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Wes Anderson vibes

1. Take a 4 way intersection
2. Draw a shape in the middle of it
3. Remove all signs and signals
4. ???
5. Roundabout

The government is almost entirely in control of education and pay for doctors. Canada ranks 75 in the world in doctors per capita in-between Qatar and Colombia. The United States ranks 40 and is probably the most capitalistic country in the world.

US law allows companies to enforce essentially any terms of service or end user licence agreement they want when selling products or services and rewriting laws to add an exception for video games is never going to happen.

Stop Killing Games believe existing EU laws don’t allow this and are alleging some TOS and EULA of game companies are in violation. They want the EU parliament to review that and hopefully clarify the laws to ensure game companies aren’t “depriving citizens of property”.

From the petition:

We wish to invoke Article 17 §1 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union [EUR-Lex - 12012P/TXT - EN - EUR-Lex (europa.eu)] – “No one may be deprived of his or her possessions, except in the public interest and in the cases and under the conditions provided for by law, subject to fair compensation being paid in good time for their loss.” – This practice deprives European citizens of their property by making it so that they lose access to their product an indeterminate/arbitrary amount of time after the point of sale. We wish to see this remedied, at the core of this Initiative.

The hope is that companies won’t make two versions of their games. One that complies with EU law and one that doesn’t. No idea where that comes from. GDPR is EU law and many companies created two versions of their service to avoid needing to follow it for everyone. Some companies, including game studios, even dropped their EU customers entirely instead of complying.

It’s also become YouTuber drama bait at this point and is an easy way smaller channels can get extra views.

It’s unfortunate because it seems like a self-made problem. There’s report after report of how there aren’t enough residency positions for new doctors. It seems like Canada wants doctors, they just don’t want to train them.

Wow. Lots to unpack there. Skipping over the part where you believe the government shouldn’t need to honour the contracts they’ve signed with First Nations if they don’t feel like it, unchecked resource extraction is also terrible.

The island nation of Nauru discovered huge deposits of phosphate under their land. The government began large scale mining operations in the 80s which saw the country sky rocket to highest GDP per capita in the entire world. The mining industry brought in huge sums of money for the country and it’s people. Mining became the biggest industry in the entire nation, with most people leaving their old job and getting a new high paying one in the ever expanding mining industry. An economic phenomena known as “Dutch Disease”. If that name doesn’t sound like a good thing, it’s because it’s not.

The market price of phosphate eventually dropped. The mining industry faced massive downturn and layoffs. The country had tore up their farmlands to build mines and farmers had left agriculture to become miners. They were importing most of their food with the money they made in mining. Money they no longer had. They also had a large tourism industry that no longer exists because they no longer have a single beach. All of them were turned into mining operations. Today the country struggles with poverty and is unable to rebuild any of the industries that mining killed. Their main source of income today is holding prisoners from Australia.

And now it’s YouTuber drama.

Or are people just venting because the initiative is struggling to succeed

It’s this one. He lives rent free in people’s minds because he made a video 9 months ago that has 1 million views where he says he doesn’t support it because it would cause undue burden on developers. Focusing on YouTuber drama is really taking away from the message of consumer rights.

Ah 2024, great year!

Why have lot company when few company do trick?

The headline is misleading because the Ottawa Citizen is owned by conservative fanboys, PostMedia. Carney promised a balanced budget but his budget guy said that’s not going to happen since making good on his campaign promises is more costly than initially expected and balancing would require a budget cut. They’re not doing that. That’s just taken out of context for the headline.

But in an interview, Giroux said that the promise of a cap on the public service will not be enough to mitigate Carney’s additional spending. He said he expects higher deficits, and as a result, higher debt servicing charges over the next few years.

Emphasis mine.

“To balance or to pay for these types of additional spending there would need to be severe cuts to the public service, significant cuts,” Giroux said.

There would need to be cuts to balance the budget. That’s why they’re not going to balance the budget.

This is a fetish thing isn’t it?

Interesting video. For people who can’t tell from the title alone, this is Chet Faliszek, who worked for Valve on titles like Left 4 Dead, talking about making the game Anacrusis playable after his company shuts down. The game was meant to be a spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead, but was dead on arrival with player counts at all time lows after leaving early access.

I knew game companies license stuff but had no idea just how much content in a game can be licensed. In-game voice chat, art assets, music, and matchmaking all done by third-parties under licensed agreements that were really difficult to work around.

If his company stops paying their subscriptions, then the in-game voice chat and matchmaking stops working. The art assets and music he licensed can only be used in very specific ways and prevent handing over raw files.

It seems like he was able to get past most things by having Steam host everything as well as handle the matchmaking. His company can go out of business but players can still play through Steam (with some stuff removed like the in-game voice chat). Of course if Steam shuts down then the game truly does stop working.

The only way around these issue were if he never licensed anything and did absolutely everything in-house, which would be a huge burden. He just wants to make a game, not worry about load balancing matchmaking servers. That’s why he got another company to handle that part. Making development easier seems to also make end-of-life accessibility harder.

These are the vests we have: TechNiche CoolPax. They’re okay. I find the ice packs melt quickly and freeze slowly but they’re good for temporary relief. My company initially bought these to be worn under hot PPE like hazmat suits, but even just having a bunch of ice packs in a freezer you can take out on the floor to hold onto could work.

You’re not alone! I worked 12 hours in 37°C (99°F), 47% humidity yesterday. However, we get essentially unlimited breaks in an air conditioned break room, have cooling vests filled with ice packs we can wear on the floor, and are supplied with sports drinks and feeezies. Your work can’t really make the world less hot, but they can work with you to avoid development of heat related illnesses!

The vast majority of my downvotes come from saying I don’t agree with Ross Scott. If only downvotes created signatures!

I’m concerned that some of the petty drama is poisoning the well and nobody will take this seriously in a long time because of it, because I do think action is needed and is urgent.

Me too. Any post about this petition instantly gets filled with toxic comments like “fuck that cunt piratesoftware!” and it seems to have overshadowed everything else. I initially approved of the movement until I saw all the cult-like zealousy surrounding it. Hopefully other consumer protection movements like right to repair can make ground without devoling into internet shitflinging between youtubers.

I think this whole conversation is mixing two types of disagreements and is going to end poorly for that reason.

Absolutely! People who support it because of philosophical reasons are getting very upset over people giving practical criticism. Portability and maintainability of software are complex issues people make entire careers out of solving. You can’t just make it illegal for software to stop working.

That doesn’t mean companies should be allowed to purposefully brick your games for no reason, but there are cases where ensuring a game works forever would be a huge burden. The petition offers no exceptions, no practical guidelines, and no suggested punishment. It’s just “If you sell a game, that game must work forever, or else”. I see that affecting more small indie devs than large greedy corporations.

It’s what I’m claiming. Why hate on someone you don’t believe prevented the success of the petition? If the petition would have failed in the absence of his video, then why post this kind of content? He had nothing to do with the failure.