Government agencies buy commercial data about Americans in bulk

Most musicians barely make money from music. Most artists don't make money from art - and I should know, being the son of two. You are either the top seller/musician or you are everyone else and in 99.99% of all cases, you are everyone else. Here's another example: a friend of my mom spent the last decade pushing her paintings on etsy. Then trump added all his tariffs and she went from making a minimum wage or there abouts to a literal 0. Meanwhile my mom never bothered with any of those and simply gave her paintings to two local art galleries - no websites, no social media, just tourists walking about and even if this isn't her main revenue income, she outsells her friend easily. And that is far more common than you think.

Admittedly, I don't think HN is a good place to promote your product either. It used to be a place where innovation and doing something complex was appreciated. These days it's all about people praising slop.

As for my friend - I've said it to his face multiple times but as they say, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

Silence demon!

> Admittedly, I don't think HN is a good place to promote your product either. It used to be a place where innovation and doing something complex was appreciated. These days it's all about people praising slop.

I do sort of agree with that, I mean I literally saw within another thread related to music (Misfits) where this guy https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=hustleracer is clearly using AI and just joined

I am seeing lots of people use AI within hackernews now. I have flagged them for what its worth but yes, I do sort of agree with that hackernews has decreased a little bit in value.

But I used to hear the same thing a year ago as well, I would still be considered relatively new to the forum but I heard stories of how one day PG would just decide about elixir and have front page all about elixir/erlang and people sometime ago reminisced that, which happened many years ago.

But even with all of this, I feel like hackernews is a place where sanity is still intact for the most part and there is still some authenticity more than other places but that's just my 2 cents.

I do agree that musicians struggle with making money sometimes. Its definitely a winner takes all market from my viewpoint and median musician doesn't make much but the mean is skewed because of the billions racked in by famous people.

I am not exactly sure how to preserve Music,Art though. One of my closest friend said to me that her sister wasn't studying well and now my friend is 99 percentile kind of fellow, but to me that moment, Man it felt like that poor girl was put into expectation by her brother and her family and sometimes feeling too. So I said to him that hey if she wants to pursue music/art/anything, then let her do that and my friend basically told me again about the struggling economy of that.

I am not sure what can be done with all of this. Universal Basic Income seems to be the solution. I think Ireland passed UBI for artists sometime ago, maybe that might help preserving music/art.

An answer I feel like is happening is that atleast for my generation, it feels like a lack of culture. I am not quite satisfied by how the social algorithms can promote brain rot but not show music and just, like, I feel like our generation and next generations to come have lost something more meaningful for these algorithms to catch the money trail and the people to make such brain-rot.

My point is, Music/Art has some incredible contribution to the society but society doesn't reward them enough or fairly and then we have the other part of society turning attention into a commodity and churning out content like a factory. All in all, feels like a cultural degradation as time passes from one generation to another.

"I don't have anything to hide," sort of foolishness.

Which is why Mazda torments me and disables my ability to remote start my car without "connected services" app installed on my phone.

I've said this ad nauseam, but their TOS says they sell to 3rd parties including law enforcement and insurance companies.

Nobody cares though. Main point. Like 80% of the public have no idea or interest knowing what connected services does. If you tell them. They still don't care (my parents).