Honestly if someone is competent enough to put together skynet, I think that might be an improvement.

More likely we'll get a shitty chatbot that some tech bro claims is skynet and the world will fall to the absolute worst, buggiest AI overlord imaginable. It'll be an unholy fusion of Terminator and Idiocracy.

Yeah, I'm struggling so hard to just limit my knowledge. Does it really make a difference to me personally if I miss one of the fucked up things Trump does? If you're already radicalized, it doesn't really matter if he's done 20 things wrong or 50. There's no further room to sway your opinion and no further actions you can take. It's just beating your mental health into the ground for no benefit.

But God damn is hard to convince the algorithms you don't want to see that shit anymore. You truly can't even do the simplest thing online without it showing up.

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).

Does their comfort bubble include comfort prices on things? If so how do I get in on that?

It was one thing when all the bad stuff was happening to people they wouldn't associate with, but tanking the economy and firing scores of government employees has gotta be breaking into that bubble, right?

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

Yes, but actually managing to use crypto for commerce is pretty tricky.

Not sure of the state of things currently, but back in the day it was so volatile that you had to buy more than you need because it might lose value before you could pay with it. And the company also couldn't cash out with the same value either. That's why Valve stopped accepting crypto if I remember correctly.

It would be nice if it actually worked well for that, but I expect if it ever did approach broad adoption the powers that be would come down hard on it to prevent losing their control.

Lucky them. My company is attempting the Jenga strategy. How many core people can leave without replacement before it all crumbles. They're absolutely confident they can just hire some people once it's clear that it's all falling apart and those people will be able to save the tower before it falls.

You were saying they were motivated by advertisers. That these websites can exist if only they chose not to use ads.

But hosting a website of any decent size takes money. So to pay for it you need ads OR payments from your users. Either a subscription or donation.

So if the websites, like you suggest, avoid advertisers to get away from advertiser sensibilities, they're still subject to payment processors. Which have many of the same kind of hang ups.

Patreon has had several crackdowns on content solely because of payment processors getting upset. Patreon doesn't care. The patreon creators are happy and their fans are happy. Everyone involved in the commerce was happy with the business. But PayPal was unhappy and the fans couldn't send money to the people they were supporting without that middle man. So a company almost entirely unrelated gets to dictate what can and can't be hosted on Patreon. And this has happened multiple times on multiple sites.

Primarily right now it happens to NSFW content, but there's zero protections from PayPal and visa doing the same for LGBT content, content critical of China, etc. They're a private company so all our rights and protections don't apply.

Theoretically there's an alternative. You could always make your own banking system and your own Internet (good old 'free market' at work) just so you can pay for your website hosting costs. Since that's technically an option, then they aren't legally interfering. It's just business and they can choose not to do business with you if they want. Just as easy as building your own power grid and water system. (Though even if you did try to make your own, they'd heavily interfere to stop you).

So yes, avoiding ads will free you from their control, but it will also limit you to only the size of website that can be hosted for free. Anything of a size that would need funding is subject to these company's morality rules. Which also makes these communities small, isolated and easily dismantled if they prove to be a problem.

As soon as any one instance gets big enough and needs to get funding, the payment processors will crack down on allowed content. Don't like it? Tough luck in receiving the money people are trying to send you.

No it's really payment processors.

There have been multiple successful ad-free websites in the past. But they still need revenue to function. Revenue their users happily pay.

But then Visa or PayPal or whoever is handling the transactions starts to pay attention and then all the sudden there's new rules in place or else they hike fees or just stop processing payments altogether.

And on the Internet, there is no true alternative methods of payment (hint: any viable methods are quickly suppressed by those same payment processors).

So the only way any website gets big is left to the whims of advertisers or payment processors (usually both).

I have no idea why we as a people are somehow fine with private companies having a complete stranglehold on all significant online business. Why we've allowed the government to privatize digital transactions, subject to very little rights or protections. It's allowing private corporations to massively suppress free speech, commerce, and social gatherings in the digital sphere.

Honestly our supposed freedoms are more and more limited these days because they only apply to public spaces, but there's been a continual erosion of 'public'. Where is the modern town square? If the only place you can practice your 'rights' is almost nowhere, do you really have those rights at all?

The government should be mandating that 'digital infrastructure' (ISPs, data centers, payment processors, etc) are neutral and can't be utilized to bully others out of business. That their privileged position also comes with extra responsibilities and restrictions so you don't have the digital equivalent of cutting off water to an abortion clinic because the water utility is pro-life.

I hate researching appliances. Literally every brand and model has a ton of haters (often with tragic stories of how the appliance caused thousands of dollars in damages). There's no way to research an appliance and come out with any sort of objective view point on it.

Sure there's high level takes (Samsung bad, speed queen good), but then if you dig deeper into those off the cuff statements you realize even that isn't true.

So I've generally just said fuck it and gone with whatever.

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).