It’s patently bizarre how a company whose only purpose is transferring money from account A to B can then arbitrarily decide what people are allowed to buy and sell.

This is the whole point of capitalism. Those who control the systems, control the people, and capital exists to ensure that the people do not control the systems.

Yup. This is purposeful mischaracterization from one of the biggest boosters of games-as-a-streaming-product. Ubisoft doesn’t want you to have the ability to play things at your whim, but exclusively at theirs. They sure as fuck don’t want you spending your time on something they sold you 10 years ago.

Don’t worry, this isn’t something they actually believe. They’re just trying to craft a narrative. I worked there for 5 years, and in that whole time nobody on the publishing end of the company said anything that even hinted at them giving a shit about fun.

Quick Time Events; characters that automatically do 60 things just by holding down “forward” on the joystick; the Ubisoft logo.

The Internet is populated by people who think English grammar is cosmic law, so it doesn’t surprise me that they think you should bend over for dogshit urban planning.

Ironically, none of them follow the rule of shutting up if they don’t know shit about shit.

Green spaces: Just for viewing.

What kind of dystopian hellscape do you want the world to be, exactly?

Sure. Neoliberalism won. Anyone not a part of the privaate equity class lost.

As someone who isn’t part of the private equity class, I ain’t fucking celebrating.

Gotta keep going. Not all signatures are going to be legit, so a reasonable buffer needs to be in place.

Ignoring the world definitely makes you good global citizens and not problems to work around. Good job. Way to go.

NodeBB. It’s a fairly popular webforum, but ActivityPub support is fairly new. It’s really something else to see the Fediverse through a the lens of the old Internet.

Because there is zero trust that this won’t be a one-sided liberalization, in favour of the fascists.

Hey, do I work for you?

“We’re the front page of the Internet!”

“No, not like that…”

Voting like this is a bit of a dark pattern, though. Especially downvotes. They come from places where the platform owners want to download the responsibility of community management to the community itself. This has a nasty tendency to silence valid criticism while simultaniously supporting brigading behaviour.

At the very least, we should be having serious, design-focused discussions about eliminating or highly restricting downvotes.

No, they’re advocating for sensible defaults. Just because you’re an enthusiast doesn’t you’re the market. Being supported is great, but believing you deserve to be sppecially catered to at the expense of the maajority is real smug bullshit.

I bet door-to-door salespeople would make way more money if they could just break into your homes, leave their junk on your table, and steal your credit card, and yet we don’t let them do that.

Right. But when the bar is owned by a Nazi, your options for pushing them out of the bar becomes a lot more limited.

“Reviewers” need to understand that, unless they paid their own money, from a bog-standard store, on or after release day, they are not reviewers, they are hired spokespeople.

JXL is my favourite squadron.

The reasons why the wealthy like liberalisation matters, though. The reasom the wralthy want more wealth matters.

Money is power. The wealthy are competing to have the most power. Eventually, that turns to taking control of the state. So, the wealthy will back free trade and deregulation right up until they, personally, are in a position to attempt a coup. After that, regulation and trade barriers work for the particular rich folk who have taken control over the state.