You’re specifically paying for an agreed upon amount of time with the product. The negotiated price reflects this limited access to the product.

‘Licensing’ something with no stated time frame that one side can arbitrarily choose to end at any time makes little sense and they know it. They were perfectly happy with leveraging the assumption that you owned a copy of the product up until it became inconvenient to them.

There’s no possible path to gun control with a broken democracy. We have terrible options available to us right now, but that’s because we’ve allowed our foundations to rot almost completely.

You’ve gotta fix the structure of our democracy before you can even begin to address issues like gun control, discrimination or reproductive rights.

Trying to go after gun control now is like a nation focusing solely on stopping muggers while they’re in the middle of being totally overrun by hostile invaders. Yes it’s a problem, but unfortunately we’ve just got even bigger fish to fry at the moment.

If Democrats were smart, they’d temporarily drop talking about some of the more controversial and not immediately relevant political hot topics.

Like gun control is not an immediate need at this moment in time. The focus needs to be on fixing our democracy as quickly as possible so we can get back to the actual process of governing once again instead of this shit show we’ve had for the last decade.

You’re making assumptions that I’m some young kid, naively thinking I can change the world with overly simplistic ‘solutions’.

I’ve been in this career for a decent chunk of time, and, more importantly discussed these issues with others that have been here 40+ years (my company has been around for 100+ years). They feel the same.

You see it over and over again, management makes a short term cost saving decision, gets promoted or leaves to a new company and the rest of the people spend the next 3 years dealing with that decision. Things that used to be fixed in 2-3 days now takes 2-3 weeks. Projects that used to be completed in 4-6 weeks now take 4-6 months, etc.

These are things that I’ve noticed after 15+ years in the job and things that my 40+ year co-workers agree with and things the next two levels of my own management agree with (both 30+ years at the company). Hell, these are things executives I’ve been on better terms with have agreed with in the past (only to get let go after failing to implement culture changes).

My experience with executives is that they don’t necessarily want yes men, but there’s a range of acceptable criticism or feedback that they’ll accept. As long as you’re within that range, it’s fine.

If you try to address fundamental problems that might require real change… well those people tend to get suppressed.

They’ll happily take feedback on meeting structure or project planning or whatever. But try to do a retrospective on what the true longterm costs of their decision to go with the cheap, but unreliable solution and they’ll blackball you.

I guess they’re giving it back to the Native Americans?

This is still what baffles me. We aren’t losing our country to a charismatic, two faced mastermind. We’re losing our country to a fucking obvious loser. He’s literally so bad it’s hard to parody him since even the parodies are tame in comparison to what he actually does. It’s ridiculous

Maga efforts assisted by Democratic leaders that also focus on everything else but class issues as well.

I’d have gone with the idiot

Typical enshittification. Brilliant and amazing technology taken over by private equity and run into the ground

I feel like a huge number of franchises were started back in the day, but everything now is just sequels and remasters of old games.

How many of the current biggest AAA titles got their start in the 2005-2015 era vs the number of new franchises in 2015-2025?

Creativity seems to be mostly dead and games all have to be mega hits or they’re considered a failure. There’s also a distinct lack of AA games (the successful of which often later became AAA titles).

AAA games are legitimately worse now than before, but the gulf isn’t as big as people are claiming.

This is why I think it’s funny people still believe ‘the Internet is forever’. Data disappears all the time. If you really start paying attention it’s scary how ephemeral the Internet truly is and how much is lost all the time.

Quiet yes. They’ve gone quiet several times before. But it never results in different actions. They don’t change, they only ever become more circumspect.

It’s how Democrats deluded ourselves that things were turning around and then were so surprised to lose everything. All of the words in the world aren’t going to affect any real change.

I honestly don’t think there’s anything anyone can do to reach these people. I think something is deeply broken in a huge majority of Americans. Either they’re voting for this or they’re too checked out, self absorbed or hopeless to bother to do anything to try to fix it. 2024 revealed just how broken we are.

Should be yes, but the human is only interested in getting passed the prompt, not with accuracy so it’s no. Which I’m pretty sure fucks with their AI training, but who cares.

I also think that, after getting up to speed, they’d fight pretty hard against measures that are meant to backslide us to that point again.

I mean the part that no one really wants to confront is that there is no alternative with a viable chance. The blue moderate has been suffocating all other options for ages and now that it’s come to this, there’s nothing waiting in the wings to rely on.

I’m struggling to believe these articles are anything but pandering to the left. I struggle to believe there’s any significant number of conservatives actually having real second thoughts.

I mean during COVID you had conservatives literally claiming COVID was no big deal as they died. I think that was when I understood just how far gone these people could be. They will happily drink the Kool aid no matter the personal cost to themselves.

So losing their jobs is questionable as to whether or not it’s going to actually result in a different mindset, rather than some fleeting complaints that are forgotten by the next election cycle.

‘How to treat a sprained neck’

So not sure if I’m the one with the neck injury or if I managed to get killed treating someone else

I think for many purposes, regular people just like cool art. We’ve very much become accustomed to a near overwhelming tide of reasonable quality, but ultimately transient media.

‘Content’ has a much lower value than it once did, simply by benefit of sheer quantity. Even ignoring AI, I have access to endless art, music, video content, etc.

AI art is not really different from the non-artist perspective. It’s just accelerating the flow. But do people really even care where their current art comes from in most cases? The average person might download some art for their phone or computer desktop. They’ll be exposed to marketing and cover materials (that they’d have no clue or care about how they’re made), and they might buy some art for their house. Either from a home goods store of cheap, mass production art, or perhaps on a vacation or art fair for something a little more personal. Beyond that, I doubt most even think about it at all. AI art will be largely invisible to them because the human artists already are.

I do think you’ll see a similar surge of ‘human’ art niches like we have for Vinyl collections today. A small subset of people will pursue the story and mystique of hand crafted art, but this will be a drop in the bucket compared to the entire industry. Only a small few will be able to fit into that new niche.