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Z-Library Helps Students to Overcome Academic Poverty, Study Finds

(torrentfreak.com)
356 points hn_acker | 1 comments | 20 Nov 24 23:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.217s | source
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bastard_op ◴[21 Nov 24 01:17 UTC] No.42200020[source]▶
Some 28 years ago I taught myself everything could get/find from graphic design, basic development, server administration, etc, all downloading commercial warez over dial-up with AOL and Usenet. I didn't need a class or subscriptions, with every software and book I could have wanted, I had the best lab in the world with any software available I could want with piracy.

Fast forward 30 years now it's mostly the same as it was, only open source replaced all the commercial, and little has changed that I can still get the rest too. You can pay as much or little as you want in life if you know how.

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jjtheblunt ◴[21 Nov 24 01:26 UTC] No.42200079[source]▶
You said you relied on piracy.

But piracy means you were in spirit and partly in reality stealing the work product of those who learned a few years before you.

Would you want your work value to be diluted by piracy?

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1. underlipton ◴[21 Nov 24 01:38 UTC] No.42200160[source]▶
Any Millennial could tell you that that particular social contract was already well on its way through the shredder, even as early as '96 (traditional pensions would have been gone at that point). The people who came before us have done quite a bit of their own thievery.

IME, the expansion of piracy follows a contraction of purchasing power without a commensurate contraction of the expectation to consume media/information. E.g., young people would still be surreptitiously downloading ripped MP3s if Spotify didn't exist, because the economic wherewithal to buy a bunch of CDs just isn't there anymore.