Anomandaris

Obviously things cost money, you patronising jackass, but pining all your hopes on CEOs and the ultra-wealthy to cut in to their own profit margins for the sake of humanity makes you more braindead than I am. It’s scientific innovation that drives discovery, cost reduction, and economic growth, not profit-hoarding conglomerates.

A large portion of our discoveries and inventions in the past fifty years or more are building on top of innovations made during the 60s, 70s, and 80s by NASA’s launches. Electrical engineering, structural engineering, communications and data, materials sciences, all needed to be advanced for space travel. Handing this responsibility off to SpaceX just leads to all the data, discoveries, innovations, and corollaries being patented, trademarked, and locked away to make sure no competitor can take advantage of it.

Shell knew climate change was going to devastate the planet over 50 years ago. Did they capitalise on that opportunity to develop green and renewable energy first and completely dominate that market for the betterment of themselves and the planet? No. They locked down that information, spread misinformation for decades, and made short term profiteering decisions to advance their own individual careers. Now we’re watching the planet slowly burn. So sure, let’s trust the corporate pigs.

This is a horrible take. Absolutely awful, ultra-capitalist drivel. Why does every action or accomplishment have to be viewed through the lense of economic benefit? Not even holistic or utilitarian, just stakeholders and making the ultra-wealthy even wealthier… Who gives a fuck about space tourism? What the hell does that give us as a species?

The original comment about the importance of aerospace and space exploration is absolutely correct, but the idea that the end goal is space tourism is more than enough to make me turn against it also. The end goal is exploration, technological advancements, and a greater understanding of how our universe works. We should be taxing the ever-loving shit out of sociopaths like Musk and Bezos and feeding some of that in to NASA, and ESA, so scientists can make discoveries for us all, rather than businessmen making discoveries so they can exploit, gatekeep, and profit off it.

But a massive amount of them are. Small and solo creators on Youtube or Twitch need to conform to the rules of Google and Amazon, and even medium size creators are influenced and coerced by the precedents and market trends set by the much larger corporations.

And it doesn’t matter if not all content is provided by large corporations, those large corporations employ the most people, and dictate in a lot of ways, the rules of the employment market. It’s due to their habits and practices that wages are artificially low and expenses are inflated for record profits.

Until corporate greed is managed properly, consumers will always struggle to have enough expendable income to pay content creators, and therefore will always be searching for free content.

They are absolutely not separate issues. How can I be expected to shell out $15 per month for 10 different content subscriptions if I can only just afford to put food on my table?

Surely you can reverse that and point out corporations whining and moaning about people expecting free content when they’re barely paying their employees enough to afford to pay their bills.

The problem starts with corporate greed, hoarding revenue by keeping employee’s salaries to the minimum acceptable, providing as little functionality as possible to reduce overheads, double dipping by selling a product/subscription and then selling their customer’s data, and then complaining they aren’t getting more money for what little they are doing.

Then inevitably a little guy like Kbin comes along and suffers because the internet is filled with soulless, ultra-capitalist corpo scumbags.

Steal this.

I don’t think so, the ARPG I have in mind wouldn’t be open world, would have no campaign and much less focus on story overall, a much more detailed crafting system akin to Path Of Exile but perhaps less punishing, and much more focus on stacking up as many extra modifiers as possible rather than being limited, push your team to get the best rewards.

No timegating, no daily/weekly quests you must log in for, the only limitation is your skill.

I’ve been thinking about an ARPG based around World of Warcraft’s mythic dungeons.

Scalable, multi-player, enhanceable instances where completion of more difficult versions of the instance rewards in better gear and crafting options.

The idea is that the content is created for a 5-man party (1 tank, 1 healer, 3 dps) but you can try solo it, or bring up to 20 people to massively increase the difficulty and the rewards. Instances would follow WoW dungeon’s formula of trash mobs (which drop crafting materials and have rare drop chances for certain gear) pathing you towards a succession of bosses with very different, complex mechanics with stages, signaled abilities, and skill requirements.

This would include a character levelling system to unlock new class abilities and mechanisms, a party finder system, certain dungeons locked behind character level and the completion of other dungeons at a certain difficulty level. Perhaps you could extend it to add in “world bosses”, massive 200-man bosses with a chance at particularly unique loot, but of course that would require a certain level of infrastructure and a game population making it justifiable.

Yes, fair correction. Perhaps that is a point itself, the way debates between political opponents are presented as formal and official when in fact they are entirely at the whim of the broadcaster and the politicians involved.

Is it not? I was under the belief that official political debates have a large influence on the format and rules of these debate clubs.

If not, it shouldn’t be that difficult to verify whether competitor’s statements are backed by evidence, or if they’re made up, or if they’re really opinions disguised as facts.

That’s because that’s how politics works. If you can get enough people to believe that what you say is true and act on that belief, it doesn’t really matter whether it’s actually true or not.

Gives real “A QA walks in to a bar and order -26 beers” vibe

Honestly I’m not very bothered. I struggle to see this as false advertising when they’re declaring on public forums that physical copies will not include a disc, and it’s quite likely that those physical copies will also state on them that it includes a code and not a disc.

Given our increasing environmental concerns the idea that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of discs are not going to be produced for this is a good thing, I think. I imagine the only reason a physical version exists at all is to ensure the game has a presence in physical stores, so large advertisements can catch people’s eye, so stores can do related promotions. In essence, all those empty boxes will be produced purely for advertising purposes, otherwise I imagine they would scrap physical copies all together to save the related production, transportation, and logistics costs.

I believe it ensures a much much sooner end, yes, but exactly when depends on who wins.

If Putin wins his authority will be significantly weakened, his army will be significantly weakened, and it’s likely he’d have to pull more of them away to ensure his leadership and security even after Wagner is defeated.

If Wagner wins the army will likely be immediately recalled out of Ukraine, they will want to confirm the army’s submission to new rule and ensure no counter coup attempts, but also it would be very easy to blame Putin for everything and win popularity with the Russian people by bringing back soldiers who would likely have died pointlessly.

Crimea, however, may be a point of contention, depending on the opinions of the winners.

There have been a bunch of mixed reports, I think it’s tough to say exactly what’s true. I saw one person suggesting that given Wagner’s numbers in Africa it’s likely there’s really only half that number there. But there have also been reports of Russian military and intelligence personnel switched to support Wagner.

As someone else said, I think for most people it’s just a matter of wait and see what shakes out.

That’s a reasonable response, but the other guy’s concerns are absolutely not meritless. Tech platforms demonstrating and offering up these kinds of currencies or tokens do explicitly talk about ideas such as limiting certain currencies from being spent on certain things, or enabling/disabling from a central authority.

China is already rolling out this type of currency albeit with limited success, and while I haven’t heard anything about the e-CNY being tied to their social credit system, or punishments being inflicted in the shape of limiting access to funds, it’s absolutely a possible option.

I think you do have to be careful here though. If you’re too permissive you allow bigotry, but if you’re too restrictive you cut off honest, good faith debate and create echo chamber silos where beliefs are never challenged.

Bigotry should never be accepted but that means non-discriminatory opinions, especially ones you disagree with, should be allowed.

And power mods too. No point moving to the Fediverse just to have all the content moderated and censored by 8 or 10 power trippy losers.