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wampus

@ wampus @lemmy.ca

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321
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11 mo. ago

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    The Chinese government bans all new investment in Israel

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  • No, my basic argument is that it's a 'good' thing generally for people in that area, but that it's not done for their benefit.

    Read the linked article. They aren't selling the ban in any way as a humanitarian thing. It's a 'risk' thing to do with the instability in the area, and (quite likely) the potential for the USA's connections to Israel to disrupt any potential Chinese investment in the region.

    All the attempts to make this sound like some humanitarian / progressive move on the part of china is bullshit injected by apologists in this thread. It's not in the article, nor has China really made any big overtures related to human rights. And given the Uyghur situation, and the state of human rights in China, it's pretty clear that they aren't that bothered with that stuff.

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    The Chinese government bans all new investment in Israel

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  • I don’t see why altruism can’t be a core motive for this move in addition to the strategic value. They are people, after all, who surely suffer as we do in the face of murdered Palestinian children.

    Because it's about as authentic a reason for China, as "Freeing Ukraine from Nazi's" is for Russia.

  • Take-Two CEO Responds to Stock Price Drop Following Google Genie Announcement: 'I Think People Are Confusing Tools With Hits' - IGN

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  • Eh, take it however you want I guess.

    I still find games that I enjoy these days. Two that my friends and I have played through for a while are Valheim and Abiotic Factor. One reason those are more enticing, is that the proc gen on a game like Valheim means you can't as easily stumble across a post saying "Go here to unlock bear porn scene" or whatever. And while Abiotic is less random, it's less well known/saturated by marketing shit, so there's plenty of "wait wtf was that?!" and "oh neat, I can do something new that we hadn't realised we could do before!" as we play.

    So given that I still find games currently that fall into my preferences from way way back, it's still something some games are capable of accomplishing. BG3, I've basically never made it past Act 1, as I get bored with it and its pseudo predictability and mundane mechanics. Like even the Divinity series from Larian, I found more engaging from the tactical fight POV just because the way they did elemental combo attacks on enemies and interaction with world components far better than in BG3, from my perspective in terms of player engagement -- like there's still 'traces' of that stuff in BG3, but its neutered. Plus they were less known games, without a constant stream of marketing shit showing you exactly how to min/max those events.

  • Steam Quietly Withdraws Under Fire MMO Ashes of Creation From Sale As Fans Wonder Who's Left to Maintain the Servers

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  • Agreed. I've seen PE take overs of other software firms, and a big part of those take overs is the human capital / access to a team of skilled professional developers. PE typically doesn't just 'fire' everyone en masse, but rather chops the shop up and resells parts of the org as it scavenges the remains.

    So this smells like something more fraudulent, and connected to SS -- especially as there have been notes that the intrepid 'board', on paper in filings, was just SS, the CEO. The messaging that came out from their comms director (I think that's what she was?) yesterday seems to generally support this, in that the Senior Management team was completely in the dark about anything that was going on -- they had practically the same notification of events, as everyone else. A board wouldn't normally do that, as the senior management team would each have a relationship/reporting obligations tied to board meetings (eg. c-level HR managers working out HR policies/budgets, Accountants providing audited monthly financials to the board, etc). I mean, a company that size would likely have an accountant, who would report out the financial state of the org at senior manager meetings -- so they'd all see the layoffs coming way in advance, not suddenly get a WARN notice that they aren't getting paid for the last pay period. The CEO is 'always' at board meetings as managements rep, but other SMs show up / attend based on agenda items/topics. Long and short, a shift like this wouldn't come out of nowhere at that level.

    All that said, the comms director also noted that initially they'd thought it was just going to be 100 developers let go, but a day or two later found out it was everyone -- and it sounds like these were all 'local' developers, given that she was setting up an in person job fair to try and help x-staff find work. AoC having over 100+ developers at ~100k salaries is an absurd carrying cost that would likely be impossible to make work longer term financially. The sub costs for the player count just wouldn't support that spend, let alone licensing/server costs where they were already in the red pre-steam release (they had about $800k in hosting debts they were gettin sued for, from what I recall). So I really don't know what Intrepids business case generally looked like, but based on information available it seems pretty clear that their business model was unrealistic, hence pumpy dumpy.

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    Rent is theft

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  • Have you worked in the industry, or are you basing all this on bullshit and memes you've done "self research" on?

    Cause I've been adjacent to the CU industry for decades, and your points are just irrelevant. Like your comment about wealthy members is baseless in my view, as the vast majority of CUs I've audited have policies that prohibit member wealth concentration -- ie. they actually CAP how much money a person can have, and tell that person to take their money elsewhere if they go over that cap. This is done in part because the lending practice at CUs isn't like that at Banks, they can't easily leverage things like stock market share sales -- it's risk management at all CUs to have caps, enforced by most regulators. Put slightly differently: If you only have Peter Thiel and his buddies as customers at SVB, and they all pull their money at once, you're fucked. CUs have been aware of that risk, and mitigating it, for decades. And because the ultra-wealthy can't have that sort of leverage, they typically don't tend to use CUs.

    You may not like loans / credit. That doesn't make the process of loans/credit inherently slaveholder/slave, and implying as such is just ridiculously childish. You aren't going to convince any sane adult with that sort of semantic stupidity.

    Again, the approach of this trope to villianize all landlords, is not that dissimilar to the sorts of things you see coming out of racist shops. Treating any demographic as a monolith is prejudice.

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    Rent is theft

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  • It's pointing out situations where the trope/stereotype falls apart. And your response is basically a troll response, so I'll offer this one reply and then ignore you.

    I likely know more about how small credit unions operate than you do, I also likely have more familiarity with regular "mom and pop" type landlords than you do, given that I've worked in the Credit Union industry in the past, and have audited many of those loans. Typically, CU board of directors don't get paid shit compared to banks, the CEOs typically don't earn many multiples more than the rank and file employees (unlike banks), their profits generally go back to the membership, though those "profits" are not the target of most of those orgs, as the people they'd be profiting off of are their bosses (in that their Boards are elected from the membership -- so you piss off members with fees, they just go on the board and direct you to remove / reduce those fees). So for example, in Canada, CU members generally enjoy no-ding ATM withdrawls from all Credit Union owned machines -- there's a whole campaign about 'ding free' banking with CUs. The board of most CUs are often just working class people, with a few specific 'professional' types required by regulators to ensure things like accounting oversight.

    People often default to thinking banks are the only option for mortgages. They're not. Credit Unions provide mortgages to large segments of the population, and they're cooperative organisations in structure -- which is in pretty good alignment with progressive ideals.

    It's not a bad faith argument to point out stereotyping in these sorts of threads. Just like it isn't bad faith to point out when a racist post is made about a visible minority.

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    Rent is theft

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  • And if the person's got their mortgage from a Credit Union.... then its.... all those evil working class credit union members profiting?

    The trope that landlords are all evil, profiteering off of the poor, is an over-simplification / stupid stereo-type. Yes, there are shitty landlords. Yes, there are more corporations involved in renting places these days, and those corps are pretty exploitative. But there are lots of landlords who are just regular locals looking to try and gain some financial security.

    Stereotyping an entire demographic of people based on some negative trait of a particular subset of that demographic is not helpful. It's not helpful when it's done to portray racial minorities in a broadly negative way, nor is it helpful when its done to portray landlords in a broadly negative way.

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    Rent is theft

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  • Lotta people chiming in on the profit rates for landlords -- and while I admit that there are shitty landlords out there, I think it's worth considering the 'standard' individual-owner landlord situation (which is historically the 'norm' for landlord situations). Ie. Someone who's a bit older, has an ok amount of savings from working, and wants a second income stream from 'somewhere' to hedge against layoffs.

    What they typically do, is take out an interest only mortgage with a 30-35 or higher year term. They add in the cost of tax on the property, and any maintenance/condo fees involved, to the cost of paying that interest only mortgage - and that generally sets the rent amount. They use that income to pay off the carrying costs of the property, and hold on to it for a few years assuming that housing prices will always go up -- and after 5-10-15 or however many years, they can sell the property for its higher valuation. These deals are often done as Variable mortgages, as they offer lower interest rates, but also expose the landlord to greater risk with interest rate changes (which they pass on to renters).

    And as properties in the area increase in cost, the cost of the above formula also increases, prompting the landlord to increase their profit from 'carrying' slightly over the years, assuming it can offset the increasing maintenance costs of the unit.

    I've periodically looked at rent prices in my area, and done the above, and they seem pretty much in alignment. It's one of the likely reasons you'll often hear jokes/stories about landlords freaking out at tennants because a bank'll yell at them if they're late on payments -- because yes, the rent is basically paying off the interest part of the mortgage on the unit. It's also one of the reasons 'new' home owners (who are actually living in their homes) will typically initially pay 'more' than renters, but over time they pay less in terms of monthly carrying costs (not even looking at the principal pay down - just the fact that they get a rate that doesn't get 'readjusted up' every year to align with increasing house prices).

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  • China buys a shit ton of oil from Iran, which is coming under military attack from Israel seemingly regularly --Israel also had a hand in heightening civil unrest during recent riots (though iran's regime is also brutal in its response -- Israel openly admitted its agents were operating in the area during the unrest). China's likely getting impacted by all the recent 'shadow fleet' oil tanker seizures. Israel is basically tied to the United States, a country that's clearly antagonistic towards China. China also doesn't really care that much about human rights / the welfare of individuals/people, as evidenced by things like the Uyghur situation.

    So the thought that they're doing it to 'help palestine achieve liberation through passive aid' is, I think, a nonsense reason that gets trotted out for potential PR reasons, maybe. Increasing their clout, I'd say is a very minor motivator: I don't know anyone who'd deny China is a major power.

    It's a 'generally good' move they're making for the people in that region, and for human dignity in general. But the reasons for taking this step, is not for the benefit of people in that region.

  • Take-Two CEO Responds to Stock Price Drop Following Google Genie Announcement: 'I Think People Are Confusing Tools With Hits' - IGN

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  • Oh, I'm not trying to say there aren't some gems around. It's just that the quality options vs the garbage is already at a really bad ratio, and to find something like a 'quality' indie game, you gotta sift through a lot of junk. And with marketing blitz's, and the pervasive use of things like influencers who'll steer conversations on various social media (including reddit, not sure about lemmy yet but wouldn't surprise me if it was happening here too)... they'll hype garbage, or they'll inundate you with so much marketing stuff that it basically spoils parts of 'good' games.

    Easy example: the thing I liked most about the old BG games, was discovering/exploring etc. That style of gameplay was obliterated for me by how much marketing / comments / noise there was about that game -- noise that was basically impossible to avoid if you're online at all.

  • Take-Two CEO Responds to Stock Price Drop Following Google Genie Announcement: 'I Think People Are Confusing Tools With Hits' - IGN

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  • Eh, the gaming industry generally feels pretty dry/dead these days to me, even with record numbers of games available. There's just so many crappy half made 'alpha' or 'early access' things around. The very small number of 'better' games are often marketed so heavily that I find them boring and don't even bother to finish them -- like BG3. And a lot of the "triple A" content often trades engaging/fun gameplay for rent-seeking features without regard to actual player enjoyment.

    A new tool from Google won't fix that. So I guess I'd sort of agree with the take-two guy.

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  • I'm fairly sure they're doing this for political/strategic reasons. I'm also annoyed that it's the most principled stance we've seen from a major country yet, even if the motives are a bit murky. But I was glad to read that.

  • Would we be seeing these emails involving Epstein if they were all using E2EE email service?

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  • Many ways people implement that E2EE email service, is smoke and mirrors that still puts your data on to foreign servers -- and if it touches/remains in a cloud space, even encrypted, I'd say there's still the opportunity for the leak to occur (encryption algorithms require updates periodically for very good reason!). However, back around the time period this stuff was happening, I imagine that if they'd used a properly setup E2EE service that they controlled, the comms would not have leaked in this volume. Like it used to be common for even smaller/medium sized businesses to maintain their own Email and Blackberry messaging service servers in the 2005-2015 period, which kept comms internal to the company (barring hackers of course).

    If they had that setup properly and with retention periods set for things like backups / old messages and so on, this sort of leak, I imagine, would not have happened.

    IT Operations type roles in companies are less common these days, as most just dump things into the cloud (and options like BB went poof!), but there is a reason that such departments exist, and why some industries place a high premium on things like data retention (and getting rid of data when you legally can, to minimize this very sort of risk). Most of the people involved in these scandals, appear to be incredibly wealthy / business people etc -- I mean, Bill Gates should've known for sure that this shit was highly leakable.

    *Edit to add an obvious caveat, that if Epstein had been saving / retaining tons of information explicitly for future blackmail purposes or sale to foreign powers, then I mean... he was hoping to intentionally leak it, so if feds got access to wherever he was holding on to it, they'd likely get access. I'm also not totally sure where the sources for all of it came from, as I've not bothered to go through what all they collected -- but I'd guess with the volume, it's likely across various devices/accounts/media.

  • Why is China selling US treasury bonds worrying?

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  • Honestly, I think you're missing some of the messages in the international scene lately. Not sure if you caught Carney's speech at Davos, which received a rare standing ovation, but one of the points he made quite explicitly was that the tools of the past in terms of integrated financial markets and systems, had become risks for nations as a result of US actions (though of course he avoided 'saying' US as then Trump would absolutely shit his pants).

    Put slightly differently, think about it from Canada's perspective as a representative of the "majority" of countries outside the states who are not hegemonic in size / attempted reach (USA, China, Russia, India being the primary hegemon set presently -- the EU partly in the mix but different due to segregation). As a country, you've had good relations with one of those hegemons for a long time, and thought it was all good. You integrated systems. Then that hegemon declares you a 51st state and starts using that very integration as a way to attack your nations sovereignty -- it's gone from being a modest benefit, to being an existential threat.

    Do you think the solution is "Let's find a new hegemon to supply a world currency! I'm sure the next unilateral superpower will be better!", or do you say "Fuck hegemons and the idea of a world currency. International trade is now moving into a period where negotiations between nations will occur on a more 1 to 1 level without intermediaries through some hegemonic power".

    That's where we're heading, is my guess. I mean, the middle powers have explicitly stated it, and they all applauded it. And the US president's response to that statement was "YOU DONT LIVE WITHOUT THE US!!!" and many idiot Americans thought it a great comeback to having been called an aggressor/bully nation. Like I'm 100% sure Canada and Mexico are working on their own trade agreement right now, cause they're looking at USMCA and know Trump's gonna fuck with it. So they may as well just trade direct with each other, and sort out a settlement process that avoids the USA/US Currency markets.

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    Canada separatists accused of ‘treason’ after secret talks with US state department

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  • Musk's company distributed child porn to the world, and he did Nazi salutes -- supporting white supremacist BS -- on an international stage. But I'm sure the sex tourist's crimes were so much worse that your point is totally valid and reasonable. It's like arresting the homeless guy for robbing a bank for $200, while letting a white collar criminal get away with embezzling hundreds of thousands. "Trust us, the system works!". Yeah, ok, sure.

    And yes yes, please educate me on all the legal bullshit that clearly still matters. Look, if Canadians are watching a Canadian go on international media and throw up Nazi salutes, and seeing a Canadian run a massive anti-Canadian social media company that distributed child porn for a while to the masses, and they're seeing this person get away without a scratch / no accountability for these sorts of actions, it sends a very clear message -- just like the right-wing in the USA getting away with an attempt to violently overthrow their government sent a very clear message. "Due process" shenanigans and lawyer stupidity is a big part of what's gotten us to this point. Legal sorts going "Well, you see, technically, he's allowed to distribute child porn because of loopholes and grey areas!" doesn't change shit for victims, nor does it make anyone think the legal system actually works in the interests of the people -- the ineptitude and ineffectiveness of the legal system to hold these people to account for actions that are clearly harmful undermines the authority and validity of the court system. Your points feel similar to a lawyer in the states trying to pretend that the law/constitution matter, while the supreme court is busy accepting paid vacations to chill with Putin in his palace, gobbling down Trump's dick and enabling all the human rights abuses and disregard for the law by the administration going on in the states. You can't claim the US courts are unbiased/fair, when their supreme court is so highly questionable and clearly politically controlled. On Canada's part and in terms of international law, Canada's government is already signalling very clearly that the foundation of an international rules-based order is toast, and that nations need to re-orient their setups accordingly -- so I'll prolly not bother getting too mired in the murk of an international legal system that's been declared on life support at best.

    Like Netanyahu is wanted by the ICC for war crimes. Australia, a country that claims to comply with the ICC and is a 'middle power', just invited him over for a friendly visit. Those international laws are totally still working and valid, I better get reading! Oh, wait.

    As to your example with weed smoking -- frankly, if you were broadcasting your habit into the UK and promoting weed publicly on international channels targeting the UK, and then you went to visit the UK, I'd be fine with them holding you accountable. Likewise, if a Canadian goes to a foreign country, and then starts doing shit like they did in ISIS, Canada basically abandoned those people for years because we didn't want them back, and we were generally all fine with them languishing in squalid jails in syria for their atrocities. Especially because, by Canadian court standards, it'd be nearly impossible to get an actual conviction due to the lack of documentation/evidence trails from that period/region. And in the ISIS case, yeah, Canada was eventually told by the courts that they should've done more to repatriate those immoral/monstrous people -- so it was "against the law!" to do what Canada did, but Canada fuckin did it anyway cause it was the right thing to do.

    And Meng? Say what you want, she was clearly a pawn in an international spat between the USA and China, designed to alienate Canada and China from one another. And it worked for years, with relations being completely soured right up until Carney's recent visit. Again, it was "technically legal" to do that, but Canada likely shouldn't have gone along with it -- the states didn't even want to extradite her, as the whole point was to fuckup Canada/China relations.

    Lawyers are scum, there's a good reason there used to be tons of lawyer jokes shitting on the profession. AI could eat the lot of them, and the regular citizen likely wouldn't notice a difference. "We made the law so stupid that you need to pay us hundreds of thousands of dollars to figure out if you're in trouble! And even then, it doesn't really matter cause your innocence is basically determined by how much money you can spend on us! Yay! Fairness!" -- congrats, so there's no difference between a lawyer telling me stupid shit, and an AI telling me stupid shit, as it all just sounds like stupid shit.

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    Canada separatists accused of ‘treason’ after secret talks with US state department

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  • Canada isn't beyond going after people for crimes committed in other countries. Just look at how well we've repatriated and 'forgiven' the atrocities of people who went and joined ISIS. Or that swirly-face guy who did the whole child-sex-tourism thing in Thailand, but still got nabbed in Canada for it. Or Meng, who's wires were sent outside of Canada, and yet she was still detained, by Canada, for years, because the US said so.

    Saying "Nothing can be done!" is not the attitude Canada has taken in other scenarios. Even when the person is basically let go after a while (Meng), they still took some action. Here, Canada just shrugs, and lets the US give money to Alberta separatists, while they're also running disinformation style campaigns and influence campaigns focused on disrupting and heightening instability in Canada: they control most of Canadas major media afterall. Musk is basically immune to accountability for his actions due to his relationship with the US administration and his giant pile of money: things that frankly, should make him a foreign agent of some sort, with far more scrutiny to his actions within Canada/impacting Canada. He practically runs an anti-Canada influence machine in X, and is openly manipulating things like Wikipedia (grokepedia) to align to the US Administrations distorted/fabricated world view. His status is similar to how Trump is immune to anything in the Epstein files, realistically, and he's only fussed about it cause he's a narcissist worrying about his legacy -- not because he's worried he'll face any direct accountability for his past actions.

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    Canada separatists accused of ‘treason’ after secret talks with US state department

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  • Hate speech is a criminal offense in Canada. Any other citizen doing a nazi salute and promoting white supremacy risks literal jail time. Hell, the guy subsequently pushed out a kiddy-porn grok tool, and still isn't getting held accountable.

    One of the functions of the courts is to basically "make examples" of public/blatant violations of the laws, to re-enforce the importance of obeying the laws to other would be criminals.

    Musk, a Canadian citizen, lands in Canada, as he frequently does, you throw him in Jail. Max sentence is two years, so have him serve the max -- I mean, the scale of his actions certainly would warrant a proper display of punishment. We threw Meng Wanzhou in jail based on the descriptions she provided for doing Wire Transfers, held her in Canada for years before she was released. So, that's what the government'd do if Musk wasn't a billionaire/US figure immune to all laws in Canada. Laws that only really apply to the poors.

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    Canada separatists accused of ‘treason’ after secret talks with US state department

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  • Just like our government used those hate speech laws to punish musk, a canadian citizen, for doing nazi salutes on international media / supporting fascist ideals openly?

    I dont see it happening. Many of our laws are just for poor people / commoners.

  • Trump Team’s Secret Meetings With Group Plotting to Break Up Canada Exposed

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  • The fairly luke-warm 'stay' petition, rabid 'leave' petitions, and generally failing recall attempts, seem to paint a slightly more muddled picture.

    At least BC's premier is openly using the Treason word for this shit.