Japan is remarkably close.
Cuba, also, but their economic priorities are very different.
1,095 karma · joined July 26, 2022
Cuba, also, but their economic priorities are very different.
I'm not proposing anything specifically, but the implication that this field should not be regulated is just foolish.
The PC games space has always been more open. If you had a weird game you wanted to share, you could share a disc with your friends or make it available on your website. But, again, if you wanted to make some decent money, you probably needed a marketing department and to have a boxed copy on store shelves (which, again, means working with a publisher). With a few exceptions, hardly anyone would ever find your game otherwise.
With modern-day Steam, an indie dev needs only to pay $100 to put a game on Steam (and I believe that $100 is refunded if the game crosses a certain threshold of sales). Discoverability is still a challenge, but just by existing on Steam, an indie game has a chance to make a bit of money. Steam itself has some discoverability features that can boost the visibility of even quirky little titles. The indie dev needs to do their own work, of course, to get visibility, but they don't need to have major resources behind them to get that visibility. They don't necessarily even need to host a website anymore - the game has a page on the Internet through Steam after all. The indie dev can direct anyone who will listen to them to go there.
All that said, I do agree that Steam is practically a monopoly. If Steam decided they hate you for some reason, then that's it. You almost certainly do not have a viable path forward for selling your PC game simply because they have such dominance (see the recent controversy where major payment processors suddenly decided they would not facilitate the sale of lewd games, and Steam reacted by pulling any game that seemed to fall into that category. Although, even in that case, the harmful monopoly tactics are coming from different actors in a different industry). For the time being, I just think they are kind of a benevolent dictator.
Like Keynes, I'm just as optimistic that such a future is possible, and that it could happen very soon if society willed it so. But just looking at the 95 years of history that have passed since Keynes wrote this essay, it is clear we are not natually, inevitably moving towards such a society. The technology is making such a future possible, but such as a society has to be demanded by the people, and it will not be gifted to us by benevolent rulers or captains of industry.
"We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin. But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight. I look forward, therefore, in days not so very remote, to the greatest change which has ever occurred in the material environment of life for human beings in the aggregate."
My 1-year-old, however is pretty monstrous to the records. We have some little kid vinyl that I got for cheap off a friend, and we placed those within his reach. He thinks they're interesting, but grabs the record or sleeve and bends them a lot. It's whatever, it's fine. But I did make it a point recently to move my favorite records to another room for the time being :)
If China decides they want to continue developing and building commercial airplanes, where will they be in 5-10 years? Where will Boeing be?
In the short-term, I imagine USA-based airlines will not be allowed to buy any airplanes from China: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-comac-military-... And perhaps they would not even be allowed to fly in our airspace. But if China decides that it wants to build planes at lower prices than Boeing (or Airbus), then I imagine they will. Their marketshare would grow elsewhere in the globe, reducing Boeing's sales. Can Boeing deal with that? Would the USA borrow China's playbook, and nationalize (or something similar) Boeing to keep it solvent?
And I think this is tangential to your point, but it has to be said that there are many different approaches to Christianity, many of which have lead (and are actively leading) to terrible violence.
The toddler does have a "Yoto," which is a thing that plays music and little stories for kids. They love it, and I think it's kind of cool. We also let them watch a few shows on TV, but only during the afternoon. It usually gives the adults a chance to do something else, like cook dinner, but if there's an adult available, we try to do something else besides watch TV. Jellyfin has been great for curating a small list of parent-approved shows, with no other shows vying for my kid's attention.
When they get a little older, I would like to introduce video games. It would be either a home console with no online connection, or maybe some kind of Linux box that I've locked down.
We will be avoiding social media and similar platforms for as long as we can. That is where I feel the most worst, brain-warping dangers exist.
Likewise, employers won't have to carry this burden. Companies that hire employees across multiple states have to navigate a patchwork of state/region based health insurance policies. Whenever there is a wrinkle in health insurance paperwork, an HR person has to to hunt down the issue and coordinate between an employee and the health insurance.
My gosh. I switched employers within a month of having a major medical event, and it was just the worst. The hospital was claiming I didn't have insurance, but I did (through COBRA, which is a whole other shit show that should and would go away), so I had to have multiple phone calls with the HR dept of the employer that I had just left. It's pretty awkward!
How often do we get to say that the government option reduces bureacracy.
That's not to mention the increasing potential for innovation! I know personally I left a fulfilling but somewhat unstable freelance lifestyle to get a job that offers health insurance after I had kids. I would like to pursue something else independently, and I can tolerate the financial risks, but I simply cannot tolerate the high costs of health insurance for myself and the rest of my family (or worse, the risks that come with having no insurance at all). If my family had health insurance, I'd leave my day job and chase other more exciting, fulfilling prospects. If that was a successful venture, maybe I could afford to hire a few employees because I wouldn't have to cover their health insurance.
Medicare For All should be a slam dunk. The only thing standing in the way is the health insurance industry, which is rolling in money. Get rid of them.
The post office fucking rules.
The republican politicians then have to craft a message that will get enough normal, not rich people to vote them into office. So they talk about hot-button culture war issues, selecting the positions they must take to get numbers they need (abortion, gun rights, "freedom of speech," gay marriage, immigrants, vaccines, etc etc), all the while reminding their base that the government (except the military and police) is bad.
So that is say, normal people who vote republican can be very nice and reasonable, and they have one or two things that strongly motivates them to vote for a terribly harmful platform.
I find it annoying because I often just want a document to live on a local device, and I'll decide when I want to upload it to a cloud service. But a lot of normal, non-tech people don't have any concept of how data is stored on their devices. I can't tell you how many times I've encountered a situation that roughly goes,
"Did you download the file?" "I guess so." "Okay. Now go the file and open it." "Where is it?" "I don't know. Where did you download it? "I don't know!"
For a lot of normies, just saving the document in the cloud is going to be easier. The ironic thing is that now I'm the one who is annoyed because I have no idea where my document is saved.
"People don't say home ownership is important because it's an asset for retirement; if you sold it, you wouldn't have a home in retirement!"
It's very common in the USA. A married couple has some kids and buys a house big enough to accommodate them comfortably. 20ish years later, the kids have moved out and the parents don't need such a big house. They also are about to or have recently retired, and they would like to stretch their retirement money. Sell the big house, make a lot of money, and then buy a smaller, cheaper house. In the USA this pattern is pretty common.