Ding ding ding. If they had made changes to improve the game, they would be advertising those changes. No rational company invests time and money into improving a product without capitalizing on those changes. Best case scenario, nothing noticable changes, worst case scenario, they have added anti-consumer features, like drm, game store/3rd party launchers, sign-in, telemetry, ads, and other crap.

Wired ones are great. They even talk to each other on different floors.

Accountability in the court of public opinion, the last line of defense. The public needs to understand that institutions will not save us. They are corruptable.

Okay, but I don’t think the scenario you are describing is particularly relevant to the comic. This looks like a white collar job application, not a blood diamond mine or sweatshop.

So back to the point at hand. The question is, why do you want to work here? It’s a super relevant question. If all that was important to you is money, you’d go work on an oil rig. But most people don’t do that. Thousands of intangible factors someone might choose a workplace besides just for cash. Work/life balance. Personal interest. Comfortable work environment. Relevant experience. Proximity to home. Perks…

The point of the question or interviews in general is to stand out from other applicants. The answer “I need cash” doesn’t make you stand out.

You don’t need the latest Nvidea GPU to self host your own computing. You don’t even need ssds. You arguably don’t even need that much RAM. A ten year old Dell work fine. Are you self hosting your own AI? Probably not. So what? AI is not mature enough that it is a necessity.

Are computing prices coming down? Unlikely before the AI bubble pops. I think we have taken for granted that computing will perpetually improve price/performance. This is not sustainable.

They did answer your question. Same way in a “capitalist” society: those who take more responsibility or risk earn more benefit. More/better food, more rank, more commission, more salary, better housing, better medical care, etc.

There are plenty of examples of this happening and also not happening under both capitalism and communism. Is there a trend? That’s a very long debate.

You aren’t wrong about those actions but it overestimates the importance of “might makes right” and seriously underestimates the importance of soft power. The meme you shared commits the same fallacy, as is the current US administration.

What crystal ball told you this was temporary? Every day for the past few years the consumer market moves further and further into serving only the wealthy. The people in power don’t care about selling RAM or other scraps to peasants.

The earth’s core is about 5500C and is mostly composed of iron and nickel, probably. Presumably, it would shrink tremendously going from 5500C to 0C so in theory you could calculate the rate of shrinkage using iron’s rate of thermal expansion. However the core is also under immense pressure which makes iron much denser (smaller) than on the surface of the earth. The immense temperature and pressure is a result of the action of gravity pulling the core onto itself.

The short answer I think is the earth cannot exist as we know it at anything below its core temp of 5500. Suppose we waved a magical wand that set it’s temperature to 0, it would implode on itself (along with the rest of the planet) and heat right back up to its current core temp of 5500 before you could measure the effects of thermal expansion.

Society has been steadily forgetting the importance of reliability, all in the name of convenience. And in the end, you get neither.

“They don’t make it like they used to”. Sure. Sure. Old man yelling at clouds. Blah blah. But when your light switches stop working because of some overly complex system that requires the switching data to travel twice around the world just to fucking turn a light on (or an AI to invent 15 Python scripts and a mathematical proof just to add two integers together), you’ve got a really fucking fragile system.

And you know what isn’t convenient? Fucking fragile products that break as soon as you touch them. Who the fuck wants a hammer made out of salami? Sure, it might look like a hammer, it might taste great, but it can’t drive a nail for shit. That’s a garbage product that belongs in the garbage.

An LLM can tell me a (lame) joke. So can Bob. Bob can also turn on the lights, and is pretty good at that. But those things together don’t automatically mean an LLM is good at turning on lights. They are fragile, by design, like the salami is!

Stay in your fucking lane tech companies.

but suddenly there is very little that connects both continents.

I think the Nazis would disagree with you.

Communism, brown skin, religions other than Christianity are still public enemy number one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exports_of_Canada

Anecdotally, it has made things worse. The shopping bags were already being reused as garbage bags, now I have to buy rolls of single use plastic bags instead. Worse, those tote bags are everywhere now, and so much less ecological.

You crave salt and fat because your body needs a little bit of these things to survive, but finding salt and fat out in nature is really really hard, so those cavemen that liked the taste of salty or fatty foods enough to make the extra effort to find those foods were more likely to survive to be your ancestors and you inherited that behaviour. That’s why you like McDonald’s, it’s full of the salt and fat that is hard to obtain if your diet consists of mostly roots and mushrooms and leaves.

McDonalds is bad for you because it’s unnaturally full of salt and fat. Far, far more than your body needs and far more than your cavemen ancestors would have eaten naturally. Especially if you eat McDonald’s often. Too much of anything turns that thing into a poison.

McDonald’s has only been around a generation or two. That’s not enough time for the people who crave McDonalds and eat too much of it to die off, leaving mostly people who don’t crave McDonalds to remain.

Why stop there? Why not fire all supreme court justices every two weeks, while you are at it. Who needs moderation? Let’s just fucking go whatever direction the wind is blowing. I’m sure that will lead to a functional, stable government that gets stuff done.

Enshitification is the specific process of capturing a supplier/consumer market through short term subsidies, squeezing out the competition, and then squeezing the suppliers and consumers directly.

Increasing prices alone isn’t enshitification. But increasing prices after sustaining artificially low prices for the purpose of creating a monopoly or quasi monopoly is enshitification.

Plex most definitely was providing a good quality product but was not generating revenue, and has little to no competition (Jellyfin is a bit debatable) as a result. Was it intentional or just incompetence? Hard to prove either way. I’d say the biggest argument against enshitification is that Plex is mostly a product instead of market space hosting suppliers and consumers, like Google, YouTube, AirBNB, Uber, etc.

So what you are saying is it’s not the immigrants that are arriving that is the problem, it’s what happens to them once they are here?

Shocker.

Mains electricity is highly regulated because it can and regularly does kill people and start house fires.

I’m not sure why the author chose this sentence and why you are picking it out. The author provided no evidence of it. Instead, when you read on it seems to be an ownership problem. People rotating in and out for a year on a ten year project. You can be the most competent and skilled worker, if you don’t get the opportunity to become invested in the success of a project, of course you won’t see the project become successful.

“Selfish” would be a situation where sufficient community exists that cooperation is at all possible. I think most preppers will simply tell you that they are expecting and prepping for complete collapse. As in, like it or not, “every man for themselves” would come to them, not them seeking it out.

In other words, without arguing why a “every man for themselves” situation can’t or will never happen, the rest of your argument becomes irrelevant.

Now that question is fascinating. Haiti comes to mind as an example scenario. Are community-skills relevant in the face of roaming gangs and anarchy? I think that depends on how desperate these gangs are for immediate versus long term survival and planning. I’m also not sure Haiti is an exhaustive example of the types of societal collapse that are possible or likely.