Took me getting fired from one job and almost a second before I finally got my coping mechanisms figured out. It’s still a struggle and it’s also cost me a significant amount of my ability to enjoy my free time (have to severely limit my investment in anything not work related so I don’t accidentally get consumed by it and lapse at work), but I’m ‘functional’ now.
I do. I enjoy figuring out how it all works and then restructuring it to my exact specifications. But then the problem is ‘solved’ so my brain wants to focus on something else.
Even when I play games, I struggle to complete them. I play just enough to figure out the gameplay loop. The part where you’ve got all the mechanics and the game goes ‘and repeat till the game is over’. I struggle to have the desire to do that part, because why? The puzzle is solved and the rest is simply execution.
Every now and then I pull up a game I might want to play. Mod the hell out of it, sometimes even fixing old broken mods or writing my own. I spend ages learning all the details of how it all works and engage in the community, etc.
I never actually end up playing the game.
Yeah, I was surprised at how dextrous their front paws were having grown up with only dogs. Definitely little hands.
This would be funnier without the last panel
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.
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
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.
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.
Quiet yes. They’ve gone quiet several times before. But it never results in different actions. They don’t change, they only ever become more circumspect.
It’s how Democrats deluded ourselves that things were turning around and then were so surprised to lose everything. All of the words in the world aren’t going to affect any real change.
I honestly don’t think there’s anything anyone can do to reach these people. I think something is deeply broken in a huge majority of Americans. Either they’re voting for this or they’re too checked out, self absorbed or hopeless to bother to do anything to try to fix it. 2024 revealed just how broken we are.
Should be yes, but the human is only interested in getting passed the prompt, not with accuracy so it’s no. Which I’m pretty sure fucks with their AI training, but who cares.
I also think that, after getting up to speed, they’d fight pretty hard against measures that are meant to backslide us to that point again.
I mean the part that no one really wants to confront is that there is no alternative with a viable chance. The blue moderate has been suffocating all other options for ages and now that it’s come to this, there’s nothing waiting in the wings to rely on.
If only that were true. That is at least a rational response that can be worked around.
But COVID told us just how many conservatives will laugh on their death bed if they’ve been convinced that what’s happening to them ‘owns the libs’.
It’s a cult and so reality is whatever the cult leaders say it is, even if that reality is harming them directly.
Popularity of robo wasps went up when the president claimed dying in horrible agony was actually a good thing. Several people voluntarily provoked their nests. Others tried keeping them as pets.