Obama certainly didn't want to do single-payer, nationalized health-care, a "robust public option," (whatever the Hell that means, since if it was any good the for profit healthcare system would cease to be in an number of years, so they might as well go to single-payer) or any of those things. Obama is a neoliberal, he'd never propose anything that wasn't a cash grab for someone (the Republicans are also neoliberals, but they have that Southern Strategy gunking them up that means they can't be as fleet of foot as a neoliberal Democrat like Obama). His healthcare plan was basically written by the Heritage Foundation, not generally known as a bastion of socialism.
Basically, in countries that are sensible, they understand that healthcare ought to be like fire and police departments. (Whereas in neoliberal Hells like the United States, they'd like to make the police and fire departments more like our wonderful healthcare system. They're already doing it to the post office and the school. And it's bipartisan.)
It's not capitalism, it's Thatcherism (oh, and you know what country has suffered under the yoke of Thatcherism for year? I'll give you a hint, she was Prime Minister of the UK.). There Is No Alternative. (I'm looking forward to our coming Greek style healthcare, myself, though in many ways we already have it.)
I think that EA's position is "No matter how cruelly we overwork our programming and other staff, we just can't seem to get more than mediocre quality out of them. We have some ideas on how to improve, but first we need to lobby congress to allow the use of the Cat O' Nine Tails in the workplace again."
EA (since Cliffy used them as the example) had a game like Dragon Age where after you come to camp a guy begs you to save his grandma. And you can save his grandma for a nominal fee of $10. On day zero of the game being released.
This would work great if, after the begging and the asking for $10.00, for a nominal fee of say $20.00 you could crucify him by the side of the road. Money hand over fist, in that case.
So, let's take this apart. The ranter, Cliff Bleszinski, is not actually saying "Vote with your dollars" he's saying, "You'll take what we give you and like it." However, the rant comes across as desperate and rage filled because that's actually false bravado, he knows that his customers don't have to take what they give them and like it.
I think a certain amount of games industry executives, people who aren't in the business because they love games as an art form, probably look at other businesses with envy. "Look at those heroin kingpins, their customers will do anything for another hit." "Look at the oil industry, it seems like they can raise prices through the roof and people keep buying." "Look a pharmaceuticals, if people don't pay their prices, well, they die." or "Look at credit cards, those earn money for the banks while the bankers are sleeping!"
However, for whatever reason, the games industry executives are stuck in an industry that lives or dies on customer service. Ask Atari how well they did after 2600 Pac -Man made all the little children cry..
So does this mean no DRM? No DLC? No microtransactions? Why no!
I've been dealing with DRM since games came on 5 1/4 inch floppies. DLC reminds me of paying for a disk of shareware, and then paying some more for the rest of the content. And while it isn't an electronic game, I don't think any Magic addict like myself could be unfamiliar with the concept of microtransactions.
What it means is that you can't push it and expect to make money. However sad it makes the game honchos, they aren't heroin dealers. They can't say "the price is the price, yo" like Badger on Breaking Bad and expect people to pay it.
If you are going to sell people a $60.00 game, it can't be the equivalent of a $5 shareware disk with DLC being necessary to complete it. That's why some companies played around with selling games as episodes at a slightly lower price... and that model didn't pan out. I think expansion packs make money, I enjoyed Yuri's Revenge but some actual effort was put into that, and Red Alert II was a fine, complete game without it.
DRM that makes the game unplayable... makes the game unplayable. That's not hard to understand, is it? If it makes it unplayable some of the time, it makes the game unplayable some of the time. It diminishes the games quality. Don't do that if you don't want a reputation for selling unplayable junk.
There are two kinds of games. Games built from the ground up around micro-transactions and games that are totally destroyed by shoehorning microtransactions into them. You can't take the latest iteration of Doom (by which I mean any FPS that can be loosely described as lone hero versus hordes of monsters), and make the player have to pay for every gun and demon. It won't work. It will make the game suck.
You might not like it, but if you don't I suggest you look for work in one of those other industries I mentioned, because an industry built around pleasing customers is clearly not for you.
Is it even still possible to do high-tech manufacturing here â" or should it be?
I suppose that the answer to "should it be?" depends on how likely we think it is that countries we are at war with will send us their high-tech products in order to fight them.
Of course, we'll probably never have another major war, which is why we spend so little on military technology. If we were worried about it, I expect our military budget would dwarf our social spending budget by orders of magnitude. Since it doesn't, and we just have a small military for defense, we must not be worried about it.
And of course, it would be silly if we thought we needed a gigantic defense budget, because then we'd never let treacherous CEO's send our technological crown jewels overseas in order to give our strategic competitors (which if we were really silly might think was the Shanghai Cooperative Organization: China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan with India,Iran, Mongolia, and Pakistancurrently having "observer" status) a huge military advantage if there was ever a major war between the world powers.
So, no, as a country that believes purely in peaceful trade and in purely non-military solutions to world problems, we should not worry that Innovation occurs on the factory floor. After all, as a tiny country along the lines of Lichtenstein or Vatican City, the United States doesn't have any territory or natural resources that other nations would ever want to seize by force, which is why we are better off having a banking and finance oriented economy. No matter what happens the dollar will always be the main world currency, and we'll always be able to bribe any belligerent, heavily armed, high tech countries with them. Fnord.
Market Research Guy: Wow, we are making a lot of money on these free, microtransaction oriented games.
EA Executive: Programmer, add microtransactions to our premium $60 retail games. Don't let the players see the best parts of the games unless they pay.
Yes, but I have a choice. Well, three choices actually:
1. Go to Barnes and Noble, browse and buy books. Paying a premium. (Oh, and never seeming to find the exact book I want when I go looking for something specific.)
2. Go to the Library and read for free, but have to deal with all the maple syrup stains on the books.
3. Buy cheap books for as low as I can get them (too low, really to keep a bricks and mortar retailer in operation) and not run out of books to read because I can actually afford them.
Frankly, it would make more sense, to assuage my guilt at the death of premium book retail, to just go into B&N every so often and hand the cashier some money. "Here, I know you guys are struggling."
They'll enforce SOX against you if you don't have political connections.
There's a reason my company had a former US president to speak at one of their recent shindigs, and it wasn't because they wanted to hear the man speak (even though he often comes out with unintentional comedy... he's the master of the spoonerism...)
Everyone is broke, which turns everyone into a bargain hunter which means that stores that aren't designed to do bargains (but have other goals like convenience or quality) are priced out of the market.
I used to be an investor (before I met a girl) it was important to me as a small investor that companies I invested in focused on the big picture, and I would ruthlessly dump stocks that I thought weren't in it for the long term.
See, it's the big guys,and only the big guys, who profit from juiced stocks... everybody else involved gets totally screwed, and that includes the small investors and the people with 401ks.
If you enjoy getting screwed, by all means try to play in the big boys pool, but you'd be better off going to Vegas and betting everything on "7."
What people fail to understand (hence Obama's ads about Romney at Bain) is that capitalism is as much about failure and loss as it is about success and profit, and that's a good thing.
I don't know what capitalism is "about," but are you really going to try to argue this in an age when truly parasitic zombie banks are declared "too big too fail" and are kept alive by a flood of public money, even as they destroy everything else through leverage buyouts, bubbles and the other tools of the finance Visigoths?
When I was a young science fiction reader, I liked the three laws because they added complex intellectual puzzles to science fiction short stories.
After I grew up, I realized that nowadays they function as an off switch for human imagination. They subtract value when they are mentioned in the context of real robots that we are currently building.
Some people get mentally stuck in a particular fictional universe like Star Trek or I, Robot, but these are just ideas about the future. They are not predictions about the future, and would not particularly accurate if the were (check the dates, sometime, in those stories that mention actual dates. In those that don't check the things that are out of date mentioned in the stories.)
Slashdot Mirror
"hosting a fundraiser in 2006 Hilary Clinton's Senate reelection campaign"
I'm afraid that tells you far more about Hillary Clinton than it does about Rupert Murdoch.
"It's called doubleplus ungood crimethinking for a reason, Winston."
Obama certainly didn't want to do single-payer, nationalized health-care, a "robust public option," (whatever the Hell that means, since if it was any good the for profit healthcare system would cease to be in an number of years, so they might as well go to single-payer) or any of those things. Obama is a neoliberal, he'd never propose anything that wasn't a cash grab for someone (the Republicans are also neoliberals, but they have that Southern Strategy gunking them up that means they can't be as fleet of foot as a neoliberal Democrat like Obama). His healthcare plan was basically written by the Heritage Foundation, not generally known as a bastion of socialism.
Basically, in countries that are sensible, they understand that healthcare ought to be like fire and police departments. (Whereas in neoliberal Hells like the United States, they'd like to make the police and fire departments more like our wonderful healthcare system. They're already doing it to the post office and the school. And it's bipartisan.)
It's not capitalism, it's Thatcherism (oh, and you know what country has suffered under the yoke of Thatcherism for year? I'll give you a hint, she was Prime Minister of the UK.). There Is No Alternative. (I'm looking forward to our coming Greek style healthcare, myself, though in many ways we already have it.)
I think that EA's position is "No matter how cruelly we overwork our programming and other staff, we just can't seem to get more than mediocre quality out of them. We have some ideas on how to improve, but first we need to lobby congress to allow the use of the Cat O' Nine Tails in the workplace again."
This would work great if, after the begging and the asking for $10.00, for a nominal fee of say $20.00 you could crucify him by the side of the road. Money hand over fist, in that case.
Wow. What a bitter, incoherent rant.
So, let's take this apart. The ranter, Cliff Bleszinski, is not actually saying "Vote with your dollars" he's saying, "You'll take what we give you and like it." However, the rant comes across as desperate and rage filled because that's actually false bravado, he knows that his customers don't have to take what they give them and like it.
I think a certain amount of games industry executives, people who aren't in the business because they love games as an art form, probably look at other businesses with envy. "Look at those heroin kingpins, their customers will do anything for another hit." "Look at the oil industry, it seems like they can raise prices through the roof and people keep buying." "Look a pharmaceuticals, if people don't pay their prices, well, they die." or "Look at credit cards, those earn money for the banks while the bankers are sleeping!"
However, for whatever reason, the games industry executives are stuck in an industry that lives or dies on customer service. Ask Atari how well they did after 2600 Pac -Man made all the little children cry..
So does this mean no DRM? No DLC? No microtransactions? Why no!
I've been dealing with DRM since games came on 5 1/4 inch floppies. DLC reminds me of paying for a disk of shareware, and then paying some more for the rest of the content. And while it isn't an electronic game, I don't think any Magic addict like myself could be unfamiliar with the concept of microtransactions.
What it means is that you can't push it and expect to make money. However sad it makes the game honchos, they aren't heroin dealers. They can't say "the price is the price, yo" like Badger on Breaking Bad and expect people to pay it.
If you are going to sell people a $60.00 game, it can't be the equivalent of a $5 shareware disk with DLC being necessary to complete it. That's why some companies played around with selling games as episodes at a slightly lower price... and that model didn't pan out. I think expansion packs make money, I enjoyed Yuri's Revenge but some actual effort was put into that, and Red Alert II was a fine, complete game without it.
DRM that makes the game unplayable... makes the game unplayable. That's not hard to understand, is it? If it makes it unplayable some of the time, it makes the game unplayable some of the time. It diminishes the games quality. Don't do that if you don't want a reputation for selling unplayable junk.
There are two kinds of games. Games built from the ground up around micro-transactions and games that are totally destroyed by shoehorning microtransactions into them. You can't take the latest iteration of Doom (by which I mean any FPS that can be loosely described as lone hero versus hordes of monsters), and make the player have to pay for every gun and demon. It won't work. It will make the game suck.
You might not like it, but if you don't I suggest you look for work in one of those other industries I mentioned, because an industry built around pleasing customers is clearly not for you.
"If Groupon was Battletoads, it would be like I made it all the way to the Terra Tubes without dying on my first ever play through."
Wow! He must have been the greatest CEO ever!
Damn this economy.
Is it even still possible to do high-tech manufacturing here â" or should it be?
I suppose that the answer to "should it be?" depends on how likely we think it is that countries we are at war with will send us their high-tech products in order to fight them.
Of course, we'll probably never have another major war, which is why we spend so little on military technology. If we were worried about it, I expect our military budget would dwarf our social spending budget by orders of magnitude. Since it doesn't, and we just have a small military for defense, we must not be worried about it.
And of course, it would be silly if we thought we needed a gigantic defense budget, because then we'd never let treacherous CEO's send our technological crown jewels overseas in order to give our strategic competitors (which if we were really silly might think was the Shanghai Cooperative Organization: China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan with India, Iran, Mongolia, and Pakistan currently having "observer" status) a huge military advantage if there was ever a major war between the world powers.
So, no, as a country that believes purely in peaceful trade and in purely non-military solutions to world problems, we should not worry that Innovation occurs on the factory floor. After all, as a tiny country along the lines of Lichtenstein or Vatican City, the United States doesn't have any territory or natural resources that other nations would ever want to seize by force, which is why we are better off having a banking and finance oriented economy. No matter what happens the dollar will always be the main world currency, and we'll always be able to bribe any belligerent, heavily armed, high tech countries with them. Fnord.
Yes, this has the ring of truth.
I would probably have just written, as an answer to "What is their motivation?" one word, "Evil".
But this goes into detail as to why evil would motivate something like this.
You'd think they'd have gotten a clue from the interview.
I just thought that the programmers working for EA were 70's style Cylons.
Wait, didn't you see Minority Report... ...oops, I just remembered the ending of that movie, never mind.
Uh-oh, I've become unstuck in time. Well, at least people can enjoy this comment on EA from 2004:
What's going on indeed... by jayhawk88 (160512)
"The past is never dead. It's not even past." -- William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun
Market Research Guy: Wow, we are making a lot of money on these free, microtransaction oriented games.
EA Executive: Programmer, add microtransactions to our premium $60 retail games. Don't let the players see the best parts of the games unless they pay.
Programmer: By your command.
Game Tester: Wow, you know the single player mode in this game is a lot of fun even without having made even a single microtransaction.
EA Executive: Programmer, make it not fun unless the player pays for microtransactions.
Programmer: By your command.
Yes, I ran into this when I criticized Anita Sarkeesian:
Female Cousin (knows nothing much about video games) puts up link to Antia Sarkeesian and how awful all the stuff that happens to her.
Me, comment, "I don't want to start an argument here, but I am not a fan of Anita Sarkeesian."
Her: "So, do you support rape threats against her then?"
Me: "Of course not..."
(Discussion degenerates from here)
Obama Admin Backing New Six Strikes ISP Policy: The Obama Administration is reportedly behind a new "six strikes" policy conjured up by five major American ISPs.
" Anyone can buy OCP's stock and own a piece of our city. What could be more democratic than that?"
Yes, but I have a choice. Well, three choices actually:
1. Go to Barnes and Noble, browse and buy books. Paying a premium. (Oh, and never seeming to find the exact book I want when I go looking for something specific.)
2. Go to the Library and read for free, but have to deal with all the maple syrup stains on the books.
3. Buy cheap books for as low as I can get them (too low, really to keep a bricks and mortar retailer in operation) and not run out of books to read because I can actually afford them.
Frankly, it would make more sense, to assuage my guilt at the death of premium book retail, to just go into B&N every so often and hand the cashier some money. "Here, I know you guys are struggling."
But that would be silly...
They'll enforce SOX against you if you don't have political connections.
There's a reason my company had a former US president to speak at one of their recent shindigs, and it wasn't because they wanted to hear the man speak (even though he often comes out with unintentional comedy... he's the master of the spoonerism...)
Everyone is broke, which turns everyone into a bargain hunter which means that stores that aren't designed to do bargains (but have other goals like convenience or quality) are priced out of the market.
It's part of the Western readjustment, as we move into a new dark age of low compensation and diminished expectations.
On the plus side, things might improve when we are finally conquered by the East. (Probably not though.)
I used to be an investor (before I met a girl) it was important to me as a small investor that companies I invested in focused on the big picture, and I would ruthlessly dump stocks that I thought weren't in it for the long term.
See, it's the big guys,and only the big guys, who profit from juiced stocks... everybody else involved gets totally screwed, and that includes the small investors and the people with 401ks.
If you enjoy getting screwed, by all means try to play in the big boys pool, but you'd be better off going to Vegas and betting everything on "7."
I don't know what capitalism is "about," but are you really going to try to argue this in an age when truly parasitic zombie banks are declared "too big too fail" and are kept alive by a flood of public money, even as they destroy everything else through leverage buyouts, bubbles and the other tools of the finance Visigoths?
When I was a young science fiction reader, I liked the three laws because they added complex intellectual puzzles to science fiction short stories.
After I grew up, I realized that nowadays they function as an off switch for human imagination. They subtract value when they are mentioned in the context of real robots that we are currently building.
Some people get mentally stuck in a particular fictional universe like Star Trek or I, Robot, but these are just ideas about the future. They are not predictions about the future, and would not particularly accurate if the were (check the dates, sometime, in those stories that mention actual dates. In those that don't check the things that are out of date mentioned in the stories.)
Dr. Evil: No, we'll leave them alone and not actually witness them dying, and we'll just assume it all went to plan.
Scott: I have a gun in my room. Give me five seconds, I'll come back and blow their brains out.
Dr. Evil: No Scott.
Dr. Evil: ....you just don't get it, do you?