The sales tax being collected isn't actually the company paying taxes. It's the company collecting the customer's taxes and passing it along. So the states where they have physical presence (as determined through tax "nexus" studies") do get the company's income taxes, but customers skirt the taxes they were supposed to have been paying. Customers are supposed to self-report the sales tax they aren't paying through vendors, and pay that directly to the government, but nobody really self-tracks that kind of thing and they just don't bother paying it.
So it's really about online retail companies reaping the benefits of helping customers to skip out on paying their state's sales taxes. This shouldn't be the basis for a competitive edge. People also shouldn't skip out on paying their tax burden either, but I'm right with you on getting rid of sales taxes entirely for all states. It's a tax on demand in a sluggish economy. It's inefficient and cumbersome, and should be replaced.
There's another alternative: get rid of state sales taxes for physical retail stores too. That'll level the playing field too. It's a regressive tax anyway. There's other ways for states to collect the taxes they need to operate.
I support it...for businesses with high enough revenues. Small online shops are too small to bother with and the state tax calculations are too cumberson
States need tax revenues. Physical retail locations collect sales taxes, that provides tax revenues to the state. If online retail is able to bypass state taxes, that puts the retail locations at a disadvantage, and sales tax revenues drop for that state.
The State ends up with lower sales tax revenues, but they still need tax revenues. So they just end up raising my property taxes again, and physical retail continues to get screwed over. They're going to get their tax revenues one way or another because they have a budget to pay for, if high taxes are a problem we should fight them on their budget.
So in the meantime, we should just level the playing field with regards to collecting sales taxes. If physical retail should go out of business because it's inefficient, let it. But it shouldn't get pushed out of business by unfairly granting an advantage to online retailers. We're going to pay the same total amount of tax either way.
Really, the biggest change in Windows 8, is that I have to press the windows key when I login. Nothing else really changed in the OS for me. I still just hit win+r for the "Run" prompt, or click a shortcut in the number of places I've aggregated them that make much more sense than Win 7's start menu layout. I got Windows 8 because it was just $15 for a valid windows license.
I'm in full agreement that there's no reason to upgrade from windows 7 to windows 8. But if you get windows 8, it's not the end of the world (unless you're really married to the start menu). Or hell, if you really need the start menu, just go download it and install it. If you're on slashdot you should know how to do this. This askslashdot is kind of a no-brainer.
I own all 3 consoles and a gaming PC. The reason I can do this is because I only have to buy the console games I want to keep, while I can rent games that I want to try (and send back the ones that aren't worth it). On PC it's even easier. I can just buy everything under the sun, because Valve pushes everyone to participate in discounting their games after they're out of the limelight. I don't need to buy used on PC because they sell me "new" games at "used game" prices.
On consoles, if their games are out of the limelight, they'd rather just not sell them at all and stop making money on them. I wish they'd smarten up and realize how much more money they can make by competing with "used" games instead of just not selling at all after falling out of vogue. Sell me the game at used price months later, or shit, just rent games to me directly and make money off me that way . Bottom line is that if I don't want to buy their game at full price, they get no money from me. If they want some of my money, they can get some by meeting me in the middle with a discount after the hype has died down. It's not rocket science and Steam has proven that you can make money off this model.
I'm absolutely on board with the idea of taking out confirmed traitors engaged in plotting against the USA.
But I want them confirmed first. I like the president, and agree with the desired goals and the results achieved. But let's call this for what it is, it's a potentially dangerous expansion of executive power. I want process involved. even if it needs to be a streamlined process to serve the realities of the difficulty in responding to brief flashes of intel. Maybe one day it won't be a president I like and agree with, and I want proper precedent in place. Hold a trial in absentia if need be, something involving the legislative or judicial branch, even some process would be better than none at all. The evidence against the guy was tremendous, it should have been a slam dunk case to put him on a targeted kill list anyway.
"During the persistence hunt an antelope, such as a kudu, is not shot or speared from a distance, but simply run down in the midday heat. Depending on the specific conditions, hunters of the central Kalahari will chase a kudu for about two to five hours over 25 to 35 km (16 to 22 mi) in temperatures of about 40 to 42 ÂC (104 to 108 ÂF). The hunter chases the kudu, which then runs away out of sight. By tracking it down at a fast running pace the hunter catches up with it before it has had enough time to rest in the shade. The animal is repeatedly chased and tracked down until it is too exhausted to continue running. The hunter then kills it at close range with a spear."
Kind of a brutally hard way to make a living, but it works for these guys apparently.
They fumbled the execution, but they're heading in the right direction.
That Metro UI is/bullshit/ for desktops, no question, but the idea of bridging the gaps between the various devices that consumers use in their day is a good one.
Getting my phone, tablet, desktop, and laptop to talk to each other is no small feat, but if they can pull it off, they add tremendous value. Now, I'm not asking to be able to perform identical tasks on the phone/tablet as the desktop/laptop. The first two are for consuming, and the second 2 are for producing.
If I could do work on the desktop and have that work automatically and immediately transferred to my laptop, that would be a tremendous increase in usability. If I happen to want to fact-check an item in my work while in a conversation, I'd love to get that information on my phone/tablet as well. I'll use each of these devices in different ways, but having them all talk to each other will still add a lot of value. I saw those commercials for NFC communication between phones. I'd love for that kind of communication to be happening between each of my devices all the time, automatically.
Giving them all the same (bad) interface was a foolhardy idea, but if they can muddle along until they put together a single multi-device platform, they'll have a very compelling feature. Obviously this one feature alone won't win the battle, but it would sure help.
That deals kicks the shit out of my Verizon plan. I'm paying $90 for 1 smartphone, 1 dumbphone, with 750 min shared, no texts, and 150mb of data per month. We did get our phones for free in this deal, so that's something, but we're month to month now. Might as well switch now.
When I say she didn't tell anybody, that even included her family back at home who had been trying to just get a short travel visa to come over and visit her for awhile but having trouble with the process for whatever reason and it kept getting rejected. Since she'd already made up her mind about how she'd spend the rest of her life, she didn't tell her family she was dying because it'd only upset them, especially since there was no way for them to come see her. She at least had some co-workers she confided in and kept her secret here and helped take care of her after work. (It's the only way I found out about this story after I found out she'd died). It's a pretty rough work schedule in our industry, for maybe 5-6 months each year they have 60hours per week minimum requirement, nobody ever has trouble hitting that since actual hours often range into 80s and 100s per week. It's a little embarassing for me to whine about working a lot when the person next to me was working just as much and literally dying without complaining.
My co-worker came here from the phillipines on a work visa. The money she made here was decent, but great considering that it's getting sent home to her family where a dollar has more mileage. Got diagnosed with terminal lung cancer at 27 (she didn't even smoke).
She didn't even say anything to anybody. I almost complimented her on managing to stay so trim. Needless to say I was pretty surprised when she suddenly died over the weekend at age 29. d
That's a crazy kind of work ethic, not even taking a day off from work for TERMINAL CANCER. I don't even know what my point is here, I'm just a bit daunted by the concept of working to death.
Some console ports rely heavily on loading first, then streaming in textures as you go. You can end up with quite a bit of chop in games if they did a shitty job porting it to the PC. Even when I could pretty much all games at max settings, the worst offender was Gotham City Imposters which would only run at about 20 frames per second, and at the start of every level would only run at about about 1 per second (yes, one. per. second. I could count the pictures going by). SSD made the problem go away.
This is pretty much what I was using before I did a full overhaul during the past few months. Between replacing the CPU+Ram+Mobo, graphics card, and primary harddrive, by far the biggest improvement was replacing my old harddrive with an SSD. The games already ran smoothly on the old hardware on medium-high settings, so the upgraded processor and graphics card really only let me notch up the settings back to max, but ultimately resulting in the same frames per second. But the quick boot/wake and fast level loading made a tremendous difference. Even the split seconds saved in regular desktop use made the user experience change dramatically.
"To understand the impact of tech on skilled labor (where automation is extremely questionable) , we studied the impact of tech on unskilled, easily automated labor"
"Technology has consistently reduced the number of manufacturing jobs for 30 years; people with repetitive jobs have been easy to replace in the past, and task jugglers like managers and supervisors will be likely targets in the future"
When we come up with a real Computer AI, wake me up to care about "middle class" jobs... until then why not focus on the question of what we are going to do with all unskilled labor that is currently being replaced?
Send them off to fight the enemy. We've always been at war with Eastasia.
The biggest reason games are big on PCs is because Windows is big in business. Those businesses have windows throughout their organization, so they continue to use it for compatibility year after year, regardless of whether or not it might be the "best" tool for the job, it's the one that is working, so they have no urge to rush out and break it. People continue to use windows at work, they know it, it's familiar to them, and then they go home and use a Windows PC at home. All those Windows PCs out there get developers to make games for windows. Games on PC are pretty much locked up for MS with little more effort than pushing out Direct X.
Consoles carved out a separate market from PC gaming in a livingroom. MS wants a piece of that market. If people drift from the computer to a laptop, tablet, console, TV, they're moving away from MS's domain. When consumers drift away from a desktop, MS is losing it's hold on the baseline consumer. The Xbox helps them stay relevant when people move into the livingroom instead.
As for Windows 8, it's terrible for desktops, but since new PCs are going to be sold with windows 8 on them one way or another, they'll get an install base that developers can sell to. That'll get them apps. That app foundation can help get them tablet sales. Basically, windows 8 is a shitty deal for the desktop user, but the point was to sell to tablet purchasers anyway. They want to leverage their momentum on the PC and Console to creep into phone and tablets with a unified theme. It's still a shitty theme, but they've got a plan for the future at least. They tripped right after leaving the gates (pun unintended) but conceptually, it's not a terrible idea to offer users a unified experience across their many devices.
I would very much like to have my desktop, laptop, and phone all be 1 single platform that seamlessly integrates without any effort on my part. That's where things are going. Apple is farther ahead on this point, MS is playing catchup, and Google is even farther behind but is gaining speed
I don't think there's as much "sport" in a gladitorial game as compared to our popular sporting events. If you're dealing lethal blows to one another, it takes only a momentary slip for a prime athlete to fall and high-level competition is diminished as a result of this loss.
In Boxing and MMA, there are long slugging matches, but sometimes you have one clean shot that ends the match in the first round. I'm aware that vast amounts of training had gone into living up events into that one clean shot, but it makes for a spectator event that is harder to enjoy because the battle isn't played out for others to watch.
It'll be harder to get invested in a gladiator if they only last for a couple rounds before an accidental slip ends their career.
This is what the parent poster is talking about, the picture isn't being missed. In theory, capitalism utilizes self-interested parties to direct scarce economic resources towards their most productive uses.
However, in practice, self-interested parties use any means available to get ahead, and that means if they can pull in government money to back their risky investment instead of having to get others to front their money, they'll do it.
In reality, economics, politics, and society are inseparably inter-linked. Changes to any one of these factors means changes in the others. Capitalism is useful as an economic theory for debate, but the undesirable side effects that pure capitalism has in practice means that society gets pissed off by the fallout, and invokes politics to restrain unbridled capitalism's effects. Pure free market capitalism isn't really used anywhere in the world because reality naturally invokes society and politics to bring the system to find an equilibrium, thus we find ourselves with the many different implementations in different countries and markets.
Excess government waste also pisses off society, and politics gets used to cut back on the policies that led to such waste. It's not a foolproof system, but you can be sure that the current local government officials are not in a hurry to fund another 38 studios given the recent backlash. They will abstain for the time being until public outcry dies down a bit.
TL;DR, parent poster is indeed getting the big picture, capitalism naturally manifests as crony capitalism in the real world. They're inseparable.
I just want to mention a point that was brought up on NPR's Planet money podcast investigating the role of lobbyists in Congress.
As Slashdot is well aware, the congress critters on these committees may have little to no understanding of the subject matter. They need to at least try to get informed, and oftentimes the only way they can get information on the active state of the system is by meeting with those who are currently engaged with that system (i.e lobbyists).
Of course there exceptions like Elizabeth Warren on the Senate Banking Committee, where you have someone who is intimately informed, and can see right through lobbyist bullshit from the get-go. For other situations, you have legislators relying on industry insiders to get information. If the lobbyist says, "If you apply ___X____ regulation everything will fall apart, don't do it", how does the congressman know if the lobbyist is telling the truth about how this regulation might go down? Or is the lobbyist is just trying to protect their profit margin? I thought this was an interesting insight into the system.
Skyrim sold millions of copies on consoles, and millions more on PC, plus DLC sales(which have lower volume, but huge profit margins). It was an incredibly popular game. It made them lots of money. Of course they'd want to milk that.
Square-Enix also made an MMO, but they didn't stop making the single-player FF. Basically it comes down to capital availability, profit projection, and sales cannibalism. I don't see those factors pre-empting a single-player TES game being developed concurrently, particularly since these are separate studios. What do you think Bethesda would be working on while Zenimax Online Studios is working on the MMO? While I'd sure like for them to work on new IP, I'm betting they're already hard at work on their sequel.
Has there been a Star Trek story where: the crew is held captive, and the captain programs his transporter to copy the buffer mid-transport, and then he transfers the data to the replicator to fashion himself a crew to combat the enemy and free his crew, then when questioned what the crew will do now, he reveals that he did makes one small change in the replicator...all of the replicated copies have no telomere in their DNA, and will age and die on the journey home. The copies reluctantly agree...they would have done the same and await their death in quiet reflection of whether or not what he(they) did was right, but ultimately they die and only the original is left to survive with the guilt.
Because it feels like such an obvious story that someone must have done it by now. I'd like to read it.
Slashdot Mirror
The sales tax being collected isn't actually the company paying taxes. It's the company collecting the customer's taxes and passing it along. So the states where they have physical presence (as determined through tax "nexus" studies") do get the company's income taxes, but customers skirt the taxes they were supposed to have been paying. Customers are supposed to self-report the sales tax they aren't paying through vendors, and pay that directly to the government, but nobody really self-tracks that kind of thing and they just don't bother paying it.
So it's really about online retail companies reaping the benefits of helping customers to skip out on paying their state's sales taxes. This shouldn't be the basis for a competitive edge. People also shouldn't skip out on paying their tax burden either, but I'm right with you on getting rid of sales taxes entirely for all states. It's a tax on demand in a sluggish economy. It's inefficient and cumbersome, and should be replaced.
Why do asteroids have a minimum velocity of 11km/s?
Continuing from my post above:
There's another alternative: get rid of state sales taxes for physical retail stores too. That'll level the playing field too. It's a regressive tax anyway. There's other ways for states to collect the taxes they need to operate.
I support it...for businesses with high enough revenues. Small online shops are too small to bother with and the state tax calculations are too cumberson
States need tax revenues. Physical retail locations collect sales taxes, that provides tax revenues to the state. If online retail is able to bypass state taxes, that puts the retail locations at a disadvantage, and sales tax revenues drop for that state.
The State ends up with lower sales tax revenues, but they still need tax revenues. So they just end up raising my property taxes again, and physical retail continues to get screwed over. They're going to get their tax revenues one way or another because they have a budget to pay for, if high taxes are a problem we should fight them on their budget.
So in the meantime, we should just level the playing field with regards to collecting sales taxes. If physical retail should go out of business because it's inefficient, let it. But it shouldn't get pushed out of business by unfairly granting an advantage to online retailers. We're going to pay the same total amount of tax either way.
It does. You can also just left click in the upper-left hand corner too.
I never do.
Really, the biggest change in Windows 8, is that I have to press the windows key when I login. Nothing else really changed in the OS for me. I still just hit win+r for the "Run" prompt, or click a shortcut in the number of places I've aggregated them that make much more sense than Win 7's start menu layout. I got Windows 8 because it was just $15 for a valid windows license.
I'm in full agreement that there's no reason to upgrade from windows 7 to windows 8. But if you get windows 8, it's not the end of the world (unless you're really married to the start menu). Or hell, if you really need the start menu, just go download it and install it. If you're on slashdot you should know how to do this. This askslashdot is kind of a no-brainer.
I own all 3 consoles and a gaming PC. The reason I can do this is because I only have to buy the console games I want to keep, while I can rent games that I want to try (and send back the ones that aren't worth it). On PC it's even easier. I can just buy everything under the sun, because Valve pushes everyone to participate in discounting their games after they're out of the limelight. I don't need to buy used on PC because they sell me "new" games at "used game" prices.
On consoles, if their games are out of the limelight, they'd rather just not sell them at all and stop making money on them. I wish they'd smarten up and realize how much more money they can make by competing with "used" games instead of just not selling at all after falling out of vogue. Sell me the game at used price months later, or shit, just rent games to me directly and make money off me that way . Bottom line is that if I don't want to buy their game at full price, they get no money from me. If they want some of my money, they can get some by meeting me in the middle with a discount after the hype has died down. It's not rocket science and Steam has proven that you can make money off this model.
I'm absolutely on board with the idea of taking out confirmed traitors engaged in plotting against the USA.
But I want them confirmed first. I like the president, and agree with the desired goals and the results achieved. But let's call this for what it is, it's a potentially dangerous expansion of executive power. I want process involved. even if it needs to be a streamlined process to serve the realities of the difficulty in responding to brief flashes of intel. Maybe one day it won't be a president I like and agree with, and I want proper precedent in place. Hold a trial in absentia if need be, something involving the legislative or judicial branch, even some process would be better than none at all. The evidence against the guy was tremendous, it should have been a slam dunk case to put him on a targeted kill list anyway.
Speaking of movies about branding...:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HInOg12jMiY
Looks like someone got there first.
Generally speaking, I don't think humans succeeded by virtue of their endurance.
That said, in some regions humans run down quadrupedal game with their endurance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting
"During the persistence hunt an antelope, such as a kudu, is not shot or speared from a distance, but simply run down in the midday heat. Depending on the specific conditions, hunters of the central Kalahari will chase a kudu for about two to five hours over 25 to 35 km (16 to 22 mi) in temperatures of about 40 to 42 ÂC (104 to 108 ÂF). The hunter chases the kudu, which then runs away out of sight. By tracking it down at a fast running pace the hunter catches up with it before it has had enough time to rest in the shade. The animal is repeatedly chased and tracked down until it is too exhausted to continue running. The hunter then kills it at close range with a spear."
Kind of a brutally hard way to make a living, but it works for these guys apparently.
They fumbled the execution, but they're heading in the right direction.
That Metro UI is /bullshit/ for desktops, no question, but the idea of bridging the gaps between the various devices that consumers use in their day is a good one.
Getting my phone, tablet, desktop, and laptop to talk to each other is no small feat, but if they can pull it off, they add tremendous value. Now, I'm not asking to be able to perform identical tasks on the phone/tablet as the desktop/laptop. The first two are for consuming, and the second 2 are for producing.
If I could do work on the desktop and have that work automatically and immediately transferred to my laptop, that would be a tremendous increase in usability. If I happen to want to fact-check an item in my work while in a conversation, I'd love to get that information on my phone/tablet as well. I'll use each of these devices in different ways, but having them all talk to each other will still add a lot of value. I saw those commercials for NFC communication between phones. I'd love for that kind of communication to be happening between each of my devices all the time, automatically.
Giving them all the same (bad) interface was a foolhardy idea, but if they can muddle along until they put together a single multi-device platform, they'll have a very compelling feature. Obviously this one feature alone won't win the battle, but it would sure help.
That deals kicks the shit out of my Verizon plan. I'm paying $90 for 1 smartphone, 1 dumbphone, with 750 min shared, no texts, and 150mb of data per month. We did get our phones for free in this deal, so that's something, but we're month to month now. Might as well switch now.
Thanks for the tip!
Damn I forgot the other part of the story:
When I say she didn't tell anybody, that even included her family back at home who had been trying to just get a short travel visa to come over and visit her for awhile but having trouble with the process for whatever reason and it kept getting rejected. Since she'd already made up her mind about how she'd spend the rest of her life, she didn't tell her family she was dying because it'd only upset them, especially since there was no way for them to come see her. She at least had some co-workers she confided in and kept her secret here and helped take care of her after work. (It's the only way I found out about this story after I found out she'd died). It's a pretty rough work schedule in our industry, for maybe 5-6 months each year they have 60hours per week minimum requirement, nobody ever has trouble hitting that since actual hours often range into 80s and 100s per week. It's a little embarassing for me to whine about working a lot when the person next to me was working just as much and literally dying without complaining.
My co-worker came here from the phillipines on a work visa. The money she made here was decent, but great considering that it's getting sent home to her family where a dollar has more mileage. Got diagnosed with terminal lung cancer at 27 (she didn't even smoke).
She didn't even say anything to anybody. I almost complimented her on managing to stay so trim. Needless to say I was pretty surprised when she suddenly died over the weekend at age 29. d
That's a crazy kind of work ethic, not even taking a day off from work for TERMINAL CANCER. I don't even know what my point is here, I'm just a bit daunted by the concept of working to death.
Some console ports rely heavily on loading first, then streaming in textures as you go. You can end up with quite a bit of chop in games if they did a shitty job porting it to the PC. Even when I could pretty much all games at max settings, the worst offender was Gotham City Imposters which would only run at about 20 frames per second, and at the start of every level would only run at about about 1 per second (yes, one. per. second. I could count the pictures going by). SSD made the problem go away.
This is pretty much what I was using before I did a full overhaul during the past few months. Between replacing the CPU+Ram+Mobo, graphics card, and primary harddrive, by far the biggest improvement was replacing my old harddrive with an SSD. The games already ran smoothly on the old hardware on medium-high settings, so the upgraded processor and graphics card really only let me notch up the settings back to max, but ultimately resulting in the same frames per second. But the quick boot/wake and fast level loading made a tremendous difference. Even the split seconds saved in regular desktop use made the user experience change dramatically.
To sum up:
"To understand the impact of tech on skilled labor (where automation is extremely questionable) , we studied the impact of tech on unskilled, easily automated labor"
"Technology has consistently reduced the number of manufacturing jobs for 30 years; people with repetitive jobs have been easy to replace in the past, and task jugglers like managers and supervisors will be likely targets in the future"
When we come up with a real Computer AI, wake me up to care about "middle class" jobs... until then why not focus on the question of what we are going to do with all unskilled labor that is currently being replaced?
Send them off to fight the enemy. We've always been at war with Eastasia.
But I imagine the researchers barely restraining their smirks after submitting a proposal to blow up mice as their study.
The biggest reason games are big on PCs is because Windows is big in business. Those businesses have windows throughout their organization, so they continue to use it for compatibility year after year, regardless of whether or not it might be the "best" tool for the job, it's the one that is working, so they have no urge to rush out and break it. People continue to use windows at work, they know it, it's familiar to them, and then they go home and use a Windows PC at home. All those Windows PCs out there get developers to make games for windows. Games on PC are pretty much locked up for MS with little more effort than pushing out Direct X.
Consoles carved out a separate market from PC gaming in a livingroom. MS wants a piece of that market. If people drift from the computer to a laptop, tablet, console, TV, they're moving away from MS's domain. When consumers drift away from a desktop, MS is losing it's hold on the baseline consumer. The Xbox helps them stay relevant when people move into the livingroom instead.
As for Windows 8, it's terrible for desktops, but since new PCs are going to be sold with windows 8 on them one way or another, they'll get an install base that developers can sell to. That'll get them apps. That app foundation can help get them tablet sales. Basically, windows 8 is a shitty deal for the desktop user, but the point was to sell to tablet purchasers anyway. They want to leverage their momentum on the PC and Console to creep into phone and tablets with a unified theme. It's still a shitty theme, but they've got a plan for the future at least. They tripped right after leaving the gates (pun unintended) but conceptually, it's not a terrible idea to offer users a unified experience across their many devices.
I would very much like to have my desktop, laptop, and phone all be 1 single platform that seamlessly integrates without any effort on my part. That's where things are going. Apple is farther ahead on this point, MS is playing catchup, and Google is even farther behind but is gaining speed
I don't think there's as much "sport" in a gladitorial game as compared to our popular sporting events. If you're dealing lethal blows to one another, it takes only a momentary slip for a prime athlete to fall and high-level competition is diminished as a result of this loss.
In Boxing and MMA, there are long slugging matches, but sometimes you have one clean shot that ends the match in the first round. I'm aware that vast amounts of training had gone into living up events into that one clean shot, but it makes for a spectator event that is harder to enjoy because the battle isn't played out for others to watch.
It'll be harder to get invested in a gladiator if they only last for a couple rounds before an accidental slip ends their career.
What makes it innovative?
This is what the parent poster is talking about, the picture isn't being missed. In theory, capitalism utilizes self-interested parties to direct scarce economic resources towards their most productive uses.
However, in practice, self-interested parties use any means available to get ahead, and that means if they can pull in government money to back their risky investment instead of having to get others to front their money, they'll do it.
In reality, economics, politics, and society are inseparably inter-linked. Changes to any one of these factors means changes in the others. Capitalism is useful as an economic theory for debate, but the undesirable side effects that pure capitalism has in practice means that society gets pissed off by the fallout, and invokes politics to restrain unbridled capitalism's effects. Pure free market capitalism isn't really used anywhere in the world because reality naturally invokes society and politics to bring the system to find an equilibrium, thus we find ourselves with the many different implementations in different countries and markets.
Excess government waste also pisses off society, and politics gets used to cut back on the policies that led to such waste. It's not a foolproof system, but you can be sure that the current local government officials are not in a hurry to fund another 38 studios given the recent backlash. They will abstain for the time being until public outcry dies down a bit.
TL;DR, parent poster is indeed getting the big picture, capitalism naturally manifests as crony capitalism in the real world. They're inseparable.
I just want to mention a point that was brought up on NPR's Planet money podcast investigating the role of lobbyists in Congress.
As Slashdot is well aware, the congress critters on these committees may have little to no understanding of the subject matter. They need to at least try to get informed, and oftentimes the only way they can get information on the active state of the system is by meeting with those who are currently engaged with that system (i.e lobbyists).
Of course there exceptions like Elizabeth Warren on the Senate Banking Committee, where you have someone who is intimately informed, and can see right through lobbyist bullshit from the get-go. For other situations, you have legislators relying on industry insiders to get information. If the lobbyist says, "If you apply ___X____ regulation everything will fall apart, don't do it", how does the congressman know if the lobbyist is telling the truth about how this regulation might go down? Or is the lobbyist is just trying to protect their profit margin? I thought this was an interesting insight into the system.
Skyrim sold millions of copies on consoles, and millions more on PC, plus DLC sales(which have lower volume, but huge profit margins). It was an incredibly popular game. It made them lots of money. Of course they'd want to milk that.
Square-Enix also made an MMO, but they didn't stop making the single-player FF. Basically it comes down to capital availability, profit projection, and sales cannibalism. I don't see those factors pre-empting a single-player TES game being developed concurrently, particularly since these are separate studios. What do you think Bethesda would be working on while Zenimax Online Studios is working on the MMO? While I'd sure like for them to work on new IP, I'm betting they're already hard at work on their sequel.
Has there been a Star Trek story where: the crew is held captive, and the captain programs his transporter to copy the buffer mid-transport, and then he transfers the data to the replicator to fashion himself a crew to combat the enemy and free his crew, then when questioned what the crew will do now, he reveals that he did makes one small change in the replicator...all of the replicated copies have no telomere in their DNA, and will age and die on the journey home. The copies reluctantly agree...they would have done the same and await their death in quiet reflection of whether or not what he(they) did was right, but ultimately they die and only the original is left to survive with the guilt.
Because it feels like such an obvious story that someone must have done it by now. I'd like to read it.