greenskye

huge percentage of profit that theaters get for the first few weeks of a film’s release.

This is backwards. Theaters actually get very little percentage early on in the release and only get more later. Most early profits go to the film studio/publisher. Or at least this was how it worked ore-Covid. Maybe it’s different now.

I love how I have to submit documentation as part of project deliverables only to then get asked for that same documentation again 2 years later because the project management department can’t actually find anything that they require everyone to submit. So you just end up maintaining all of your documents in multiple places anyway, but then this leads to multiple versions being a thing and people operating off of older versions that they sometimes stumble on.

Brother took me to a casino for my 21st birthday. I did a bit of research, so I only took in $40 and left my atm card at home.

I wanted to play the cool looking slot machines. Brother convinced me that roulette was going to be way more fun. It was a busy night, so it took almost an hour to get a spot at the table. And the minimum bet was $10. Roughly 3 min after finally getting to bet, I’d lost all $40, having not won a single time (even my bets on the colors failed).

It was so utterly disappointing, especially when the next person in our party got to the table and managed to keep their bets going for over an hour and left with a few hundred extra $ that night. Most of the night was me just standing around bored out of my mind.

I’m very thankful for that early experience. Later experiences were better, but also far more tempting. I attribute my ability to resist the temptation largely to how shitty that first night was.

I mean it varies. That definitely exists, but that’s not the only way (or even the majority way).

For one thing, most big box stores don’t actually own the product on their shelves. They basically rent shelf space to the supplier and only when the product is purchased do both sides get the cut. Walmart can’t arbitrarily lower prices on some (most) items because it’s literally not theirs.

This set up greatly simplifies a lot of the retail flow, so it’s more and more common (at least in the US). It’s mostly smaller stores that are ordering in product and in that case your example is correct.

Steam effectively does the same thing. They offer to list your game and then only get paid when it sells (minus some overhead fees). They aren’t pre-purchasing copies to do with what they want. And part of that contract is that they will list your game, but only if it’s the lowest price or tied for the lowest price. Otherwise you’re free to go elsewhere.

Which is again, because being available on Steam provides value itself and they aren’t interested in helping you cut them out the profits by undercutting the price you listed it for there. Which, explicitly is just an attempt to get the benefit of Steam without paying Steam’s fees. Otherwise all of these games would just never list on Steam at all. Nobody is preventing that. If they allowed this, more and more people would behave like people do today with bookstores, where they look for a book at the store, but walk out and buy it on Amazon instead.

This is a pretty common tactic in retail spaces. Walmart also won’t let you sell the same product that you’ve contracted to put on their shelves elsewhere for cheaper.

The general idea is that you are benefitting from Walmart’s market dominance for exposure and advertising. You can’t get that benefit and then encourage consumers to buy it elsewhere by listing it for cheaper than Walmart sells it for.

You can agree or disagree with that approach, but it’s not unique to Steam and it’s so far generally been held up as reasonable.

Spouses yes, but only because things are generally in both names. Children no. They’ll try to lie and say it is, but it’s not.

I’m not totally up to date with AI, but are we even capable of running our current AI tech in a fashion similar to humans? My exposure to AI is so l stuff like chatbots, which don’t do anything until a user interacts with them. They aren’t sitting there thinking on their own. They aren’t proactive in any way.

My understanding is that it would be astronomically expensive to run one constantly with constant input. And I’m not aware of any of them even trying to run like that.

Are they doing anything like that?

To me it’s rather that the would-be fixers have just been tricked into thinking this violence is the solution when it’s not, causing their efforts to be short circuited.

I mean peaceful solutions seem to have the same problem. It’ll seem like it works for awhile and then later generations realize that that issue was never really resolved. Just look at the civil rights movement. Supposedly solved ‘peacefully’ by MLK, but as we’ve all come to learn, the only thing that happened was that racists just grew quiet for awhile and waited for a chance to be racists again.

No solution is permanent. And violence isn’t technically the fix either.

The problem is you can’t solve certain problems from within the broken system. It’s possible to go outside the system but without violence but it’s rare. The violence is what enables outside system fixes to be possible and those have been of varied quality.

It’s not what we do when we’re violent, it’s what we do immediately afterwards that matters.

Nonviolence often just means you don’t get to make any meaningful changes at all, because they aren’t going to just let you vote them out of power and into to jail.

Yep. Just like they did when people started making community fiber ISPs

Local street corner has had weekly protests on Saturday for over a year. This is random suburbia, not downtown or anything. Older folks are the overwhelming majority of routine protestors. Certain big protests had more young people, but those were all one and done. Older folks seem to be putting in the work far more than the younger.

Most people could afford it if it were universal. It’s only a luxury when it’s only partially implemented.

Looks like an old attic with dirty insulation

Sometimes I wonder if those smart, imaginative people had just simply kept their horrifying hypotheticals to themselves, would those dumb enough to try to make one have actually thought of the idea?

And then I wonder how many smart, imaginative people have done exactly that with even worse ideas that I just don’t know about.

Spiders are welcome to the basement. Currently I’ve got one posted in pretty much every corner down there. Those guys are chill.

I’m also okay with out of the way corner spiders up near ceilings, but only if they aren’t too big.

Currently I’m still able to buy the book and break the DRM, though that option is rapidly closing. I try to buy it elsewhere if possible, but it’s often not.

Piracy is an option, but because the authors are so small, pirated copies can take months to become available, if they ever are. Also, I consider myself very knowledgeable in breaking the encryption for these files. I would be the person putting the upload out there if I was interested in that kind of thing. So if I’m having difficulty breaking the DRM, chances are high that nobody else has either. Or at least we’d be stuck with crappy OCR’d PDF copies instead of proper epubs.

At the end of the day though, as the consumer, exclusive content like this means I participate in the platform or I simply don’t get access to that content. If it were simply a couple of titles, that’s one thing, but it hurts when it’s an entire genre. It’d be like being a fan of metal music, but 90% of all metal music was only on Spotify and nowhere else. It’s horrible that a single company can control an entire genre like this.

I’m happy to leave Amazon, but it sure feels like Kindle Unlimited has a stranglehold on indie publishing. At this point I’m faced with sticking with Amazon or basically finding an entirely new genre to read, as 90% of the titles I like (litrpg) aren’t available outside Amazon due to KUs exclusivity clause.

There’s no way any costume that looks that good would only cost that much

It’s an interesting strategy to infuriate the generation most primed to be a user of AI by using that to make it near impossible for them to get a job because of AI.

Feels like an excellent way to radicalize an entire generation against your product.

They really do seem to be going all in on AI and not leaving any escape routes for if it fails to actually enable an Elysium style future.

Strong protections and regulations on what counts as ‘news’ and then offering subsidies paid for via taxes on Internet/cable TV/etc subscriptions to non-profit news outlets.

Of course that’s near impossible and humanity would corrupt it eventually, so I don’t know.