corporations have too much power over customers already, EULAs should be made null and void - ain't going to happen though:/
Starcraft and Diablo 2 were pretty much balanced in the we-them relation. They offered matchmaking service you could access _voluntarily_ but had to agree to follow the rules. On the other hand you had the right to take your toys elsewhere and play on LAN for example. Simple deal: you want bnet, play nice - if you don't want to, gtfo.
Now battle.net is mandatory and you can't even fart without their permission. They become pimps and users are their hoes graciously allowed to pay their masters. This trend of steamization needs to stop, seriously. Convenience is nice but not at the expense of basic customer's rights (reselling, freedom of use in bounds of law).
Unfortunately they got too big, too successful, tasted the heaps of money and there is no going back, especially with Bobby Kotick sailing the boat of Activision-Blizzard.
- she reportedly refused to give painkillers because suffering gets you closer to Jesus
- magnitude of charity donations collected didn't match expenses, majority of cash went to vatican or was used for missionary work in non-christian countries
true that
i wish it was mandatory by the law to allow reselling with full rights transfer and creating obstacles would get smacked hard. There is need for real protection of user rights, companies have it way too easy to fuck with them. Right now they have a dozen of dirty tricks in their playbook to circumvent 1st sale doctrine and kill 2nd hand market - DRMs, steam like authorizations, binding products to user's account permanently and all that shit are there for exactly that purpose.
One can dream...
If you really believe that the government will falter to such a degree that it will not be able to honor its FDIC obligations, I suggest you remove your funds from your bank,
if only they were redeemable in gold and silver as once US constitution stated...
If i am not mistaken recently FDIC announced that it has nowhere near the amount of money needed to meet its obligations, bacause situation in the bank sector is in much worse shape than they predicted - we are talking about tens or even hundreds of billions. What it means? More and more T-bills - so people will pay through the nose (taxes) for the illusory safety of their wealth or will be robbed of their purchasing power (money printing)
And if you want to see how the total decay of monetary system looks, just read about Zimbabwe with its few million percent inflation or look for some clips on youtube. People in Zimbabwe pay for their daily bread at the village market with gold and don't accept anything else as a payment for their merchandise.
Gold was, is and will universally recognized as something valuable in majority of cultures. Even world of Fallout wouldn't change it because there would be continuity of humanity and there would be no reason for gold to suddenly lose its cultural meaning - gold value is deeply entrenched in people's minds. That's more that what we can say about paper currency.
Fucking with the economy? During the 90s and 00s, the economy had the least regulation since the great depression. Reagan and the following presidents all saw to that. The Austrians got what they wanted. Of course, they forgot to include the corruption that comes with it. They always do, because Austrians economy is like a game economy. Totally unrealistic when actually implemented in reality.
No, Austrians didn't get what they wanted - interest rate was not decided by the free market forces but by arbitrary decisions of the FED. When people rapidly get loans in ridiculous amounts, it should end up quickly raising interest rate to the 2-digit range, yet it was kept near 0 because it stimulated the economy, kept that frightening R-thing at bay and produced nice GDP growth numbers - debt driven consumer spending is so good and financial institutions leveraged 50:1 have ridiculously high profits to show to their shareholders. Politicians are happy, voters are happy, disaster is around the corner.
Meddling with interest rates in a way FED did is anything but Austrian economists' wish.
Except that bubbles are natural outcome of using money, bubbles will ALWAYS occur under the fed, gold standard or not.
removing FED would work much better than what we have now. In 19th century the US economy was stable and after FED creation in 1913 we had several serious recessions.
Bubbles happen because there is fast, steady influx of new players who want to profit quickly - you only have to put some cash on the table to enter the game and 2 years later you get guaranteed +50% in return. Where do players get their money to enter from? They take loans. If there was a limited money pool and no central planning, interest rate would instantly shoot through the roof thanks to free market forces (when people compete for money from banks, interest rate raises). In such scenario the forming bubble meets its pin of doom much quicker because people are discouraged when IR starts to match projected profits. When you keep the rate of 1% for years no matter what (like the FED did), don't be surprised that everybody and his dog enters the game - after all money is almost free and almost guaranteed to pay for itself... until the supply of suckers runs out and the whole Ponzi scheme collapses.
What we had recently was a whole economic growth for a decade or even longer built upon bubbles of nasdaq, housing market and whatnot. GDP growth had nothing to do with productivity and other such worthless qualities, it was all hot air in the financial world playing with big virtual numbers. Such scenario would never happen with free market rules being the only ones defining the game.
Whole situation with central banks micromanaging the economy is like meddling with the ecosystem. You may think you can somehow make it 'better', but you just can't do it right - unintended consequences of your actions will always bite you in the ass. The system will find it's equilibrium by itself
The problem is LAN was already implemented and intentionally removed later for business reasons. Last year they showed SC2 version with true LAN option because there was no battle.net 2.0 working. This year LAN feature was no more. Besides how do you think they tested stuff internally before having battlenet prototype?
incgamers.com
quote: In order to install the game, "you need to connect once to install the game," StarCraft II lead designer Browder revealed. A player will also either have or sign up for a Battle.net account during the installation process.
no it's not. Introducing God doesn't make other questions about physics and universe go away. You get old entities with their problems to solve plus God standing behind all of it - additional questions appear: why? what purpose? what is God's thought behind it?. You just effectively introduced more complexity by adding God into equation when it does nothing to solve the riddle.
Slashdot Mirror
Starcraft and Diablo 2 were pretty much balanced in the we-them relation. They offered matchmaking service you could access _voluntarily_ but had to agree to follow the rules. On the other hand you had the right to take your toys elsewhere and play on LAN for example. Simple deal: you want bnet, play nice - if you don't want to, gtfo.
Now battle.net is mandatory and you can't even fart without their permission. They become pimps and users are their hoes graciously allowed to pay their masters. This trend of steamization needs to stop, seriously. Convenience is nice but not at the expense of basic customer's rights (reselling, freedom of use in bounds of law).
Unfortunately they got too big, too successful, tasted the heaps of money and there is no going back, especially with Bobby Kotick sailing the boat of Activision-Blizzard.
- she reportedly refused to give painkillers because suffering gets you closer to Jesus
- magnitude of charity donations collected didn't match expenses, majority of cash went to vatican or was used for missionary work in non-christian countries
true that i wish it was mandatory by the law to allow reselling with full rights transfer and creating obstacles would get smacked hard. There is need for real protection of user rights, companies have it way too easy to fuck with them. Right now they have a dozen of dirty tricks in their playbook to circumvent 1st sale doctrine and kill 2nd hand market - DRMs, steam like authorizations, binding products to user's account permanently and all that shit are there for exactly that purpose. One can dream...
If you really believe that the government will falter to such a degree that it will not be able to honor its FDIC obligations, I suggest you remove your funds from your bank,
if only they were redeemable in gold and silver as once US constitution stated...
If i am not mistaken recently FDIC announced that it has nowhere near the amount of money needed to meet its obligations, bacause situation in the bank sector is in much worse shape than they predicted - we are talking about tens or even hundreds of billions. What it means? More and more T-bills - so people will pay through the nose (taxes) for the illusory safety of their wealth or will be robbed of their purchasing power (money printing)
And if you want to see how the total decay of monetary system looks, just read about Zimbabwe with its few million percent inflation or look for some clips on youtube. People in Zimbabwe pay for their daily bread at the village market with gold and don't accept anything else as a payment for their merchandise.
Gold was, is and will universally recognized as something valuable in majority of cultures. Even world of Fallout wouldn't change it because there would be continuity of humanity and there would be no reason for gold to suddenly lose its cultural meaning - gold value is deeply entrenched in people's minds. That's more that what we can say about paper currency.
Fucking with the economy? During the 90s and 00s, the economy had the least regulation since the great depression. Reagan and the following presidents all saw to that. The Austrians got what they wanted. Of course, they forgot to include the corruption that comes with it. They always do, because Austrians economy is like a game economy. Totally unrealistic when actually implemented in reality.
No, Austrians didn't get what they wanted - interest rate was not decided by the free market forces but by arbitrary decisions of the FED. When people rapidly get loans in ridiculous amounts, it should end up quickly raising interest rate to the 2-digit range, yet it was kept near 0 because it stimulated the economy, kept that frightening R-thing at bay and produced nice GDP growth numbers - debt driven consumer spending is so good and financial institutions leveraged 50:1 have ridiculously high profits to show to their shareholders. Politicians are happy, voters are happy, disaster is around the corner. Meddling with interest rates in a way FED did is anything but Austrian economists' wish.
Except that bubbles are natural outcome of using money, bubbles will ALWAYS occur under the fed, gold standard or not.
removing FED would work much better than what we have now. In 19th century the US economy was stable and after FED creation in 1913 we had several serious recessions.
Bubbles happen because there is fast, steady influx of new players who want to profit quickly - you only have to put some cash on the table to enter the game and 2 years later you get guaranteed +50% in return. Where do players get their money to enter from? They take loans. If there was a limited money pool and no central planning, interest rate would instantly shoot through the roof thanks to free market forces (when people compete for money from banks, interest rate raises). In such scenario the forming bubble meets its pin of doom much quicker because people are discouraged when IR starts to match projected profits. When you keep the rate of 1% for years no matter what (like the FED did), don't be surprised that everybody and his dog enters the game - after all money is almost free and almost guaranteed to pay for itself... until the supply of suckers runs out and the whole Ponzi scheme collapses.
What we had recently was a whole economic growth for a decade or even longer built upon bubbles of nasdaq, housing market and whatnot. GDP growth had nothing to do with productivity and other such worthless qualities, it was all hot air in the financial world playing with big virtual numbers. Such scenario would never happen with free market rules being the only ones defining the game.
Whole situation with central banks micromanaging the economy is like meddling with the ecosystem. You may think you can somehow make it 'better', but you just can't do it right - unintended consequences of your actions will always bite you in the ass. The system will find it's equilibrium by itself
The gold standard isn't actually different in this respect, because gold has very little nutritional value and sucks for building things.
people of Zimbabwe beg to differ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ubJp6rmUYM
The problem is LAN was already implemented and intentionally removed later for business reasons. Last year they showed SC2 version with true LAN option because there was no battle.net 2.0 working. This year LAN feature was no more. Besides how do you think they tested stuff internally before having battlenet prototype?
incgamers.com
quote: In order to install the game, "you need to connect once to install the game," StarCraft II lead designer Browder revealed. A player will also either have or sign up for a Battle.net account during the installation process.
no it's not. Introducing God doesn't make other questions about physics and universe go away. You get old entities with their problems to solve plus God standing behind all of it - additional questions appear: why? what purpose? what is God's thought behind it?. You just effectively introduced more complexity by adding God into equation when it does nothing to solve the riddle.