injurai
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Posts posted by injurai
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Open Letter From New York State Budget Director Robert Mujica Regarding Amazon
This whole read is a trip. Easily will go down as one of the greatest **** ups of the decade. I'm not sure there can ever be enough lambasting of the politicians involved without a significant mea culpa resignation.
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So America has it's own Spartan / Helot dichotomy. Some things don't change.
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Any jab at the oscars is good in my book.
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Curious what you mean by warrior caste? I know there are military families who see that as their best financial vocation. I've also heard of some contract military workers that get to sock away 6 figures straight into a 401k for a decade while basically having the lowest possible living expenses the entire time.
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Journos do hold a soft power, and they lack a lot of autonomy because they are debt saddled graduates mostly in which their job's incentive models is that when they happen to write stuff that advertising publishers like, then those publishers continue to pay for exposure. Which means journos self edit and chase a certain flavor of plausible deniability while essentially shilling. It also helps if their taste aligns with what they get to report on anyways. Which is why if a bad review does come out the publishers take the hit to not trigger a Streisand effect, but essentially reach out to reviewers who they anticipate an acceptable review based on their history of opinion.
You'd be surprised how amenable the young population is to popularity trends, especially ones that half-sell what they want but smuggle in the monetary models that make the heaviest demands on the families wallets. There is a reason youth culture dominates in America, they are easy to sell to and their parents cave in. It's less about approval is more about exposure to products and ease of extracting cash. I think we can all despise the roulette racket that is being sold to the world's youth.
Also wage slaves is the term I used to reference to the developers stuck at the mercy of their employer, not the "poor powerless consumer who exert discretion." So that entire first argument of yours is railing against a scenario I never setup in the first place.
On a and b. The fact that people can earn their living doing creative technical work to create luxury entertainment products is a great testament to human progress, and having dedicated themselves to that career path it's helpful that they continue to find employment. Of course one doesn't wish for the employees demise, but also realize a company is not a person and also comes with it's own sins. Good riddance to companies like Exxon, that should be a no brainer. Atari and Old Sega both were rife with their own sorts of malpractice, Konami is another recent example that comes to mind. I certainly don't hope anything bad happens to Obsidian and it's employees, but it's not like we want to bail out EA to save those jobs as some sort of economic crisis response because the thought of letting a bad business contract is too heinous. Saying also this on a game companies forum seems hardly in poor taste, especially when you want to reaffirm the desire that companies find business models that transfer less risk onto the employee. If something bad happens to Obsidian it won't be because of my post or this thread surely. I think you slightly over register rhetorical posturing as being outright bile, of course I think OP is wrong for thinking EA parting with BioWare is the solution when they are really one in the same at this point and all of EA really needs reform, which can happen by a changing of the guard on the board of investors when a new round of capital comes in as the old leaves with their head hung low. Which is just more proof that EA is just a transient shell and not really anything enduring other than it's IP portfolio.
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Did Bloomberg announce his run again?
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Super reasonable to root for people to lose their jobs. Classy.
The other way of looking at this, is EA corporate runs high risk hail marry strategies that chase trends, and it is they who put their own employees at risk. So in a round about way, you are rooting for a capital entity to eat dirt so healthier publishers that better sustain their employees are the institutions that persist. Of course the games industry runs in cycles like anything else so at the end of the cycle their is really nothing you can do about it anyways.
Honestly I see sentiments like yours often on more reactionary game forums and usually it's always a way to assert one's moral superiority over an OPs schadenfreude. While I'm not saying that's what you're doing, I am saying that it's also not great to conflate a person's intent as being something else. Consumers don't like being taken advantage of and in a world where so much of the power is held among sell out journos, it's not surprising when someone salivates at the demise of "soulless interactive experience brokerage farms." The thought of wage slaves ultimately taking the fall is not necessarily on the persons mind, because that's a second order result, and certainly not the one they are hoping first in the moment.
Anyways, I literally cannot remember the last time EA made something that I was actually interested in. Obviously they are doing high volumes of business but I chalk that up mostly to hopeful hype, every IP being a mini-monopoly on an experience, and a large treasure trove of advertising funds that keeps naive (mostly young) consumers feeding from the trough.
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There is a massive difference between socialism, and earning a honest and fair living without fear of the financial sector screwing you to kingdom come. One thing I find odd is how Rutger Bregman's recent soapbox at Davos and elsewhere have been pretty well received. Him calling out hippocrates is commendable, but his alternatives are rather myopically ironic. In paraphrase. "Necessitating philanthropy bad, pay your god damn share of taxes." Well how is socialism any different national philanthropy? In some ways it's not. What if we maintained sensible tax regulations (I'll get back to this.) Problem is American finance bets on growth and we have to make good on the debt we've taken on. It's hard to socialize when your nation's asset and liability portfolios are so askew. Anything that looks like socialism will not even be national philanthropy but a new paradigm of credit lending, where everyone is seeded with what they need because they have no choice to have a high percentage of their wages garnished forever more (we just got back.)
When you really start looking at economics. You realize that anything could be anything else. It's the time frame of "lock ins" that tends to be the problem. With socialism it's forever, but at least everything is well amortized. With capitalism the lock in is as long as your debt is large. With either, as long as your asset's life-cycle is long.
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BioWare is only the trademark of a registered corporate entity, running out of a building with a familiar address. What people like to mean by BioWare died a long time ago. If "BioWare" really does, at least fans can be at ease. Probably not a great feeling to see your dead aunt's visage reanimated.
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How free is free education though? Typically people have to test into schools. The good thing about a lot of European schools is you know whether your on a trade, service, or intellectual labor track earlier. What's wrong with America is largely how it indiscriminately lets people take on debt on the gamble that they'll be able to pay it off. But inflation doesn't chip away at fixed interest rates, instead deflation is gutting the next generation whose label is going straight towards padding out boomers twilight years, while lengthening the non-productive years of an elderly voting class. (Not saying we should let the old die btw.)
It would be nice if people had more free time to pursue their passions as second order pursuits, and to ratchet down the high risk stakes of gambling everything on your first order pursuit. One pursuit would be filling a needed societal job, the other on your personal interest. That way you progress at your own rate, don't gamble everything on something you can't monetize. Those that can transition to be dedicate solely on their side pursuit earlier would have done so on their own merit, others still have a chance of making things work but aren't left high and dry. And I'm not just talking about struggling artists, I'm talking about people with hobby research and more. College in America is just the giant holding patter where people are unsure whether they'll make it out the other side or not. If they do there is no guarantee their gamble gets' them where they want to go. So many artists are absolutely chewed up, but even those in the STEM and Medical professions find themselves pinched in a highly competitive market that demands them make larger and larger personal sacrifices. All for what? For the sake of stretching boomers dollar while keeping corporate margins acceptably high? And now they don't even want to be in their roles and will probably decay in their effectiveness as they lack the motivation to stay fresh, all while trying to focus on building up the other half of their life that was delayed so many years?
Testing for free education though just means if you aren't at the place others are at during a certain arbitrary chosen cross-section of your life, you've been classified as a certain... class. That's not good because it stifles the sort of independent passion pursuits that others may make possible in a place like America when you take on student debt.
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Normally people align behind the political party and not the person as the overall political aspirations should matter more than the person because the personality is the party surly ?
This is the most naive thing ever. Not only do people rally behind individual leaders. But party platforms change and are not reliable constants. The last thing people want to do these days is merely tow the party line based on what it represents, not what it does. People become partisan because of their general orientation, but will refuse to vote outright given the wrong lineup of candidates.
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If you are a supporter of Bernie Sanders you really, really need some medication. Or education. Try reading a book or two. This would be a good one to start with:
If you think Bernie's election will be the start of a disastrous American Red "Blue" Wave, then I think you're sadly mistaken. He'd be president, sure, he won't be able to introduce laws into congress. At a district level people are far less interested in a loony representatives like AOC. They don't believe in a communist or socialist paradise. They might believe in forms of public insurance, safety nets, investment pipelines for human capital, and generating lower skilled jobs through infrastructure spending. But they aren't looking to revoke private property rights. They are looking to close tax avoidance avenues which allows people to disproportionately acquire property rights which they have no business maintaining based on their contributions to society. What people are looking for are a compressed valuation of the dollar so that class mobility comes back, where the incentives align with productivity not merely rent seeking.
Populism is already here, and it's here for reasons of central economic policy that have long been in play. There are good reasons why people are turning on the neoliberal center. If Bernie wasn't shutout in the primaries I absolutely think he'd have won. Instead your only option was right-wing populism. People need an ice-breaker, they don't care who captains it. Which has been awful for the culture war, because it's driving classical liberals to the fringes. Since the neoliberals have no economic platform to sell to the people (only the elite) they are left only able to make a case for cultural mores, this is where the illiberal left get's it's strength as it strives to minimize overlap with the right (which happens when you pursue truth.) You don't need Bernie to confuse people towards socialist idealism, that's already baked into the current climate cake. Any sort of fiscal realignment will ultimately still be embedded in capitalism, socialism is merely a reused brand. Which as the side affect of making a smallish pool of reactionary marxist gather on the fringes, but no more. I think the elite are increasingly looking towards ways of making the gig economy more amenable to manage the over leveraged US population that had very little choice but to take out bad loans to get the sorts of training that keeps them competitively employed. We simply can't have colleges continue to be bad lenders in an economy that prevents inflation of any kind, while still not paying wages that even dent debts. Especially with the current state of rent seeking increasingly gutting the middle class. We also can't afford to not train our population to run the form of economy that the US is trending towards next, and the US absolutely can't let it's economy shrink like Japan for international monetary reasons. So either we need lots of cheap immigration, which adds to our inequal class systems. Or we need to shift our training and finance sectors sector as to not produce as much debtor liquidity that merely pools into the gravitation credit sinks of investment portfolios. Where by debts aren't payed but made deeper, only ever increasing the division of the working and empire building classes.
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I had to read that twice, once utterly confused, and once singing to myself. lol.
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In some ways Black Mirror is just a modern version of The Twilight Zone, one that deals with plausible notions of technology gone awry. So I guess this will share the same episodic format but include the whole spectrum of science fiction for it's premises.
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Might be proof we are living in a simulation and I might just be okay with that.
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Dogs are better than people, willing to brighten your day even if you have darkened a bunch of New Yorker's next 10 years to the amount of $28 Billion in tax flow.
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Wolfenstein: The New Order isn't Diesel-Punk though, neither is Sky Captain and the World Of Tomorrow or Rocket-Man. Star-Trek isn't Ray-Punk.
The breakdown of "punk"...
Wild Wild West is what Coal-Punk
Lol Cassette Futurism....
I don't see Star Trek in there. Star Trek and its franchise doesn't fit neatly into any of the "punk" categories anyway.
Ray-punk kind of overlaps with Atom-punk in the 50's and 60's because of the science fiction in that era.
Never heard of 'casette futurism'. Kind of looks like 'near future' cyberpunk if you're going from the 70's and 80's though, so, maybe it's a subset of cyberpunk? Or maybe just a precursor to it.
I think you fell for the bait.
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I'm certainly no communist, and certainly no socialist by old or traditional definitions. But if you actually take a look at the existing financial institutions, having one of the many wealth redistribution systems operate under a sort of pro-social state investment in human capital, then Bernie's message makes a lot of sense.
Of course Bernie is older so his ideals are probably grounded in a true socialism. I don't see him taking on the whole world though, merely balancing something that is grossly unfair. As long as he doesn't chase capital away, I think his focus on improving the average Americans freedom to pursue pro-social productive pursuits and to do so for longer while healthier is very important.
Honestly I think he could be an antidote to some of the more crazed ideologues far left of him. Certainly he'd be part of the solution to the cynical neoliberal style of identity politics which seeks to only have to offer socialism to the smallest minority identities that it can find. Someone once equated refugees and super-minorities to a gay man's "beard." Certainly truth in that, and it distracts from the realization of truer classically liberal social and economic structures.
Also don't buy gold, canned food, ammunition or solar panels. Buy arable land and invest in a classical private homestead estate that you can work. Oh and have enough kids so they can be your medicare.
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Ladies, he's available...
Is this what Paul Krugman really does in his free time?
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Presidents aren't brewers operating under German beer laws, every candidate is out to have a legacy.
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The ending goes similarly to things like Akira and Ghost in the Shell, where the ending is avant-garde and meant to be representative of transcendence. Though I actually liked how it was done in Annihilation way more. Even better though are the ways Interstellar and The Fountain have both skimmed notions of transcendence without leaving an empty mic-drop that doesn't really close off the main thrust of the story. Annihilation closes out the plot of rescue, but basically leaves all the interesting and unique facets of the story as loose ends.
Though it does make me want to read the rest of the series to get a better sense how things fit together.
In your opinion,
was the alien a creature that had the ability to combine any DNA, or was the evolutionary process more of a "force of nature", for lack of a better term?
I got the sense that it was an exotic physical phenomena that drove a new paradigm of evolution. The alien creature seemed more like a highly focused construct from the refraction of many lifeforms, so I'd imagine any sentience is copied from external sources. The fact that it refracts its surroundings makes me read the alien as being an entirely unique local entity, although one might think other incarnations of such a phenomena exist. My impression was that it didn't exactly have a purpose or meaning, it merely was a process that disturbed that natural order of things.
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Hate to say it, but I'm in no rush to purchase. Too much prep and hype tends to kill my interest in games anymore. I'd rather catalog what I think I'd like to play, the pick something up on a whim when I have the free time to kill. TOW is at the top of that list, but usually I want to wait for some patches to land regardless. I don't really wait for prices to come down, that's only an added bonus if I don't get around to something for a while.
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Definitely more of an anarcho-communist, but contingent on doing so from one's own heart under the spirit of God.
The Funny Stuff thread
in Way Off-Topic
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