We need an AI bot that scrapes the internet for people who edit the text on Calvin and Hobbes panels, and gives them an incurable disease.
My mentor once said “It’s like everyone is just trying to scam everyone else.” I told him that was the best description of the economy I’d ever heard.
The stock market looked like gambling. Ever since Trump has been in office running his weekly pump and dumps, it looks exactly like fraud.
Finally, the orange man is working out!
But the effectiveness of the fraud is ironically predicated on people continuing to treat it as gambling.
I hate that this makes gaming look like only lootboxes and crypto casinos are left
But if you’re not like, out there looking for good gaming, yeah that’s what get shoved in front of normies
God damn capitalism got unhinged quickly after a few bumps in the road
If the Germans are to be believed, things are a little depressing.
So, fraud actually.
That looks like market saturation, no? And yeah, fuck microtransactions, another thing brought on by the epstein class
Do you know if that is including mobile games?
Mobile gaming is the largest market segment of gaming. There’s probably billions of people who have a phone but do not have the Internet service to download games onto a computer or console
Most normies don’t have home Internet because the unlimited data they already buy for their phones is plenty good enough that they often don’t see the point of home Internet at all!
The German games industry is basically only mobile games
Pretty sure, yes. Also this is data in just the Herman games industry.
Herman
Sometimes I get really depressed when I think about problems that could be solved if people would just behave slightly differently.
If people would just stop buying lootbox slop, it wouldn’t be a problem. it’s not asking a lot. It’s not asking you to change your diet, or ride a bike twenty miles in the snow. Just stop buying that shit. I just want to smack impulse buyers on the nose with a newspaper, or squirt them with a spray bottle. Stop it!
But that’s not how people work. We barely function at all.
Nope, if people stopped buying lootboxes, they would just find something else.
The problem is not peoples behaviour, it is the fundamental incentive structures, that incentivize exploiting your customers.
If we really want to fix this problem, we need to abolish capitalism.
I don’t disagree with you but it’s comforting to me to hold onto the fantasy that the something else would be better, like exchanging a quality good for money in a one time deal.
But yes, capitalism is a common source of many problems. (Though I guess a worker owned collective could produce loot boxes, too. )
How do we abolish capitalism if we can’t even control our own behaviour?
Prefiguration.
We are products of our environment. Always have been, always will be. Capitalism has shaped our environment so thoroughly that it’s hard for the average person to imagine defaulting to anything else. So we need to change people’s environment so they they can see and they can change and they can imagine more.
How do you stop alcoholism? Get rid of the alcohol in your environment. How do you stop doomscrolling in bed? Put your phone charger in a different room. How do you stop paying for overpriced food deliveries? Get a calendar of community kitchen events so you always have a place to eat without effort.
By shaping our environment so that anarchy is easier than capitalism in specific cases, we can wean ourselves off capitalism and see what issues, if any, there are with anarchy fulfilling those or other cases. Then we can overcome those issues, resent capitalism for blocking us, or acknowledge them as limitations, whatever the case may be. Then when it’s clear that we have the means and the people by which to improve society by replacing capitalism in all areas of life, we can.
That’s a lot of stuff which is all incompatible with executive disfunction
That is literally the opposite of true. Prefigurative politics is explicitly about acknowledging the limits to executive functioning that every person has. If you “have executive dysfunction”, it means those limits are tighter than for most people.
Prefiguration means shaping the environment so that the behavior you want is easier than the behavior you don’t want, so that it doesn’t take executive functioning to do the right thing. Maybe the specific answers I gave wouldn’t help you, but hopefully you can find others that do. My flavor of executive dysfunction is more in the choosing than the doing, so a calendar helps for me.
But if your flavor of executive dysfunction makes it hard to go places, maybe what works for you is moving into group housing (e.g. a squat) so your housemates can provide a safety net for when you can’t get yourself to make food and you can help them out when you have the space for it.
It’s not about not doing something, it’s more about learning to do something.
I would personally recommend you start educating yourself about anticapitalism / anarchism and communism. Here is a good video to give you an overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrTzjaXskUU.
After that, maybe start with joining some leftist protests in your area or joining a local leftist group. Then talk to the people there and learn how to do even more.It’s hard, but it shure as hell is better than just giving up.
You are the cliché of a communist online.
How? I actually do the stuff I say, which would defeat my cliche of a communist online.
If you mean by that, that I am a communist and spend some of my time online, then you are correct.
Also, if you didn’t want to know the answer, then why did you even ask?
Games are also gambling in the sense that trying to make money from one is a huge gamble
I feel like “would you enjoy this art I have for sale” doesn’t really count as gambling, unless you lose all your money if you don’t hit a sales target.
That’s not really the same as “for $5 you might get a super special skin for your gun, but you usually won’t. Try your luck again!”
That’s the case with any media that has a production cycle, movies, books, etc. You don’t know how successful your thing will be until it’s put to the market test
Honestly it’s a result of being the world’s reserve currency. At one point Brazil was the capital of rubber, and like 2 towns in Brazil made all of the latex the world used. They used to ship their clothing to Europe to be washed. Then 900 rubber tree seeds were smuggled out and it crashed their monopoly, devastating those towns.
Much the same has happened to the US when you can deindustrialize and print without consequences. The same happened to Spain with their silver mines in the age of sail. Silver flowed through Spain, but didn’t stay there… It was cheaper to buy foreign goods in Spanish silver than to pay a Spaniard to do it. When the silver ran out it all crumbled…
Trump killed the petrodollar and it’s going to turn the US into an inward looking regional power…
It’s his goal. Kill off the ability of the masses to contact and trade with the outside world, so they depend on him. Then extort the poor₁ much as possible.
₁ “Poor” here being everyone who isn’t a multimillionnaire. Because compared to people like Muskrat, everyone is poor.
I don’t think it makes sense to ascribe some devious plan to Trump. It is like saying that COVID-19 had the goal of making a short term bump of IT jobs that would be shed a few years later, breaking the long term job security of programming as a profession. 😉
Yeah it’s pretty smart too since he’ll be dead in the next 10 years or less so he won’t have to live with consequences…
This looks like calvin and hobbes, but it reads like xkcd
there are two types of comics left: Calvin and Hobbes and xkcd
despite looking like a Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin and Hobbes is an xkcd.
Hm. Fair, but is Oglaf a Calvin and Hobbes or an xkcd?
It varies
it’s like that old commercial…
you got your chocolate in my peanut butter! you got your peanut butter on my chocolate!
And gambling IS fraud since the house fixes it.
But at least with State regulated gambling, it’s not really fraud because there’s no deception. They will tell you explicitly what the odds are and how the rules work.
I hear there’s quite a bit of physical manufacturing in Mexico, Brazil etc. But of course, we aren’t talking about that “America”.
But it’s all manufacturing arbitrage by Wall Street, exploiting workers for cheap, buying their politicians, then selling expensive here. It’s also all defective. So Fraud.
Countries like Mexico and Brazil still have a lot of smaller manufacturers, not listed in any stocks, neither managed by any large international group, that actually produce useful things that get used by people for real applications. It’s not a fraud
Ha ha, this is good.
