gila

They aren’t concerned with deaths, this legislation positions the most harmful and most physically addictive nicotine option as relatively more accessible.

They aren’t concerned with nicotine addiction, else NRT gum wouldn’t be allowed to stock within reach of children in retail outlets.

They’re just NIMBY’s, there’s nothing else to it.

In Australia our tobacco strategy was to effectively ban vapes and price cigarettes out of existence.

The impact to date has created two totally new black markets: one for vapes after people realised anyone could just hop on AliExpress to buy them in bulk and resell for a 2000% markup. They are banned for import, but nicotine is a colourless odourless liquid and there are no rapid tests for it, no capacity to do expensive GCMS testing on all the random freight entering the country from China (our biggest trading partner by far).

The other new black market is for “chop chop”, the colloquial name for unprocessed tobacco illegally grown and sold by gangs for cheaper than regular cigarettes / RYO tobacco.

There’s also been a big increase in violent robberies at tobacco outlets and even gang turf wars over sales of illegally imported or stolen cigarettes. The excise tax is so high that the gangs can extract enormous sales margin and still undercut the market.

Predictably (and contrary to the rest of the western world) tobacco use has gone up nationally over the past couple of years following a significant downtrend lasting several decades. I’m confident that this strategy, which has been bipartisan amongst our 2 major political parties, will be used as a future case study in why prohibition is fucking moronic. It has continuously demonstrated to be a net detriment to public health, in this case related to a totally preventable yet leading cause of premature death and public health spend.

There is literally no logic to it beyond Lovejoy’s Law, except for some false manufactured statistics parroted by our leaders which blatantly ignore scientific consensus.

For what it’s worth, Mozilla did release a Firefox nightly test build a couple of months ago which included a proof of concept vertical tabs feature: https://www.ghacks.net/2024/04/02/mozilla-released-a-firefox-nightly-test-build-with-vertical-tabs/

Still not clear whether they’re gonna implement it properly though

The resulting song would be useless to everyone, including you. In the hypothetical eventuality where what you’re asking for is implemented, only a tiny minority of the tabs you’ve collected will be of the slightest usefulness to you, ever. Fundamentally, why did you ever open a given tab in the first place? In the case where you ever need to recall it, it will be trivial to open it again in a fresh browser session. You acknowledge googling is easier than managing bookmarks in these volumes, and you’re right. That’s what you should do. Your current approach is simply hoarding.

I run it as a pwa using an extension. The only extensions I have running in the pwa container are ublock & sponsorblock. No custom user-agent or anything else. Never had an issue

Only for citizens of countries part of the visa waiver program, which doesn’t include China. Neither is there any visa waiver program for Australians entering China

How are you elucidating Satoshi’s intent? The Bitcoin white paper doesn’t say anything to indicate it would predicate a utopia. It puts forward decentralisation as meaningful. If you don’t think it is, chances are it’s because the existing centralised systems cater to you. That’s great, but there are millions in the global south for whom that isn’t the case. For whom those systems serve to restrain and restrict. For whom there is no reason for a “better use case” than simple and fair value transfer they don’t have access to. IMO, that empowerment alone justifies the means, by which I mean proof of work. As real value transfer always has a cost, whether or not it’s realised by the transactor at the time of the transaction. And under any non-anarchical system of government, someone is realising that cost. PoW doesn’t worsen that cost, it is more transparent about it.

Originally, undiagnosed ADHD. The pathway to get licensed was somewhat annoying for me, and I couldn’t be bothered engaging with it. I’ve also always had great access to efficient public transport, which I took to school so was accustomed to using it.

There’s been lots of secondary reasons over the years - for a long time I had fines to clear before I could progress getting licensed. The fines were bullshit, and I wouldn’t pay them out of principle. Now they’ve expired, that roadblock is no longer in my way, but I’m still not licensed.

Sometimes it’s annoying, but only really in the sense that I’m proud of my independence / don’t like the rare occasions that I’m dependent on others for travel. I’m in the US on holiday now, and there is comparatively almost zero public transport - that sucks. When I’ve travelled around Europe, Asia, New Zealand, or at home in Australia - the issues are pretty few. I don’t feel held back enough to care, and it seems like a money pit.

I have learned to drive a car, though. I’m just not licensed to, and don’t. M 33

I think it’s 2 names for the same thing. Either one sounds fine to me!

aka pinkwashing

https://archive.is/96Woj

The company made “more than a dozen technical improvements” to AI Overviews …

… making the feature rely less heavily on user-generated content from sites like Reddit

So it prefers the results that Google normally deprioritizes? I guess we have that in common

The capitalist organisation is the entity being exploited. In Marxist terms, it is not from each according to his ability, it is to each according to his ability. Specifically the ability to fire people without cause like they are playthings. That describes anarchy, not capitalism.

I’m not seeking to make any point about MTX or game ownership. I’m seeking to respond to OP’s central point about current layoffs as an example of capitalism ruining games. MTX is far from the majority of revenue, though. People don’t even play the games they buy, let alone buy MTX at an average rate which exceeds the license cost.

This is liberal speak. I’m astonished that you can say this and not see that capitalism is to blame.

I’m assigning some blame to capitalism in my sentence, the one you quoted. I’m saying the regulatory failure is the mechanism by which the crux of the issue, the option to lay off without cause, is enabled. The specific failure I mean is the failure to require employers to have a good reason to end the work contracts they offer. It is fair to lay someone off for a good reason. It is fair to make their position redundant under macroeconomic circumstances like described in the Business article, if the employees are paid out. These statements are true under many kinds of organisation of government. But similarly under any organisation, including a capitalist one, it is not fair to broadly lay people off without cause where the positions are not redundant; rather the associated payroll expense is temporarily inconvenient, or not preferable to the similarly temporary and unrealised shareholder profits. In the case of a capitalist organisation, it’s because it’s not good for sustainable ongoing business, due to the compromise on future production. These are austerity measures enacted without conditions of austerity. The measures themselves will induce austerity in those businesses. That is antithetical to capitalism. And it is something that can be legislated against today for the protection of the employees against becoming collateral damage, without having to compel the people into revolutionary action. It is the position already held by the majority currently. It is already the status quo in the capitalist world outside America. Or is your position that only America is truly capitalist?

What I’m advocating for is direct action, over using shaky reasoning to try to compel revolutionary action. Because if your own goals are achievable within the framework of capitalism, why would the average person revolt? That’s what I’m telling you is the case. Indeed it isn’t only achievable, it is achieved. I am anti capitalist because my goals are not achievable in a capitalist framework. If directing my actions most productively within the framework in which I exist makes me a liberal, tell me your plan for direct action on this issue and I’ll be happy to consider it on its merits.

Stanford business professor Jeffrey Pfeffer has called the phenomenon of companies in one industry mimicking each others’ employee terminations “copycat layoffs.” As he explained it: “Tech industry layoffs are basically an instance of social contagion, in which companies imitate what others are doing.”

Layoffs, in other words, are contagious. Pfeffer, who is an expert on organizational behavior, says that when one major tech company downsizes staff, the board of a competing company may start to question why their executives are not doing the same.

If it appears as if an entire sector is experiencing a downward shift, Pfeffer argues, it takes the focus off of any single individual company — which provides cover for layoffs that are undertaken to make up for bad decisions that led to investments or strategies not paying off.

Right, doesn’t sound like a conspiracy to game the system at all.

The attempt at mitigating the appearance of investor risk in the company via reducing spend is neutralised by the resulting compromise to their production, at best leaving the company as attractive as it already was. More likely they will lose some resources along the way due to loss of trust, the best hires being picked up elsewhere in the meantime, etc.

If execs game the system to receive a bigger bonus by tricking investors into thinking company finances are better than they are, this doesn’t serve the company. Its base intent is to reward the exec for adding value to the company, which in this case is imaginary, or a result of defrauding investors. The exec in this scenario is more anarchist, working to extract excess profit from their employer, than a capitalist.

That we live under capitalism was not secured by capital owners short-sightedly arbitrating their capital in ways that aren’t really profitable.

I think if we put it to the American people, as capitalists they would be happy to create laws against this kind of blatant worker exploitation, because that’s what is best for business. I certainly don’t mean it as a solution to anything other than OP’s issues that caused the post. But it would solve that, and is something we can achieve today to improve the lives of workers, so yeah we should try it.

I certainly take your general point about 0day DLC’s and MTX being bad and detrimental to games as a whole. I’m not sure about D3/4 as examples of this, their monetisation is limited to paid cosmetics that aren’t even substantially better than the free ones. The launch reviews were positive, the current reviews are positive, it has maintained a player base. The main current points against it are raised by engagement farmers, to farm engagement.

That’s all beside my original point though - OP post uses the title “capitalism ruined gaming” to make a specific point about the current round of industry layoffs. But the layoffs aren’t a product of capitalism - they don’t truly serve anyone’s interest or profit motive, including the developer/publisher. It’s just weird arbitration of profits for no real reason - the inability to sit on their hands when that is the most profitable course. It’s a practice only really done in the US, resulting from that gaming is excessively profitable (i.e. risking some long-term profit isn’t of major consequence) and that a huge proportion of employment in the US is on an at-will basis (i.e. laying people off for any reason carries little if any risk). So while we should retain the goal of an ultimate dismantling of capitalism, that isn’t necessary to stop the issue OP is lamenting - just do what the rest of the capitalist world does currently and have some kind of baseline employee protections.

Layoffs in the context of gaming/big tech don’t really produce profits though, they reduce expenditure such that existing profits (generated by games already shipped, for which the development cost is already summarily incurred) look more attractive to potential investors. The only participant that would truly stand to profit more from this type of action is the exec attempting to scam investors by exiting during a period of artificially inflated valuation

No, the proposition makes no sense from a capitalist perspective. We can be united against capitalism without turning it into a caricature, that doesn’t serve to convince anyone of anything.

The fundamental issue is the game being released is gaining profit at a rate where the game itself is virtually unprofitable.

I don’t believe this. Gaming is one of the biggest and most profitable industries in the world, and MTX aren’t principally responsible for that.

The developer that participates in cyclical layoffs (read: the average publicly traded one based in the US) is more of a failed capitalist. That they profit from the failure doesn’t change that it fundamentally is one. Franchises have been worth billions each since Guitar Hero, ruining them to reduce short-term company expenditure is shooting yourself in the foot. Outside the US (but still under capitalism), it doesn’t really happen.

If this is an effect of capitalism, it is only insofar as US capitalists have the leeway to fuck around and find out, because what they find is still profitable (largely due to complacency of gamers). But that leeway is a product of regulatory failure. It’s ridiculous for workers to be thrown aside to boost profits when this purpose isn’t actually achieved.

As an anti-capitalist I think that’s an undue slight on capitalism. Prioritising profits doesn’t suddenly turn you into a rabid animal that would give up $5 in 5 minutes for $1 right now. What you’re ascribing blame to over layoffs is more than capitalism, it’s a particular brand of mad short-sightedness uniquely observed in US big tech & gaming sectors.

The reality is that under US employment law, there is very little risk in disposing of workforce assets just to print a lower P/E ratio for the quarter. The company can just rehire the same staff again later if they want. It’s an infinitely more solvable problem than capitalism: pass employment reforms. Studios not having a choice is utter nonsense. The choice is to stop working counter to the mutually aligned long-term interests of literally everyone - the company, its staff, its customers. But they kept choosing some other wacky shit instead.