The referees are bureaucrats. Bureaucrats are white collar cops. They're the ones who enforce white collar laws.

There's a 80% chance that you are just now recoiling in horror. That's by design. Billionaires have spent the last 50 years telling you that bureaucrats are bad because bureaucrats are the ones who enforce laws that billionaires break.

Imagine if you're a criminal and you can convince the public to shut down the police. That's what billionaires did with bureaucrats and our minds.

The problem is no one is telling parents about the actual danger. If anything people go out of their way to tell parents there is no danger lying to them.

As a parent you are taught that you need to constantly watch out for random people on the internet.

You are then taught that the priests and preachers you leave your kid with are perfectly safe.

That's before we talk about other quacks and psychos like those Health guru types that use the same tricks religious people do just with weird fake medicine.

The problem here is that parents are giving an exaggerated sense of the threat online and told that the threats around them are minimal.

I'm not entirely sure why but I think it's that the powers that be don't particularly want various authorities to be questioned. I can't think of any other reason why for example major churches refused to report child sex offenders when they find them.

Sorry I guess I wasn't clear enough but no random online people they meet online aren't included in the heading people they know.

People they know means people with much closer social ties. Basically it's people who are in a trusted position of power.

This is not to say that you still don't need to worry about it but it's very unlikely your kid is going to meet somebody randomly online and get taken advantage of there.

It is infinitely more likely that a priest or a counselor or a medical quack is going to be the one taking advantage of your kids and what's worse you are likely to facilitate that unknowingly.

Parents know to watch out for random weirdos. And they teach their kids that. What they don't do is teach their kids to recognize when they are being taken advantage of by somebody who is trusted.

This is also by the way why the right wing religious extremists oppose sex education. Sex ed teaches kids when they were being abused and religious extremists want to keep the abuse on the down low.

The bottom line is we continue to ignore the primary vector of attack because well, I don't know the fuck why. Seriously.

Colorado for example passed a law requiring priests to report when they were told about child sex abuse and the priests managed to get the law overturned.

There is absolutely no reason for the priests to want to do that except that they want to be able to hide child sex predators inside their ranks.

Again I cannot comprehend why except maybe, and I'm literally just making wild guesses but this is the only one I can come up with, they have so many sex predators that they cannot imagine rooting them all out. That it would fundamentally break their organization if they tried.

We have decades and decades of studies on this. Children are going to be assaulted and taken advantage of by people they know who are in positions of power.

Most commonly this is going to be priests or pastors. The reason why isn't terribly difficult to understand. You've got some people who already have a screw loose so they join the priesthood to be celibate and then they're stuck in compromising positions with children.

What I haven't quite figured out is why every single organized religion goes out of their way to hide the pedophiles when they find them instead of just giving them over to the police. They all do it (except for the ones like the episcopals that don't care if their preachers are gay or married or gay married). But I don't get why.

But whatever the case going after Roblox isn't going to save any children. It is however going to be great for somebody's political career.

My side didn't suddenly get a quarter of a billion dollars from Elon Musk right at the end when it was needed most.

And that that spending only applies to the presidential race. If you take all the other races across the whole country the right wing outspends us two to one at least.

We get a lot of money from a lot of small donors to the presidential race every 4 years and it just barely lets us be competitive on the national stage for the presidency and nothing else.

It's like dude, don't you ever get tired of being wrong?

Corrupting unions. They just shut them down entirely.

Again you're just spouting right-wing propaganda and it is so damn sad. I can't tell if you're doing it to get a rise out of me or if you genuinely are that dumb.

It's Poe's law. Right wing opinions are indistinguishable from people parodying or pretending to be right wing. Because right wing opinions are so fucking absurd on the face of it.

I think cyberpunk still includes capitalism just a more fascist style capitalism where government and corporations are intermarried.

I know there are authors who have talked about what's coming before me. Because people here have mentioned some authors. I have no doubt that I'm not the first person to make the observation that the billionaire class would like to put a stop to capitalism.

But I don't think most people think about it or talk about it because I think it's just too far out there and too out of whack

I think it's literally outside of modern thinking for the most part. We have been intentionally boxed in to think the capitalism is the only system that can possibly work. There are socialists out there trying to convince people otherwise but they are few and far between and there's a lot out there to discredit them.

So the idea that capitalism might fall to something else entirely is just beyond what I think most people can envision. Even cyberpunk still is basically capitalist systems. The people at the top are still corporations concerned with having products and customers.

And I think that's the difference. The billionaires are looking to a tomorrow where there is no customers and no products just them getting everything they want.

I'd kind of worry about the opposite. Super fans might ignore problems because they're so excited about getting their hands on a new device.

Like back in the day I was hyper excited about the Sega Genesis and turbo graphics 16. I was way too broke a kid to get them at luanch and pick them up years later.

If I'd had one as a kid I think that would have blown my mind. Certainly playing altered beast on a kiosk did back in '89.

But it wasn't really until I had my own job that I could afford to buy my own consoles. Until then I had to be content with a commodore 64 that was bought for school work and often used for gaming and a Sega Master system that was left over from one particularly extravagant Christmas where the whole family came together to help get it (which looking back was absolutely insane given our income level, if I had the guess it was probably the result of a large bonus or a promotion that year).

Not that I was without food and stuff it's just that it wasn't a huge amount left over for expensive toys.

So going back to first generation Sega Genesis and turbo graphics 16 games when they started to get cheap and I had a job it was kind of disappointing to be playing stuff like China warrior and altered beast and revenge of Shinobi. I think I had built them up a little too much in my head. Later on I really started to appreciate revenge of Shinobi and there are some pretty impressive parts to eswat. Plus there is the holy Trinity of the tg-16 that is blazing lasers, legendary ax and dungeon explorer.

But by then I think the PlayStation would have been on the horizon and I'd be looking at stuff like Virtua fighter on the Saturn and Raiden project on the PSX. I'm pretty sure the 32x would have been out by then for some time and I've been looking at arcade perfect ports of space harrier and afterburner (although years later I found out those are 30 FPS).

I guess I'm saying it's a matter of timing and when you get the thing. If I'm getting it right at the beginning when all the excitement is there then I am inclined to ignore all the warts and just get too excited as a fanboy...

I don't think you can help but believe in capitalism.

In my first year of high school I had a mandatory economics class. There wasn't any math or statistics or anything useful like that. It was just about 6 weeks of capitalism rah rah rah. It was slotted in between drivers ed and the health class where they show you what it looks like to get an STD.

At the time it was just one more dumb course I had to take and do homework for it. I remember it being an easy A.

But looking back it was taking advantage of something called 4 to 14.

That's the idea that anything put in your head between the ages of 4 to 14 becomes a core part of your worldview. This is because children are able to learn and memorize before they are able to think critically.

It's something cults and religious extremists have been exploiting for ages. Anything you learn in that age group that's wrong or a lie basically has to go through a process called deconstruction where you separate the emotional and social effects of believing those things from the reality of them.

Capitalism does have its place and its places things that have lots and lots of competition that can be properly refereed.

The problem is that the people at the very top have decided they've had enough of capitalism. They are sick and tired of being dependent on consumers for the wealth, power and prestige and they are looking towards a post-capitalist world that does not include you and me.

And that is extremely hard for people to wrap their heads around. The idea that capitalism might go away with something other than socialism. I've been calling it techno feudalism but I don't think that lands with most people. It's something I'm not sure how to communicate.

I think it's gamers Nexus that has the good video on how China bypasses these export rules. Basically they bring cards in that have the chips they want but not the same amount of ram or the same amount of bandwidth and then they have plenty of engineers so they just rebuild them.

It does slow things down a bit but it's not like it's really stopping China from getting the chips.

I think there might be some really really high-end stuff they can't get using that method. But honestly I'm sure they can just use Black market tricks.

All that said China is absolutely working on their own homegrown solutions but they always do that. China even went to the so far as reverse engineering German ballpoint pen manufacturing so they could make their own high quality pens.

China makes it a point not to be dependent on other countries for manufacturing and because they have a large disposable workforce they aren't tempted to outsource manufacturing like countries like America where we don't particularly want to poison our groundwater or pay slave labor wages. Although at least here in the states that's absolutely changing... Christ what a world.

I mean I have put quite a bit of money into arcade cabinets back in the day so I'm not completely opposed to the idea of temporary entertainment.

Not that I would bother with these kind of micro transactions just because there's plenty of better places for my money to go for entertainment but still.

I think the issue is that the way stuff like this is structured it doesn't clearly indicate how temporary your purchases are. That's on purpose. Making the purchases feel permanent increases their relative value and let's companies charge more.

So it's a constant juggling act between making people feel like they bought something that they didn't and making sure they don't get sued for doing just that...

It's one of the many reasons I'm not a fan of mobile gaming.

I came across a weirdo on YouTube who loves Mobile gaming and plays free to play games almost exclusively and without ever spending any money. It's easy enough to do that I guess but I can spot the Skinner boxes pretty easily and it bothers me.

The real problem here is we turn everything into a for-profit Enterprise even things that very obviously shouldn't be.

Capitalism works great for things where there's lots and lots of competition. Assuming you have a referee in the form of bureaucrats enforcing antitrust laws.

But you just aren't going to get a lot of competition for something this specialized. That's why it's such a big deal. We already can see the free market isn't going to step up for these patients.

At some point we need out of the box thinking and the box we are all trapped in is the one we were put in when we were 12-year-olds taking junior high level economics courses telling us that the only way forward was to compete in an endless race to the bottom.

Just like it doesn't make sense to take a natural monopoly like electricity and hand it to a company to skim 10 or 20% off the top it does not make sense to take a natural monopoly like advanced medical research and then hand it off to companies that bugger off as soon as they realize it's not going to make them money hand over fist.

I get why because you don't want to lose out on micro transaction revenue but still kind of messed up.

I wonder if there are enough players left to attract the lawyer for a class action lawsuit. They're going to be people who bought stuff and only got to use it for a couple of months. The last couple of times I saw a major mobile game shut down I think they gave it at least 6 months notice after shutting off microtransactions.

I'm guessing Big Data means EA has already calculated that there isn't enough to attract a lawyer. It's amazing how just about every big computer technology in the last 20 years has kind of just made things worse. Big data to machine learning to AI/LLMs.

I don't think it's just enshitification though. That's a thing sure but I think there's more to it. Market consolidation means we get fewer and fewer products focused for consumer's benefit. Most big new tech is meant to make more profits for the big big corporate players.

It's why we see so little cool new tech. Because the new tech is in for us.

Well the easiest way to measure productive output is income. But you're right that it's not a good way.

I mean we pay Farm workers like shit and we would all be dead of starvation without them. Meanwhile there are guys on Wall Street making millions a year because they funnel billions into the hands of about 2 or 3,000 people

Long before AI. I agree we need a shift to class work though. Multiple studies show homework is pretty close to useless except for very small doses of it.

But that cost a lot of money and who's going to pay for it?

Years ago, before the current run of funding cuts, my kid used to have to race to their math class to get a seat because the last five or six kids had the stand in the back. There were 45 kids in that class.

Nationwide there is a huge push for voucher programs. The two places they have been tried 95% of them are taken by wealthy parents already sending their kids to private schools. It really is just a way for the rich to avoid paying for everybody else to go to school.

I'm sure having vast swaths of unemployed and unemployable and uneducated people capable of holding firearms during a major push for automation is going to turn out fine though. It's not like we had 25% unemployment right before world war II right?