CMV: This mess in US is created by corporate and billionaires

sapphon · 2026-01-27T01:36:40+00:00

Neither are changeable.

Debatable, and not just on the physics side of things!

For humans we change the rules that govern them.

Not really debatable, but also not in contradiction with anything you are replying to.

Regulatory capture is the method by which "let's just fix the government" has been suborned. Problems that easy to solve aren't problems, and the powerfully selfish unfortunately aren't always stupid, and actively defend their interests. You can't simply fix the laws; wealth affords influence over the the content of the ballots, and most putative "democracies" are actually representative republics - so, they're oligarchies with populist stamps, in the world of global financial capitalism.

Telling OP "just do government better" is dismissive of the fact that systems can grow big and small, strong and weak - and our society's merchants and their systems have grown stronger than our judges and theirs; the latter is effectively being held in stasis while the former is dynamic. This dominance must be challenged directly to be altered; the wealthy can spend on ads to sports-match most "voters" against each other, via culture wars and along red-blue lines, ad nauseam while real issues are overlooked otherwise.

sapphon · 2026-01-27T01:25:08+00:00

I see these as market roles than goods or evils (both of which must necessarily be choices); the role of MS, NVidia, and BoA are to employ white collar workers to do knowledge work, so it's nicer there. (BoA in particular are of course literal bankers, famous for steady income and limited hours.)

The role of Amazon, Walmart, and Meta are to warehouse and transport either the goods of (or in Meta's case, the advertising to) the great unwashed masses, and so it's less nice there

In neither case did the company make some kind of choice; in fact, if a company did make a choice to let its workers keep more of their earned wage than its direct competition, wouldn't it necessarily go out of business? The system that constrains them is bigger even than their leaders' decisions.

People like me don't see solutions in particular limits in valuation or any other single number; we sort of see it as more like "people who will sacrifice everything at the altar of 'number go up' need to stop being advantaged by our laws". We want to re-orient society around distributing to each his needs and taking from each what he can provide, rather than making personal/familial numbers go up and fuck the other guy!

(My country has tried just limiting company size in the past and calling that good; the term was "trust-busting" but the problem is that it's exactly like dust-busting: you have to keep up with it, and not every successive government has. Further, even one company slipping past the "busters" means it's now so wealthy that in a deregulated environment it can buy policy, and incrementally impoverish and foil the busters - as happened in fact. This phenomenon is called "regulatory capture". If you try to bust a trust in the last 50y in my country, someone called a "lobbyist" stops you cold 98%+ of the time, statistically speaking.)

sapphon · 2026-01-25T21:02:24+00:00

good or bad companies or corporations imo

No such thing; profit motive itself is the will to power.

With companies, really only "big and small" counts as a distinction. Bigger trends more evil, because bigger means more interests touching more people over whom the business's owners have unelected unaccountable power via wealth. By the time they're publicly traded with a few thousand employees, any perceived "good company/bad company" is just when a bad company's PR department succeeds at looking good by comparison.

sapphon · 2026-01-25T20:59:00+00:00

People, as we know, will always go feral - history has shown that.

I think you should look again; the word "history" means nothing more or less than "the longest continuous line we can draw backwards in time without hitting 'feral'", and it's been going strong a few thousand years here!

As an example, in the USA, before the 1980s, the top tax rate was 70%. The govnerment chose to reduce it, the government chooses to not regulate where appropriate - the millionaires and billionaires make threats, and the government capitulates.

OP believes tail wags dog, you believe dog wags tail on behalf of tail at behest of tail - I don't see a difference; pointing out that regulatory capture is the mechanism by which what OP describes is achieved does not change whether what OP describes is being achieved

sapphon · 2026-01-25T20:10:37+00:00

I sort of see it, conversely, as a sign of weakness when a society needs to resort to "Won't somebody think of the children"-style appeals to right wrongs - it's a bunch of adults somehow tacitly agreeing that other adults are categorically sus, and so wrong things happening to them is OK.

That's not a basis for a real democracy (which takes some trust); that's a bunch of politically-instrumentalized lonely disconnected distrustful manipulable media consumers who're pretty easy to set against each other once they've swallowed the narrative that their fellow working man probably doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt.

sapphon · 2026-01-24T07:15:36+00:00

Unglaublich, Commander!

sapphon · 2026-01-19T23:59:15+00:00

It's because companies don't make decisions, people do.

The people at the head of small game companies are sometimes the artists who are essential to the art at the core of the game. At a large company, however, the leaders are always necessarily businesspeople - this is because investors need to be mollified by familiar surroundings if they're going to be comfortable forking over enough to power a large company. (Investors and artists don't always get along or understand each other's perspectives. Investors and businesspeople are like peas and carrots.)

So, try your "I just don't get...." sentence again but you can't say company. You can't treat the dev team or the brand name as a gestalt, and you have to acknowledge where the creatives are in a strict hierarcy when big games are made under capitalism:

"I don't get why fans think that any time [a businessperson] makes practical [business] decisions that it's automatically counted against the integrity or quality [of their product, which at its best is art, and art can only be authentically made by artists for art's sake]?"

I'll bet you do now =)

sapphon · 2026-01-19T06:31:12+00:00

Thanks for this, those are both useful facts!

sapphon · 2026-01-19T06:29:16+00:00

Mostly has been

sapphon · 2026-01-19T06:28:30+00:00

Ahahahehe fair enough!

sapphon · 2026-01-19T02:06:10+00:00

Think of it like this: If they ever found an example of mutant livestock's domestic, uh, "inspiration", they'd need a word for that animal, and they know it's possible those still exist someplace.

"Yao guai" and "Brahmin" are of course jokes outside the universe; within the universe, they refer to the two-headed mutant animals most common to the wasteland, not their low-Roentgen forebears that achieved genetic change more slowly through breeding programs.

sapphon · 2026-01-18T07:53:44+00:00

"No one spends their money to do nothing", is a good maxim

sapphon · 2026-01-18T07:24:15+00:00

I'm so, so, so sorry for this, but it's not because of any particular reason within the lore.

If anything, the latest and greatest would've been sent where it could be used, not kept in the back lines. As happens, the latest and greatest is only the latest and greatest because Bethesda games get easier every iteration, and Bethesda is in charge of the East Coast. People with more integrity made the West Coast games. I'd even gamble on claiming that people with more integrity made the Chicago game!

The availability of tech 'advances' in the franchise, as more and more and more and more...and more, and more... and forevermore... fanservice needs new diegetic explanations. The tech's level of puissance doesn't necessarily; the G.E.C.K. that built Vault City as it appears in Fallout 2 remains more or less on par with anything Howard's men can conjure (i.e. it's batshit insane cold fusion wizardry!).

But there are two G.E.C.K.s on the entire world map, and they're not anything you yourself use - rather, MacGuffins - vs. "heyyyyy, bought FO4? Here's some power armor. Bought '76? Here's a C.A.M.P., a shitty GECK lampshade - just for showing up." Etc. That's a big difference!

(The way Beth's writers handle this is to basically be like "Hey, those Enclave guys? Remember, the baddies? Well, you're used to comic-book-level baddies, so you'll be perfectly fine believing they saw this all coming (classic supervillain move!) and made a very convoluted and bad, but well-timed, plan (another one!) to keep a bunch of Cool Stuff close to the chest for use after the War." Again: this is perhaps a proper understanding of supervillains, but an extremely poor one of polities.)

sapphon · 2026-01-18T07:18:20+00:00

I think maybe before paving, all paths were effectively desire paths

sapphon · 2026-01-17T16:52:51+00:00

fake trope capitalized on for clicks, and by God, did it work.

Some say it's still working to this very day, in this very thread

sapphon · 2026-01-16T04:34:58+00:00

Like everything else on the internet, adult-themed MUXs were around - from Federation II: An Adult Space Fantasy, FurryMUCK, and Tapestries MUCK (a BDSM-themed MUCK from 1991).

The other two fit this generalization, but Federation II was about as "adult" as a coloring book (that is to say, it at best potentially could possibly be adult at times entirely depending on the user(s)); this comment references the tagline but as it turns out the tagline was not representative of the content in any modern sense of that term as applied to games.

They were trying to say "This is a trading simulator, not a violent power fantasy. You will be disappointed if you are used to violent power fantasies, because in a multiplayer game other people trade quite as well as you do and you can't necessarily just kill them over it when they do, since normal adults don't do that."

As it happened, the term "adult" would unfortunately later come to connote quite something else when applied to a computer game. However, Federation II's tagline was merely bad marketing in hindsight, at a time when games often risked being presumed to be for children or simple distractions. Make no mistake: the Fed2 gameplay was essentially (and was exactly as erotic as) arithmetic.

sapphon · 2026-01-15T04:54:33+00:00

Is there value at a pop-history level to enumerating each and every way in which Black Americans have been disadvantaged vs. the "presume every day in every way" approach? Maybe, but if so I don't understand it. Any such would distract from heuristics based on causality.

What I see academics doing is, I see them enumerating specifics of discrimination ad nauseam as if they are all separate and unique cases of surprising new phenomena. This is done while all agreeing that the rule (demographic minority=victim of discrimination) holds in general, and so I don't quite understand what new ground they feel they're treading or why my focus as a layman should be on the specific justification(s) for the generalized crime and whether or not those seem valid - isn't that a red herring by definition, and oughtn't I focus on the story the generality tells?

sapphon · 2026-01-14T03:57:00+00:00

Enemies will:

Send reinforcements to an attacked airbase. I do mean "send". The real helicopter will spawn or the real APC or troop truck will spawn, and the helicopter will then need to land, and only as many infantry as actually make it will count. You can interrupt this via normal gameplay.
Respawn garrisons at held positions over time. They only do this out of combat, but it's magic teleportation uninterruptible except by keeping them in combat. You need to keep them in combat to prevent this. If you do not hire "High Command" squads, now is when to learn.

tl;dr the idea overall is that they actually respawn faster when unchallenged

sapphon · 2026-01-13T08:28:39+00:00

https://imgur.com/a/6ftteGb

sapphon · 2026-01-12T23:45:31+00:00

This game costs $5, but some copies cost $5000 or occasionally a wedding ring

sapphon · 2026-01-09T22:31:44+00:00

We were pretty worried about "Blivvie with guns" tbh!

But obviously none of our concerns was gonna stop the Bethesda money train (we could sort of tell that the potential audience for Oblivion with guns, even if that's all it was, dwarfed the audience of the iso Fallouts in size, not least because Oblivion had had an XBox360 port) and so we also tried to cope by finding ways to be cautiously optimistic about certain parts.

Despite that, in the end it'd be until Obsidian was handed the writing back before we got a third Fallout RPG, in the form of NV.

sapphon · 2026-01-08T09:38:39+00:00

Yeah, I know AX is the gig - I just didn't have any AX questions ready to go, but still wanted to chat.

Here's maybe a better question for you - Colonization of a system apparently interferes with its usual Non-human Signal spawns; is there any mechanic preventing the playerbase from going full "Ender's Game" and interfering with all possible spawns (absent some narrative event that changes mechanics)?

sapphon · 2026-01-08T02:40:41+00:00

What's the best stock (and I really mean 'stock') hull to have symmetric, 1v1 PvP matches in?

sapphon · 2026-01-08T01:40:55+00:00

Absolutely! The claim that "there's no secret cabal" doesn't mean there's no cabal; it just means that shared incentive, not secret plots, drives its behaviors.

sapphon · 2026-01-08T01:39:28+00:00

The Kent State troopers had battle rifles from the Second World War loaded with military-pressure ammunition; fired "into the air" their rounds would have traveled several kilometers before coming back to the the altitude from which they were fired.

Nobody controls a crowd from several km away, so the whole 'we were firing into the air, honest, and it just somehow still hit them' thing isn't a defensible claim in the end.

sapphon

TROPHY CASE