Soo, how would they "subsidize everything"? I mean, where would the money come from? Materializes out of thin air?

Joke is on him. Steam allows refunds. And they get used.

And buy the slop before they know! Great business idea!

I guess this asshole does not know that Steam does refunds and often does refunds far beyond the "2h played" official limit. I have used it several times, never an issue.

But it still means some diversification in the more general landscape. It also means they can now, for a while, move again with lower effort.

While Google is probably not the best choice, the move also causes increased flexibility. They will now, for a while, be able to move again with relatively low effort.

That the move is difficult just shows how direly needed it is.

It should be in a database.

Who ever created it should be ordered to check all the calculations with a 1960's mechanical calculator each time there is an update.

"Dumb company runs its finances on 20-million-cell spreadsheets" is my takeaway from that.

AI is pretty good for voiceover work, reducing not only the cost but the time to completion. Its only real flaw with the latest tech is the pacing, but it doesn't take much for a human to correct that. It's not at all what I'd call slop. A major problem with human voiceover is everything has to be well planned in advance, you have to get a sound studio and do it all in one run, and once it's done you can't go back and change anything without a big expense.

That and the modder scene can't do anything to replicate voices from the original game, making character interactions pretty jarring. AI has a decent chance of eliminating all of that.

Shit, maybe even like that video game headset in three body problem where character interactions are done in real-time without fucking with dialog menus. We're already pretty close to that with just text in a big server farm.

Sure, what we have now is still slop everywhere else, but that's no reason to be dismissive of it yet, or worse, be like rsilvergun and raise torches and pitchforks because it took his job as a 65 year old fry boy.

Indeed. About time.

You must be new here.

Difficulty doesn't come into play. What does is how unique and/or replaceable your particular talent and/or skill is. Everybody can learn to build an airplane that flies after going to school for a few years. There's nothing special about that. But some people are going to create better designs with the same amount of effort.

How did you reach this conclusion? Do tell. What math did you use? Don't forget to justify your own pay while you're at it.

Though it honestly sounds like you're using the labor theory of value, a concept either invented or made popular by Karl Marx. He believed that the amount of labor you put into something determines its worth. So by his own reasoning. Mein Kampf is more valuable than the Communist Manifesto. Or maybe you believe that the difficulty of it determines its worth, but if you do that, you're going to reach the same conclusion, only using a different method.

And that also makes me wonder: Why do you even care? What is the point in caring about it? Let me guess, you believe that the more the CEO of the place you work at makes means the less pay you get? Only it doesn't. The economy isn't a zero-sum-game, only fools believe otherwise. If you took away money from the CEO, your pay will not increase. Instead, that money just goes somewhere else in the company, where exactly really depends on what they're prioritizing, but it's not going to employee salary. It may just pay dividends to the shareholders.

If your coworker in the desk next to yours makes more than you, are you going to demand that some of his pay gets taken away to go to you? Better yet, do you have any idea what determines your pay? Raising your pay won't increase your productivity. You may believe it does, but it doesn't. You're paid whatever your employer thinks it's worth to retain your services instead of having you go somewhere else. That's all it comes down to. You know the best way to increase your own pay? Go work somewhere else. Really. If another employer thinks your pay is worth that, they'll pay you that. Guess who else does this? CEOs. Just because you think his pay isn't worth billions (hint: Nobody gets paid this much, at that level it comes from assets they own appreciating in value) or even millions (very few people get this, and they are not all CEOs or even financiers, some are just actors, engineers, etc) doesn't mean that nobody else thinks they're worth that much.

I'm going to haul in $385k of taxable income this year, would you pay me that much? Somebody does. I'm just a line worker, not management, definitely not a CEO. The last place I worked at I made more than my manager did. My skillset doesn't include managing people. There may even be more hollywood actors than CEOs who make 7 digit figures, I'm not sure, but I think it's plausible. Why are we complaining about CEOs but not them again? You just really like Tom Cruis's smile or something?

Mind you, I'm not complaining about hollywood, just making a point. You're complaining about elitists you know nothing of, while leaving the ones you are familiar with alone. This is the modern definition of populism.

It doesn't matter what they tell you. Not a bit. Every case you're talking about is something they were able to negotiate into their own contract. Just like pay, if you feel you're worth it, demand it when you apply for your job. Whether you get that depends on whether the other party thinks you're worth the risk.

This is rarely ever the case. People who make big bets are usually single guys with no mouths to feed. You can recover from practically anything if that includes you. All you really need is a marketable skill and a high appetite for risk. No money required. The risk calculus changes if you have mouths to feed.

Indeed. But the proponents of the hype are not rational.

FYI, their statement about Iceland is wrong. BEV sales were:

2019: 1000
2020: 2723
2021: 3777
2022: 5850
2023: 9260
2024 (first year of the "kílómetragjald" and the loss of VAT-free purchases): 2913
2025: 5195

Does this look like the changes had no impact to anyone here? It's a simple equation: if you increase the cost advantage of EVs, you shift more people from ICEs to EVs, and if you decrease it, the opposite happens. If you add a new mileage tax, but don't add a new tax to ICE vehicles, then you're reducing the cost advantage. And Iceland's mileage tax was quite harsh.

The whole structure of it is nonsensical (they're working on improving it...), and the implementation was so damned buggy (it's among other things turned alerts on my inbox for government documents into spam, as they keep sending "kílómetragjald" notices, and you can't tell from the email (without taking the time to log in) whether it's kílómetragjald spam or something that actually matters). What I mean by the structure is that it's claimed to be about road maintenance, yet passenger cars on non-studded tyres do negligible road wear. Tax vehicles by axle weight to the fourth times mileage, make them pay for a sticker for the months they want to use studded tyres, and charge flat annual fees (scaled by vehicle cost) for non-maintenance costs. Otherwise, you're inserting severe distortion into the market - transferring money from those who aren't destroying the roads to subsidize those who are, and discouraging the people who aren't destroying the roads from driving to places they want to go (quality of life, economic stimulus, etc)

It would be nice if they used those taxes to actually pay for road maintenance in California. It's actually incredible, right when you cross the California border into Arizona, the price of gas goes from $5.55/gallon to $2.89/gallon, and the roads suddenly become drivable. That was my exact experience yesterday. Literally, the potholes on the Arizona side were all filled in (you can see the patches) where in California they're just left open. And this is out in the middle of fucking nowhere, desert plains for miles.

You are welcome.

Porkies