Everyone who needs to strike is living paycheck to paycheck. Nobody wants to become homeless in order to strike. And our media and networking are largely controlled by compromised assets.

I’ve been in and out of politics as a personal interest since the early 2000a. We’re in a really bad situation right now.

Without a central voice to organize and lead people we’re not going to be able to coordinate enough people across the country

I want you to understand what it is you’re talking about when you say things like this:

You are asking for what it’s the equivalent of all of Europe revolting against leadership that never leaves Prague.

America is really fucking big. I live in Seattle. I have been protesting. But my state officials are already more or less on my side

For me to protest in a way that actually causes a problem for the people in power I would need to drive no less than 41 hours if I didn’t sleep. Realistically it’s 3-4 days each way. Or hundreds of dollars in airfare or train tickets.

And of course I’d be fired for missing work.

I’m pissed as any American but what the fuck am I supposed to do? Asking America to revolt isn’t like asking England or France or Belgium. Our leaders are in a proverbial ivory tower and we’ve been stripped of any ability to effect change through anything but a national strike, which has not been successfully organized, largely due to the scale required.

We have 341m people on 10M km² of land. Compare that to somewhere like Germany with 84m people on 357k km²

It’s a much easier proposition getting 10% of Germans to their capital than getting 10% of Americans to ours

Are you the key master?

There are lots of reasons to pirate stuff, but this argument in particular boils down to “We should steal stuff now because maybe some day in the future I won’t be able to use the paid version after they go out of business.” And that is shitty.

You bought it, so go crack it now that the license check is broken and nobody will care. That’s GOOD piracy. Support the creators, pirate when you can’t or it’s unreasonable to pay (more).

Don’t just pirate to mitigate theoretical future inconvenience. Do it to circumvent actual inconvenience, or to get things you couldn’t otherwise afford, or to say “fuck you” to big, shitty companies.

But pirating from a small-time dev just in case there are maybe license problems far in the future is not The Way