So what, like, 30 cents per violation?

It exists partially because many great games, for a long while, before widespread internet access, could not be played if they were no longer directly sold without either paying out the nose for a working, used cart or disc, and console… or via emulation, which is apparently basically illegal, in practice, technically, its complicated, etc.

Then the video game landscape changed with widespread internet access, much more oriented toward what used to be seen as buying a fancy pants board game into well now you’re just buying a ticket to a fancy pants board game that can be revoked at any time, and now you just have an expired ticket to a box that is magically superglued shut and will light on fire if you pry it open.

Some of us olds still view software as a product, a good, not a service.

The Stop Killing Games concept is not stopping or protecting anyone from buying video games.

… Neither is slapping a warning label onto games that says ‘hey you don’t own this the way you own a blender.’

That’s very strange framing to use.

What SKG does is mandate that your purchased product be technically possible to be usable in perpetuity, or refund the cost of it.

Everyone knows servers cost money to run, so its not reasonable to mandate every game that is totally online only just have servers up forever, maintained by the publisher.

But what is also unreasonable is needless, always online DRM that shuts down one day (Games for Windows Live, anyone?) or having a massively online game that could still be enjoyed by dedicated fans, willing to front the cost for one or two servers… but cannot, because reverse engineering network code is orders of magnitude more difficult and costly than the publisher just releasing it to the public when they no longer want to officially maintain it.

SKG would completely allow you to purchase an online game whose official server support would end someday.

It… just augments consumer rights by mandating either a refund at that point, or a pretty effortless and costless release of the server files and configs.

I am really struggling to see how you are interpreting this concept as somehow preventing the purchase of games.

Please reread the second sentence.

It doesn’t make any sense if the whole market is shitty rip offs.

In this case I’m not saying all games are bad, shitty games, but they are all shitty rip offs in the sense that they all legally can, and many do just suddenly deactivate, and you’re not even compensated for this.

The whole fundamental legal trick the software industry has pulled is making everything into a license for an ongoing service, as opposed to a consumer good.

And the problem is that this is now infecting everything, expanding as much as possible into anything with a chip in it.

Even if the consumer is perfectly informed, it doesn’t matter if the entire market is full of fundamentally unjust bullshit, as there aren’t any alternatives.

All you get is consumers who are now informed that their digital goods can poof out of existence with no recourse.

A while back I was discussing Ross Scott’s ‘Stop Killing Games’ proposal in the EU, in some other lemmy thread.

If passed, that law would make it so you cannot make and sell a game that becomes unplayable after a person buys the game, or you have to refund the purchase of the game itself as well as all ingame purchases.

If gameplay itself is dependant on online servers, the game has to release a working version of the server code so it at least could be run by fans, or be refunded.

If it uses some kind of DRM that no longer works, it has to be stripped of this, or properly refunded.

Someone popped in and said ‘well I think they should just make it more obvious that you’re not buying a game, you’re buying a temporary license.’

To which I said something like ‘But all that does is highlight the problem without actually changing the situation.’

So, here we are with the American version of consumer protection: We’re not actually doing any kind of regulation that would actually prevent the problem, we’re just requiring some wordplay and allowing the problem to exist and proliferate.

All this does is make it so you can’t say ‘Buy’ or ‘Purchase’ and probably have a red box somewhere that says something like ‘You are acquiring a TEMPORARY license that may be revoked at any time for any reason.’

US gets a new content warning. EU is working toward actually stopping the bullshit.

So, the goal here is to prevent ghosting by making ghosting minutely costly to the ghoster.

They pick from an array of multiple reasons why, and the app formulates an exceptionally kindly worded explanation to send to the ghosted person.

I don’t see this as dangerous to people who are ghosting potentially dangerous people.

Instead of getting nothing, and formulating whatever cockamamie explanation in their own minds (or maybe just going ‘sigh, oh well’), they at least get a facsimile of closure from a canned response.

Obviously this does not magically solve the many problems of dating apps, but I fail to see how this is more dangerous than just ghosting on its own.

The problem is that its minutely time consuming to provide a ghosting explanation.

This ghost explanation requirement requires people to actually explain themselves, and that’s gonna be very cumbersome to people who are not really looking for a serious, long term relationship.

It makes it very annoying to use the app in a scattershot approach for rapid fire hookups, with tons of potentials on deck, as you’ll be forced to consistently ‘tend’ to all of your simultaneous matches, or drop them…

…and for people who think they’re looking for a serious, monogamous relationship, but consistently ghost people, it will basically cause uncomfortable cognitive dissonance when they realize they don’t like having to do a modicum if effort to explain why no one seems to meet their standards or is due their attention, even though they previously thought they were interested.

Basically, the problem I see with this app is that it forces users toward being honest with themselves.

Smile for the drone!

Yep, I am totally convinced that at bare minimum a million Americans live like this.

Car breaks down? Gets in an accident? Can’t afford repairs? Can’t afford gas? Parked somewhere too obvious? Can’t make payments and repo people find you?

All gone, excepting what you can carry, maybe.

Shits gonna go orders of magnitude more nuts when half of Bangladesh gets swallowed by the sea.

Are you talking about the whole vegan drama or did something else happen?

Probably the most common way to become homeless is to flee domestic violence and be poor.

If not that, be poor, lose your job, get evicted.

Being homeless causes you to become mentally ill and drug addicted. Constant violent trauma, starvation and exposure does that.

We would need socialized medicine and socialized housing to solve the problem.

We have neither. Section 8 is a fucking joke, as in, its called Section 8 because it’ll take you 8 years to get a place.

And theyre almost all slums run by slumlords.

In this case many homeless literally do not even have bootstraps.

In reality it is probably double or triple that.

I used to be a data analyst for a non profit assisting the homeless.

650k comes from the Point In Time, PIT count.

There is 0 consistent or established methodology for how to actually do the count across the country.

Every government agency and non profit in every city and county does it differently, and then it all gets amalgamated in inconsistent ways at multiple stages, by multiple different agencies.

Does living in a car or RV count as homeless?

Does jumping from motel to motel because you have an eviction and can’t rent anywhere count?

Does living in a managed tent city or tiny home community count?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no, for all those.

Are you currently living in a shelter, which may or may not only allow you to stay inside during evenings, regardless of inclement weather or your disabilities, and lock you out if you arrive late, which almost certainly will kick you out after 30 or 60 or 90 days, regardless if you’ve found a home or not?

Not homeless.

Beyond stuff like that… what, do people think that teams of demographers go around and personally locate and record every single homeless person in the country?

Fuck no, they count the people at the most stationary, most visible, least dangerous encampments.

…

The way I estimate its two or 3 times the PIT count is from the number of requests we got for assistance we literally didnt have the resources to provide, and then scale appropriately.

Its as methodologically sound as the PIT count.

That’s closer to ‘does not have a permanent residential address capable of receiving mail.’

…

Try setting up a (non prepaid) phone plan, replacing a stolen ID, setting up a debit card or SNAP account without a permanent residential address capable of receiving mail.

99% chance you can’t.

Try getting an apartment with no previous address whatsoever for 2 or 5 or 10 years, god knows what kind of credit score.

99.99% impossible.

…

EDIT: When they say migrants, they don’t mean foreign migrants, from other countries, exclusively.

Its mostly internal migrants. American, homeless citizens, who just get round up and shipped to somewhere Republicans are not in charge of.

Honestly I’m just happy for you, myself and basically everyone I’ve ever known just gets scammed by car insurance.

As an aside, when you had the Prius, would any (non absurdly overpriced dealer) mechanics even touch it, beyond a basic oil change or tire rotation?

I used to have a Prius C and 95% of mechanics would just go, nope, hybrid scary, me no understand, no touch no fix cuz maybe I break it worse.

I’m quite autistic, infodumping/mansplaining is my passtime.

Short version is: Car insurance is a mandatory, required part of your life if you want to leave the trash heap disassociation zone, but if you’re poor, it and everything else about cars in America is basically a legal scam.

Welcome to America baaaabyyyyyyyyyy!!!

Metric had it right over a decade ago:

Drive a car to go to work to pay for gas to drive a car to go to work.

EDIT: i got the lyrics a bit off, but yeah.

Time to get your Seven Sigma black belt so you can synergize silo’d teams into efficient fusion collaborators via Lean Agile development paradigms and maximize productivity!

Did I make up or misuse some of those terms?

Maybe! I don’t care!

In my experience its all just ‘I learned some new lingo which makes me very cool and also very serious and important’, but its only function is to create social etiquette hierarchies and obfuscate and overcomplicate meetings and directives to the point they don’t mean or accomplish anything.

I have worked many different tech jobs precisely because all the managers were as I described, or, they outright told me I was being exploited and should work elsewhere, and showed me the documentation to prove it.

My last manager was a very, very wonderful person who I got along with great.

Someone who actually fostered employee’s ability to work and grow and gain skills, as opposed to just issuing orders one moment, being unreachable without explanation most of the day, and then popping by with a new personality hours later to explain how to do something i already knew how to do.

He did almost everything you mention and more, it was the shock of my life up to that point to find someone like that.

We hit it off so well that I was basically his double within 6 months and began taking on many of his tasks so he could catch up on things he was behind on.

That is when I began much, much more interactions with managers and team leads of other departments, and found that most of them were so totally incompetent that I had to interview most of them team members to figure out what the process I was supposed to be documenting even were.

Team after team, each manager and each of their underlings described entirely different and contradictory work processes which we were attempting to just understand, before attempting to evaluate how or if to streamline and standardize many disparate digital and physical paper procedures.

I unfortunately lost that job due to a series of crimes happening to me that ruined my life, but I absolutely would have loved to stay at that job despite being surrounded by incompetent morons, because I had at least finally found my own really good manager and team.

I am not saying all managers are as awful as my previous post, that everything they do is useless.

I am saying that a vast majority of them are incompetent and a vast majority of them would be obviously seen as basically just chit chatting as 80% of their job, which is at best a waste of time, and at worst, actively harmful to the work of others, when you remove the physical office environment.

Of course there are exceptions to this, good managers do exist, but they are by far the exception.

Oh, same, I personally agree and do likewise.

The ‘OpSec’ thing to do would be to have a signal chat, or discord or something disconnected from work software/hardware to do the gossip so said paper trail is harder to establish.

Cleverer tech savvy folks will do this, but many don’t.

I basically hate all work related gossip of any kind, but my point was that gossip is completely normalized and common and widespread whether you are working remote or not…

… its just that in a largely remote work environment, it becomes exceedingly obvious that many middle manager types both don’t really do many actually useful things, and they need in person social stimulation to maintain their egos in a way they can’t when someone can just not join a gossip group chat, when they can’t randomly barge in to your workspace for a check in.

These are the MBA, team building types that basically have the skillset of a failed motivational speaker and also typically know so little about the specifics of any given employee’s work that you have to spend an hour explaining what your precise, technical block is at this exact moment, when you probably could have fixed it in 15 minutes were they not wasting your time and interpreting their own actions as somehow beneficial.

Turns out that for a great majority of remote capable work, socially awkward people can be astoundingly more productive when they’re not constantly distracted, and that if you just say hey, if you need help with something, schedule a quick video chat with me and I’ll see if I, or someone with relevant experience can help.

They can’t accept the flipped power dynamic of themselves being on call (within schedule constraints) to provide assistance, they need to be the ones that police, monitor and ‘morale boost’ others whenever they feel like it.

This kind of dynamic is part of why mouse jigglers are a thing. If middle management can be a social butterfly and only do one or two hours of actually productive work a day but get paid for 8, why shouldn’t a less socially inclined person be able to do the same?