Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Amazon Twitch to discipline people for offline behavior
This discussion has been closed.
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Comments
That's nothing, I don't even have to be a terrorist to get kicked off this forum! Just dissing FF14's combat is enough to get a ban here.
And imagine it wasn't just an online gaming forum but a massive, nearly indispensable company that shipped your medicine or hosted your small business...
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
The main issue (or should be) is the companies we are discussing, are the ones with the power to shut down half the people in the country's ability to use some of the biggest way's to communicate, if they want.
A mega-corp that sell pants...who cares. One that can muzzle the half of the country that is in other political party? Ya, who they can ban, and the how and the why, is a much bigger nightmare.
And as long as we're getting specific, we're talking about Twitch here. Who gives a fuck who is or isn't on Twitch? I don't.
All I care about is watching The Jimquisition and that's on YT
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
For example, Trump claimed that he won the 2020 election in a landslide. He didn't, and no one on this thread is claiming that he did. His speech at the ellipse had plenty of lies, demagoguery, and conspiracy theory peddling, though it wasn't really out of line with what you'd expect of a typical slimy politician. Probably the best summary is that he went the full Stacey Abrams sore loser route.
Speaking of whom, if people should get fired for claiming that Trump had the election stolen, should people also get fired for claiming that Stacey Abrams won her governor election in 2018 and that was stolen? After all, that's literally exactly the same offense as claiming that Trump's election was stolen.
Or how about the claims that Trump incited insurrection? I've read his entire speech from the day of the riot. For all that is wrong with it, there's nothing in it that could plausibly be called incitement of violence of any sort, let alone insurrection. Claiming that he incited an insurrection is every bit as flagrant of a lie as claiming that Trump won the election and had it stolen. Should the people peddling that lie be fired, too?
Or there's a long list of other popularly believed lies that I could point to. In most cases, the people claiming such lies actually believe them and don't realize that they're lies. So many media sources are willing to peddle lies if it advances their narrative that you often can't determine what is true without checking the primary sources--and a lot of stories don't have primary sources that are checkable. Should being taken in by one conspiracy theory or another be a firing offense?
Or is it only the right's conspiracy theories that should be a firing offense, and not also the left's?
Ideally, political views wouldn't be a firing offense outside of the handful of jobs that are explicitly political. Ideally, companies would never want to fire people for their political views, so it wouldn't matter if it were legal for them to do so. But now we have the modern phenomenon of a bunch of trolls getting together to demand that this or that person be fired for some real or imaginary offense and threatening a boycott if their demands aren't met, and sometimes companies cave and give the trolls what they want.
What's the solution? I don't know. But just telling people not to lie isn't it. That doesn't offer any protection from the troll mobs.
Wait ... are you AJ????
https://www.statista.com/statistics/312014/average-price-of-humira-by-country/
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.
Yes, it can be abused, but so can everything.
Plan: dont do stupid shit, dont post stupid shit and you should be fine.
You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.
If that makes sense to you, I have a bridge I want to unload at a bargain price.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
and I see why as I read Orwell's works and then looked at the lens of humanity, it always seemed to easy to believe that humans could be put under such oppressive control without a fight, and some even embracing it and supporting it.
"We asked for this"
Also, have you seen the prices of any hospital or clinic visit in the US, health insurance or government pays the bulk of it and not the people. Pharma can get health insurance to pay X, then that is what they will charge.
If you think of it, once you've made your product, where the bulk of the cost is probably R&D and FDA approval and such. I am assuming the manufacturing is a small amount. So then the pharma companies probably go to each country and say, "hey, i have this drug, what will you pay". They negotiate it and sell the drug. If you're already making 20,000% markup on the manufactured drug per unit, it's fine to do 10,000% markup per unit to another country rather then just making it and not selling it. It probably all has to do with bargaining power and leverage a country has vs the pharma company. For example, with single payer entities, the government of the country has a ton of leverage over the pharma where america is broken up into many different health insurances which each negotiate their price along with the government.
At some point what a country will pay for a drug and what pharma will sell it for is agreed upon and it is sold. Hence, the price that is 10x more in the US.
Im' not justifying it, just saying that, yeah in the world we live in, it makes sense. Also, given that medicare/medicaid pays a fraction of a dollar, a lot of bills are overinflated to reach a level of revenue for the clinic and/or hospital. It ain't right, but it is reality.
You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.
The Net Neutrality rules of 2014 were some of the stupidest rulemaking I have seen from the FCC since they decided to censor radio broadcasts. Hundreds of billions were dropped from broadband infrastructure investment as a result. Ajit Pai was FCC commissioner for 4 years. None of the dooms day people used to justify the 2014 rulemaking even happened.
To me that rulemaking was to give the government more power to regulate internet companies. All the talk surrounding it was just propaganda by people who's understanding of the internet ends when they plug an ethernet port into an outlet.
Since the '80s the FCC had a hands off approach to the internet. The FCC through the 2000s was a budget neutral government agency. It made money by selling RF Spectrum and used it to pay it's employees and subsidize rural broadband.
You really just need to understand that the USA is currently the host for the parasite. The parasite has drained the host dry and now the host is dying. The parasite has numbed you to its existence with its control of media, government, and currency.
The parasite, knowing the end is near for the host, built up a new host (China) over the last 50 years and is now ready to move to the new host. This will be a dangerous time for the parasite and well everyone!
When the move is complete the old host, drained of its essence, will be broken up and left to wither and die. The usa will become the worlds biggest welfare state(s) as the last things of value are packed up and shipped out.
It is unfortunate because the USA is the worlds last gasp of freedom, and when its gone, unless something changes, all freedom will be extinguished. People didnt ask for it. They just dont know or understand the parasite or its nature.
Wouldnt be much of a parasite if you all did.
The US is one of the largest countries in the world. Just because a small country can offer fast internet doesn't mean it scales to a country like the US with a lower population density. There are parts of the US that a cable must be run hundreds of miles just to service 1 customer with internet. The cable will also probably need replacing in a couple years. Figuring out solutions to these issues requires a multitude of approaches that a utility model does not solve.
What the US has is a self-regulating market that is subsidized by RF Spectrum licensing. There are 2 tiers of internet providers. There are providers who simply run cable from region to region and connect with other ISPs. Then there are ISPs that connect people within a local region. With this method, a company needs to partner with many others and it helps limit abuse. Take for instance Comcast wants to charge ATT for access to it's network. This would violate Cogent's rules to access it's network and they will place restrictions on Comcast or remove them from it's service.
After a drug is developed and shown to be safe and effective, it usually costs very little to create each dose. It's kind of like the usual copyright problem. It's enormously expensive to create the first copy of software or a big-budget movie or whatever, but making each additional copy is extremely cheap.
This creates a free rider problem. A given country knows that a given drug already exists, and it's just a question of what the company that created it can charge for it. If you allow the company to charge whatever they want, it could be quite a lot. If they cap what the company can charge at a little more than the per dose price, then the company can't make very much money selling the drug in that country, but the alternative is to refuse to sell the drug at all and make nothing. And countries are likely to just ignore the drug patent and produce it themselves if a drug company tries that.
For a given small country to pay a lot or a little for drugs doesn't have very much effect on the global profits of the drug, but it does have an enormous local effect on how much people in that country has to pay. So a lot of countries want a free ride and demand that their drugs be cheap.
But if all countries did that, then the drug company can't make very much money, even on drugs that are highly successful in a medical sense. With prices set too low, they might not even be able to recover their costs of developing the drug in the first place.
Companies not being able to make money on past drugs doesn't make those drugs vanish. Most drugs aren't very hard to produce, just like most software isn't hard to copy. But if all countries made it so that there wasn't profit to be had in making new drugs, then drug companies would stop developing them. At that point, the new, lifesaving drugs that could have been developed in the future don't exist.
There are trade-offs here, of course. It's not a hard cut-off between all possible new drugs being developed quickly and nothing ever being created. The more that companies can make off of new drugs that they produce, the more new drugs they'll develop. But there's still a huge free-rider problem, and in the trade-off between new drugs being developed and getting cheap prices on old drugs today, most other countries lean much further in the direction of the latter than the United States does.
In the short term, the trade-off is only between cheap drugs and expensive drugs. In the long-term, one option is drugs that are expensive for a while, then cheap once they come off patent and there are generics. The other option is that the new drugs don't exist at all, and the people who would have benefitted from them just suffer or die instead.
Has the second ammendment been added to the conversation yet?
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
The case for treating Internet access as a utility that everyone has to have access to became stronger with time. It's heavily integrated into people's lives today in ways that it just wasn't 30 years ago. But you still don't have access unless someone builds a network out to where you are to give you access. And building out that network is expensive. And you don't get better access than you previously had until someone builds a better network, and that's also expensive.
The case of rural Internet is a harder one, as when you're laying out fiber optic cables, the cost per house that you connect depends tremendously on how far apart those houses are. It costs a lot more to dig a ditch a thousand feet long than fifty. It just does. You can rely more heavily on wireless Internet, but that's not nearly as good as wired.
In this as in many other situations in life, there are trade-offs between the price tag and the quality of access. I'm often happy with regulations that ISPs have to give people access, at least apart from things like cutting it off if people refuse to pay bills. Regulations to try to force that access to be cheaper are likely to deter building future networks, however.