Growth is slow but collapse is fast because it takes decades for those people to build, earn their status.

With our eggs in one basket, a small group of elders, they all die off within just a decade or so of each other. A much faster process than the 30-40 years it took to for them to grow their worth to trickle down on us.

Entropy tears apart all structure. Its mechanism for tearing apart society is generational churn.

Time is non-linear. No thing has the same epoch and erodes at the same tick. Endless linear economic growth will never be because once dead belief the elders were rich has to be rethought.

https://www.antennasdirect.com/big-game-tv-station-list.html

https://www.wgal.com/article/consumer-super-bowl-2026-antenn...

https://www.silicondust.com/hdhomerun/

"You can just do things." Public airwaves? Consumer owned compute enabling adversarial consumption and interoperability? Good luck.

Mission Accomplished: NFL to Hit Goodell’s $25B Revenue Goal - https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/mission-accomplished-nfl-h... - February 2nd, 2026

Do people need to watch the content? No. Are people entitled to the content? Is it "stealing" or not? That last one is probably up for date.

Regardless, the answers to those questions don't matter in the end. The public has made its demands clear time after time. The rightsholders can either deliver a convenient experience at a reasonable* price, or they can play whack-a-mole with pirates forever. Spotify managed to do it; Steam managed to do it. Only video media companies are so stubborn these days.

*There is always much debate on what constitutes a "reasonable" price, but it is certainly no more than a consumer is willing to pay. If that's less than the cost of producing the product, then perhaps the business model simply isn't viable.

So maybe it's just that. Life feels like it should be better although it's the best it's ever been in many first-world countries. I am sure that entitled attitude is very common among rich people too.

You need this thing called an 'antenna' which captures invisible radio waves and decodes them into a picture with audio. You can't pause or rewind, and you have to be in front of the TV at specific times, so it is not precis the same, but you can access TV this way.

It used to be that you'd pay one company a little extra, and get all the extra channels you actually wanted. Now you pay multiple companies _a lot_ extra, and still might miss out on what you want.

Many people still remember the original deal.

Well, the major services like Google and Facebook provide content without requiring payment because they extract value from their surveillance of user behavior, plus ads. The users have now accepted that they are the product, but they get little kickback in the form of entertainment. Why should TV be any different?

* Continually remove good content

* Continually produce 'new and exciting' series only to cancel them after 1-2 seasons

* Continually raise the price

* Continually split off into ever more services - so instead of having 1 or even 3 good streaming services, there are dozens of them with limited content

I would not mind paying for 1-3 good, well-made services with a reasonable price tag. As it stands, I would need to pay for more like 8+ to get coverage of what I want to watch, and their prices are all $20+ a month. And almost every month I'd find something I really enjoy has been taken down. I'm not paying $160 a month for streaming that I barely use. I cancelled all of mine.

I can understand someone jumping to piracy. These services are terrible and don't need to be - they're that way because of absurd greed.

Frankly, IP should last 7 years, 14 at the most.

Why are we paying for Alf year after year, decade after decade?

Why are we required to pay for stuff while also being advertised to and having our data sold?

Now when you do buy something, you're buying a revokable license you can't even buy it and own it.

We'll if buying isn't ownership, then pirating it isn't stealing it. Plain and simple.

I've said this for years but most people probably don't watch more than 2 streamers / month every month. Pay for one month at a time and be pleasantly surprised at how many months you don't pay for 1 or more that you're paying for now.

Do you really think we're worse off today? Is anyone paying close to a 90's cable bill for their various streaming services? And is the quality the same as we endured back then?

As I understand it, the difference is sports channels. Sportsball stars’ high salaries are paid from TV rights, and the subscription cost reflects that.