why do we punish people

Hey, listen, I’m all for not punishing people and instead letting the victim take vengeance as they deem appropriate. It doesn’t warm my heart that the drunk driver that ran over my grandma got 5 years parole, I’d much rather carve out various parts of the fucker, cook them, make him eat them, and then force him to guess what part he ate. But violence is a state-controlled monopoly, and the state gets pissy when others realize monopolies are destroying the market and bring only downsides to us regular buyers.

Also, some shithead said at some point “an eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind” without realizing that once we finish the initial “eye for an eye” scenario justice has been met and we don’t need to continue ad infinitum, and for some reason a bunch of cretins who want to hold onto their eyes agreed with him and now Hammurabi would shit upon our flawed society and its insane rules.

As an aside, I was looking into Hammurabi’s code of laws while writing this, and the man seems to have been both just and metal as fuck. Here are some snippets I’d prefer to live my life by:

If a man breaks into a house, they shall kill him and hang him(?) in front of that very breach. (21)[80]

Like, fuck yeah - fuck around, find out.

If a man accuses another man and charges him with homicide, but cannot bring proof against him, his accuser shall be killed. (1)

More of the same, yes please.

If a man has a debt lodged against him, and the storm-god Adad devastates his field or a flood sweeps away the crops, or there is no grain grown in the field due to insufficient water—in that year he will not repay grain to his creditor; he shall suspend performance of his contract [literally “wet his clay tablet”] and he will not give interest payments for that year

Pay your insurance premium? No thanks, I don’t need it, it’s included in THE FUCKING LAW.

If a builder constructs a house for a man but does not make it conform to specifications so that a wall then buckles, that builder shall make that wall sound using his own silver. (233)[85]

Great. Fuck civil court where the builder’s army of lawyers can bully my $5/h law student cause that’s all I can afford while also rebuilding my house

If an ox gores to death a man while it is passing through the streets, that case has no basis for a claim. (250)

Fair. Why the fuck are you next to the goddamn ox, dipshit?

If a slave should declare to his master, “You are not my master”, he [the master] shall bring charge and proof against him that he is indeed his slave, and his master shall cut off his ear.

Yeah maybe some of them need some work, but fuck if most aren’t perfectly reasonable.

I’ve also not spent anything on games I’ve played, and then if I liked them I’d go on to purchase the game on steam. What’s the point here?

Oh yeah, I feel that. I got a nice beach towel with my company’s name on it some years ago, of course I couldn’t take it to the beach, I’d feel silly. But on the other hand - nobody sees it if I use it in the shower. Man, that company name has touched my dick&balls so many times I’m thinking I should marry it at this point.

I always try to make them put the branding in shitty places. For the umbrella I got them to print it on the classy wooden handle, instead of the fabric, exactly where you’d hold the thing. That way it’s still usable, you just need to hold your hand over the brand name. And on some other shit like wireless earbuds & smaller objects, the guys doing the printing can sometimes provide smaller velvety satchels to put the objects in, kind of like a gift bag, and I can usually print on those. Then you’re just left with the plain unbranded object when you inevitably throw away the satchel.

Aa someone who has misspent a budget before - you’re making it sound like a lot more people in the company care about the topic than what’s happening in real life.

I organize some events in our office every now and then. For example, one of them is a sort of competition/race/quiz/whatever - completely optional, but I get about 75% of the office to join, which in my experience - that’s huge, nobody joins any type of other events in such magnitude, usual rates are at 30-40%. The big bosses approve it because “morale” and “team building”. The people like it because it’s actually fun. So I get a budget to spend on this event, and we use it to buy “prizes” for literally everyone participating. Which means they’re shitty prizes, but hey, it’s not about winning first place, it’s about making some jokes at the bosses’ expense, on company time.

The way the process works is: all my bosses already know how this money is spent, and they approve. But because I need the money, it has to go through finance. And they involve marketing/PR guys. And these guys insist on having the fucking logo on everything. At the end of the day everyone is going home with several items (backpack, external battery, pen, umbrella, Swiss army knife etc) with the company logo on them, which is goddamn ridiculous. It’s actually one of the reasons I always refuse to receive items, even if the budget includes the organizers - because I really hate the branding aspect.

But all that aside - you see the aftermath of this event and you’ll draw the conclusion that we just spent the day in a corporate culture workshop, when in fact we were answering silly questions and getting imaginary points the entire day, but there’s ONE guy in ONE department who can’t let things slide. So… Idk man. Take it with a grain of salt next time. The agile dudes probably did it to get away from other things for a few hours, and they got the budget to also give something back to the coworkers. But not everyone really cares about agile, they’re just going through the motions.

I will literally play anything OTHER thank Pokemon. Nintendo is a shit company, everything I’ve read about them has painted them as incredibly litigious - and that would be almost ok, but it seems to always be at the expense of their own fans. Someone organizing a tournament for some shitty Nintendo game? They need Nintendo permission or they’re getting shutdown. Seriously? This is how you treat people who used their money to purchase your crap? Get fucked.

That being said - I’ve never gotten into the Pokemon craze. It just seemed like a dumb cartoon, boring games, money-grabbing cards etc. I remember trying Pokemon Go when it first appeared, getting hype about it for 1-2 days, then abandoning it cause there was nothing to do. Nothing interesting. Nothing fun. So imagine my fucking surprise when I found a dozen monster collector type games out there that are actually fun. I had always thought I didn’t like the genre. Turns out, I just don’t like shit games and/or the lack of nostalgia towards Pokemon prevented me from wearing rose-tinted glasses when looking at their shit-colored IP.

I hope Palworld makes it big enough to buy Nintendo and turn it into what it was born to be: a game development company focused exclusively on creating games based on the Palworld franchise. Fuck 'em.

I work on crap like this, and it depends. Yeah, diagnostics are done in the car - the main ones, that is. But for example BMW collects data from all their cars - they’re able to do some big data analysis. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the diagnostic info this app provided is an inference - your car has software version 4.3.21, and all cars on that sw version have experienced a certain bug at 200k km, so it’s time to go to the dealership or get a remote update or something. It could be done.

Most likely though, they’re just taking the personal data from your car and showing it to you. You know - after also saving it for themselves.

Maybe its their instances and those are just the way they are

Not to disparage your reply, because it’s well thought out and written, but doesn’t it seem to you we’re hiding behind legalese?

I want to buy a turkey. I have money. I will visit a farm, pay for the turkey (if the price is agreeable to both parties) and I now own that turkey. I will then do whatever the fuck I want with that turkdy, from raising it as my child, to cooking it for thanksgiving, to cloning it if I have the technology. Sure, I might not be able to return it in some cases. But that’s a living fucking thing, and nobody can tell me how to use it.

Now - I want to buy a movie. I have money. I will go to the cinema, but it’s not playing anymore. I will look for it on TV, but it’s only on one channel, only while I’m at work. I will look for it on the internet and it’s available on one website, where I need to make an account and provide quite a lot of information about me. So I make the account and click through their shitty prompts, pay for the movie and now I can only do one thing: stream it?

Excuse you? Who the fuck are you to tell me how I can enjoy my media? What if I want to make a vynil record and listen to it? What if I want to watch it on my old-timey projector? What if I want to burn a frame of the movie onto my morning toast every day for 2000 years? What if I want to put it in a small baggy tied to my balls while I’m fucking the mom of some movie exec, am I supposed to put the entire laptop in the baggy? How the fuck dare you make that distinction for me? Oh, because your site isn’t granting me the right to buy a movie, but to buy a license to watch that movie in whichever conditions you decide? Great - here’s the thing: I have my own license, which says whenever I pay for something, I use it however the fuck I want, and if you attempt to exert any control over my property or how it is used I will literally stab you and bury you in the woods, because I don’t take kindly to corporate fucks who attempt to instruct me how to use the things I’ve bought. Fuck you, you should’ve read my license when you took my money.

There is no “license” here, my dude. I don’t pay for licenses, regardless of what the website wants to charge for. I pay for a product, or a a service. Let’s not hide behind legalese and let’s just acknowledge that these are scummy practices to ensure the wealth of corporations at the expense of the rights of consumers. And until these types of shady “licenses” to temporarily view THEIR PROPERTY are smacked into the fucking ground by consumer-friendly laws, piracy is the only way to have justice in a system stacked against you.

Add counters to progression:
20/180 quests completed
1805/9456 dialogue choices explored
567/568 npcs killed
95/102 areas explored
And whatever else you define as progress

Add this info into your save data. When quitting the game, open the most recent save, read the counters, compare to current values, display a nondescript “you’ve had a little/a lot of/no progress since you last saved, are you sure you want to quit without saving?” Shouldn’t take so long that it triggers a lag spike, I don’t think.