Here’s my risky comment of the day.

I think piracy isn’t like stealing, but it’s still wrong in some interesting and nuanced ways. Just so you know, I’m in no position to judge people for pirating, because I’ve done my fair share of sailing the high seas. However, I would still like to discuss the ethical aspects of piracy and how it compares with stealing.

IMO, calling it stealing is completely wrong, but free-riding or trespassing could be more suitable words for this. Obviously, the movie industry would love to compare it with the most severe crime they can come up with, but they certainly have financial incentives behind that reasoning. I’m looking at it from a more neutral perspective.

Stealing has clear and direct harm associated with it, whereas the effects of piracy are more subtle and indirect. Free-riding a bus or sneaking into a circus (AKA trespassing) are somewhat similar, but there’s clear indirect harm. If you watch a football match from the outside of the fence, it’s probably still considered free-riding, but I would put that into a completely different category. IMO it’s also closer to piracy than the other examples.

Most pirates shouldn’t be counted as lost customers, so the argument about depriving the creator of their rightful income is only partially correct. If pirating wasn’t possible, but paying for the movie was, vast majority of these people would prefer to do something else like, go outside and play football with friends. To some extent, piracy still does reduce the demand for the pirated material, so there’s an indirect harm associated with it, and that’s what makes it unethical IMO. Still not wrong enough that I would stop doing it, especially considering what the alternatives are. Again, I have no moral high ground in this situation, and I’m willing to call my own actions unethical. You can call yours whatever you want.

Depending on how you count it, you could say there’s been some sort of fighting and violence going on for decades. Even though, you can distinguish several periods of intensified war (such as the numerous intifadas), it’s difficult to call the in-between parts “peace”.

Power sources is another one. The errors caused by a slightly broken PSU can be really mysterious.

Reminds me of the time when I bought a stack of microSD cards and readers from alibaba. About half of the cards and readers were dead on arrival, and the remaining ones died within a few years.

Now I’ve learned my lesson. This is what happens when a company outsources quality control to the customer.

They’re planning to use the 530 m long secondary shaft at first. The entire mine is a lot deeper, so obviously, there are other shafts too. You gotta start somewhere.

That’s the whole point of grid energy storage. Even if there are losses, it’s acceptable considering that otherwise you would need to burn fossil fuels in a peaker plant to keep the grid balanced. You aren’t supposed to recharge a battery like this with fossil fuels.

These cursed time units remind me of the super messy imperial units. Unfortunately, the French revolution wasn’t able to fix that, but it did fix a whole lot of other nonsense.

The illustration also showed a bucket wheel excavator. Don’t remember seeing that the last time I visited Pyhäsalmi.

Just walked the distance of 1.8 km/h.

Mistakes like this could be avoided if we just used joules for energy and watts for power.

Sodium batteries would be a welcome change. Solid state batteries are another interesting technology that looks promising.

Current Li-ion batteries have numerous issues, but fortunately there are several alternatives too. Bringing a new battery chemistry to production scale hasn’t been easy, but we’re taking small steps like that every year.

We may still need lithium, nickel or manganese in the near future, but the demand for cobalt (per cell) has been decreasing gradually. Who knows which alternative ends up dominating the market after a few decades