I just opened the Apple TV app on my phone and "$4.99 Essential Movies" is listed prominently just under the top charts and new releases. I'm not trying to be rude, but this whole thread has people just speculating on stuff with limited self-awareness. The reason you aren't building a big film library is probably because you aren't that passionate about films, it isn't because no one is providing you a list of cheap movies. It's all there already, you just had to open the app.
>I think the other thing is that there are a ton of free things for me to watch on various streaming platforms.
Yes, I think it's just people today have more options for entertainment. There are lots of people in this thread trying to rationalize their declining interest in movies as the failing of someone else with "there's no Steam for movies", "they don't make good original movies anymore", or "they don't hire talented people anymore" but that stuff is all happening and has been for a while. People just found other stuff to do with their time so they aren't seeking movies out as much anymore, but it's all out there if you put in a little effort to find it.
Almost none of this is specific to EVs, manufacturers just see EV consumers as technology forward (which seems to largely stem from Tesla's design approach) so they have been more aggressive with technology than with their traditional ICE models.
Agreed, none of these are specific to EVs. A new Ferrari suffers from half the issues the author complained about. This article is pretty much "Gripes I have with Tesla design that I see making their way into other vehicles".
The natural incentives had already pointed to subscription based games, these companies attempted it, and consumers mostly rejected it. I'm extremely dubious that this regulation would be enough to reverse that. It's a much easier decision for a company to put a small development team on readying the server tools for public release than brute forcing a new business model on a resistant consumer base and all the associated risks that come along with it.
If by subscription you mean World of Warcraft style continuous subscription then yes, it doesn't work for most games. But I'd argue the modern battle pass model is just another flavor of subscription. And according to the article, free to play games with battle passes and micro transactions also get an exemption from the proposed bill, so companies will just move to that instead.
Are we still talking about negative impacts of this regulation? Because I don't follow the argument that games going free-to-play is bad for the consumer. Consumer pressure has pushed most games with battle passes and microtransactions to limit those to optional expansions of the base game, often merely cosmetic. People can and do spend hundreds of hours playing Fortnite without paying a cent and I don't see how that type of outcome is bad for the consumer.
And if the consumer doesn't invest any money into the experience, I have a hard time justifying a requirement for the publisher to provide options to keep the game running in perpetuity, so I'm fine with that exception.
It’s basically going to incentivize gambling and skinners box type implementations to juice revenue.
Sure, people can opt out and some will. However the base human psychology is pretty well documented. If the ability to simply not engage in what amounts to addictive behavior was enough we wouldn’t have the crazy online gambling epidemic. That is at least to me obviously bad for the consumer even if you can simply choose not to engage.
Some ethical game companies will likely draw the line at what you say - but I predict far more will realize they can juice revenue quite easily by simply moving towards incentivizing more lootbox type things.
You are treating multiple related issues as one singular issue. Battle passes and microtransactions aren't inherently a form a gambling. They can be implemented with gambling, but plenty of games aren't setup that way. If we have a problem with a model that specifically relies on gambling, we can regulate it like other jurisdictions have done[1]. But this specific piece of regulation is addressing something else and doesn't do anything to point the market specifically towards gambling.
Battle passes/mtx would IMO definitely fall under monetary considerations, which would make the excemption not apply. But as is written now, there still needs to be a precedent set for that, to really cement that interpretation
Or we take some small portion of that new surplus in productivity and share it among everyone by divorcing the need to work from the need to not starve.
Living off redistributed surplus is exactly what happens when you don’t work.
I’ve been there: no job = food pantry + food stamps.
I live in a nice area. Since we are wealthy, our local economy has quite a bit of surplus. The food pantries regularly have organic and high end food. Plenty of people with money go there just because - why not?
The poorer parts of the county don’t have as much surplus, so they’re food pantries had old cheese and peanut butter.
You are simply selecting new elites to be from the redistributor class (vanguard party, Nomenklatura, secret police etc), instead of the entrepreneural class.
Works well if you are the one redistributing stuff from "rich to poor", but it ends up as creating a new elite class, every single time
All modern Western-like societies involve some amount of indirect redistribution already. Outside of extremely peculiar places like Singapore or the Gulf states, it's just not seen as desirable or even sensible to have extreme wealth alongside people living in extreme poverty on the equivalent of less than a dollar a day. This actually used to be relatively common in the 19th century, it was the actual kind of widespread pathology that early social reformers railed against.
It is still extremely common today, if you look at the demographics along the Atlantic Coast of the US. The richest zip codes always have poor ones nearby.
By the standards of underdeveloped countries today or historical poverty in general, these "poor" people are nonetheless living in outright opulence: their genuine plight is mostly one of social marginalization, that can't really be solved by purely economic means. That's partly the effect of new technology (developed by capitalism) but partly redistribution in action.
Doesn’t seem like it did it in Norway. Or the Us from the new deal until the 1970s. Or the vast majority of western Europe. This red scare stuff is tiring.
This is a genuine problem indeed and part of the appeal of an UBI. The idea being that if the rules of redistribution are dead simple, then that helps minimize the potential for grift, which in turn minimizes the potential danger of a redistributor class.
That said, it is fundamentally important that nobody has too much power, and that power changes hands on a regular basis.
At a global scale, this necessitates taking power away from the capitalist class.
Ideally that power just doesn't go to anybody, but to the extent that it has to go somewhere, it almost doesn't matter where. Or perhaps it's better to say that there are many options that are acceptable and better than allowing power to continue to accumulate unchecked.
UBI has been tried experimentally around the world many places including the US and did not have that effect "the money people had received was not squandered on frivolous products such as drugs and luxury goods": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_pilots
Which experiments were successful depends on what your desired outcomes were, but none were as bad a you suggest, I would say many succeeded.
I do not know how COVID support worked in the US, but one of the things you refer to seems to be loans to businesses, which is very different from UBI. Were people given a fixed and guaranteed income stream not linked to earnings during COVID?
My impression is that China has a pretty high standard of living. They have been extremely successful in reducing poverty over the last few decades. You should see how shiny even some of the third tier cities are.
I wouldn't use the COVID economy to understand anything except "What happens to an economy during a pandemic?" People had more money, but there was a lot less to spend on for a while. Not to mention the psychological effects of lockdowns, restrictions, or quarantining.
The fundamental problem is that power and resources are always captured by Cluster B types, and Cluster B types are poison to every form of social organisation.
So it's true it almost doesn't matter, because you can absolutely guarantee you're going to have growing inequality, political instability, and a culture of dishonesty, abuse, and contempt, unless you keep Cluster B types far, far away from resource dominance, strategy, and enforcement.
I don’t think that power and resources are always captured by Cluster B types, and that statement is doing a lot of load-bearing in your argument. You’re going to need to back it up somehow.
> it is fundamentally important that nobody has too much power
> taking power away from the capitalist class
An obvious and apparently irresolvable contradiction.
Capitalist power is inherently anarchic and isn't power at all. It's simply order emerging from the anarchy of the market. But the ability to take that power away from them, no matter how you measure it, itself falls into the category of "too much power" with wide margin. And with this amount of power there will be no change of hands that hold it.
You fundamentally misunderstand UBI. it does not stop anyone working, and where it has been tried people continue working because they want more than a minimal income. its not a universal high income, its a universal BASIC inome.
It seems obvious to me that a complex society needs a privileged class to function, but I don't think it's self evident that every kind of elite class would behave in the same way.
No, it's much better for an elite class of superhumans to hoard all the wealth. After all they guided us to our current utopia, the least humanity can do is give them the vast majority of wealth.
All else being equal, the cooler a job is, the less it will pay. It's why unions have been so successful in other "cool jobs" like professional athlete and working on movies and TV. There are some people who would do those jobs for free which completely destroys the market power of most individuals requiring collective action to prevent exploitation.
"Agrees" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Agreeing to $100/hour because you think it's fair and agreeing to $1/hour because you're starving may both qualify, but they're quite different.
It would be prudent if you would dig a bit deeper into how unions came to be. Long story short, capitalism can easily create situations where you agree to be exploited to some degree, to avoid being exploited to another, worse, degree.
That's why it has to be collective. That's why OP mentioned saying it in an all hands. That's why there's always discussion of tech worker unions despite our high pay. Any one of us try to push too hard on this sort of thing on our own and they'll "just find someone else" who would happily take our place.
Why would it be the immigrants fault? They are just following the rules setup by the billionaires. I wouldn't blame everyone that came to my party and had it shut down for overcrowding but I'll blame the groups that invited them and collected money at the door.
So true. Pick your boogeyman (Muslims/Immigrants/Antifa/Trans/"Marxists"), pump the attack propaganda through all available media channels and hope no one mentions the billionaires.
It's been awhile since 9/11 and we've got pretty short memories, so we'll probably cycle back to Muslims soon.
If I saw this comment 5 years ago, I would have thought you were some crazy conspiracy nut. Today I read it and worry that you might be right. I wonder what I will think seeing this sentiment 5 years from now.
I personally don't know if the world is on some sort of precipice. It seems like that's possibly the case. The strongest piece of evidence is that many of the rich and powerful, including those big tech leaders, are behaving like it is and that they think they're close to some sort of victory.
Power has always tried to shape the perception of reality: kings, feudalists, slavers, industrialists, etc.
What’s novel isn’t that powerful people are trying to shape the perception of reality, it’s that who is powerful and what makes them powerful may be rapidly changing. I think it’s something that our “big tech leaders” are primarily concerned with, over everything else. Fundamentally evil, imo.
Other end is concentrated power (via money, violence, manipulation,...) so something like a dollar per universal vote.
Other end is one vote for each, including the future generations.
Wikipedia is an obstacle for the first one that must be taken down. Perhaps one of the last barriers before the endgame.
And there's no fuzzy middle option, we've (me included) have thought in our comfort for too long that us vs. them scenario that both the left and the right (at least mainstream ones) is possible. But it's now clear that there's no lukewarm at-right or green social democrat version. Only full fascism or full democracy.
We might still have the time but one by one the platforms that would enable this (wiki included) keep being ingested thus making it less and less likely.
But like you said five years ago this level of consciousness would have been out of the question for us both so perhaps there are more of us?
Whether the average Big Tech job is better than the average job overall has no real relationship to whether Big Tech workers are being exploited. I think we can simply look at the number of billionaires that Big Tech has created as evidence that even those workers making relatively high salaries are being underpaid compared to the value they are actually creating.
The obvious rebuttal to that framing would be that if those workers are not able to create that value on their own (such as by starting their own business or bringing their expertise to a firm with more favorable terms) then they aren't actually contributing that outsized value, the company itself is. And if they are able to do so but choose not to, then they are not being exploited.
There is no such thing as exploitation with that mindset. That sweatshop worker isn't being exploited, they just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and open their own sweatshop.
Why do the benefits of logistics go to people at the top of the food chain rather than being spread out evenly among everyone? That type of democratization of the benefits is the exact type of thing unions are meant to achieve.
That's how scaling works- more product and distribution with less people. As proven by Amazon, it's what consumers want. Unions only function by taking a share of money and giving it to less people- it's the only way each person makes more.
You're saying that we should have more people get paid by artificially paying less people more...
> Unions only function by taking a share of money and giving it to less people
Isn't that backwards? Don't they take money that previously would be going to the CEO/C-suite; (aka profit), and give it to the union and it's members? The corporation certainly isn't sharing it with the public (aka lower prices) for the fun off it.
These hypotheticals tend to accidentally reveal a disturbing worldview in the way they treat immigration as a natural phenomenon rather than people with agency of their own. It's dehumanizing.
For example, where does that 99,999,999th person sleep on the night they arrive in this country? What is their immediate plan? How and why did they come here? Your hypothetical has them almost emerging from the ether as an inherent problem rather than a person making an active decision to move to somewhere they think they will have a better life. If we stop providing them a better life, they'll stop coming. But the primary path to doing that is making life worse for everyone already here and none of us should want that.
You know what, I made a mistake in engaging. The way you moved the goal posts from open immigration to the obligation to provide social services to immigrants above and beyond any services provided to citizens and they way you're combining the concepts of immigrants and refugees tells me it isn't worth having this conversation with you.
If you live in a Red State, it is highly like that my Blue State money pays for your health care, highways, narcan, and a myriad of other transfers.
Like, I feel for you and your situation, but I just don't think it's sustainable for Blue States to keep being patsies by letting the Red States control what happens with Blue State money.
Mate, I live in Europe like my comment says. And no need to wave the flag, people can tell you're from a blue state since you couldn't extract that from reading my comment. Minnesota learing center alumni by any chance?
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