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Didn't the Germans get in trouble for "just following the rules" back in the mid-20th century?

"I was just following orders." --Any German soldier after 1945

It's interesting considering that based on the German military doctrine at the time low ranking officers on the ground had a huge amount of independence while the French ones were stuck doing nothing and waiting for orders to be signed and approved..

Of course maybe that didn't apply to committing atrocities to the same degree.


Brian Herbert reference detected, opinion ignored.

> We should all aspire to this?

Yes, we should all aspire to have our children's mother at home during the child's developmental years rather than letting it be a string of minimum-wage strangers. If you can't manage that, oh well, it happens... but that's the ideal that we should all want. And wouldn't it be a hell of a world, where the single income could support such a family?

>I'm reminded of a 90s comedy series that had a regular segment that lampooned how some families worked 3 or more jobs.

Someone above asked "who was telling them X". Well, in your case, it was 90s sitcoms. Not just your case, everyone's really. Sitcoms have been used to negatively portray what should be ideals since at least the 1970s.


>Somebody getting news from TikTok will probably be better informed than somebody relying only on print or TV.

Imagine talking about how the "internet has unlimited stories" and then following up with "people who use TikTok are better informed".

If you're getting the information by listening to one of those jackasses in their sing-song presenter voices... you're not getting information at all. You're functionally illiterate and hyponotized by someone who learned to exploit Youtube-style algorithms.


What we didn't know back in the 1990s was how little this sort of presentation (that you describe) was engaging. Everyone could sort of tell, which is why producers shied away from it, but with the rise of algorithms and internet slop it can be measured very precisely. And the measurements show that it's damn near close to zero, on whatever scale it is that they use.

Intelligent people are boring. They're worried about problem-solving. Problems like on the tests back in school that used to make my head hurt, problems I'd get the red X on and have to repeat 3rd grade over because of. Unintelligent people are exciting. They're in conflict. They're fighting, or going to find a fight somewhere, and if you watch long enough they might even get into that fight right then and there (Bill O'Reilly used to do that on air, after all).


Funny then, how he could be so wrong. The population is plummeting in many countries, and the rate of decline will only increase. In China, they're looking at each generation halving the previous (or worse).

>The concept of intellectual property on its own (independently of its legal implementation details) is at most as evil as property ownership, and probably less so as unlike the latter it promotes innovation and creativity.

This is a strange inversion. Property ownership is morally just in that the piece of land my home is can only be exclusive, not to mention necessary to a decent life. Meanwhile, intellectual property is a contrivance that was invented to promote creativity, but is subverted in ways that we're only now beginning to discover. Abolish copyright.


>the piece of land my home is can only be exclusive, not to mention necessary to a decent life

That mentality is exactly why you can argue property ownership being more evil. Landlords "own property" and see the reputation of that these past few decades.

Allowing private ownership of limited human necessities like land leads to greed that cost people lives. That's why heavy regulation is needed. Meanwhile, it's at worst annoying and stifling when Disney owns a cartoon mouse fotlr 100 years.


>Allowing private ownership of limited human necessities like land leads to greed that cost people lives.

You're not "allowing" it unless you've already decided that you own it and can dispose of it (or not) as you see it. And this is why you'll always be the enemy of all decent folk.

"Real communism's never been tried!!!!"

>Meanwhile, it's at worst annoying and stifling when Disney owns a cartoon mouse fotlr 100 years.

It's actually destructive of culture in ways that are difficult to overstate. Disney nor any other "copyright owner" can't be trusted to preserve culture and works, they're the ones that threw the old film reels into the river and let them burn up in archive fires. No thanks. It's amazing how wrong you are on every single point.


But you are also wrong, so where do we go from here?

Well, you could agree not to be a rabid communist hellbent on destroying everything, and we kind of muddle through this the way we've been doing. Or, you eventually work up the nerve to do the violent revolution thing. And then people like me respond.

It's really completely out of my hands.


Feels like we think along similar lines on this issue.

Could have sworn they did this years ago. I even have the first 80 years or whatever on DVD in the closet.

Normally when laymen say "digitized" they mean one of two things: scanned images in a PDF or fully transcribed (and possible formatted) text extracted from the scan. The Complete New Yorker you're thinking of was mostly the former, with a bit of indexing (table of contents pointing to the PDFs if I remember correctly).

This latest digitization project does the latter, transcribing the text into their existing content management system and as far as I can tell, preserving much of the formatting. This comes with full text search, allows cross linking between articles, and all that good stuff.

I suspect that since they include an LLM summary and started this digitization project in early 2024, this was enabled by LLMs.


If I’m reading this correctly, they now have all their historic articles loaded into their CMS. I think they previously just had a system where you could page (and maybe search?) through scans of old issues, which is also cool but not as versatile.

When a lot of content was being put out on CD/DVD, a number of publications did but they are not straightforwardly accessible these days because they're usually on an old version of Windows. (Yes, if you want to make a project of it, you can probably get into them but has never been worth it for me.)

Usually Windows/Wine is the much better case than the old Mac apps (32bit, PPC etc) in the age of Apple Silcon

https://old.reddit.com/r/thenewyorker/comments/1jlhrve/instr...

Breaking the DJVU DRM would be the perfect solution though


It has been broken. I actually have the set on my desk ready to rip, I just couldn't find my USB DVD drive.

Here's a link to the guy that broke it:

https://github.com/reconSuave/PlayboyPDF/


Last I checked, he had Playboy and Rolling Stone ready, but not New Yorker. Any updates?

Surprisingly, this has been a project I’ve been tinkering with for years. There is an easy way to get the raw png/jpeg files out, but it does require a windows box. Im planning on working on it more over the long holiday.

I think the disc release GP is talking about had files in DjVu format.

Encrypted DjVu, and the viewer doesn‘t run on modern Windows.

It runs great on windows 11. The install took a long time but I didn’t have to do anything special to make it work

Maybe we have different editions? I never got mine to work.

doesn't wine have old versions of mswindows pretty much nailed?

I have the MAD archives bought in 90s on CDs but can't use..

The issues on the Absolutely MAD DVD (1952-2005) are just plain PDF files, no DRM, they work perfectly

https://files.catbox.moe/x4np6u.png


The CDs I have seem to be proprietary for Windows from the late 90s. But I also have PDFs through 2005 on my computer which I must have "acquired" at some point.

The browser app might be some outdated Windows application, that's the case with the MAD DVD too, but you can find the actual issue files in some folders

Yes the file names are something unknown. It has a software to access. They did a damn good job.

For instance, in Disk 1, there is a big binary file mad.m1 492MB. That seems to hold content, but not sure what file type or which program can open it. Rest of the files are very small.


No mine were pre dvd era. In CD. Older. They had a surprisingly good UI with its own funny stuff. Your install that and insert the disk 1-7 based on which issue you select. Even scold you for installing wrong disk & comments about 'you can insert a CD of Yanni if you prefer screeching' or something like that. Lol don't know what mad has against him their comments are always funny.

I have MAD archives somewhere. I thought they were in some standard format but maybe not.

A lot of the gen 1 or so CD content isn't easily accessible although a more industrious person could probably get to it in some manner.


I have the CD backed up as ISO files which I can mount. Since these days laptops don't have CD players.

Need to try on latest windows 11 I gave up earlier. For a while had a windows 2000 virtual machine that worked.


>Would you like your work to be pirated,

Imagine being so good at writing, that people out there are trying to get a copy of it that they can upload to The Pirate Bay. Hell yeh, I'd love that... seems like reaching the big leagues.


Too much convenience, selection, and the prices are all too low!

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