It’s worse than that. Much like the corporate, “middle class” white collar structure depends on keeping people too indebted to ever really have power or freedom to negotiate for fairness, the military also depends on underpaying and overworking its people. They have to provide that same level of inadequacy, and then, make not getting it even more unbearable.

When you start to look at the math, a lot of the previously incomprehensible decisions of the government start to make sense. Why is abortion illegal? Because given free choice, poor people stop reproducing at levels needed to maintain the slave wage labor when they can’t afford the basic necessities to raise a family. Or more specifically, women do… you can find a willing sperm donor, but the mom gets told by society don’t have a baby you can’t afford, and does exactly that. And then they trot out a whole “God doesn’t like this” moral argument, all while happily looking the other way when it’s clear a bunch of their leaders party fucked kids on an offshore island.

Well, we figured out how to maintain the Turing test line.

To be clear, autism doesn’t make someone an asshole, but autism makes it a lot more apparent when someone is an asshole. Which in the current climate,

Downvote me father for I have committed bad praxis.

People are still paying over 100k for a bitcoin. Which in my opinion, is equally absurd and doomed to fail. Like yea, if you bought one for 2 dollars and turned it into 100k you won investing and maybe established generational wealth. But the same could be said if you managed to catch the windfall of NFTs, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s stupid to assign billions of dollars in value to a global game of guess the number.

This is the key thing many criminals fail to understand. The fact Miranda rights exist and the officer just had the balls to read them to you and still wants to engage, should be a red flag as to just how much of a disadvantage you are at in the impending battle of wits.

I’m just glad they got a power hungry, austistic lunatic in charge now, so everyone can see this is absolutely the end game, before this becomes normalized and people like me get called retarded for not wanting a car that can be remote deactivated.

Honestly, AI creating absolute dogpiles of low-effort resumes, making shit up all while being the trendy thing so HR recruiters not only can’t ban it but have to embrace it, is the best damn thing to happen since the pandemic briefly taught us most of us could do our jobs remotely. I’ve already observed several new hires come in, make a complete mess and sail off for their next opportunity … it’s definitely gumming up the corporate gears. It’s automating all the circle jerk bullshit, and I’m here for it.

I believe some of the rich assholes really do see birth rates as a sort of global crisis. Mostly because it poses a threat to their bottom line. Less workers = less labor to exploit, less consumers to buy their shit, pay subscriptions or blast with ads. And a demographic shift where the size of the older generation is greater than the younger generation massively screws up social security systems that depend on taxes from the young to pay the benefits for the old. And, more nefariously - because parents necessarily consume more and become more reliable workers: when you’re living paycheck to paycheck you can’t afford to quit, take unpaid leave, turn up overtime or go on strike. But perhaps too, some may be experiencing the existential crisis that there is a real, natural limit to the growth of the human race, that we are not god-destined to just expand forever and ever, but rather finite in our place in the cosmos.

Piracy is still alive and well, especially in the Pacific and around nations with less powerful naval defenses. It’s probably to push back against piracy, especially with much the rest of the world turning towards “me first” attitudes and an island nation’s heavy reliance on trade for prosperity. It may also be that the agreement to purchase an aircraft carrier might extend the willingness of other nations to continue helping to protect the trade routes: like it’s a show of good faith that they’re helping too and not putting all the burden on other countries.

Lol. They were trying their damndest to get me and my family to install that. I’m like… there’s a bit of a conflict of interest there. I can see some value in having location data of your family, who’s driving too fast, if someone’s in an accident. I will absolutely not be sharing that data with the company that earns money for its shareholders by outperforming the statistical likelihood of paying me money, by finding every way possible to not pay me money.

NGL, when I first saw Warner making a public fuss over this, I had a bit of a reaction. Like, no one comes after my boy steam, I like my games and I like my platform. And maybe it’s because I don’t engage in many public multiplayer games these days, but I just haven’t really come across this extremist content frequently enough to feel Congress needs to get involved.

But…

I can see from the comments, my anecdotal experiences aren’t the whole picture. And I do get that sometimes in an otherwise free market, regulation is necessary to prevent a situation where a company does the right thing and then suffers financially from the backlash/boycott that ensues. Better to let the government be the ones to take the heat by those that get upset by the moderation.

But I also kind of agree with the sentiment, Congress needs to clean up its own hate speech and ethics, before further legislating what everyone else should be doing.

Judging by the stock price decline that didn’t start last week, but rather has been ongoing for monthsyears, you’re spot on. This is exactly what the market was expecting.

DEI has at least some roots in holding a positive connotation, a lot of companies that value an image/brand of diversity will have a DEI department/team. It’s not just an acronym they made up, though it’s definitely been co-opted by reactionaries as a way to describe someone they feel only got the job/promotion/attention because of a compulsion to raise up minority voices (a “DEI” hire is their way of saying the person wasn’t qualified for the job, but got it because they were black/a woman".

My initial take on the rant was to simply ignore it, but now I’m wondering if there’s maybe something to the idea that specifically in the shooter genre, the market is different enough that I don’t really know the space. Like BG3 was about as DEI a game as you could get, and no one’s arguing that game’s success. But I do know a couple conservatives that were specifically kind of turned off by games like cyberpunk and BG3. Apparently they couldn’t handle tasteful sidedick. Maybe for a shooter to be successful it’s got to coddle what the gun enthusiast crowd is demanding? I don’t know. Despite their popularity, I just don’t play that many shooters.

It’s fair to continue to consider them in competition with other store fronts. Don’t be fooled into thinking it will always be a great way to get cheap games, though. That brand, is EXACTLY what IGN paid for when they bought them: for the faith they built up in people like yourself, that they are and will always continue to be a trusted company. And part of the amortization of that purchase, is converting that belief into money, by enshittifying it. By taking advantage that they can make less valuable offers, raise prices, and fail to keep up with competitors innovations, on the backs of people remembering the good experiences they had with the company based on its original ownership.

Correct - this was always going to be the case the moment IGN bought humble bundle. Any delay in getting to this point was a conscious decision about how fast to boil the frog - but IGN didn’t buy Humble Bundle because they believed in the mission of helping charities and indie game developers, they bought it because they believed they could make more money than they spent on it.

Maybe not in some countries. It’s certainly a way that term gets used in the US. See also, reduction in force (RIF), downsize, reorg, shifting priorities, etc. The way labor laws are written, companies are encouraged to do this, because it circumvents protections against firing someone on leave, pregnant, or in a minority. When an individual is let go, there’s risk of litigation or claims that it’s because of some protected status: and correct or not, we’re a very litigious country with a lot of lawyers looking for a payday. So more and more, companies have normalized layoffs even when they’re doing very well, because its a way to “clean out” the company of less productive employees with much less risk of getting sued: and they can always rehire or shift exceptional employees they want to keep.

Yep - we get it. But some of us don’t enjoy the effects that microtransactions have on the game experience, and would prefer not to play those kinds of games. A filter whereby we could just hide those games, and browse ones that we would enjoy, that are more targeted for us, would both save us time and increase the likelihood of us finding a game we want to buy, improving the shopping experience and putting more money into game developers’ and Steam’s pockets. Similar to how the google play store offers a “premium/paid apps” section, because while much of the market prefers free to play and doesn’t mind ads or microtransactions, they know some of us loath it and would rather pay up front for an experience that doesn’t go there, and they make more money when they help shoppers shop.

This has been a universal problem with any MMO game that tries to have some kind of a resource grind/time sink. Even if you can manage to stop players from botting it, you can’t stop players from third world countries selling their time to players in first world countries. The game economy quickly becomes a reflection of real world capitalism that most of its players were trying to escape.

It feels like there’s a lot of potential here. One of the most loved colony sims, Dwarf Fortress, thrives on this concept of emergent behavior: yes, the descriptions of the individual characters, their motivations and backstories does have a sort of hollow, procedural generation to them. But the stories they enable, the wacky quirks like an engraver going nuts putting up murals to cheese on everyone’s walls, the fact that when you get an unlikely hero or battle outcome it isn’t the author’s giving them destiny but a true random fluke, the unexpected disaster of opening an unseen water or lava flow or awakening some ancient evil - that can create a wonderful sandbox where players encounter and create their own stories.

There’s a balance in story telling, especially interactive story telling, between romanticism and realism. Between what we want to happen, and what actually happens. And sometimes, oftentimes, it’s the things we didn’t want to happen that make a story more compelling and memorable.