I understand your point, but I think the logic you are presenting is what is enabling these people. Ask yourself - what is the nuance in the Ukraine war? Fence sitting, and talking out both sides of your mouth about how we should condemn Putin yet also accept there is nuance to these issues is dangerous. It’s not complicated. If you don’t condemn Putin’s actions, you are implicitly accepting/agreeing that Ukraine should be wiped out.
Putin relies on the populace accepting that there is “nuance” to the Ukraine war. Russia has conditioned (or at least is trying to condition) the population (in the west) into adopting this logic but the reality is that there is no nuance to this issue. What nuance could there be to an aggressor invading someone’s land?
The House on Wednesday passed a bill with broad bipartisan support that would force TikTok’s Chinese owner to either sell the hugely popular video app or be banned in the United States....
Israel (at least in large part) is why they’re pushing the tiktok ban now. It is a little hard to connect the dots on this because the China-reasoning seems strong on the surface. I agree that China is bad, but there has not been any stellar evidence to show that China censors or otherwise manipulates users on the platform. You can easily go to tiktok and find videos discussing how awful the Chinese government is, information about tiananmen square, Winnie the Pooh jokes, etc. In comparison, the data that came out of the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal was far more concrete, and Congress did nothing. Certainly there were not 81% of house members coming together to force Facebook to sell. Tiktok has even offered to make major concessions about data privacy.
Israel’s war in Gaza is deeply unpopular and the fascists in Israel and here in the US are concerned that they are losing popularity. Tiktok has 100+ million active users in the US and the heaviest anti-Israel sentiment (the government and the US’s relationship with the Israeli government, not the Israeli/Jewish people) is heaviest on Tiktok, which is dominated by young millennials and gen Z. This is leaked audio of the director of the anti-defamation league (a very pro-Israel organization) speaking about this. He basically tells his audience that they have a “major major major… problem” and specifically says that they have a “tiktok problem and a gen Z problem.” Listen to the audio- you can agree or not with his reasoning, but he’s essentially saying that the spread of ideas on tiktok is causing their polling issues.
People like this want to stop the spread of ideas on tiktok because young people are organizing, boycotting, and putting dents in the system. They do not like that young voters are having a larger and larger influence. These young people are also boycotting major companies like McDonalds and Starbucks who have taken pro-Israel stances, and these companies have lost profits from this. All this to say - I don’t think there is any lack of motivation by people with lots of money to destroy the platform where these people are organizing.
It is incredible how much money Israel pumps into our politicians, both Democrats and Republicans. Joe Biden himself is the largest recipient of this money. There are anti-BDS laws (specifically for Israel) in 37 states. I don’t think many people are aware of just how much influence Israel has in the US. It is surprising and disturbing, but I am equally surprised/disturbed at how little attention these topics have received on Lemmy of all places. I don’t think it takes a genius to start making these connections and to start asking questions - maybe this isn’t the full picture but there is a lot of stuff here to be skeptical about. That said, I absolutely do think this kind of information is suppressed on other platforms, and they want to suppress all of tiktok because it’s dangerous to them.
The blockchain is essentially a ledger that tracks transactions (including the creation of currency). One thing that is not always clear is how important it is for a blockchain to be decentralized. When I say “decentralized,” I mean that many different people are operating a server that performs transactions on a larger network. These people are rewarded in currency for their efforts, and are sometimes referred to as “miners,” though this term is changing somewhat.
There are thousands of these servers in a network that are operating on and tracking the ledger for blockchains like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Any updates to the ledger are verified by all of these nodes. As long as 51% of nodes can verify a transaction, it will be added to the ledger. This means that as long as someone doesn’t own 51% of the network, they can’t just inject whatever transactions they want (i.e., fraudulent activity). In practice, this makes these networks very resilient to fraud.
I think this paves the way for a lot of the practical examples you’re looking for. For example, there’s no way for the network to decide to just give tons of money to a single entity for some “economic policy” like Too Big to Fail (i.e., corporate bailouts). This means you don’t have to wake up one morning worrying about whether or not your currency will rapidly inflate because of things like corruption. Another example is the true ownership of digital assets. NFTs have (rightly) gotten a lot of flack for being overpriced JPEGs, but there are real use cases here. A random middleman can’t just decide to price gouge because they own all the tickets first (Ticketmaster). Instead, artists can mint tickets on the blockchain (very important: this ensures authenticity) and then fans can buy them on the blockchain - no middle man required. You still show a QR code at the door for verification like you would now.
Lexmark seems like such a niche thing to put here but I know about it because it’s based in my hometown. Also it deserves to be placed next to the soyboy.
I also really like these things. I read the article, and I got the sense that their rationalization for picking BG3 as GOTY was based exclusively on the actual game design, and before I say anything else, I agree that the design is fantastic. But, I would love to see Larian get more credit for the transparency during development, their commitment to delivering an experience of the highest quality, and the fairness and respect they give to their player base.
Whether or not a person likes games like BG3 or thinks it deserves GOTY, this stuff alone should be the bar for all games, not the scummy greedy practices we’ve become so used to seeing. Thank you Larian Studios!
I’m not sure it’s entirely accurate to say these companies aren’t destroying themselves though. Are they just going to explode and die all at once? Probably not, but they will likely fade to obscurity like IBM or HP (two powerhouses of the last century). I agree that exploiting customers is how they make money hand over foot (and we just roll over for it) but the point is to make the largest possible short term gains, not to maximize profit. It’s important to maximize short term gains because it makes big shareholders happy, and the shareholders (e.g., the CEO and the board) want to enrich themselves. The issue with optimizing for short term gains is that you miss out on the dividends of long term effort, which is usually significantly greater.
Something I think about occasionally is how it is that a no-name startup beat the likes of Google, MS, Facebook, etc to chatgpt. Chatgpt is the single greatest innovation in search in almost 3 decades. Google’s whole business relies on users needing Google’s search platform to find information. Google gets to place ads here, and that makes up the largest part of their revenue, but chatgpt threatens to upend that whole business. There is the potential for a whole new generation of advertisement technology to be baked into chatgpt that delivers an unprecedented level of ad targeting. In case you need a translation, that is massive $$$$$$$$, because advertisers want their ads to be placed in front of people who will actually buy the product (and they will pay a premium for this!), not the spray and pray strategy you see today.
So yes, in a way, Google and other companies that rely on simply extracting wealth rather than innovating/building wealth risk losing billions of dollars and eventually fading to irrelevance. I really think Facebook has passed the point of no return already in this regard, and has allowed numerous social media sites to steal market share very easily.
Microsoft didn’t “absorb” open ai, they have a partnership where Microsoft pays assloads of money to sustain openai so that Google doesn’t get it. Ironically, this might be considered “long term thinking” but I wonder how long shareholders will tolerate such a hit to the books. There is supposed to be a profit sharing model here eventually (up to a certain point) but Microsoft isn’t getting chatgpt, otherwise bing would have replaced chatgpt. I have to wonder if, by the time chatgpt is profitable, if there will already be better models produced by other groups (maybe even open source), especially given the pace of AI innovation. I would not be surprised if this was a net loss for MS. GPT is amazing but it has numerous drawbacks at the moment. I admit that, if they figure things out quickly, this could be a huge win for them. I would go so far as to say that this is not anti consumer at all and is exactly how the free market is supposed to work.
As for Facebook, the only data you need is that the younger generations think it’s for boomers and don’t use it. I’m a little older and (to your credit) I check in about once a month. I know that meta has a very powerful user data harvesting business (arguably more valuable than Facebook), but Facebook’s user engagement will continue to slide if they can’t capture younger users and keep millennials and gen x users on the platform. This devalues their ability to make money from ads directly, and again, they did this to themselves by destroying their reputation for short term gains. They will eventually become like Yahoo! or AOL, both of which have almost zero brand value.
Since the starfield exclusivity thing started, this point has always stuck with me: PlayStation owners buy PlayStation because of the expectation that they will get the best exclusives (and even most other games first). It was so bizarre to see them so brazenly attack Xbox over making starfield exclusive. They couldn’t see that they were beneficiaries of these same tactics for so long that they just accepted it as “the way it is.” Logically, why would you ever buy an Xbox if PlayStation gets better exclusives and the other great games first? No one should be surprised when TES6 is Xbox/PC exclusive.
You can see how those two things are a little different though, right?
No, not really. Contrary to your point, Bethesda has worked quite closely with Xbox a number of times (especially back in the oblivion days) and Sony has never been interested in Bethesda’s ideas about games (support for Skyrim was abysmal on PlayStation and mods on PS3/4 were a joke).
Is MS a huge jerk for yanking starfield out of the hands of the majority of console gamers? Yeah totally, but Sony is also a huge jerk (and has been) for a long time when it comes to negotiating exclusivity deals, which they have been able to do because they are the number 1 console. It’s really not hard to extrapolate how much leverage Sony has over the industry when you see that they have sold 75% more consoles than xbox (35 vs 20 million units sold PS5/XS). I believe the previous gen was even worse. The outcry over this would have been much smaller if the roles were reversed, because it would have just been business as usual for every gamer.
Russia forces Ukrainians in occupied territories to take its passports – and fight in its army (apnews.com)
He and his parents were among the last in their village to take a Russian passport, but the pressure was becoming unbearable....
House Passes Bill to Force TikTok Sale From Chinese Owner or Ban the App (www.nytimes.com)
The House on Wednesday passed a bill with broad bipartisan support that would force TikTok’s Chinese owner to either sell the hugely popular video app or be banned in the United States....
Please Stop (jlai.lu)
Fezmaxxing (lemmy.zip)
Baldur's Gate 3 Is GameSpot's Game Of The Year 2023 (www.gamespot.com)
Valve doesn't sell ad space on Steam so it can make room for surprise hits: 'We don't think Steam should be pay-to-win' (www.pcgamer.com)
Starfield Is Bethesda's Lowest-Rated Game On Steam (www.gamespot.com)