• 0 Posts
  • 16 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 15th, 2023

help-circle



  • Technically true, but I think everybody knows exactly what kind of dlc is meant, and because they still make up the majority of dlc content and addon-sized dlcs are so rare, it’s fair to call them that.

    Moneygrab empty dlcs ( shiny horse armor! ) are stupid, and history has shown that people are not fiscally responsible enough to not be lured into spending absurd amounts of money for very shallow or plain empty content. “Vote with your wallet” doesn’t really work in the face of more and more insidious marketing efforts.



  • Regarding the profit incentive: providing free school lunches or medical/ hygiene supplies does not hurt profits. As the meals/supplies will still have to be sourced from the market, it probably will now be a few big contacts with big suppliers that will cover entire school districts.

    The costs of these contracts will be a public burden unless they implemented a specific focus tax to pay for it, so it will come out of various broad tax pools. This means everyone pays a little bit so every kid has something to eat. Even if you don’t have any kids or if your kid gets homemade lunch packs. This is where the “social” aspect comes in.

    Other countries, many of them European, actually go a step in the other direction: if you do not have kids, you actually pay a premium on your income tax. And that is generally accepted, because for society to live on, obviously kids are necessary. And if you don’t support society by raising kids, you at least help cover some of the associated costs. These premiums are explicitly used to fund kindergartens, schools etc…

    An often valid capitalist criticism of public large contracts on infrastructure such as this is that the public offices tend to be notoriously bad negotiators, accepting worse deals than private companies would. This is because there’s little to no incentive for them to reach good terms. It also makes the process more vulnerable to corruption and politicking on a grander scale. These are not guaranteed to happen, good governance can definitely avoid this. But public governance simply isn’t that great to begin with in many areas.



  • Laying even 10 times the cable should not be more difficult when you have 60 times the total population (335mio in US vs 5.6mio in Finland) and hence more resources.

    And sure, Alaska definitely it’s expensive and inefficient to service, having a pop density of about 0.5 inhabitants per km². But unlike Northern Finland, most of Northern Alaska is in fact entirely void of human life and more akin to a desert. There really mostly are a handful of oil industry clusters and native communities. And still, the extremely low pop density means it’s only 730 000 people living in Alaska. That is 0.2% of the entire population of the USA. If you were to completely ignore and not service Alaska, you should have a an even easier time providing service to the vast majority of the US population in all the main states. I think it’s pretty clear this is a political failure and not a matter of financial resources or natural obstacles.


  • You are absolutely correct that distribution matters. However, Finland has an even more uneven population distribution than the US. 75% of the population lives in the costal cities, with 30% of the entire population living in the capital region( density of 193 persons/km²). The entire rest of the country is not empty dessert ( which would require no services), but very sparsely populated rural woodlands, down to 2 people per km².

    Density still is an overall useful quantifier given that extra knowledge, as providing services for a small population of only 5.6mio inhabitants is not easy either. Sure, providing coverage for the 75% in the cities is fairly easy. But that still leaves 1.5mio rural residents, which require huge investments in cable to supply with broadband. And due to the vast distances, you definitely cannot cover them with wireless alone, if you were thinking that.




  • You are swapping correlation and causation to some degree. A country does not become industrialized by people starting to have kids at a later age. Rather, people start getting kids when their circumstances allow it: in industrialized countries, you rely less on children to provide for you when old, as there hopefully are social systems in place or you can save up on your own. Downside is, without social systems you also have to provide for yourself at old age, meaning people need to build up more savings before they feel ready for the financial burden a child is for around 20 years.

    In developing countries, children often get little support above bare necessities and start contributing to the household income at a much earlier age, even before hitting their teens.


  • I was about to say… What does “suitable” mean? I grew up in the 90s, and “suitable games” ranged from SimCity or the settlers to age of empires, crusader Kings, quake, doom, unreal tournament or half life.

    There is no need to over protect kids from the “simple” evils: when I was very young, I didn’t want to play violent or scary games, even knowing they exist. Later I got curious and explored them. Depending on your choice a game such as the settlers, age of empires or crusader Kings could well be classified violent and “unsuitable”. But violence is everywhere, and those were some of the games that I fondly remember for instilling a huge curiosity in history and cultures in me. And yes, we were marketing victims as well: everyone spent way too much on Magic, Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh cards and related toys. But it didn’t infect every part of our lives.

    Help your kids reflect on their choices and wants. Help them find out why they really want to pay too much money for that shiny Roblox skin. And offer alternatives with free, open content sharing so they realize they are being swindled. Media literacy is much tougher today because companies got much more insidious marketing vectors to infect kids.

    Nowadays there are thousands of games being released per week, in addition to classics such as Minecraft, Terraria, Rimworld, Eco, which still have very strong modding and multiplayer communities.




  • Yes, there’s much more.

    But it’s hard to explain without spoiling things, as is typical for Kojima games. His games often feature unique and bold new gameplay, have a strong focus on character storytelling ( almost movie-like), all embedded in worlds that share many similarities with our own, but have bizarre twists to them.

    In terms of gameplay, it has elements of survival, crafting, stealth, fighting/shooting, and navigation.

    I consider Kojima games pieces of art. Not everyone will enjoy them, sure, but it’s worth having at least attempted to interact with them, purely to experience their hard to forget uniqueness. Those that find the gameplay enjoyable often rank it as a game of the decade in terms of memorability.