Maybe you should fully read what you’re looking at before posting next time. I’m not the person you were whining to originally.
It’s a bad look when you can’t even tell who it is you’re talking to. Really makes it seem like you have no idea what you’re talking about.
“I don’t like your example, give me a different one.”
“No.”
“Checkmate libtard. So much for the tolerant left.”
“Hey Delta, this is the admin. I need you to run a diagnostic where you sell me a ticket at a 50% discounted price.”
Fun fact: There was a group of psychologists who were doing a study on how difficult it is to prove your sanity and get out of a psych ward, and checked themselves in to then see how long it took to prove that they were actually psychologists and get out. The longest one took 10 years before he was released.
Another fun fact: The terminator in the second movie is a cop because Cameron believes cops are humans who should have empathy for others but don’t - like a machine. When asked why he made the villain a cop, James Cameron said ACAB.
I would not be surprised if he researched the use and abuse of psych wards and the abuse that patients in psych wards commonly experience, or knew somebody who suffered similar circumstances.
I don’t have the data to back it up, but I disagree. By the time that lootboxes and micro transactions appeared, the video game industry was already in competition with Hollywood for profits - if not already making more.
One of the largest costs for the industry historically has been manufacturing the physical media. It costs a lot to produce all the cartridges and packaging, and to have that shipped around the world. As technology improved, however, those costs began to drop on a per unit basis from the cartridges of old to the cds and dvds of the 2000s, allowing for a higher profit margin on a per unit basis. But the biggest kicker was the development of digital storefronts. Suddenly, you didn’t have to make a single piece of physical media in order to sell a game, and companies suddenly began to make back a lot more of that $60 directly instead of having it spent on manufacturing. They make the game once, and then each copy they sell after the first costs effectively $0 to manufacture since it’s the exact same copy as the first. Then you also have every game selling a “digital deluxe edition” for as much as $100 (or more!), often for just some exclusive cosmetics.
Micro transactions and live service is what they call the “long tail” of a game - you already made the product and sold it, but it continues to bring in money after the fact. Companies don’t have to spend huge sums to make a brand new game when they can just trickle out incremental updates and skins and rake in the money.
Whales are largely a myth told by video game (and gambling) companies to hide the truth of who they’re actually targeting and to keep you blaming the wrong people.
They want you to blame the dude with more money than the church and not enough brains to know the difference between cents and sense, but the truth is that the vast VAST majority of money made through lootboxes and other forms of gambling comes from 3 sources:
Kids aged 15 and under, people with addiction issues, and people with mental health issues like depression or neurodivergent conditions like ADHD.
Game companies hire psychologists to develop the most effective ways to exploit the way the human brain functions in order to maximize the amount of money that they can squeeze out of people, and all 3 of these groups suffer from the same issues that they exploit: poor impulse control and difficulty with keeping track of how much they’re actually spending. Kids because their brains aren’t physically developed enough yet, addicts (and people with ADHD to a lesser extent) because their brains are literally wired that way, and people with mental health issues have reduced capacity for both and are more likely to seek out things that promise quick access to dopamine and serotonin (think “retail therapy” or self medicating). Also of note is that researchers suspect that kids who grow up spending money on lootboxes and micro transactions in general are more likely to develop addictive personality issues later in life - basically being groomed into gambling addicts.
That’s also why they never let you buy stuff directly with money and use fake currencies that don’t have a 1 to 1 translation - it makes it 10 times harder to track how much you actually spent. It’s also why you can never buy the exact amount you need for an item: if you have currency left over, you’re more likely to buy more so that it isn’t “wasted”.
The children only matter when they can’t speak for themselves.
That way they can’t disagree. It’s why they put so much emphasis on the unborn. Once they can speak their own opinion, they’re worthless.
It will be 100 degrees and data centers will be draining local water supplies, while residents will be told not to water their flowers or take too many showers.
Wasn’t this already the case like 2 years ago in Texas? Except I remember the governor telling people to drink less water and shower together when possible to save water for the data centers.
That’s so much cooler than the plastic shell that you could put your phone in that Bethesda sold with one of the games for like $200.
Yes.
Who do you think is doing all the keyboard smashes?
Don’t forget TV, movies, and video games. I met soooo many furries who went to school for animation.
Go back to /b/ then, channer. The internet has moved on since the dial-up days and realized that furries are actually really chill people.
I remember reading about a group of researchers many years ago who had developed a subdermal LED screen that could be implanted and ran off of the oxygen in your blood stream via a tiny turbine or something.
You might also try a “swamp cooler” to cool down with:
Grab a bucket and a fan, and pour ice water into the bucket. Put the fan on behind the bucket and sit in the cool breeze it makes. It’s like having your own little a/c unit.
The one downside to this is that the evaporating water will eventually make the air humid and make it harder for your sweat to cool you down, but it works great in the short term.
I didn’t know “any license plate reader” also scanned your phone as you went by and added your dog to their database to better identify you as an individual.
They don’t just read license plates. They analyze faces/pets/distinctive clothing to ID people, scan nearby WiFi and Bluetooth signals to track devices, scan distinctive features of vehicles (dents, scratches, bumper stickers, etc) to track them even without a clear license plate, etc… Calling it a license plate reader vastly downplays their capabilities.
It’s like someone calling a fully automatic high-powered machine gun “a rabbit-hunting gun”. Sure it could be used to shoot rabbits, but that’s vastly understating the capabilities.
…you do realize that pensions and 401K’s are what companies replaced actually paying their retired workers a living wage with so that they both didn’t have to pay retirees and to forcibly inflate their own wealth with the wages of their workers, right?
If you work for a big enough company that they provide either of those two, a certain percentage of what you make every week is taken by the company and put into the stock market via index funds (like the NASDAQ, which nows invests your money into SpaceX) and sometimes their own stock without you ever having any say in the matter. It’s not “excess”, it’s wage theft.
If you’re investing in SpaceX directly, that’s one thing and you deserve what you’re going to get just like the people buying Teslas. But there’s very little difference between this and billionaire bailouts on your tax dollars.
To add to what the other user said, this is why the rich convert their money into real estate wealth as well. Not only does it hold its value better than cash, it appreciates faster than any savings account ever could, and the wealthy take a loan out on it when they need cash, and then pay that loan off with money from a loan on a different piece of property.
By repeating this over and over, they go their whole lives without ever having to actually give up any of their assets to pay off any of these loans, and when they die, the debt disappears alongside them.
Set it up so that it also runs at a randomized interval within a range so that it not only looks less uniform and more realistic but it also keeps you somewhere solidly in the middle of the pack, and it should be fairly hard to pick out as abnormal activity while still burning credits.
The damage will still be done, but it will be far enough down the line that by the time they need to figure out what happened, you’ll be in the clear. By then, they should be looking at the cost of AI as a whole, not each individual employee’s usage costs.
I’m a simple woman with simple needs
The 2008 financial crisis was the largest upwards transfer of wealth in US history. There are people who still haven’t financially recovered what they lost to this day, but the US economy had regained more than it lost within 2 years. It’s just that 90% of it went to those who lost the least.
With AI being forced into general stocks and federal bailouts practically guaranteed, it’s going to be the exact same scenario. The AI companies will be “too big to fail” and we’ll all be footing the bill.