It seems like their economy is reliant on a series of short term fixes, and as each one winds down another bigger one needs to take its place.
12% interest is another example of this, it will improve things in the short term but has no effect on the underlying problems, meaning that in a couple of months or so something even more drastic will be needed.
gold checkmark identifying that the account belongs to a verified brand.
Blue checkmark and gold checkmark are different things.
But a massive amount of them are. Small and solo creators on Youtube or Twitch need to conform to the rules of Google and Amazon, and even medium size creators are influenced and coerced by the precedents and market trends set by the much larger corporations.
And it doesn’t matter if not all content is provided by large corporations, those large corporations employ the most people, and dictate in a lot of ways, the rules of the employment market. It’s due to their habits and practices that wages are artificially low and expenses are inflated for record profits.
Until corporate greed is managed properly, consumers will always struggle to have enough expendable income to pay content creators, and therefore will always be searching for free content.
They are absolutely not separate issues. How can I be expected to shell out $15 per month for 10 different content subscriptions if I can only just afford to put food on my table?
Surely you can reverse that and point out corporations whining and moaning about people expecting free content when they’re barely paying their employees enough to afford to pay their bills.
The problem starts with corporate greed, hoarding revenue by keeping employee’s salaries to the minimum acceptable, providing as little functionality as possible to reduce overheads, double dipping by selling a product/subscription and then selling their customer’s data, and then complaining they aren’t getting more money for what little they are doing.
Then inevitably a little guy like Kbin comes along and suffers because the internet is filled with soulless, ultra-capitalist corpo scumbags.
RedHat, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu.
All are good choices.
But the other side of that is no political accountability. There’s no risk of punishment, so why should they care? Insider trading, corruption, nepotism, general lying, acting in bad faith, and intentionally misrepresenting facts to disrupt useful debate.
Politicians get away with all of that and more, and get paid massive amounts of money, above and below the table, while they do it.
It’s so weird to me, what do they expect to happen to the economy of their state when their workforce has such a poor education?
I don’t think so, the ARPG I have in mind wouldn’t be open world, would have no campaign and much less focus on story overall, a much more detailed crafting system akin to Path Of Exile but perhaps less punishing, and much more focus on stacking up as many extra modifiers as possible rather than being limited, push your team to get the best rewards.
No timegating, no daily/weekly quests you must log in for, the only limitation is your skill.
I’ve been thinking about an ARPG based around World of Warcraft’s mythic dungeons.
Scalable, multi-player, enhanceable instances where completion of more difficult versions of the instance rewards in better gear and crafting options.
The idea is that the content is created for a 5-man party (1 tank, 1 healer, 3 dps) but you can try solo it, or bring up to 20 people to massively increase the difficulty and the rewards. Instances would follow WoW dungeon’s formula of trash mobs (which drop crafting materials and have rare drop chances for certain gear) pathing you towards a succession of bosses with very different, complex mechanics with stages, signaled abilities, and skill requirements.
This would include a character levelling system to unlock new class abilities and mechanisms, a party finder system, certain dungeons locked behind character level and the completion of other dungeons at a certain difficulty level. Perhaps you could extend it to add in “world bosses”, massive 200-man bosses with a chance at particularly unique loot, but of course that would require a certain level of infrastructure and a game population making it justifiable.
If you honestly believe the standard, sterile, grandma-friendly, value-brand emojis typically available to mobile devices convey tone and response in the same way then nothing I could say would convince you otherwise.
That’s not to mention the fact that non-mobile devices typically have no emoji keyboard available.
We unironically need these Twitch/pepe emotes to spread further, they’re great for quickly and easily conveying a tone or emotion.
There’s a massive range of these emotes that we’re all missing out on… Madge
-50% ad revenue says otherwise
One of the topics I’ve seen become more prevalent in recent years is the idea of limiting your use of privacy addons and softwares, with the aim of trying to prevent your fingerprint becoming too unique.
For example, there are probably a billion users with 21 inch monitors, running Windows 11, browsing on Google Chrome. Providing them with that information just makes you one more in the bunch, but if you stack up privacy addons you end up creating a more easily identifiable picture of yourself through the hole you created by hiding information.
Like most things, it’s about balance. All changes to open source software must be approved by the community managing it, and if that community is lazy or poorly managed or simply too busy then there’s an opportunity for new vulnerabilities to be created, either accidentally or maliciously.
But for well managed software, as other people have said you can get more changes more frequently, more security as many people are evaluating the code base, and greater attention to what users want rather than what’s profitable. Whereas with closed source software there is a greater focus on profitability, and sometimes that leaves vulnerabilities open when development is rushed and/or vulnerabilities are not seen as important enough to justify the cost to fix, but sometimes that tendancy towards profitability can also ensure the product stays a market leader. Steam may be a good example of a good closed source product.
It would be interesting to see exactly how Meta is managing to block VPN users. Is it simply a matter of looking up instagram or facebook account related to email addresses used to sign up? Is it evaluating some sort of browser fingerprint? That’s assuming VPN users are doing so via desktop, if it’s an Android device for example is the OS itself providing information that’s not getting obfuscated by the VPN?
This is the issue with the new “own nothing, subscription only” and “if you’re not the customer, you’re the product” type models. Everyone went to Threads to take a look at the brand new thing, but now everyone has seen the new thing they’re gone.
All the hype that was built up initially based on that curiosity comes across as arrogance and empty promises as users inevitably get bored of the new shiny thing that’s really just another attempt to harvest them for their metadata and ad-sense.
Yes, fair correction. Perhaps that is a point itself, the way debates between political opponents are presented as formal and official when in fact they are entirely at the whim of the broadcaster and the politicians involved.
It would be massively more simple, and more profitable to government, to simply levy a colossal tax on property owners who leave their rental properties empty for more than six months or so.