I’m reopening this topic for the time being, after cleaning up de xenophobic/bigot comment. Please stay civil, remember to criticise ideas, and not people.
Wow! Maybe this was naive, but I wasn’t expecting this to get so much controversy and downvotes. I’ll post a few thoughts here FWIW.
I see a lot of comments in here that remind me a lot of this New Yorker cover. As with any other country, there’s lots of different types of people in China with lots of differing opinions, but some comments in here feel like they’re casting all of China as a monolith. I should probably know better than to expect nuance on the internet, but the amount of opinions in here that were expressed as if they were total undeniable truth was still kind of annoying.
Following up on that, the main point of the article was requesting that people not conflate the CCP w/ companies and players. No one who was born in China chose to be born there. But they still have to live their lives, find creative expression, etc. I also hate the CCP, but I was surprised to see so an article that was trying to distinguish between the CCP and ordinary Chinese people receive so many comments that just brought up the CCP.
All that said, while I definitely disagree with many comments in here, I personally didn’t feel like I saw comments in here that were racist, despite what some people suggested.
For me, this article made me interested in finding out what cool games might be getting made in China that aren’t being released to the West. I also found it disappointing that the article explicitly called out that lots of the cool stuff isn’t making it to the West, and yet so many comments here talked about how China hasn’t made any good games, with no acknowledgement of whether the commenter has tried anything other than a small handful of the ones that actually got translations and came over here.
Anyway, that’s it. Thanks for reading and hope you have a good day.
If they want my time and patronage, they can learn how my community’s melanin distributes across our bodies. They can learn how to render coarse hair. They can broaden their character demographics beyond ‘what kyles are comfortable with’. Otherwise, they can fuck right off. And I haven’t seen many Eastern in general devs willing to even so much as try. Mihoyo and Square-Enix are both kinda on my shitlist right now.
Also with an app you just buy it. If the app is like 10 euros that’s pretty fast. But with Spotify you need to listen to streams for hours and hours, it’s fucking slow.
I’m pretty sure nobody is actually listening to the songs… they would just be playing them in an empty room. Probably with a bunch of devices playing the songs at once.
This is such nonsense. The gangs would be losing something like 90% or more of their money in the process. The only ‘proof’ stated in the article is a bunch of unverified claims by anonymous sources.
Feels like Epic should shoulder some of the blame here as well, considering they allowed the fossil fuel company in the game at all. Fuck both of these companies.
Do most of these kids parents not go to the gas station 1-2 times a week? Last I checked the pumps are always still loaded with people. I highly doubt a fucking shell sweepstakes in Fortnite is causing harm.
Then describe the innocent reason for adding a gas company in a video game? Like it doesn’t fit in universe at all, but arguably does have an indoctrining effect
So they’d tell their parents to fill up at Shell instead of Chevron or whatever. It’s not like kids are going to want more fossil fuels, they’ll just want to shop at the cool brand instead of the less cool brand.
Yeah, I’m a parent and I take my kids with me to the gas pump quite often. We shop at Costco and fill up before or after. I honestly don’t see an issue at all, my kids know gas pollutes (I tell them frequently even though they’re in elementary school), and they know why I continue to buy gas (EVs are too expensive, inconvenient for longer trips, and have a fire hazard).
So no, I don’t have a problem with fossil fuels being a thing in games. I do have a problem with advertisements in games generally, and ads marketed to kids specifically. So if this was an ad for a socially acceptable business (take your pick), I’d still be opposed. Keep that nonsense away from my kids.
Tough time to be an American Jew I imagine. Saw a video of an American Palestinian who was bitching about all the stupid questions she’s constantly asked. Like do you like Hamas? She said she didn’t like terrorists.
She’s probably being asked since most Palestinian Americans ive seen posting online aren’t even addressing whether or not they support Hamas while plenty of Jews are quick to call for peace and Netanyahus ousting.
Should we go ask every Jewish American if they support bombing hospitals? Illegal settlements? Every time the IDF shoots and kills a Palestinian child?
You just hate Palestinians because they are brown and Muslim. Stop pretending it’s about anything other than justifying your bigotry.
If you’ve been paying attention to society over the last 5-10-15-50 years you’ll see precisely that this concept will never be implemented. It would take catastrophe and the destruction of current society.
You mean essential work? Building the homes people live in, cooking the meals people eat, delivering people the stuff they’re otherwise incapable of getting for themselves?
Not sure why anyone who’s not part of the ruling class who profits from its devaluation would want to refer to it as being done by ‘grunts’?
I agree that we shouldn’t devalue it, and that was my initial word choice. That wasn’t the intent behind the choice, but I get it. I’m not sure “essential” is a good descriptor either. It is essential, but that’s not the defining quality we’re after.
My comment was a reply to another user, quoting the exact same verbiage as them to offer them a counter point.
Instead, you’ve deliberately skewed my entire comment and attached your own deranged rambling about “the elite class” to demonize me. We’re on the same side but you’re too lost to understand that.
If you had a bad day today, take it out on a pillow instead of harassing other people. Get yourself some help.
Quoting you is demonizing you? You’re the only person here who’s called anyone a name.
Language is important. “Grunt work” is a phrase used to devalue jobs in order to justify low wages, regardless of how important those jobs are and what skills they actually require. If you want to use the phrase, don’t expect to be immune from criticism. You weren’t using it ironically or something, you were just straight calling it that.
And you’re the one who asserted that “some people” can only do those jobs. Which people are that, exactly? Have a group in mind? Or was that just another careless use of language?
There is no such thing as ‘unskilled’ labor. That concept is part-and-parcel to that undervaluation of labor. Line cooks, construction workers, professional drivers, etc, all have skills that doing similar activities non-professionally does not impart. They all require training and experience.
The attitude that certain jobs are something “anyone can pick up and do just as well” as someone experienced in that work is just hubris.
The dumbest timeline is indeed the one we have -- living in times of nearly boundless plenty yet letting people starve and go homeless.
Amazon's not doing this to enrich and improve society. They're doing it to enrich and improve themselves. Fighting to keep bad jobs is what we do when the entire economic system has entirely given up on serving the needs of the public rather than private wealth.
It's not that we should force Amazon to not use robots to replace jobs. It's that we should force Amazon to contribute at least as much value to their communities as they extract, through any means possible. Unfortunately, in this idiot society, we think "being an employer" is the only reasonable way a company can contribute to its community.
I’d really love to see some better propositions for quantifying value that’s better than straight up corporate profit. I’m with you a 100%, just looking for the path to get there.
Imo it’s not so much that corporate profit is the problem, it’s how corporate profit is allowed to happen. Make stock buybacks illegal again, revert tax law to a point where dividends are a better way to profit than endlessly increasing share price, and force all businesses to be some form of business cooperative.
It’s not a perfect answer, I don’t think a perfect one actually exists, but it plugs most of the biggest holes we have right now
We have a puritanical idea burned into our society that you have to suffer to live, that you have to work your fingers to the bone to deserve even the most basic necessities of life, and can’t imagine a non-capitalist society where we just provide everything people need to live and not force people to do bullshit busywork just to prove they “deserve” the basics of life.
For ages, we’ve been talking about automation, and how it can free us from the drudgery of menial, dangerous, and repetitive work, freeing us to have more time to live our lives enjoyably and pursue our desires instead or having to spend a third of our lives working. But the problem is that people think that if you don’t work, then you don’t deserve to live, or be happy, or have any kind of enjoyment in your life at all. It’s completely at odds with the kind of society we’ve actually built.
We have so many empty homes in the US that we could give every single homeless person in the country a home, for free, and still have loads left over. But instead we’d rather let them die on the streets because they haven’t “proved” they deserve a life.
We produce so much food that we could just give every single person in this country all the food they’d need to survive, and still not have shortages. But we’d rather throw away 50% of the food we produce because it’s kinda not pretty, or it sits on store shelves until expiration date, and gets chucked in the garbage.
We have Conservatives that talk about how all life is sacred, and we must protect it at all cost, going to far as to value the life of a fetus over the life of a parent. But once that child is born? Fuck them. Can’t afford healthcare? Can’t afford housing? Well then the parent shouldn’t have gotten pregnant. Oh, we have ways to take care of that beforehand? Sorry, no, cant have that either. Let’s make birth control, family planning, healthcare, housing, education, etc. impossible to access. And now that you have an impoverished family? Better get tugging on those bootstraps, because helping you would be unethical and antithetical to our Rugged Individualist ideal.
So many people in this country are absolutely terrified of the idea that someone else, somewhere, might possibly get something they “don’t deserve” and will go out of their way to make people suffer because of it.
So say Amazon replaces all of their warehouse workers with robots. Those are objectively horrifying jobs that we have years of evidence to prove. People suffer and die in those warehouses. So getting people out of them is a good thing. But what then? You’ve “freed” them, but to do what? Maybe they live in an area where that Amazon job was the best paying one, and moving or finding other work or going to school, etc. just simply aren’t options.
The robots aren’t the problem. Our society is the problem. And it’s completely and utterly broken. Until captialism is destroyed, there won’t be a meaningful solution to this.
I would have thought that building an automated warehouse starts with designing robots and warehouses that complement each other. Using humanoid robots seems strange - I doubt that evolution gave us the optimal shape to work in a warehouse.
He denied this would lead to job cuts, however, claiming that it “does not” mean Amazon will require fewer staff.
Sure thing. As if Amazons endgame isn’t always to reduce costs and increase profits. They don’t give a shit about their employees or people in general.
Ultimately we will absolutely want warehouses and bots designed for eachother to maximize efficiency and output but in reality today all existing infrastructure is designed around human bodies so it makes alot of economic sense to invent a humanoid bot to work with existing infrastructure first.
I worked for a company that did automated warehouses once. Their development over many years went something like this:
Fully manual: people would pick stuff from shelves and put it in baskets. It was organized in a complicated way but that’s not very important, it was manual in the end.
Mixed: they had packing stations. Worker would stand in front of a screen and plastic create would come on conveyor belts and stop in front of them. They would have plastic bags below the basket. Instructions on the screen would tell them what to pick up. For example a crate would come full of soda cans and they would see “put 3 coca-cola cans in the bag” in front of them. The bagging process is very hard to automate because robots have trouble recognizing and grabbing things. The crate delivery system was fully automated and very complex. It would take up to 20 minutes to take a crate from the warehouse and deliver it to packing station so everything had to be synchronized so that all the crates needed to fulfil and order would come to specific packing station one after another. The move from manual to mixed models cost them hundredths of millions to develop. They had to build new warehouse from scratch. The mixed model still had lots of people dealing with edge cases like cutting cheese or handling fish.
Another mixed: they had this huge cube like structure with small elevators moving plastic crates up and down inside of it and small robots moving the crates between stacks on top of it. You could tell it which create you needed and the cube would pick it up and deliver. It was the same as the huge warehouse as in it would deliver the crates in specific order but was a lot smaller. People would still have to bag it manually. Again, this was build in a new warehouse from scratch.
So as you see the thing is moving from one model to another is really complicated and requires rebuilding everything. They have tons of warehouses optimized for people so it makes more sense for them to build humanoid robots than rebuild all the warehouses.
Conceivably, to increase the performance of the humans WITHOUT making them lose their jobs.
These warehouses all act like they're perpetually short-staffed and under intense demand. If they boost overall performance, one reasonable outcome would be easier working conditions for the same workers, or shifting workers from jobs robots can do to other areas that were short-staffed.
It won't be because fuck the workers. But that possibility should exist.
This has never been how automation has worked. Automation all the way back to the first factories displacing handmade goods has used automation to increase total output, not to reduce time spent for the same output, and then allowing everyone to work less. It actually increased the workday for most of those jobs, because the automation so drastically reduced the per-item price that it drove down wages in turn.
Amazon wants employees who won’t unionize, who don’t take breaks, and who cost far less, and since they can’t outsource a local distribution warehouse, they’ll use robots instead of exploited foreign workers.
I mean let’s be honest from the minute 0 Amazon has wanted to automate all the warehouse… Like the people were meant as transitory thing or for the parts were there wasn’t any alternative at all.
theguardian.com
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