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Comment We're going to put 30 million people out of work (Score 1) 7

Very soon. That's on top of stuff like how Amazon uses 50% robots in its warehouses and that percentage continues to increase.

We are going to have major social problems when that unemployment hits. There isn't going to be anything for those people to do. Especially the Uber drivers. Uber is pretty much the bottom of employment in america, sub minimum wage in many cases. If you're at that level then it's because there isn't anything else for you.

People always say that there will always just be more jobs but what do you actually have the base that off of? I can tell you that I know history and there was widespread technological unemployment following both industrial revolutions. We didn't actually solve that technological unemployment until after world war II.

I guess we could do world war III only this time we've got nukes.

We could transition from a competitive society to a cooperative one but absolutely nobody except a handful of socialists wants to do that. And I mean a handful. Even among socialists a lot of them don't want to do it

Basically I'm just spitting out problems here without solutions. Happy to hear solutions but all I ever hear is people denying the problem exists.

That works. For a little while anyway.

Comment Isn't it the same tech as Apple Air tag? (Score 1) 29

And those seem to work just fine right? It's something I wouldn't think would ever in a million years work but somehow it seems like it does.

Sure there are going to be gaps. The messaging might not always be real time like we get used to with IMs. But if it's more secure and less traceable I could see there being a market for it.

I mean sure criminals. Bitcoin and cryptocurrency is a trillion dollar industry on the back of money laundering. But there are billions of people living in authoritarian regimes that have damn good reasons for wanting secure communications.

I don't really see a business model though.

Comment Re:You get to pick how much you invest in the game (Score 1) 15

True but that's a pretty simple game gameplay wise. If you're trying to make a fast action game like Mario kart I think it would be much harder to achieve what that game does.

That isn't to take away from those developers accomplishments, the game looks very nice for something two people made. But I don't think those guys could make Mario kart world. And keep in mind Mario kart world has a lot less content than you would expect. It has fewer tracks than the last Sonic the hedgehog kart racer...

It's just a different kind of game entirely. There's a reason triple a games are triple a games. You just have more scope.

You can make a cart racer on an indie budget but you're going to end up with something that while charming doesn't have all the pizzazz of Mario kart. Look up the recent Garfield kart racers as a good example. Fun little games but nobody's going to buy a $500 console for them.

Comment The studies I saw (Score 1) 35

Regarding Cash for clunkers indicated it made things worse. You got a relatively small tax break for your car and you needed to buy a new car in return.

So a whole bunch of perfectly good cars got destroyed for tax breaks by well-to-do people typically buying large SUVs often at the expense of a smaller car and us poor people like me kept driving our clunkers because we had to. It wasn't like they were going to give me enough money for my ancient Honda to go out and buy a new car.

Also by all measures if you go out and buy a new car the effect of making the new car on climate change far exceeds the effect of keeping an old car on the road.

I could see issues with cars that are more than 25 years old because if you go that far back you start having emissions problems. Again thinking back to my ancient Honda it put out a lot more emissions than even the 2008 year car I eventually had to replace it with because the Honda got stolen. But once you get to 2000 or so you've got plenty of zero emissions cars just need to enforce emissions testing.

Of course as I've pointed out before the problem with cars isn't the emissions anymore, it's the tire particulate. For Some reason hearing that really upsets people around here. I think because it's a problem with cars it's basically impossible to solve. I mean unless we can develop anti-gravity cars.

Comment Re:You get to pick how much you invest in the game (Score 2) 15

Not really. Modern video games required complex pixel shaders to achieve the look they want. Nintendo games especially have a tough time because they need to be bright and colorful and full of pizzazz. You can't just use off the shelf pixel shaders like you can with a unreal engine game.

I mean you can but everything will look like fortnite. Which isn't to say that fortnite is a ugly game, but it's a very specific style and if you copy it by using those default pixel shaders your game is going to look cheap.

This is a problem Japanese game studios have had for a long time. Going all the way back to Sonic boom where Sega tried to use the Cysis engine on the Wii u to disastrous results.

It's just plain hard to make games look like the kind of fun bright colorful Japanese games the Japanese game players expect and want. That means you've got a lot of people doing a lot of work a lot of which doesn't directly pay off.

And make matters worse they have to write for a underpowered system relatives of the ps5. The switch 2 is roughly equivalent to a PS4 pro. Which is a amazing technical feat in that form factor but it means that you're going to have to put a lot more work into your optimizations to make the games look like people expect.

If you want to see what happens when you don't have the money for that work look at Mario tennis or Star Fox on the Wii u. Both complete disasters.

Comment Re: Go BRICS! (Score 4, Informative) 47

It does, but there's a slight issue with that. In terms of the world's largest economies by GDP the BRICS countries rate as:

#2: China
#4: India
#10: Brazil
#11: Russia (sanctions not withstanding)
#17: Indonesia
#28: United Arab Emirates
#38 South Africa
#42: Egypt
#44: Iran (again, despite the sanctions)
#66: Ethiopia

Now it's not like these countries are doing absolutely nothing to mitigate things, but it would be really interesting to see some numbers on exactly how much of a proportionate contribution they are making to "fund mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions in poorer nations" when even lowly Ethiopia still has over 130 poorer nations to choose from.

Comment Re:That's pretty cool (Score 1) 48

In America it was tough to get anime on TV because parent groups considered it too violent. If you watch the shows we had when we were kids there was a lot of fighting but nobody ever really got hurt. Like how would the A-Team you could throw a grenade at somebody and they would just go flying through the air and you could fire a thousand machine gun rounds at them and not hurt anybody.

Hilariously the Rambo cartoon was less violent than GI Joe but it's still got pulled off the air because parents didn't like the association with Rambo. I had some of the toys when I was a kid because they were on clearance after the cartoon got pulled.

I'm actually surprised we got it as much robotech as we did. Same with Tranzor Z and Voltron. But there were several super robot animes that just never made it over here because of that.

And they cut a ton of Star blazers out because of the violence, to the point where the American cartoon didn't really make much sense.

Comment Re:Is this a surprise? (Score 1) 18

It's not that AI "knows" anything. It's just a big statistical web programmed with mass amounts of data

This just raises the question of what it means to "know". The LLMs clearly have a large and fairly comprehensive model of the world, the things in it and the relationships between them. If they didn't, they couldn't produce output that makes sense in the context of the models we have of the world, the things in it and the relationships between them.

Comment Re:50% of users watch anime (Score 1) 48

Good point. I never really got into shaman King but I think it's on the younger end of shonen fighting anime.

On the other hand so was Kekkashi so much so that it had the furigana in the opening for kids to sing along with because they were too young to read the kanji. And that show gets brutal about 40 episodes in. Maybe an aging demographic but still. I didn't make it far enough in the shaman King to see if it goes that route. I don't think it's as goofy as something like Lord of Lords Ryu Knight though.

Comment Also it means no actual savings (Score 1) 76

Georgia did those requirements and the cost of implementing them exceeds the cost of providing the health care. As usual it's cheaper to be a good person.

But this way Trump can lie and say to the CBO that they're going to save money by kicking people off and they can sell it to the public as getting lazy welfare Queens back to work.

And anyone who knows history knows that the whole welfare Queen thing started out as a anti-black and anti-gay slur.

Comment Re:That's pretty cool (Score 1) 48

No it won't. The kind of Mary Sue stuff that you're probably into, the isekai slop, isn't going anywhere. It's plenty profitable using its regular formula so it's not going to evaporate anytime soon. You might have to buy a Hidive subscription if you want the really crazy stuff. Like the stuff that mother's basement makes fun of in there this season of anime trash. But it's not going anywhere.

The real existential threat to anime is capitalism. They are pushing the animators way the fuck too hard even in South Korea and the entire industry is on the verge of breaking down. You can find tons of articles about it. Crunchyroll makes something like 120 million a month off of fees but somehow can't pay more than $180,000 for a entire episode of one of the best animated shows in existence like one piece or demon Slayer.

If you're an anime production company you make absolutely nothing off of streaming. The only chance you have to make money is merchandise and blu rays. Maybe mobile games if you're lucky.

It is absolutely shocking how low the budgets are for these huge series. It's absolutely not sustainable. Japan was running out of animators because of how badly they treated them so they moved to South Korea for most of the work and I think some of its making its way into China now but all that did was kick the can down the road. Both countries are now having the exact same problem where younger people aren't going into animation because you can't make a living doing it.

You can abuse artists a lot but there are limits to everything and the anime industry has been blowing past those limits for decades now. It's been riding on older talent that puts in the work because it's all they know but those people are literally dying sometimes from over work.

What pisses me off the most is the money is there it's just all going to the top like always. The anime industry needs unionization like Hollywood but for various reasons it's extremely hard to unionize in japan. I don't think they still use the Yakuza the bust unions, if you ever wondered why Japan didn't take out the Yakuza with Rico laws like America did that's why by the way, but they've got plenty of other ways to prevent workers from unionizing.

Anyway like most things it's the economy stupid. The kind of shows you probably like the best, the ones that are really not PC appropriate, do not bring in a lot of money. So it won't take much squeezing to make those all go away. Leaving a handful of pretty safe and tame shows like Black Clover and Boruto. Stuff like Bakeneko isn't going to survive much longer.

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