Anything but public transit, eh?

These Ax4 game budgets are getting out of hand. If you sell 3 million copies of a $70 game and still don’t break even, someone fucked up in management. No, raising the price is not the answer.

Your country is lying to you. No surprise there, as all governments lie. There are plants specialized in recycling only the caps. For certain regulatory markets, the caps are easier to recycle than the bottles. As with anything, it’s all about what infrastructure is in place, and how well it meshes with already existing manufacturing. You do what is best suited to your local waste management. But be aware that it is by no means global or a universal (chemical or otherwise) limitation. Governments need to regulate both sides to make recycling viable.

Enshittification strategies only work if the product actually produces revenue and it grows along with market share. Unfortunately, even if market use grows, revenue from AI is not there. Even YouTube crossed the break even boundary before the start of ad enshittification and after the Google buyout. LLMs financial projections are starting to show that it will never reach enough revenue to cover costs, much less cover ROI into infrastructure and capacity. The math isn’t mathing and investors are starting to get cold feet. So they either enshittify now or the capital soon will start vanishing.

Good analogy, but it is not nearly as close. Movie aspect ratios are actually variable. Most movies today switch several times over the course of the movies depending on what the director wants to convey. The problem is that they can easily do that on theaters, where the screens seamlessly accommodate the different aspect ratios almost imperceptibly for the audience, but to great emotional impact. However, the same is not true for home TVs, it is a little less flexible and far more noticeable.

For me it’s literally cheaper to pay for cable than buy the sports subscriptions. I don’t watch sports, thus I don’t have cable.

Launching in a workable state is criminally underated by publishers. A bad game can eventually be patched after launch, sure, but a botched first impression takes decades to switch in the public eye. Look at cyberpunk and witcher games. Beloved after decades of bug fixes, but not everyone has the good will of CD projekt red to burn through. A bad first impression can turn a good if unimaginative game into “that ugly game that was broken at launch” forever. And let’s be real, 90% of a game’s lifetime profit comes during the launch window.

I recognize the complexities involved. But as long at data centers are fueled by a fossil based grid and use clean water for cooling, this amount of paper is not hurting more nor less. OP is fine, if they want to save trees the move is to stop corn and palm oil in products. That’s what is destroying forests.

Before full paperless, a college semester for me was a quarter of a small closet stack of paper. By the time I graduated it was a couple of notebooks and a tiny binder not larger than yours. Paper is super recyclable, paper is not what is killing the rainforest, if that is your concern. A single Google data center kills more and wastes more resource than all the tiny paper stacks of each student combined.

The problem is that with the potential damage to the body and their career this is exactly what happens. Only the retired or mid performers are willing to actually take on the experiment. Top athletes already use some forms of doping but are very protective, since they have more to lose. Only those with nothing to lose will go all in on the enhancements.

That’s actually the valuing (wealth) definition of money. But money doesn’t have to be that way. There are economic theories that propose decoupling value from debt by having two different mechanisms for each function. Part of the inequality reproduction problem is that both debt and wealth are coupled in our current fiat money systems without any real underlying value equivalence.

First forms of money made sense when money was made of valuable metals. The value was intrinsic to the physical object. Debt was managed by paper accounting. Or paper money like in China. Then paper debt was based on gold, like the early xix century money. Finally, modern fiat money stopped being backed up by gold and today it is purely debt, though it is still used as value. Which has accelerated the negative effects of capitalist labor extraction.

Like, Jeff Bezos doesn’t do $55k per minute of labor. But, amazon does extract and steal that amount of labor and funnels it towards his pockets (actually steals much more). While the workers receive an infinitesimal fraction of their own labor. They can do that because there’s no friction from having to transform said labor into an actually valuable medium, like silver or gold.

This is why the other response to OP’s question is that fiat money is actually infinite. The us treasury snaps their fingers and billions come into existence. It’s pure abstract value.

It makes me sad that e-ink is so niche that it will never reach a truly cheap price. Last time I checked it seem to have already achieved its mass production potential. It is so hard to manufacture already, and newer developments just find ways to make fancier screens that are even more expensive and complex to make. The process to make them is already as efficient as it can be.

Top tier copium. FIFA games also release to raving reviews every couple of years. It’s just FOMO.

I didn’t contradict that notion. Apple devices are supported for longer than Android. But, again, it is an attempt to hook new people into a subscription-adjacent model. The pressure and nagging to change to a new phone every two years is still there, and they also kill software support to devices that are still functional.

Apple is in the same business model. They also kill their phones via software. They just captured the used market through various means so they get money off you more consistently. People think that trade in with credit options for a new phone every two years is such a great idea. Do the math, it’s actually a subscription model, you don’t own your iPhone, yet you’ll always pay more than what the hardware is worth.

The US has lived in a state where any measure to squash terrorism would never be enough, for a long time. All you have to know is an address and say to the police that you heard a group of Arab looking middle aged men speaking of blowing up a place and a small army would be raised ready raze that domicile to the ground if necessary.

That’s what happens when a group of people is armed beyond reason and in constant paranoia.

Even in 2015 it wasn’t about keeping the copy unopened. Games came in CD but internet was barely getting fast enough to download large amounts of data fast and efficiently. However, CD has little collecting value or preservation qualities. They go bad fast, half of commercial CDs go bad in less than a decade. Organic layer CDs that were used for home burning are dice rolls. Only inorganic archival medium burned at very slow speeds theoretically can go for more than two decades, and it is still recommended to keep redundancies

On the contrary, I think it was, again, about convenience. CDs were part of DRM. A type of DRM that had to have the CD in the PC’s CD tray in order to run the game, even if all the information was already locally installed. While later consoles acquired the capability to install the games to a hard drive for faster load times, this type of DRM was also adopted.

It was not rare for people to buy a game for PC, then immediately look for a crack online to play without CD. People were rigging hard drives to their consoles to install games there. Etc. So you could play your library without having to stand off the couch to change disks. Piracy offered the convenience at no cost.

Thanks for the honest insight. I will not be contrarian to what you said. But I do want to point out that honesty without emotional responsibility is cruelty. It might be a costume party, but it’s not always born out of malice, often it is self preservation. After all dissecting living beings usually kills them.

I appreciate the honesty, however, cynicism and lack of patience can be challenging for others to deal with in communication. However, I believe very thoughtful of you to keep it on the internet. Even if it makes the internet more toxic, at least you keep real life more sensible and that’s very considerate. I can see how it can be challenging, as I struggle with civility and empathy online as well.

Wanna have a ton of fun? Penn Jillette, of Penn & Teller, has a documentary following a guy who sets out in an adventure to prove that Vermeer used a primitive form of camera osbcura to make his paintings so realistic by making a painting himself in the theorized way. It’s called Tim’s Vermeer and it is incredibly fascinating as an insight into the obsession that Vermeer’s work still creates today.