Because without recurring revenue you're not going to be able to make enough money to keep your software business afloat. I watched several software companies in the 90s and early 2000s go tits up because they just sold their software and everybody bought it and it worked and it was fine and it was great but nobody ever bought more software because the software they had was fine and great so the company eventually sold to everyone who could buy and they went out of business.

If you're going to run a service you need to have all the infrastructure that goes with that and that's where the cost is and always has been. Not the building of the app any schlub has been able to do that for ages. It's building out and maintaining the back end while getting enough customers or monetizable users.

Trump just created a 1.7 billion dollar slush fund for him and his buddies. You don't need to excuse anything. The news media is 90% billionaire owned and they just won't cover it when all this shit's going on. A large percentage of voters are either low information or bad information voters and a little voter suppression at the county level takes care of the rest.

Barring a miracle we're going to be a Russian style dictatorship in 10 years and a techno feudal hellscape in 20 or 30.

But at least trans kids can't play sports right? Is it the culture War fun?

What pisses me off is that if the press actually talked about the recession we are in, and it is a recession if you take out the ridiculous amounts of money spent on AI slop we are in a deep recession, then people would wake up and poll numbers would collapse and while the current Republican party in charge of everything wouldn't do anything to help they would at least stop making things substantially worse.

But because they control the media now, literally 90% of all media is owned by billionaires and if you're paying attention you are really seeing them exercising that power fully for the first time ever, well it's simply not allowed to talk about it.

But what's frustrating is people can see it happening but because the economy is a large complex thing it hasn't hit them personally yet and there's a core of about 20% who it probably never will with another 20% who will probably escape the worst of it and because of all that without someone explicitly telling them the state of the economy they just blitheringly and blissfully go about their lives thinking everything is fine and if you're struggling it's because of some moral failure or another...

This is why people call journalists the 4th estate and why it's such a huge problem that they are now completely under the control of billionaires. In the past what would stop that is journalists could do muckraking to make money and then on the side real journalism but the billionaires figured that out so if you're a muckraking journalist they will sue you into Oblivion like they did Gawker.

People really don't realize the importance of the institution of journalism or what journalism actually is. To be blunt I only know because I took some courses in high school along with some mid-level college history courses.

Ordinarily with prices this high somebody would take the plunge. I would bet money that in 10 or 15 years we're going to find out they were colluding. It'll take that long for the Democrats to put the regulatory apparatus back in place assuming we aren't knee deep in the El Naranja's third term.

So basically I suspect the memory producers have all agreed not to increase production and there's no way a new player could enter the market because with the complete lack of antitrust law enforcement the memory manufacturers would just drop their prices and run the newbie out of business.

This is exactly what happened with LCD panel prices until, as usual a democrat, stepped in and enforced the law so that the trusts were broken up and prices immediately plummeted.

Folks need to understand the bureaucrats are more than just the annoying guy at the DMV. They're the guys that make it so that large corporations can't manipulate markets to screw you over. Or they used to be anyway. Now they're just unemployed.

Journalists want to use the terms that are being given to them by the people involved in the story. It's a vulnerability in the basic concept of journalism.

Also 90% of our news media is owned by billionaires now and they are exerting their power so any attempt to push back against any narrative that inconveniences the ultra wealthy just gets you fired. During the last election I watched Donald Trump lose his marbles multiple times on stage without it being covered meanwhile Joe Biden stutters a bit and we get a 3 week media cycle.

I watched a couple dozen journalists get dog walked because they pushed back against that narrative and were immediately fired by their billionaire bosses.

The fourth estate has fallen. Virtually all the institutions designed to protect you have broken down. That is going to get real bad real soon and there's fuck all we can do about it

We literally made Biff Tannen presidents of the United States. Honestly Trump is probably worse as far as I know Biff wasn't a pedophile.

There is a massive automation push going on. And it's naive to think that it doesn't work at all.

At the very least you can use it to get quick answers that would normally require more skilled googling than most people can do.

Those kind of productivity boosts quickly turn into layoffs and reductions in force.

And remember good enough is always good enough when you have no competition because you haven't been enforcing antitrust law in decades. Yes the quality of AI generated products might be shit but you're going to have to buy something at some point to live and you're going to have to buy it from one of seven companies because they own basically everything.

And if a competitor does start to come up they will either be run out of business or bought and there's nothing anyone can do about it because we're not going to start voting for politicians who will enforce antitrust law. Even if you do your neighbors don't.

And it's happening whether you want it to or not. It doesn't matter whether any of it works because they will make it work. Over half of Americans are white collar workers and the prospect of replacing them with automation is to tantalizing to give up.

Even if only a third of this crap works you're looking at permanent 20% unemployment on top of the typical 5% that the economy floats around. And that's pretending we are at full employment by pretending gig work is full-time work and ignoring underemployment and the millions of people who just gave up looking for work and the ever-increasing number of homeless people.

As a reminder world War II started with 25% unemployment.

I don't think there's a solution. We are just going to put too many people out of work and we're not putting everybody out of work all at once. This means the people who still have jobs are going to fight it out with the people who are now completely economically useless to society. In the middle will be the trillionaires consolidating their power.

I suspect eventually we will hand the nuclear launch codes to some religious lunatics and then it's game over. It is possible the trillionaires will simply create their techno feudal nightmare as well.

But I do not know how you overcome the concept of, if you don't work you don't eat. That is so deeply ingrained in people and there's nothing more infuriating than watching somebody stay at home playing Xbox drinking beer and getting laid when you're putting in 60 hours a week at a shit job you hate. No amount of logic or reason and no amount of telling you to start asking why you're working so hard for so little will change the emotional knee-jerk reaction or the ability for those trillionaires to point you at the unemployable and get you the fight with them crabs in a bucket style.

And this is before all the other social problems with employment collapsing, like how men traditionally are valued as providers and that role is becoming obsolete or how we have tons and tons of people who are just not ever going to be able to hack it academically but that we have absolutely no use for... Especially in a country that refuses to fund infrastructure which is pretty much all countries.

If somebody wants to suggest a specific way out of this trap besides just dismissing this as Doom and gloom I would be happy to hear it. I have noticed that people have stopped accusing me of being a luddite. It's too obvious that the storm is coming at this point to pretend it's not.

Everyone just seems to be hoping they die before the shit hits the fan. But I think it's coming too fast. Even some of the baby boomers aren't going to escape it anymore. You can't have shit like a data center in Utah sucking down more electricity than the entire state and not have consequences that are immediate and devastating for the surrounding communities

It's a question of what you traded that money for or what your neighbors traded it for.

So when people go to vote they have a hierarchy of issues they use to pick what's most important to them.

This is why you have Trump sitting at a 40% approval rate in polling averages but a 70% disapproval rate on the economy. People prioritize different issues or just confidence in the man versus what they can see happening day-to-day with their own eyes...

The most common and Stark example of this are people who prioritize moral panics over economic issues. So somebody who votes for a political candidate who is going to cut services they desperately need because that political candidate promises to protect them from trans girls in sports or ethics in game journalism or the woke mind virus or whatever the current mortal panic is. Back in my day it was violent video games and before that satanic rock music... Kind of miss those days.



They also have a hierarchy of information. Everybody hits an information limit at some point. I haven't dug into the particulars of how the Democrat party apparatus works for example although I know I should because it's important to understand. Compare that to a much much lower information voter I'm better able to make informed decisions.

So the basic problem is people will trade money and privacy for addressing moral issues and that people have varying amounts of information they have access to and can process.

Fundamentally improves education with an emphasis on critical thinking would fix this but the problem is parents don't like that. Little Johnny gets taught how to dismantle arguments and systems and he comes home and points the skills that whatever sacred cow the parents have, most commonly religion but also a variety of incorrect political views or moral views.

Parents want their kids to have enough thinking skills that they can get a good job and avoid being scammed but not so many that they can no longer relate to their children. They don't want schools creating a generational gap. In some extreme cases like the Jehovah witnesses they have traditionally stopped their members from going to college at all because they lost them so quickly. One of the quickest ways to leave extremist American evangelism is to sit down and actually read the Bible critically...

So every time you see something like this you have to stop and think how did I vote in the last election and what did I trade and what did I get for that trade.

You might say that you did all right but the problem then becomes your neighbors.

And that was the reason why they were pulling them, not the desire for exclusivity.

Pulling them off of PC is actually a problem for Sony because modern AAA games are so expensive to produce that it's difficult for them to be profitable on a single platform. Even when you have the most popular platform out there like Sony does.

I don't think helldivers was ever really designed to be a PlayStation exclusive. Also don't think it was meant to take off like it did. It's closer to a AA game in scope. When you play something like the Horizon games with all the voice acting and cut scenes and incredibly elaborate animation and dozens of different features and options and hyperbalanced gameplay you are looking at something that had a ridiculous budget.

So something like helldivers 2 had somewhere around 50 to 70 million dollar budget versus the 200 million they spend on Horizon Forbidden West.

Also the hell divers games were in development for 8 years, a lot of the budget was just development hell where is the Spider-Man games or the Horizon games cost that much even when the games were making solid progress in development because they were just so freaking huge in scope.

Sony came to the PC hoping to make enough money to make the games themselves profitable or at least break even. It doesn't seem like a modern single player, triple A game can be profitable. Even Grand theft Auto needs to rely heavily on multiplayer content to do it.

There aren't a lot of AAA PC games these days and Sony's releases were some of the few we got and they were all the very high quality.

But this isn't because they're trying to be evil or anything they just aren't selling enough copies to justify the ports.

If the cost of a PS5 was low I could see that because people would just buy the PS5 and not bother with the PC version but with a PlayStation 5 pushing $700 for the base console that doesn't seems like it wouldn't be the case. I don't know the demographics though but the facts of the matter is they aren't selling enough units for anything except the Spider-Man games.

Ever tried running Windows Vista on a minimum spec computer? Painful doesn't even begin to describe it. That's where we're at right now with Windows 11 but at least in the case of Vista they were doing a bunch of fancy modern operating system tricks that brought new features, albeit stupid new features but still they were genuinely trying new features. The hardware at the time couldn't handle that, you really need it about four times as much RAM and an SSD to do what they were doing and that was just too expensive for oems at the time so when does Vista crawled on anything but a high-end gaming PC.

With Windows 11 we've got all that shit performance but absolutely no new features except the operating system spies on me now and feeds all my data into Microsoft's AIs so they can sell co-pilot to my company after firing me. Or at least that's the goal it's debatable whether or not it's going to work out for them but in the meantime my computer runs like shit unless I run Linux or Windows 10 and both of them have issues with games and other complex software...

The basic idea, which their own people have admitted, came from a old Japanese live action TV series called ultra 7 which is in the Ultraman series.

So it's patently ridiculous, pun intended, for them to be trying to get patents on something they didn't come up with on their own. Never mind the obvious ridiculousness of everything about this.

Window 11 is painful to use. Things draw in like I'm on a Pentium 3 with 256mb of RAM.

If you can't spy on me without killing performance don't do it.

You are probably Gen x. Or at least younger boomer. I say that because what you probably experienced is a unique phenomenon only Gen x saw which was a lot of crappy teachers because there was a whole bunch of people who went to college to get out of the Vietnam draft and they just hung out in college until the war was over. When they were done they had to cobble together a degree and a bunch of them went into teaching and they really suck that it. Most of them became history teachers which is why Americans suck so much at knowing history...

Those guys are long gone and anyone left in education is extraordinarily dedicated because the pay really really really sucks especially after that much education. Also you work a lot. You don't have a choice you can't function as a teacher unless you are working your ass off. You are constantly busting your ass on lesson plans and you spend Summers putting them together. The state gives you guidelines not a complete guide and plan to follow. You still have an enormous amount of work to do there on top of grading all the papers and providing tutoring.

Yeah back in the late 80s and early 90s we had a small rash of bad teachers. They are long long gone but as usual old people cannot comprehend the idea of that change happens and it's something that occurred when they were young isn't occurring anymore. Not sure why old people do that but they all do. I do it too I just try to catch myself doing it and I sometimes fail.