kevincox

Does someone connecting to this have an IP highly correlated with your non-open network? Because if so then yes, that is fairly concerning.

with no changes to the salary they received during the production stage

But this just isn't how it works. These people aren't paid minimum wage. This will definitely be played in salary negotiation as part of the compensation and will almost certainly result in less base salary.

So now the studio is shifting some risk onto the workers.

I don't know if I really buy "not doing much of the work". Middle management maybe but to own and run a company is serious work. Especially starting a company is huge risk. So if you take the risk you get a lot of the reward.

IMHO ways to help even this out are:

1. Higher taxes on the wealthy. Keep that progressive tax curve going (and not regressing). I think these people do deserve to be rewarded, but up to a point. Honestly I think the tax rate should approach 100% as you approach the very highest percentile of income.
2. Universal basic income. Make it so that people don't need to work. They get to choose to work when the compensation is worth it to them. This makes explotation much harder and makes it much easier for people to negotiate fair compensation (whether that is salary, profit sharing, a mix or something else).

I would also like to see some way to change the natural goal of a company from "make as much money as possible" to "bring as much value to people as possible", but I think these two things would be a good start.

I would be a bit careful with this.

1. It is incredibly hard to define each worker's contribution to any particular profit.
2. It means that the worker's compensation depends on the overall success of the product which may have little to do with their work (for example bad management tanking a project or it getting cancelled before release).
3. Accounting can move profits around in a lot of cases. Look at how every movie makes no money.

In many ways having it be a transaction (work x hours get paid x dollars) is nice. I means that the employee knows exactly what they are getting upfront.

EV is negative. Difficult decision.

Yeah, if you can reflash it you are completely in control. This is the optimal state.

I think this is a little confused. Unless your WiFi is open someone seeing your network can't find out what the WAN IP is.

And getting your ip can connect the people directly to your box

"Connect" is a strong word here. Yeah, they can send traffic at it. But that shouldn't do anything.

A trace route command to this IP could return intermediate equipment of your isp, helping to pinpoint your town or even your street.

This is the most reasonable concern. Depending on your ISP and location the IP itself or packet tracing you can get a pretty good idea of the user's location.

Maybe in some areas. But in downtown Toronto tons of restaurants are super busy, and delivery orders seem through the roof. But this also doesn't really solve the tipping problem, it seems pretty orthogonal.

No, I don't mean a law. I don't even know how you would make this a law. You can already legally just walk away. Maybe you can have a law that the "no tip" option on card machines must be at least as easy as the tip option or something.

There is no such thing as "everyone", but you only need a tipping point. Maybe 1/3 of people or similar. You just need enough awareness so that it isn't considered incredibly rude or outrageous, that most retail workers will understand what is happening and the businesses will see it coming. It definitely wouldn't be easy, that is why I would put the target date far in advance (maybe next January is actually too close). So that cultural knowledge could slowly be built and enough people to make a difference would switch at the same time.

Yeah mp4s with h264 will play basically anywhere if the audio format is a common one. Must be the most supported setup.

I'm pretty surprised that all of the audio formats work. I'm not so surprised that the TV has h265, although maybe a bit surprised that it is exposed to the browser. The container support is also pretty surprising. Unless your MKVs are so simple that they are effectively WEBM.

Or maybe it pops the link out of the browser into a dedicated media player which has decent codec support.

iDevices do expose h265 in the browser, but the container support is still a bit surprising. But then again WEBM is basically MKV, so maybe that is why it tends to work.

In China there is no such thing as a throwaway number (at least outside of black markets). All numbers require ID to acquire.

For the US it would be a bit different. VOIP numbers do exist but they are often also blocked by services (this isn't black and white but there are services that will quite accurately map numbers into ranges like home/cell/business/VoIP).

But of course the assumption would be that if they start requiring phone numbers for WiFi access the logical next step would be to make all numbers traceable to humans.