This month the Weibo account Weibo Finance, which has more than 1.5 million followers, issued an instruction against posting any comments “that bad-mouth the economy”. The post appears to have since been deleted. Bloomberg reported that several other finance influencers had been told by Weibo to “avoid crossing red...
Lenin’s biggest mistake was thinking this whole “dictatorship of the proletariat” phase was going to be this magical normal period that no human would abuse ever, completely ignoring millennia of human history, human behavior, and the dynamics of power that would make that sort of thing literally impossible. Not only does absolute power corrupts absolutely, but even if a leader was immune to such corruption, dictatorships are never propped up by one single leader. They are precariously installed by groups of people who have other units of power, like the military, to keep the system in place.
One of those powerful people can simply say: “Keep this dictatorship in place or I will torture you and your entire family while spreading propaganda about detestable crimes, until eventually I’ll feed you to the angry mob and prop up a new dictator.”
And that’s it. The real communism dream never happens. Corruption quickly floods the state, and wealth disparity continues unchallenged and unabated. It’s just more hidden, under the guise of a system of equalative poverty for one class of people and gradients of power for another class of people.
Hell, this even happens with failed democracies, like Russia. Everybody gets behind the new system, but without the right kinds of checks and balances, corruption invades and, eventually, it’s a democracy in name only. But, at least democracy never had any notion of a dictatorship built into the philosophy. Democracies are still really hard to keep in place, but communism is a doomed idea from the very start.
To most of us, this is probably just a summary of events over the past year or so. But, it’s good to know that this sort of news is reaching non-gaming channels.
Yep, it’s rather demoralizing when the side of sanity and critical thought are ranting about getting rid of all firearms, when the other side already has enough firearms to turn a potential civil war into Team America vs. Cavemen Throwing Rocks At Each Other.
Be less like Ghandi and be more like fucking Black Panthers. Or at least support the 2nd Amendment and stop with this pointless bullshit about how we don’t need guns because the city police is totally going to have our backs :rollseyes:
Saudi officials confirmed in a statement to the United Nations high commissioner for human rights that Manahel al-Otaibi was sentenced on 9 January for what the Saudi government called “terrorist offences”....
Selective enforcement probably, especially towards a known women’s right advocate.
They were pretty brave to go through with these sort of protests, but at the same time, Saudi Arabia is just not the country to do this sort of thing. It is a harsh religious dictatorship that only respects the richest of its citizens. The best thing to do is to leave, and encourage others to do so. I know that’s not an easy thing to do, but it’s certainly better than to spend the rest of your life being beaten in a prison cell.
Alien Logic: A Skyrealms of Jorune Adventure is an abandonware video game based on the Skyrealms of Jorune role-playing game. It was developed by Ceridus Software for MS-DOS and published by Strategic Simulations in 1994.
at the least then go ask obsidian why they didnt ask for a little more time.
You want Obsidian to ask the guys who would eventually stiff them over a single MetaCritic score point to give them more time? Obviously, there was a rather hostile relationship between the two.
Valve does good not because they don’t have shareholders, but because their leadership is not gonna get fired for thinking about next year instead of next quarter. So they don’t squeeze the consumers for every dime, so people stick with them, and developers stay even though their fee schedule is not the best because they have all the people.
All of that short-term thinking is because of the stock market. All of their shareholders think of, day in and day out, is “line go up”.
The largest stock investors are institutional investors managing funds on behalf of retirement plans. Those investors tend to prefer consistent long term growth over a narrow quarterly growth target, and will actually look at things beyond just stock price, like strategy and long term market prospects.
Based on what evidence? They just make sure the line steadily goes up each quarter, instead of accounting for companies that invest potential profits into longer-term plans. If not, the 401K investor will either drop the stock, or put it in a higher-risk plan.
That sort of thinking is akin to corporate suicide when in a publicly-traded market, so they don’t do it.
A company like Valve isn’t publicly-traded, and they have a limited number of investors they can talk to about their plans. That and they have a reputation of quality products, so even the investors are going to put up with short-term drops in profitability for even more profits.
It seems like every other week a game studio is massively laying off employees; sometimes after years of development. What I’m reading is that it’s a quick way to lower expenses and pad the investors’ pockets, flooding the market with developers and reducing their value, to then hire them back a few months later at lower...
Microsoft’s not teasing Halo on Playstation out of desperation. They’ve nearly ended consoles.
Which is kind of a good thing. The console wars have been large irrelevant for the past 20 years, because PC already won.
Really, Steam won. And if Microsoft isn’t careful, all of that planning to shift gamers towards PCs will have them land squarely into the Steam/Linux ecosystem. It really depends on how hard Microsoft wants to abuse their near-monopoly with Windows 11.
AFAICT, mastodon's decisions, which are arguably problematic (on which see: https://lemmy.ml/post/14973403) are literally trickling down to other platforms and infecting how they federate with each other as they dance around mastodon's quirks in different ways.
It seems like masto is ruining "the standard" with its gravity.
Note that this behaviour is configurable. It’s default is a 500 char limit because that is the Mastodon default.
That’s a shit default, and a shitty way to treat a standard that is meant for all sorts of communication. ActivityPub is not Twitter, and it is not just for short-form communication. In fact, a majority of the web is longer-form communication that isn’t a mere 500 characters long.
Retorting with “this behaviour is configurable” is dancing around the issue. Good, sane defaults mean everything in programming.
The past week saw Democrats take up Trump’s hard-right immigration policy as their own for campaign fodder, with the liberal press’s assent. The very xenophobia that Democrats decried as “fascism” has become their policy agenda.
The past week saw Democrats take up Trump’s hard-right immigration policy as their own for campaign fodder, with the liberal press’s assent. The very xenophobia that Democrats decried as “fascism” has become their policy agenda.
Just from the word “go”, this article smells of alarmist and hyperbolic bullshit.
Reddit if full of bots: thread reposted exactly the same, comment by comment, 10 months later (files.catbox.moe)
For the threads with the older one on the left: lemmy.world/post/14859950...
China cracks down on negativity over economy in bid to boost confidence amid record high youth unemployment and struggling property sector (www.theguardian.com)
This month the Weibo account Weibo Finance, which has more than 1.5 million followers, issued an instruction against posting any comments “that bad-mouth the economy”. The post appears to have since been deleted. Bloomberg reported that several other finance influencers had been told by Weibo to “avoid crossing red...
How Greed Ruined Gaming (www.youtube.com)
To most of us, this is probably just a summary of events over the past year or so. But, it’s good to know that this sort of news is reaching non-gaming channels.
The Genius of Disco Elysium's Portraits (www.youtube.com)
A video about the art of Disco Elysium, and the character portraits in particular.
Nazi Propagandist Nick Fuentes Caught on Stream Watching Gay Porn (slrpnk.net)
Receipts
Young women in Saudi Arabia sentenced to 11 years in prison by "anti-terrorism court" after being arrested for “her choice of clothing and support for women’s rights” (www.theguardian.com)
Saudi officials confirmed in a statement to the United Nations high commissioner for human rights that Manahel al-Otaibi was sentenced on 9 January for what the Saudi government called “terrorist offences”....
Disco Elysium 2 just got cancelled and ZA/UM self-destroyed (www.youtube.com)
Review: Alien Logic (1994): Human Bewilderment (www.youtube.com)
Alien Logic: A Skyrealms of Jorune Adventure is an abandonware video game based on the Skyrealms of Jorune role-playing game. It was developed by Ceridus Software for MS-DOS and published by Strategic Simulations in 1994.
'New Vegas is a very, very important game to us,' says mildly exasperated Todd Howard, who will never stop getting grilled about New Vegas (www.pcgamer.com)
Cyberpunk 2077 director thanks fans as the game hits a 95% positive review rating on Steam (www.eurogamer.net)
Ghost of Tsushima buyers of blocked countries will be reimbursed (programming.dev)
Can somebody explain why game makers don't start their own companies together?
It seems like every other week a game studio is massively laying off employees; sometimes after years of development. What I’m reading is that it’s a quick way to lower expenses and pad the investors’ pockets, flooding the market with developers and reducing their value, to then hire them back a few months later at lower...
What is the point of Xbox? (www.eurogamer.net)
Poland arrests nine on charges of Russian-ordered sabotage (www.euractiv.com)
Archived link...
PS5 Pro developer verdict: ‘I didn’t meet a single person that understood the point of it’ (metro.co.uk)
Christopher Walken Detective Adventure | Ripper (PC) (www.youtube.com)
China Has a Controversial Plan for Brain-Computer Interfaces (www.wired.com)
Atari Revives Infogrames As A Publishing Label (atari.com)
[Gamers Nexus] ASUS Says We're "Confused" (www.youtube.com)
On Immigration, Trumpism Is Now Democratic Common Sense (jacobin.com)
The past week saw Democrats take up Trump’s hard-right immigration policy as their own for campaign fodder, with the liberal press’s assent. The very xenophobia that Democrats decried as “fascism” has become their policy agenda.