Popular among the neocons who Democrats think choose the president
Allows us to keep assisting with a genocide
Cons:
Guaranteed to escalate
Costs us international influence
Costs us billions of dollars
Raises the prices of goods
Makes the electorate nervous and unlikely to reelect a president who seems to only oversee rising tension
Further entrenches the impression that we're not actually a formidable threat if you learn basic geurilla tactics and don't mind waiting us out
Further establishes our deep affection for genocide
Increases the likelihood of dozens of unstable and unpredictable indirect consequences
Oh... and strengthens the targets of our attacks and aligns with the adversaries goals
Biden is fucking EVERYTHING up. He's fucking up the middle east, he's fucking up his reelection, and in turn he's going to fuck us all right back into the Trump dimension.
If Ubisoft wants consumers to give them a chance, they should call up Netflix and Disney and Hulu and politely ask them to not demonstrate what the fuck happens if players put trust in the platforms that we're assured will be reliable and consistent places to store games for years and years to come.
The problem really isn't streaming games and cloud storage as a concept. The problem is that the people trying to implement it have demonstrated over and over and over how both untrustworthy and incompetent they are. That's it. If the platforms had credibility and accountability, this probably wouldn't be nearly as big a deal.
What's funny is that they're not detached from the gaming industry. The average person, if you asked them "Do you think players like live service games?" they'd say, "I don't know what you're talking about."
These people have a lot of really nuanced, heavily informed opinions on the history, present, and future of gaming. They're just all highly unpopular opinions outside of people who demand to get a check in the mail immediately if not sooner because they just bought a share in a company they know little or nothing about.
These people are like an adversarial neural network being trained to find the most efficient ways to piss of their own customer base.
I think it's important to note that the entertainment landscape as a whole has been changing, and those changes have mixed with the shitty investor culture that already existed to create a terrible set of incentives that are wildly misaligned with consumer sentiment. I say this because I think that if we want things to change, we need to look at root causes.
The entertainment industry is feeling very threatened. It's hard to make money. That's a reality. And all the solutions to the problem are fucked up attempts to find ways to get players to give more money for things they don't want.
That's certainly a good point. But I really think it's more than that.
I've been reading recently about how Trump and the like are are basically running on a platform of going to war with the planet. You'd think they'd just want to stop talking about climate change. Former Republican Texas governor and secretary of Energy Rick Perry loves fossil fuels, but he still cultivated a wind energy sector, because there's lots of money in it. Not true for a lot of modern conservatives. They could make money on conservative climate solutions, or just steering around it, but what I see from the far right looks like they're determined to engage on the issue, just in the opposite direction from everyone else.
Like, their vision is that we're gonna beat climate change. Not by negotiating with it, though. We're going to beat it by developing the ability for the wealthy few to survive without changing anything, and then kill the biosphere to show it who's boss.
It's weird, and I think it really matters to them as more than just a defense of a few dying industries. It's like how they obsess over coal even though it's largely gone out of business. It's not about the money. It's about sending a message.
I think your point is well made, and I want to expand on it a bit, because it's a tricky thing for people to make sense of.
Hamas' militant arm is highly independent. Their civil administration answers to and collaborates with the same leadership, but the civilian leadership has very little control over the fighters, which operate along the lines of a militia, but in concert with a civil administration. So when we say "Hamas", we could be talking about the administrative workers or the military, and they're pretty different groups.
This makes describing them difficult. It's somewhat inaccurate to characterize Hamas as merely a terrorist group, but also as a conventional government. They're more of an unofficial ruling party that dominates a collapsed state, I think.
It seems pretty reliable that the hostages are dead.
The best case scenario is that Hamas is lying about the cause, and the IDF didn't kill them. That still means that the military campaign is obviously coming at the cost of these people's lives.
Netanyahu can save the hostages or water war, but not both. That's what a hostages situation is. He chose war, and the hostages are going to die if an outside force doesn't intervene.
This, x1000. It didn't used to be the case, but something snapped after Oct. 7. Hostages used to be famously sacred to Israelis, but something big changed. The hostages and their families have been treated terribly by the government.
For those unaware, Israeli soldiers executed three unarmed hostages who escaped from their captors about three weeks ago because they mistook them for unarmed Palestinians. Yeah.
This is good, but I find it odd that the article drives right past the question of why so many people are so determined to undermine an effective response to climate change both before and after they accept the problem as real.
It makes sense to me -- they view the entire issue as a challenge to capitalism, consumption, endless growth, and ruggeded individualism -- but I feel like this needs to be articulated. The question just looms unanswered in the article.
Yeah, what's unfortunate about CEO predictions is that they can kind of just will their expected result into being by acting on it whether it's sound or not.
Still, I think it's well past time we started preparing for high surplus labor. We're already in the early stages of post scarcity, and if we don't embrace something like socialism, we're getting more dystopia.
Good for them. It makes me sad that I think the US has spent all its credibility, and probably won't be any use to them. At this point, I really don't want us involved in the dispute, even though I wish Taiwan success protecting their democracy.
I think this is an increasingly widely held attitude. Everyone in Israel says that when this ends, he's done. He's been facing serious corruption charges and staying PM by getting support from the far right has been all that's kept him out of jail.
It seems like many people have observed that if Netanyahu believes that he's going to jail when the war ends, the war will never end.
I also think he's counting on Trump winning in November, and then the media will stop paying attention to Israel because of the insane shit that will be happening in the US.
This is a tough subject, because I agree with you.
I'm not sure what a good agreement would look like in this circumstance. I think, even if this sounds outlandish, we need to start preparing for a post-work world.
I don't mean post-work in the sense that no one will work, just that the assumption that everyone should find a job is breaking down. Surplus labor is growing, and it's going to grow more and more, faster and faster, in different industries before others. And it's going to be disruptive.
Currently, I think that labor unions are a critical part of securing worker rights, but this is another example that they're not going to be enough to respond to shifts on the order we're witnessing. We need strong unions, but we need a broad social movement towards guaranteed services as well.
This is truly horrific. I think anyone with a kid is hit especially hard. Imagining my kid drinking contaminated water, and being too tired to play, and just sitting in a makeshift tent, unable to get a good night's rest, constantly running from bombs... That's hell. No child should have to experience that.
Thanks for sharing this, this is really interesting.
My hope is that when Reddit announces their IPO, more people will start talking about wishing for alternatives. I hope this motivates a few people who checked it out and left and lots of new people to take a first look, and when they do I hope they find an already active community that produces enough content to retain more people and generate more content.
This is so fucking stupid.
Pros:
Cons:
Biden is fucking EVERYTHING up. He's fucking up the middle east, he's fucking up his reelection, and in turn he's going to fuck us all right back into the Trump dimension.
This is SO fucking stupid.