the real estate market would break. That’s what IP law is like. It should be reformed to have much simpler.
Sure. It's not super consumer-friendly. And personally, I find the absence of an all you can eat option for video to be a problem, agreed. I'd pay a lot a month to have dependable access to virtually all the TV and movies ever created. Just writing those words sounds like a pipe dream. And yet the music sector has managed it.
Glad to see you are Person with Internet Access pilled on where change will come from in the US. Presidential elections are the culminating process of political paradigm change in the US. Since the US hasn't added parties in 170 years that's now channeled through the nomination process.
People talk about this being the most important election of our lifetime every four years. But 2028 will be the most important Democratic nomination process in at least 20 years.
There already is a legal doctrine that should give people full ownership of digital copies—it’s called the first sale rule and it means a rightsholder can only sell each copy once and then loses control over it. Rightsholders make digital copies “licenses” instead of “sales” to get around this rule, but I think it’d be pretty easy to enforce something like if you advertise it’s a sale, then it’s a sale, regardless of what you bury in your terms of service. And if you try to enforce license terms despite advertising it’s a sale, then you are in violation of consumer protection laws and should be liable accordingly. The definition of copy should also match common sense definitions and not apply to things like digital copies being copied in a backend.
Right now, IP law resembles medieval property law that you learn about in first-year law school with all the random estates with arbitrary restrictions and dead hand control. In the case of real property, we have moved to a world where almost everything is just a fee simple and it’s probably not an exaggeration to say that was a necessary condition for modern civilization. We should reform IP rights the same way.
The problem is that a lot of rightsholders are extremely greedy and are always trying to push the boundaries of the law. Courts shouldn’t indulge this—we should also have a rule that if you sue someone for IP infringement and you lose or even if you win but recover less damages than you demanded, you lose the rights to the underlying IP permanently.
I like Slow Boring a lot, and have found Matt to be quite insightful over the years. But part of the deal is that whenever he writes about environmental topics other than climate change I have to cringe and start skipping whole paragraphs. It's a topic area he tends not to have anything interesting to say about, because he simply doesn't understand it, and doesn't seem particularly interested in trying to. So he ends up sounding like the dumb guy on the corner stool at the local redneck bar (some of which is admittedly part of the schtick).
I work in environmental review. I don’t see a very close relationship between those two issues.
While I think NEPA/similar state statutes should be dramatically revised, no project I have worked on (or am aware of) has actually been killed owing to the presence of a protected animal or plant. The presence is disclosed, maybe the limits of disturbance are adjusted, maybe there’s a time-of-year restriction on certain types of work. But a lot of the time there are loopholes to these (“to the extent feasible” etc). And, importantly, these are *procedural* statutes. They just disclose. The biggest problems are that such disclosure is overbroad as required and therefore very expensive, and of course the use of these laws for NIMBY lawsuits.
I doubt factory farms are subject to any kind of environmental review. They don’t get federal funding and are not undertaken by federal agencies, so NEPA wouldn’t apply. Land use regulation is generally in the purview of local government, and most local governments don’t have environmental review laws; maybe they don’t even have performance standards for intensive uses like large-scale farms.
I don’t disagree that people in general think about “the environment” in a muddled and often irrational fashion. But I don’t think that has anything to do with environmental review regulations.
When a project is killed off because Won't Anyone Think Of The One-Eyed Snakes (or insert other animal of choice), that's mostly just opportunity cost: it might be a very expensive decision relative to the counterfactual, but for the most part only those directly involved eat immediate losses. Those perfidious "greedy developers", you know, very sympathetic types. Everyone else gets to go home happy and feeling heroic.
On the other hand, putting the fact in factory farming is a real bummer! And it costs money, even if the absolute amount isn't *that* much. Don't have the figures handy, but going from e.g. caged to Pasteur-raised poultry*, or the hippie CA pork reforms targeted by the Save Our Davis Bacon Act, is really not a bank-breaking cost increase for most. Still, in this economy? You don't defy Affordability(tm) by promising to make meat and other animal products more expensive. Carnivore Theory of Everything: as the most expensive component of your average grocery basket, people get big mad about changes in animal product prices first and foremost, so it's an especially powerful and salient political lever. The spiced ham with no added nitrates (except those naturally occurring in celery powder) must flow! As always, sadly, it's a contrast between concentrated/diffuse harms/benefits. You'd think people would be more open to "factory farming and other urban/wildlife interface clashes are a major zoonosis risk factor for future pandemics", what with covid and then bird flu and then monkeypox and then hantavirus and then [probably forgot some]...but that Diamond Princess ship also seems to have sailed.
*nevermind investing in better technology for in-ovo sexing of chicks, which costs...like...pennies or less, and greatly reduces...um...let's use the industry term "maceration". Don't look it up, IYKYK.
The digital copy issue is easy to solve. If you want to rent it temporarily, it's e.g. $10.00, but if you want to buy and own it permanently it's e.g. $500.00. It's not reasonable to expect those two to be priced the same.
Why would it be more than buying a physical copy? I have plenty of books that were sold to me as Epubs and PDFs that are permanently mine and can't be pulled.
Epic dive into the collapse of the Austin real estate market. Poor guy is hoping to walk away with a 30% loss as everyone heads back to SF.
https://www.businessinsider.com/austin-texas-real-estate-bust-home-prices-falling-homebuyer-regret-2026-8
Seems like building enough homes to meet demand does dramatically reduce prices. Does it make people happy? No.
That guy is complaining about Austin traffic so he moved back to Phoenix?
Phoenix is 11th in the nation for "bad traffic".
https://www.kjzz.org/the-show/2026-08-05/new-data-shows-traffic-congestion-is-getting-worse-in-phoenix-and-delays-are-increasing
I sense an unreliable narrator.
Yes but in Phoenix the bad traffic is worth dealing with because of the high culture and the beauty of the built environment.
I am also curious about the work/financial position that lets someone move from Austin to Phoenix because they don't like "the crowds". But without needing to sell their Austin house to finance it. And being willing to eat a $200,000+ loss to avoid crowds.
Nothing about that story sounds like something normal average people deal with!
Matt’s answer about Perez running for President is half baked. The best thing about being an ambitious House member is that keeping your seat isn’t really that important. Yes, Perez probably disqualifies herself from WA-3 if she runs as a partisan Democrat, but she could always move a couple dozen miles to a friendlier seat or become a lobbyist. The map will change in 2032 anyway.
The real structural weakness is that a House seat is a puny platform to launch a presidential campaign. The last career politician to become president having risen no higher than the House was Garfield — and he didn’t launch anything. He went to Chicago to nominate John Sherman, the convention deadlocked, Wisconsin threw him sixteen votes out of nowhere, and he took it on the 36th ballot. The one last a House member made it, it was an accident in a nominating system that stopped existing in 1968
This is the kind of thing that makes me not actually pine for the smoke-filled room.
"he took it on the 36th ballot"
Ah the good old days.
36 truly is a magical number for disputed electoral ballots.
Every time I read Matt these days, I come away thinking that it would be great if people just acted a little more Christian. We really need more people going to Sunday School class talking with each other and actually trying to persuade and BE PERSUADED. That willingness to become something new and not have to do it absolutely our own way.
I find the Shakespeare Festival model (most famous in Oregon, also here in Idaho and elsewhere) to be the most sustainable and enjoyable form of live theater. The foundation are classics that stand the test of time, but then there are additional plays that might be adaptations of recent works or the occasional avant garde play. I'd wonder if Matt would enjoy that better.
Even when progressives get the policy wins they want, get the political appointees they want, and concessions they fight for it’s never enough. Reading those comments from the NYT op ed MattY wrote is just so disheartening. Even providing a modest and nuanced critique and discussing pragmatic concerns or literal facts is forbidden.
Biden and Harris apparently were “neoliberal corporatist centrists” bla bla bla… and that is why Democrats lost in 2024. It’s like a reverse mirror of MAGA delusions about what actually occurred and what many many many people feel. It points to a weak foundation of beliefs. If all scrutiny and self reflection is forbidden, then those beliefs are not actually being tested.
This was meant to be a response to polytropos, not a stand alone post. I will leave it here, but feel free to ignore or delete.
Another big driver for animal habitat preservation is so there are abundant reserves for animals to be hunted. That might cut against the grain of animal welfare, depending on one's point of view. And there's also the question as to whether the habitat is preserved equally for all animals--see the question of wolves, which hunters tend to hate, but the real biggest foes of them are ranchers.
Traditionally, while creative works have always naturally been a public good, the delivery medium of the works were private goods. Excludability was of course artificially added via copyright law, restricting who could print out copies, and consumption was rivalrous--if I have a book, movie reel, or video game cartridge, that means you can't use that same one.
The upshot though is that it was perfectly legal for you to do with that private good as you wanted. You could give it to someone as a gift or bequeathing, you could loan it (libraries!), or even rent it out (Blockbuster used to be a successful business) or sell it (thrift stores).
But the internet and advanced computing have abolished all semblance or rivalrousness. As such, in order to at least preserve the excludability, regrettably I don't see much of a viable path beyond making them purely club goods that you can only "rent" on a subscription basis. One can of course still meticulously record streaming content they really like (I sometimes do) just like people recorded music on the radio on cassettes, or movies or TV off VHS or Betamax (thank goodness for Sony v. Universal, which almost came out the other way!) to play on their own devices, but there are time and effort tradeoffs from that, so most people just relent on not actually having their own copies of stuff these days.
I know audible (audiobook site) does provide access to books they can no longer sell to people that previously bought them—The Martian, for instance, was recorded by Bray, but then again by Wheaten once the movie came out. You can’t buy the Bray edition, but you can still download it if you’ve purchased it previously. Not sure if something similar can be constructed for movies.
Amazon did also get a lot of flack maybe a year ago for making it no longer possible to download kindle books to a computer.
As someone who does want to own things, but who has a good appreciation for how difficult it is to move a few hundred physical books/DVDs and the occasional failure rate of SD drives, it would be nice if this could be figured out.
>Do you support legislation preventing that from happening? Basically, if you purchased a digital copy, it doesn’t matter if they lose a licensing agreement, you get the movie forever.<
As I understand it, there are lots of international implications, multiple-jurisdictions and so forth involving the licensing of digital content, and for reasons related in part, I think, to all the different stakeholders who get a piece of the action (compared with music), movies and TV are challenging when it comes to hammering out customer-friendly agreements. That's why no video content "all you can eat" equivalent of Spotify has emerged — the global legal environment doesn't easily permit this. It's also why you might buy a movie from one of the various online marketplaces in the comfort of your Kansas City living room, only to find it won't play when you fire up your laptop in a Berlin hotel room (you've actually only purchased a geographically specific and time-limited license for the content in question).
I suspect your best bet if you want a "forever" movie is to purchase the DVD, and rip it. As it happens I'm a long and dedicated Spotify owner — I find renting my music works just fine. But when it comes to my *video* library, I strongly prefer to own outright.
I strongly prefer to own physical copies of films for similar reasons - permanent access without edits and often better image quality than can be streamed.
Licencing issues are a big problem in the video game space too. Plenty of games from c.20 years ago had soundtracks filled with commercial music which mean modern versions can't include them, for example. In other cases the IP rights have simply been split up in awkward places which make getting the agreements needed to do anything with a particular game or property too difficult (especially after several separations, takeovers, insolvencies etc.). There's can also be tricky regional certification issues too - many countries have significantly tightened age or obscenity related restrictions; and whenever these are updated any content available for digital distribution needs to be reviewed against them.
This seems like a problem though. Like imagine if when you buy a house, the guy that did the drywall gets to have ongoing royalties and has to consent to the ongoing sale, ditto for the architect, the guy who owned the land before you, etc. It’d be very hard to sell the house and the real estate market would break. That’s what IP law is like. It should be reformed to have much simpler.
Sure. It's not super consumer-friendly. And personally, I find the absence of an all you can eat option for video to be a problem, agreed. I'd pay a lot a month to have dependable access to virtually all the TV and movies ever created. Just writing those words sounds like a pipe dream. And yet the music sector has managed it.
Ossoff 2028.
Glad to see you are Person with Internet Access pilled on where change will come from in the US. Presidential elections are the culminating process of political paradigm change in the US. Since the US hasn't added parties in 170 years that's now channeled through the nomination process.
People talk about this being the most important election of our lifetime every four years. But 2028 will be the most important Democratic nomination process in at least 20 years.
There already is a legal doctrine that should give people full ownership of digital copies—it’s called the first sale rule and it means a rightsholder can only sell each copy once and then loses control over it. Rightsholders make digital copies “licenses” instead of “sales” to get around this rule, but I think it’d be pretty easy to enforce something like if you advertise it’s a sale, then it’s a sale, regardless of what you bury in your terms of service. And if you try to enforce license terms despite advertising it’s a sale, then you are in violation of consumer protection laws and should be liable accordingly. The definition of copy should also match common sense definitions and not apply to things like digital copies being copied in a backend.
Right now, IP law resembles medieval property law that you learn about in first-year law school with all the random estates with arbitrary restrictions and dead hand control. In the case of real property, we have moved to a world where almost everything is just a fee simple and it’s probably not an exaggeration to say that was a necessary condition for modern civilization. We should reform IP rights the same way.
The problem is that a lot of rightsholders are extremely greedy and are always trying to push the boundaries of the law. Courts shouldn’t indulge this—we should also have a rule that if you sue someone for IP infringement and you lose or even if you win but recover less damages than you demanded, you lose the rights to the underlying IP permanently.
This.
Just applying first sale doctrine to digital products would solve 99% of the problem, including the library access issues.
I like Slow Boring a lot, and have found Matt to be quite insightful over the years. But part of the deal is that whenever he writes about environmental topics other than climate change I have to cringe and start skipping whole paragraphs. It's a topic area he tends not to have anything interesting to say about, because he simply doesn't understand it, and doesn't seem particularly interested in trying to. So he ends up sounding like the dumb guy on the corner stool at the local redneck bar (some of which is admittedly part of the schtick).
I would appreciate more specifics here.
That may be true, but you outta give us specifics on what you're referring to!
Matt's disdain of the outdoors strikes me as an aggravating factor at times.
Kind of funny that he spends so much time in Maine.
That is why we should breed urban adapted misquotes that thrive only in the concrete environment of Logan Circle.
Agreed.
I think there are some downsides to being a generalist too.
I work in environmental review. I don’t see a very close relationship between those two issues.
While I think NEPA/similar state statutes should be dramatically revised, no project I have worked on (or am aware of) has actually been killed owing to the presence of a protected animal or plant. The presence is disclosed, maybe the limits of disturbance are adjusted, maybe there’s a time-of-year restriction on certain types of work. But a lot of the time there are loopholes to these (“to the extent feasible” etc). And, importantly, these are *procedural* statutes. They just disclose. The biggest problems are that such disclosure is overbroad as required and therefore very expensive, and of course the use of these laws for NIMBY lawsuits.
I doubt factory farms are subject to any kind of environmental review. They don’t get federal funding and are not undertaken by federal agencies, so NEPA wouldn’t apply. Land use regulation is generally in the purview of local government, and most local governments don’t have environmental review laws; maybe they don’t even have performance standards for intensive uses like large-scale farms.
I don’t disagree that people in general think about “the environment” in a muddled and often irrational fashion. But I don’t think that has anything to do with environmental review regulations.
When a project is killed off because Won't Anyone Think Of The One-Eyed Snakes (or insert other animal of choice), that's mostly just opportunity cost: it might be a very expensive decision relative to the counterfactual, but for the most part only those directly involved eat immediate losses. Those perfidious "greedy developers", you know, very sympathetic types. Everyone else gets to go home happy and feeling heroic.
On the other hand, putting the fact in factory farming is a real bummer! And it costs money, even if the absolute amount isn't *that* much. Don't have the figures handy, but going from e.g. caged to Pasteur-raised poultry*, or the hippie CA pork reforms targeted by the Save Our Davis Bacon Act, is really not a bank-breaking cost increase for most. Still, in this economy? You don't defy Affordability(tm) by promising to make meat and other animal products more expensive. Carnivore Theory of Everything: as the most expensive component of your average grocery basket, people get big mad about changes in animal product prices first and foremost, so it's an especially powerful and salient political lever. The spiced ham with no added nitrates (except those naturally occurring in celery powder) must flow! As always, sadly, it's a contrast between concentrated/diffuse harms/benefits. You'd think people would be more open to "factory farming and other urban/wildlife interface clashes are a major zoonosis risk factor for future pandemics", what with covid and then bird flu and then monkeypox and then hantavirus and then [probably forgot some]...but that Diamond Princess ship also seems to have sailed.
*nevermind investing in better technology for in-ovo sexing of chicks, which costs...like...pennies or less, and greatly reduces...um...let's use the industry term "maceration". Don't look it up, IYKYK.