Huh, weird, you know I seem to only have “technical issues” about understanding how in capitalism you have to actually purchase the products you take from shelves when I am exiting Walmart stores.

Once I get near the door I just get all of sudden get confused about thinking that Walmart must be a government run care facility, I mean taxpayers subsidize Walmart’s entire workforce because they don’t pay a living wage to any of them, can you really blame me for my confusion?? Sometimes I end up thinking crazy thoughts like Walmart wants me to take some things for free because they feel sorry for obliterating the local businesses I used to frequent in my community (and the associated good quality jobs).

Sometimes confusion gets the best of us I guess, we are all fallible people including Walmart™ which as we all know, is indeed a person.

Thank you for all your hard work!

Those “ruined” products handily control huge chunks of the market. So from that perspective, they’re not “ruined” at all. They’re perfect.

They control the market because Google, like most too-big-too-fail massive corporations, buys out any serious competitors and uses its dominant size to destroy the threat of competition before it can actually challenge them to make better products. Yes Google isn’t a monopoly in any of its industries but it doesn’t need to be since most of the large competitors they face are thinking the same way they are, why fight when we can enjoy our cake and do nothing?

Just because google products are widely used doesn’t mean they are good, it means people think they are the best option or can’t be bothered to switch which is a very very different thing.

I understand that, but they aren’t even that functional at doing that. They have ruined their products so much that it is threatening the ad value of the ads they sell I imagine. Google search is awful now and there is a very real chance people will stop using it for the first time in like a decade.

I don’t understand why google is still worth so much money, they are a trash company that really isn’t trying to improve any of its products. It just periodically threatens its workers with job cuts and continues to serve up crap to its customers.

I LOVE that netrunner is being maintained by a community organization and I love most aspects of netrunner but when I actually tried to play it I bounced off pretty hard.

I think the thing that broke it for me was the fact that you just have to memorize which Icebreakers goes to which Ice (a fracter to break a…code gate?). Every time I would bring this up with players they would just assure me it takes a bit to memorize but I threw multiple of my games just from confusing this. I suggested to the local netrunner group I was trying the game at that the ice and icebreakers should be color coded, or have symbols or at least something on the starter set to help new players and everyone kind of reacted like “yeah I guess but honesty why?” and in that moment I realized netrunner is for a very specific kind of person and I am not it.

Honestly, there are too many good board games to sit there trying to memorize fiddly bits like what icebreakers go to which ice. Yes it is pretty simple but you have to hold that in your head and I can’t do that very well and the fact that the game designers just couldn’t empathize with that or care about it (the likely retort being “if you can’t remember those rules this game is probably too complicated for you”) didn’t make me feel welcome as a player.

I’ll stick with complex board games that give me every tool possible to remember their rules easily.

Because I don’t see a strong argument for piracy coming at a direct, immutable cost to artists. I also don’t see a strong argument that piracy reduces the chance fans will pay for art when the art is made decently easy to purchase and is being sold at a reasonable price. Of course there are complexities to this discussion but ultimately when you compare it to massive corporations wholesale stealing massive amounts of works of art with the specific intention of undercutting and destroying the value of said art by attempting to commodify it I think the difference is pretty clear. One of these things is a morally arguable choice by one individual, the other is class warfare by the rich.

Joe shmo torrents an album from a band they like, maybe they buy the album in the future or go to a band concert and buy merch. Joe shmo hasn’t mined some economic gain out of a band and then moved on, Joe shmo has become more of a committed fan because they love the album. Meta steals from a band so that they can create an algorithm that produces knockoff versions of the band’s music that Meta can sell to say a company making a commercial who wants music in that style but would prefer not to pay an actual human artist an actual fair price for the music. These are not the same.

(AI doesn’t create convincing fake songs yet necessarily, but you get my point as it applies to other art that AI can create convincing examples of, books and writing being a prime example)

I didn’t realize at first, my bad. I realize that makes a lot of my post redundant but I think my point still stands.

So much hypocrisy that a massive corporation can actually steal like this and it is more socially acceptable than torrenting.

What a bunch of losers, thinking they are making the future…… by stealing from as many artists as they can? How do you convince yourself you are doing the right thing when what you are doing is scaling up the theft of art from small artists to a tech company sized operation?

And how much oxygen has been wasted over the years by music companies pushing the narrative that “stealing” from artists with torrenting is wrong? This is so much worse than stealing (and a million times worse than torrenting) though because the point of the theft is to destroy the livelihood of the artist who was stolen from and turn their art into a cheap commodity that can be sold as a service with the artist seeing none of the monetary or cultural reward for their work.

Yeah I have one of those, it works pretty good for mining doubloons and is pretty nice all around except that every time another computer gets near it, my pirate computer has these little cannons that come out of the side vents and BAM it starts firing volleys. Can’t play LAN with other friends or anything it is annoying, I am kinda worried it is gonna find out about my smartphone and attack it too.

☠️ ☠️ ☠️ ☠️ that’s right me mateys, being a pirate is lame and you should definitely…… nottttttt do it………….

Good thing I have this eye patch so I can wink without anyone seeing.

I have never understood how these pathetic replacements of cultural holidays with sales days at a basic level are even slightly believable from the consumer side. The whole point of 99% of sales is to get people in the mood to buy things they otherwise wouldn’t be thinking about buying at that time…. but people are already the most in the mood to buy shit on black friday or cyber monday they will be all year… which makes it the absolute least sensible time to actually offer genuine discounts on items. It would be like a restaurant putting happy hour later into the evening when the restaurant is going to be packed anyways.

The whole “clearing out old stock” or “getting into the black” explanations don’t really make any sense either in a modern, internet based world where companies always have access to a willing market for used or older goods if they set the right price.