Hey, remind me what was going on in 1988 in the propaganda-free bastion of democracy that is the USA? Oh right, it was when the presidential election reached a turning point due to the Revolving Door and Willie Horton ads, which used racist dogwhistles to imply that Dukakis was “soft on crime”. Also, the person who created those ads (Roger Ailes) would later become the CEO of Fox News.

Genuine question: what’s the best way to cut through this kind of talking point?

The best I can come up with is “terms created by marginalized people to describe how people do or do not relate to mainstream society are different from terms imposed by the majority society to coerce marginalized people into a box, and refusing a label in order to obstruct understanding isn’t the same as refusing a label imposed by majority society”. Like, I don’t see any problem to use words used to describe the “normal” identity (cis, hetero, etc) for people that do not express any desire to deviate from the “normal” identity in any way for the sake of improving the understanding of marginalized people. But I’m not sure that’s convincing to someone who doesn’t already agree (perhaps not for the sake of convincing the person you’re arguing with, but the onlooking bystanders).

It’s just such an annoying tactic because the bad faith is usually obvious but it’s hard to clearly formulate why. I guess it basically just boils down to “more allowances should be given to the people on the bottom than the people on the top”, but some of the people on top never stop complaining about that.

I hate when people act as improving the healthcare system is a “complex issue”, when pretty much every developed nation aside from the US manages to do better. It’s not even good from a “fiscally conservative” standpoint; the US has by far the highest healthcare expenditure per capita in terms of government spending alone. Yet even the (relatively) progressive politicians have to talk about additional taxes on the rich to “justify” universal healthcare or else they’ll be treated as “naive fools who think money grows on trees”.

Why do we need to “debate real issues” when it’s plainly obvious that the American healthcare system is objectively worse than even other capitalist nations (the wealthy ones anyways) just from a basic observation? Even high-income PMC types would benefit from not having to deal with insurance and whatever. Though it sucks that in a lot of places that do have universal healthcare, politicians are actively sabotaging it to justify privatization. Comes to show that the “free market” can only “prove” it’s superiority through deception.

Maybe that’s the real dystopia they were trying to show: a world where you can’t drive Ford F-150s

“When you’re looking at a terminal, a traditional freight train is about three miles long, which means you need a place to park three miles of a rolling stock. You need a buffer of about 300 containers. You have trucks going back and forth. It’s a big operation with a lot of real estate and a lot of cost. Our vehicles can interface like a semi truck to go directly where they need to go, load and unload you to get out of the way,” Howard told me.

So just… make a shorter train? You can make trains more flexible without going down to “each car has its own motor”. The only reason why freight trains are so long now is because the companies wanted to cut costs by reducing the number of drivers (even though this comes at a cost to safety and worker well-being). Of course, they need to believe in autonomous rail cars so they can fantasize about automating away their need for workers instead of just employing more people.

It gets even worse:
https://unity.com/pricing-updates

Can I get a discount on the Unity Runtime Fee?
Qualifying customers may be eligible for credits on the Unity Runtime Fee based on the adoption of Unity services beyond the Editor, such as Unity Gaming Services or Unity LevelPlay mediation for mobile ad-supported games. This program enables deeper partnership with Unity to succeed across the entire game lifecycle. Please reach out to your account manager to learn more. For details on Unity LevelPlay, please contact your account manager for ad monetization, or contact sales here about ad monetization.

What is Unity LevelPlay?
Unity LevelPlay is an industry-leading end-to-end ad mediation platform for game and app developers. It supports everything your business needs to scale. With Unity LevelPlay, you can:

• Generate revenue with monetization tools and ad sources through Unity LevelPlay mediation’s competitive real-time auction and optimization tools.
• Gain transparency and data availability with granular breakdowns to pinpoint opportunities immediately. Acquire users at scale using exclusive user acquisition solutions and automated targets.

Just what the games industry needed, even more advertising.

From another journalist who covered this: (nitter)

I got some clarifications from Unity regarding their plan to charge developers per game install (after clearing thresholds)

• If a player deletes a game and re-installs it, that’s 2 installs, 2 charges
• Same if they install on 2 devices

Edit: Someone got to stealing this joke before I did lol https://hexbear.net/post/581395

Fair enough. I was thinking about the feature where Minecraft villagers up their prices if you make the same trade a bunch of times. It just seems like a hassle given that the need to restock already works to limit how often you can make a certain trade.

That’s why it always annoys me when gamers think that “realistic economies” (in games outside of the 4X/political sim genres) are a great idea. They don’t understand that only way that the player character can meaningfully progress in a game economy is if it’s built specifically to allow them to do that. Bolting on an imitation of supply and demand to shops doesn’t actually make the game more realistic and it usually doesn’t add anything interesting to the game.

Then you get to “player-driven economies” in MMOs, which require constant developer intervention to avoid devolving to the point where most people don’t have any economic power. You’d think that gamers would learn something about capitalism from that, but no such luck.

I hate how every business wants to force us to download their app (especially when browsing any site on your phone), even though they’re all secretly just websites wrapped up into an app anyways. All the inconveniences of downloading combined with all the inefficiencies of bloated websites, just the worst of both worlds for anyone who isn’t a data harvesting company.