• 0 Posts
  • 524 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 18th, 2023

help-circle







  • 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.







  • I think it’s dangerous to imagine people follow these folks, or let them run rampant over society, because they aspire to be like them. That makes it so much harder to really understand why people support them, or even just refuse to tell them “no”, and makes it impossible to do anything about it.

    People believe that life is a meritocracy. Even when they themselves can look around at the people near them and see that those in positions of power don’t deserve it, they still view society as a whole as “fair”. Yes, they personally have may have gotten screwed over, but, in general, the people who float to the top got there because they were smarter and more capable. Therefore, we should sit back and just let them cook.

    They need some kind of trigger to see the billionaires not as people who have earned their place, but who have stolen it.


  • The fact that there has been so much noise over $80 video games makes me question the thesis here. There are a huge number of video games out there now, it’s true, but if gamers truly gave a shit about them, I think everyone would be rather quiet about the prices from the big publishers.

    All of the noise tells me that gamers will continue to prioritize big name, big dollar releases, rather than actually even glance at their backlog of Steam games. And $80 spent on games you never, ever play is not a better investment.



  • The game prices I’m ok with. When I was a kid, video games cost $70 CAD, and that’s almost $200 now. I’m perfectly OK with going back to buying fewer games. I have too many of them I shouldn’t have bought in the first place.

    I’m wildly upset with the console price, in no small part because Nintendo and other electronics manufacturers seem to be trying to smooth over the shock of Dorito Don’s tariffs by increasing prices globally.

    The Americans made their own bed. I’m not willing to lie in it with them.


  • It remains so incredibly alarming to me the number of “business leaders” who looked at consumer spending in 2020/2021, looked at the global context of 2020/2021, and then went “things will now be like this forevermore,” even as other “business leaders”, and even, very often, themselves, were doing everything possible to force everyone back into a pre-COVID context.

    My own employer was one of these businesses, and every time I’ve brought it up, I’ve been firmly told “everyone else thought the same thing we did, too”.

    I didn’t have a whole lot of respect for business people before that, but I at least – naively, it turned out – believed they knew how to operate businesses. I now have no respect for such people whatsoever, as they’ve demonstrated completely and thoroughly, even to the point where my dumb ass can notice, that the only thing that ever “qualified” them to “run a business” was having money.

    The fact that tens of thousands of people have lost their jobs because the ownership class chose to believe that they’d stumbled into an infinite growth hack is shameful, and these “leaders” deserve to be stripped of all that they own and tossed into the street.