Back up a second. You've missed an important question. What do you WANT out of your time in this life? Where do you actually want to be in ten years, or twenty? $150k p/a is not an answer, or at least not a very good one. You clearly have means enough to start businesses, so a lot of non-conventional doors are open to you. Why do any of it?
I've had plenty of time to relax. Going forward I want options, and the best path to that is to pay off the small amount of debt I currently have and start making forward financial progress.
I need a way to begin making income in the next few months, I can't afford to roll my own business and wait years to break even. I don't want anything non-conventional - I want a normal job, heck even if it's $90k per year.
This does not demonstrate a sound understanding of how the public domain works, why copyright lengths have been extended so ferociously over the last century (it's shareholders who want this), nor the impact it has both on creative process and public conversation.
This is a highly complex question about how legal systems, companies, and individual creatives come in conflict, and cannot be summarized as a positive creative constraint / means to celebrate their works.
I develop copyright material from the letter and the images that I've both sold to studios and own myself. Copyright lengths are there to prevent the shareholder class from rapid exploitation. Once copyright declines to years not decades, shareholders will demand that be exploited rather than new ideas. The public conversation is rather irrelevant as the layperson doesn't have a window into the massive risk, long-term development required to invent new things, that's how copyright is not a referendum, it's a specialized discourse. Yes the idea of long-term copyright developed under work-for-hire or individual ownership can be easily summarized. License, sample, or steal. Those are the windows.
This will almost certainly go down as one of the worst mistakes in recent tech history. You can't tell 40+% of your commerical customer base "We could absolutely allow you to use your current computer with our new operating system! We just didn't want to. Sucks to be you, I guess." and not expect consequences for your public image and consumer confidence.
Five essential questions of democracy (Tony Benn):
“What power have you got?”
“Where did you get it from?”
“In whose interests do you use it?”
“To whom are you accountable?”
“How do we get rid of you?”
His observation is that the last question fundamentally defines a democracy - not the ability for the people to give someone power, but to dispose of that power via accepted protocols. It is also the reason people with power so commonly hate democracy: properly answered, these questions limit their use of that power, and threaten to remove their access to it completely.
Most people can buy an opinel and be happy for decades. You don't need anything fancy for a general purpose knife. $50 max, and that's if you're feeling like getting something special.
Expensive steels are, by and large, incremental progress over cheaper knife steels, provided it got an appropriate heat treatment and has good edge geometry. In almost no applications will an end consumer notice the difference.
“Rereading, an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society, which would have us ‘throw away’ the story once it has been consumed (‘devoured’), so that we can then move on to another story, buy another book, and which is tolerated only in certain marginal categories of readers (children, old people, and professors), rereading is here suggested at the outset, for it alone saves the text from repetition (those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere)..." - Balzac
Consumers may do this, but consumers also hate shrinkflation with a passion. Raising a price is understandable and a consumer can rationalize inflation, but shrinking the amount given can feel deceptive, untrustworthy, or exploitative. Brands that do it are playing with fire. They may not yet get burned.
I wish there would be negative feedback to shrinkflation, yet, even in my own buying behavior (and I might do more things "on-principle" than the average consumer) I mostly still stick with brands of product I've found I like or that work for me, so long as the shrinkflation remains suspiciously mostly in lockstep with other brands.
What I've seen does get consumer negative feedback is when, say, Club(?) brand crackers change owners and formula, and lose their buttery taste.
And lately I've been wondering whether Post raisin bran has deteriorated to be the same as Kellogg's. I'm feeling less loyal to Post, and have started experimenting with more brands (e.g., WFM's store brand isn't much more expensive). And also straying to other kinds of product (e.g., Grape Nuts still offers fiber for healthy trumps, but less sugar than raisin bran, and it actually doesn't taste bad to adults).
Recently, I'm seeing more negative feedback to bean-counter-looking product changes in sensitive skin products. For example, Aveeno changed their sensitive-skin fragrance-free body wash to have strong fragrance(!) which made me and others incredulously furious. And Cetaphil (an expensive sensitive-skin brand often recommended by doctors, for which you might spend 10x what a bar of soap you used to buy costs) changed their formula in a way that caused many devotees to report breaking out in rashes.
(If you have sensitive skin, or you ever got painful contact dermatitis, and desperately replaced all the products that might've triggered that... you become a very loyal customer of whatever working solution you found. And a new CEO, perhaps trying to cash in long-term brand goodwill and customer base, such as to hit a personal compensation performance target, by changing the formula/process/quality... is pure evil to you.)
It seems to me that only kellogs, post (and maybe malt-o-meal?) make raisin bran, the rest are the above with a different name. I buyithe brand name anyway as quality control will sell marginal (safe to eat but batch was mixed wrong) product to the other labels they won't to themselves. (these days i make my own meals from scratch, when I used to I bought the brand after getting burned on generics)
Not at purchase time but eventually they notice that packs don't last as long as they used to. Unfortunately (or fortunately for the big corps) they won't change their buying behavior because of it though.
While it's OK if this truly is what you need, be mindful that you're not making a decision you'll come to regret. There is no shame in crying at a funeral. Helping each other through death is one of life's innate obligations. One of the few things we have no choice but to do as humans is die.
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