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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • So I take it you’re against the government subsidizing science research in general? “The government shouldn’t fund new technology” is a stupid and destructive position. We’d be living in the 1800s if it were up to solely the capitalistic market. I mean, the first broadly effective antibiotics that are responsible for saving probably hundreds of millions of lives at least only exist because of people working in government-funded labs, under government-funded universities, for the government. Why should the environment be treated like it doesn’t matter to our civilization?


  • “There is no future without electrification. But just electrification will not get us there,”

    Daniel Posen is an associate professor in U of T’s department of civil and mineral engineering, and the Canada Research Chair in system-scale environmental impacts of energy and transport technologies. He agrees electrification is vital. But relying solely on electric vehicles to reduce carbon emissions from transportation may not be enough, especially if we want to do it in time to stop a catastrophic two-degree rise in global temperatures.

    The article you link contradicts you, it clearly suggests that adoption of EVs reduce carbon emissions, but we still need to do more (e.g. ACTUALLY HAVE PUBLIC TRANSIT INFRASTRUCTURE) to prevent a climate catastrophe.




  • Paid VPNs are dirt cheap worldwide… If you can already afford a PC capable of playing HD2, you can afford a few bucks a year for a reputable VPN.

    You have actual clueless first-worlder logic

    If 60 to 160 USD per year is “dirt cheap” to you, you have absolutely no place to speak. Hundreds of dollars over the course of 5 years just to circumvent stupid geolocation restrictions and nothing else – about the same cost to twice the cost of a low-to-mid range gaming PC BTW – is not affordable to most people. How do you compare basically throwing away hundreds of USD yearly opposed to a one-time purchase of an important utility in the modern age? How do you view that as cheap for people in countries where that could be a large chunk or most of their salary? Are people not allowed to buy expensive things for themselves rarely and actually enjoy them without having an unnecessary subscription expense tacked on just because they were born in a poorer county?

    How would you feel if I told you there were a “fuck you” fee of 10% of the cost of your house every year just because you’re American or Canadian or British or some shit, on top of your income & property taxes? I mean you’re a homeowner so you can obviously afford it.




  • Valve already has a game engine you can use – Source – although outside of their own games, it’s not really popular. Otherwise I think it’s moreso that making a good general gaming engine is hard. Like, really hard. If Valve tried to compete with, say, Unreal or Unity, (especially with their relatively small team) it’d more likely than not have no chance at all. They’d need a LOT more manpower, a massive budget, and to hope that they actually make something quality enough to actually be a viable alternative. Even then, though, it doesn’t have the 2 decades of content and design that Unreal and Unity have, which is pretty important. Although I suppose Source does have a lot of user-generated content.

    It’d be a gargantuan investment, a massive risk that has a high likelihood of not turning out well, and even if it were successful it would likely take many years if not over a decade to actually see the benefit of it.

    There’s a good reason most games use an extremely small amount of engines, either that or their own in-house engines. It’s a monumental task to make a great, easy-to-use, generic engine like the ones currently on the market.

    IMO Valve trying to enter the game engine market would just end up being either Godot but worse, or Bevy but worse. It’d be far better if they just created a team to work on a pre-existing open-source engine, although I guess there’s not any money involved in that unless they for some reason used the engine.


  • A lot of the time it’s about being lucky enough be able to have or form connections with rich stupid people. Those kinds are a lot more willing to throw insane amounts of money at someone/some company they vaguely know to do things they know nothing of but hear a lot about.

    Or just working at a company that’s well-known in the area and deals with clients very intimately while the product is being created.

    Sometimes charging more for the same service makes them want it more, to them it means it’s premium programming (as opposed to the off-brand wish dot com programming). But sometimes they demand disgracefully cheap yet world-class service and throw a tantrum when they can’t pay you $5 an hour for a full rebranded recreation of the Amazon web service.


  • More like a symptom of a broken broad economic system. In all forms of capitalism, it is a given that much wealth accumulates in the few. It’s a system where resources are distributed based on capital, and capital is a resource, and it’s a system where those with more capital have more voting power both economy-wise and politics-wise. There is no such thing as a capitalist economy that has even wealth distribution long-term, it was quite plainly a system created for the sole purpose of keeping those with power in power – this isn’t an exaggeration, the guys who basically created/popularized modern capitalism and are the basis for all the writings and philosophy of the “founders of capitalism” were post-french revolution aristocrats who wished to push a system where they could keep their power instead of having it taken while also not having their heads chopped off.

    Even with the best taxation capitalism can offer, there is no solution to the capitalist problem. It’s a system that requires there to be suffering underclasses and carefree upperclasses. It requires an immoral social hierarchy to exist. The systems that reduce the damage of this innately bad hierarchy while still maintaining it (welfare corporatism, for example) are incredibly unstable over the long-term and inevitably result in a populace that want to tear it down. The people who receive the most benefits from welfare & social safety in a capitalist society are often the ones that are the quickest to tear it down (them, and the elite) and guide us back to right-wing feudalism.

    Billionaires might maybe go away if we “properly” tax, but there is only so much you can do to patch up a fundamentally broken system. The countries with the most wealth equality and highest wealth taxes also happen to be countries with a ton of megacorporations and/or billionaires… Switzerland, Scandinavian countries, Finland, Germany, Australia all have the highest wealth equality while all being on the top 15 for billionaires per capita excluding extremely small nations. Plus those countries have a tendency for alt-right movements to pop up, a few even more by proportion than the US…

    TL;DR capitalism bad socialism good eat the rich


  • Sounds just like Gaijin… although now that I think about it, this sounds worse than Gaijin.

    I love Paradox’ games but man, I really hate Paradox sometimes. I bought all the Stellaris DLCs at the time while they were on sale (about $100, I think it was everything before the update that added espionage) thinking I was supporting the development of intergalactic space genocide & intelligent life cannibalism game, but the more I got into the community the more I realize… the devs kinda fuck the community over a lot. I would normally think “wow, they’re making so many great hits at the same time, the games might be extremely buggy but they really deserve credit” but as time goes on I start to see them more like I see every AAA studio. I guess that’s all you can expect when the company’s stocks are public.

    Also imo you shouldn’t have to pay $300 to experience the full game god damn it! Although they do allow you to play as if you have most DLC when the host does, so I can’t say it’s immorally greedy. It’s something I can appreciate.







  • Yeah I was about to say. Like Scandinavia has a high standard of living, but it’s still capitalist/corporatist as fuck, still has a lot of the problems of right-wing and even far-right ideologies, and is 100% not ideal and probably not sustainable in the modern world (especially considering their welfare capitalism ended up getting people elected into office who are trying to dismantle the social protections and laws that make the countries successful in the first place). Welfare capitalism isn’t a good middle ground because it’s extremely likely to drift back towards regular old capitalism.