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.
I love the fact that they just print too! No more “inkjet cleaning test prints”, I’ve saved so much time, money, and frustrating switching to a brother black and white laser printer… For the average (?) “I just need to print official documents” kind of person, it’s a great buy.
I need them because if I don’t have car insurance for example i get a fine. I need health insurance otherwise i have to pay out the ass. 2 stupid things made by some money hungry old fuckers that just want to collect even more money. This is just 2 examples of all kinds of insurance. The whole system is in place to make the rich richer for something meaningless.
I will say insurance companies can be very quick to fight you when it comes to giving out money. Keep at it and you’ll get something, but considering how long you can pay them month to month without using it, it’s obnoxious.
Except health insurance. Health insurance is a fucking racket, the medical industrial complex it ties into is a racket, and the United States would be a better place if it gutted this system
One pays resort fees at resorts when booking a room only, outside the normal packages. It’s to pay for and use the other perqs like the free booze, the free food, the pool, the tennis courts, and for access onto the private beach. .
Vegas offers none of these things, yet demands a resort fee because, essentially, fuck you.
Haha I thought it would be funnier to say that and not elaborate further. But yeah, even though I use it, essentially it’s a western thing - a large portion of the population use bidets or “bum-guns” that are installed into toilets. It’s actually a lot cleaner, environmentally friendlier, cheaper, but arguably at first hard to get used to from a western perspective. But yeah toilet paper has huge industry and money behind it so capitalism perpetuates it.
Bidets are amazing. I had one for years until I moved (current toilet would be rather difficult to install an attachment to) and holy crap do I ever miss it.
I went to Thailand for a holiday, came back a bum-gun convert. For ~$50, we installed one onto our toilet and haven’t looked back - there’s no need when everything’s spotless.
There’s next to no difference in regards to payroll processing on a week by week basis. Companies want to push this to a fortnight or month so it’s easier on their finances. There’s very little reason it couldn’t be paid weekly.
The employer basically gets an interest-free loan for that extra week; whereas the employee might need to pay interest to a third party to make up for any shortfall on their end (e.g. credit cards, payday loans). Majority of people live paycheck-to-paycheck and can’t cover an unexpected $1000 expense.
Technically every day you are not paid is an interest rate free loan to your employer. That said, being paid once a month is fine for me since all my fixed expenses are also paid on a monthly basis.
I don’t know if it’s so much a scam as it is banks and companies and such being stuck in the past.
You could be getting paid every week or even every day, it’s your money, you already earned it, why should you have to wait for it?
Especially in this day and age where everything is computerized. You punch in, you punch out, the computer knows how long you worked, somewhere in their payroll system they know how much you earned, what needs to be withheld, etc. It takes fractions of a second for a computer to do that math, they could send that transaction the moment you clock out.
When things were more manual, it made sense, you had to have someone adding things up, and doing math, computers were bigger, slower, less user friendly, more expensive, and not all hooked up to the Internet up to the Internet to talk to each other. It used to make a lot of sense to do things in big batches at the end of the day, every week, every 2 weeks, 2 or 3 times a month, whatever.
But now you could put in your 8 hours work, and walk out with your days wages already in your account ready to be used for whatever you need it for immediately, no more being broke until payday, payday is every day. But that’s not how it works because as far as the banks and such are concerned everything is working fine for them, so no real need to update their shit.
Couldn’t this be switched around too? I’m only paying some of my bills every other month or twice a year. Why shouldn’t I be paying those off every week or even every day?
Paying on your mortgage every week can drastically reduce your interest, depending on how your interest is calculated. Even if you pay the same amount at you would per month, paying it every week could save thousands of dollars.
It absolutely could, everyone manages their money in their own way. If that’s something that works for people I think they should have that option.
Personally when possible, I do like to do things that way. If I owe, say, $100/month on my car payment, I will tend to pay $50 with each paycheck instead of $100 once a month, and if I got paid every week, I would probably choose to pay $25 a week instead. For me and how my brain is wired, it’s just easier for me to mentally keep track of things when they’re in smaller, more frequent increments. I don’t know if I would quite break it down to ~$5 a day if I got paid every day, but i’d consider it.
Really? Is that a thing? Where I live getting paid per month is the norm. Some people get paid per 4 weeks instead of per month. But I don’t know of any trade where payment per week or twee weeks is the norm. Stuff like rent, mortgage, water, gas and electric etc. is all done per month. So it makes sense to match the income cycle to the bill cycle.
Puts living paycheck to paycheck in perspective. I can image not getting ends to meet on a monthly basis. But if you can’t afford the next week, you have basically nothing.
I know there is a lot of overhead with payroll where I live, so if companies would have to do it more often, that would be pretty expensive. There are a lot of rules and regulations, so it takes a lot of work to do it right.
Hell yeah, they’re recording my time by the second, they should pay me by the second. If I’m clocked in you can be depositing a penny every 6 seconds into my bank account. If we started charging interest for the time between your paycheck being earned and being paid out they would figure out how to make that happen.
In Germany and Austria being paid per month is the norm. All the laws are defined for that. So pretty much everyone who works gets paid just once a month, that’s it (Well, in Austria you get 14 salaries, so you get an extra salary every 6 months). It makes zero difference if you get your money one time a month or half your money two times a month, it’s the same amount in the end.
Getting paid more often would just complicate things, as it can depend on how much overtime you did in a month. Or how often you went into the office (you get lessened taxes based on how far the office is away and how often you have to drive there and if there is suitable public transport to get there).
How in the world is that a scam? I’ve been paid once a month to every day in my career and I far prefer the once a month situation but every 2 weeks is fine with me. Every day is just tedious. Once a week has the same problem but different scale. Once a month means I can actually plan out my bills easily.
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.
They’re a fund raising tool for the troop, which is very transparent. Nobody is forcing you to buy them, but people love them and do so voluntarily. Where’s the scam?
I agree that it’s a bit of a stretch. What I think they’re getting at is that individualism as it’s pushed by imperialist media creates the toxic environment that fosters the cultural traits that you’re referring to.
No only that, but it’s entirely possible to be an individual who can participate successfully in a collective. They’re not mutually exclusive or contradictory things. You can have goals and aspirations that focus exclusively on you without negatively affecting your contributions and interactions within a group. Life is nuanced, things aren’t as black and white as people often seem to think.
Once you realize you arent special you will be more humble and willing to help all the others that are just like you. Collectivism leads to a peaceful mind for you the individual.
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