Before I agree with that one I’d have to add some more details. Patents–entering the details of your invention into the public record in exchange for temporary exclusive right-of-way over the monetization of your product, after which it becomes public domain for others to expand upon–is a good idea. It hasn’t been managed particularly well of late, but the concept is sound.
Copyrights as a concept are great. They’re meant to protect inventors/creators by giving them guaranteed exclusivity over the implementation of an idea or the sale and use of a product.
The problem is the fucking things can be held by corporations, and keep getting extended to ridiculously long durations.
The concept of the patent office is a genuine one of too idealistic. Having been through the process it did feel like they pushed back for revisions with the sole intention of squeezing some more money out of the filer. Perhaps like insurance companies rejecting every claim initially.
The protection it affords is questionable. It’s really just a 1st place ribbon you can bring to court if you have the money to sue somebody copying you… A lot of that is glorified brand warfare: if you’re too similar to WD40 they’ll sue you regardless of what’s in your can.
Though originally encouraged to be layman friendly it now strongly uses overly technical jargon to obscure the invention while still legally protecting it.
That said, it holds a lot of collective knowledge that us nerd types can reference when innovating. Otherwise that knowledge is locked up in private corporate data stores or college curriculums. It’s the original open source repo. It eeks out a win in the big picture despite the abuses capitalism inflicts on it.
The best part is it didn’t really start as a scam. It started as “health assurance” in which you paid a membership fee and they covered all your medical expenses.
I should’ve added patents as well. They both have a purpose, which is to compensate creators and researchers. Although I agree with that purpose, imagine how much further society could progress if we could freely build upon each others creations, as soon as they come out. I believe medicine, technology, and art would benefit immensely. The ones who benefit the most from patents and copyright are for profit corporations anyways. It seems like the whole thing works against society, rather than for it.
Battle passes and most microtransactions in games. Day one patches, and GaaS games, always online games and expiring media licenses. VAC bans on Steam.
I bought a game a few years ago (can’t remember which one) and there was barely anything on the disc! My xbox copied maybe 100MB of data from the disc, and had to download the remaining 30+ GB. The disc is essentially just a giant license key these days.
It made me think of this revolutionary idea: Why not finish the game before the deadline, and put the game on the disc? Wow.
Oh, yeah, that’s the new normal, I’m a bit surprised they gave you a whole 100MB to call your own.
The modern Dad pro-move for giving the kids a game console for Christmas is to sneak the box open, set it up, do all the ridiculous downloads and patches then sneak it all back into the box nice and tidy so that the kids can just open it and go on Christmas morning.
Oh, yeah, that’s the new normal, I’m a bit surprised they gave you a whole 100MB to call your own.
…and then you realize that they will eventually shut the online service down for that console and you won’t be able to play the game you bought anymore at all, despite buying a physical copy.
Wait, why VAC bans? You need to earn those by cheating in a multiplayer game. Ultimately, the game company is responsible for combating cheating and moderating the game, otherwise its value is plummetting. Also, you get warnings first / time bans till you get caught too many times doing the same thing.
Because they’re automatic and irreversible, and mistakes happen. I once worked for a different game company that auto banned people from games too, but I know at least some of them didn’t, it ability to detect wasn’t perfect and we absolutely banned people from time to time incorrectly. We just left people with no recourse and pretended that just wasn’t possible. We never reversed our bans either.
I think that expecting no day 1 patches is kind of unreasonable. More specifically for PC games at least. It’s really not the end of the world if they have to fix a few bugs in the first couple of days. It’s the companies that don’t fix broken content for weeks or even months+ that are problematic. It’s not like back in the day where they could ship a game out and know exactly what equipment people are gonna have. People are playing Skyrim on toasters ffs no company is gonna get it exactly right for everyone at launch. I’m pretty forgiving for the most part as long as they communicate and make it up to the players when appropriate. I have considerably less patience for bigger companies that release dumpster fires or incomplete games on purpose. They can rot.
It’s actually pretty reasonable for console games as well, if not more so. Because consoles get physical releases, they need to put a version of the game onto the disk/cartridge long enough before the launch date to produce, ship, and stock the game where ever it gets sold. So the physical release gets a 1.0.0 version, and by the launch date, whatever other bug fixes and the like we’re done get pushed as a day one update.
How are day one patches a “scam” exactly? Maybe they’re inconvenient, but calling it a “scam” is a bit of a stretch. There’s really nothing malicious about the idea at all. Also VAC bans, really?
I know people who used to work in game QA work, the key term is used to, the work isn’t there anymore. Yes those jobs literally still exist, but it’s not like it used to be, they’re almost always contractors and where they used to hire in droves, the cycles are shorter and more last minute, with less people.
The dirty truth is that day one patches are a result of trading a release date for money - they budget for releasing, getting money from the sales, and using that to pay the last part of development. They’re borrowing against the future, and they collect so much data from games that they get to effectively test games they know are not finished on consumers.
I paid for an extended warranty for my TV, because the TV was expensive (83 inch LG OLED C2), the extended warranty was only $100, and it extended the warranty from 1 year to 5.
Check your credit card perks too - A lot of credit cards give you one year extended warranty for free.
US warranties are the real scam. Only one year for a $3500 TV? They don’t get away with that in countries with proper consumer protection… In Australia, products have to last as long as “a reasonable consumer” would expect them to last, for example 10-15 years for a fridge. The company must repair or replace the product if it breaks down during that time frame, regardless of how long they say the warranty is for. If it’s a large appliance, they must pick it up and drop it off for free. You must be able to return a product to the store you bought it from for warranty issues - they can’t say that you have to go to the manufacturer. Saying “no refunds” is illegal (except for on second-hand products). Companies that violate these rules get fined hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Americans take it as received wisdom that homes are meant to generate income through higher valuations over time. We just assume home prices go up over time and if it’s not actively increasing in value, the home was a failure.
Many other countries don’t treat homes this way. They are dwellings, invest what you want to your liking, but it’s not a retirement account.
This focus on wealth generation creates lots of perverse incentives, such as exclusionary zoning, building on lots that are overly large, and suburban sprawl. These don’t reflect people’s actual, desired form of housing but rather maximize wealth for homeowners at the expense of everyone else.
We have a completely warped view of housing that causes us to be preyed upon by real estate agents, landlords, HOAs and the like.
So much shit around bicycles is a scam because barring some major inventions like shocks for mountainbikes or maybe carbon frames it’s very much a solved problem, but it doesn’t fit into a capitalist economy if everybody just buys one bicycle and then occasionally parts for it to fix it.
Same in Denmark, just have a bike there can handle your needs and that’s it. One bike can transport you everyday and be a Mountain bike(we don’t have mountain’s)
College. The learning is fine, the cost is freaking out of hand. I never went and have no regrets. My daughter is going now and I feel like I’m supporting a scam.
Anything you take out loans for is a scam. I doubt the cost of houses or college would be anything like it is today if people weren’t enabled to pay it by banks.
In Australia you get a loan for university, but the loan is an interest-free loan with the government (it’s just indexed for inflation once per year), you don’t have to pay it off until you’re earning over around AU$55k/year, and the government heavily subsidises the cost for citizens and permanent residents.
Definitely not true in all of Europe. We pay in the Netherlands. In fact, I decided to go to school here since I never got to in the US, and found out I can’t even take out a student loan because I’m over 35.
Depends on the degree. Internet made colleges much more obsolete than what society care to admit. This is an oversimplification of course. Education is a complex subject.
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