Have you heard of F1? Do you know what it costs to just watch the F1 legally on streaming? have you ever wondered who goes to watch an F1 race when they completely shutdown a city for everyday people (like Las Vegas or Montecarlo), and how much the tickets cost?

It’s called value-based premium pricing, and companies couldn’t care any less about how much any of us think it costs to make the thing they are selling. They are simply charging the lowest price that their highest income target demographic is willing to pay. If you are not going to buy it, it doesn’t matter. You weren’t the target anyway. The people with tons of disposable income and a very high nostalgia induced perceived value for the cartridges are. You and I, we are rounding errors, we don’t matter. A single buyer is worth 20 people like you or me., they make up the difference by a long way.

Same way the F1 doesn’t care that Average Joe, or the other 100 thousand people like him, can’t afford a ticket for Las Vegas Grand Prix. The few one or two thousand high wealth targets can cover the difference. And they are not limited by living in Las Vegas or in Nevada. Wealthy people from all over the world will fly their lush private planes or first class seats to get there.

Same way free-to-play games don’t care about the complaints from the credit grinders. They only care to keep the whales happy. So on and so for. Value based pricing is the wet dream of CFOs and CEOs. It is the number one strategy that businesses turn to as soon as they have a captive market, it is the one they turn to when they are trying to maximize profits in a declining market, it is the one strategy that spears head enshittification. Why sell one million $1 copies when you can sell 20k $300 ones?

This is why “vote with your wallet” is a dumb thought terminating cliche. Your wallet-vote is worthless for companies, if on the other corner there’s a smaller, less vocal, but more willing to pay group. That’s why companies charge $100 for a download of a video game that might or might not work and don’t even blink when people complain.

There’s also maintenance blindness. It is easy to see how something lasted forever, when you weren’t the one doing the maintenance and repair work everyday. Also, many “good ol’ immortal appliances” neglect to mention how most of the parts are actually brand new or it wouldn’t be functional otherwise.

We tend to forget that the design on the left was the corporate ux language for a long time. Open source is just slower to fall for the trends, but they fall eventually.

Interestingly, social stigma is one of the somewhat associated factors. But not the way one would think of: high stigma equals high suicide rate. Instead social stigma skews statistical data available. Somewhat under or over reporting. Essentially the more stigma around suicide, and also mental health, the less reliable the data. It is similar to how social attitudes about sexual violence distort the reliability of statistics about rape.

This is just an example. They are usually toxic and combative if anyone even slightly disagrees with the echo chamber. The post I took the image from has half of their comments deleted by mods. I’ve had a couple of instances of harassment, spam and threats. Always users from .ml

But back to the point. Suicide is complex, and again, it has nothing to do with welfare state either. One of the most baffling things about suicide is that it’s rate of incidence is also independent of access to mental health care, suicide is almost independent from most of the typical socioeconomic factors we can think of. Look at Guyana and Uruguay. Exactly the same suicide rate. One is a country with development challenges, widespread poverty, troubled government, impoverished health care infrastructure and difficulty with access to mental health. The other is a wealthy country, with a long history of development, strong welfare state with great upward class mobility and mental health pioneers on the region. Both exact same suicide rate.

Sure it might be partially true (as per your link Taiwan’s rate is actually lower), the implication that thus North Korea is a good place to live on however doesn’t follow.

As a psychologist, suicide is one of the most complex mental health phenomena. Most often than not, it is completely detached from life quality or living satisfaction. It’s multi factor and it says nothing of what the meme implies.

Counterexamples exist. Rusia has a higher suicide rate than all of those countries, Cuba as well. And it doesnt get more capitalist than the UK and they also have a very low rate comparable to north Korea. Suicide has nothing to do with political ideology of the government in power.

Meanwhile, the second most popular post right now

Crazy Idea

You do know that on spheres there’s more circumference angles than just east to west, right? Any direction also has a circumference on the surface of the Earth.

It’s not racism to point out that a flight from the east coast of the US to the west coast is the exact same as a flight from Lisbon to Oslo. Physics don’t bend according to flags. I’m just pointing out that this idea is the product of US exceptionalism and the arbitrariness of the human conceptualization of what a country is. France is as large as California. But being in the US doesnt mean California is magically larger. You’re just deciding to compare different political and demographically distinct concepts.

Again, I’m not comparing people, I’m comparing transportation infrastructure. Of course people choose to fly or to drive on Europe according to distances. Just like in the US. It’s you who are xenophobically insisting on portraying the US as special, when it is not.

Yeah, But the US is a federation of States. It’s not that deep to understand. A member of the EU can move freely from country to country just like people can do the same from state to state in the US. The difference is that you can cross France and reach Barcelona from Paris in the same time it takes to drive the distance of Los Angeles to Las Vegas, roughly 6 hours by train. Except Paris and Barcelona (1000 miles) are 3 times further apart than those two US cities (300mi). Infrastructure has a great impact in perception of space and distances. The US is not that big, but it can seem to be when the most common transportation method is the least efficient. Each state is about the same average size as most countries in the world. It’s just that their transportation infrastructure (including highways) suck ass.

Even driving the highways let you do the distance in 10 hours. Twice the time but three times the distance.

Even then, being a small country doesn’t stop the French from knowing that Africa is not a single country.

“Texas is larger than France” means nothing. My country is larger than Texas, and one of my states is larger than Switzerland but also larger than North Carolina. That’s a non argument, that’s just physics. Again, size is not some exceptional property of the US.

This is so wrong in so many ways that if you told me it was a The Onion article with a made up map, I would believe you. Nothing makes sense. The lines don’t go anywhere, all the colors are mismatched. The position, but also the size and the shapes are all wrong. I would bet all the data is also made up and have nothing to do with reality.

Americans frequently overestimate how large their own country is. The US is about as large as all of the European union. But the US fits inside Africa nearly 4 times. Australia is roughly the same size as the US. So is China. Rusia is about 1.5 times the size of the US. The US is not special in any way, quit the exceptionalism.

Always check steamdb.info/sales. They’re always accurate and can help sift through the bundle’s mess.

Just to be clear. The flatpak is free but the mobile one is $3,62?

Not judging, nothing wrong with FOSS getting sources of income to keep the work up. But I’m just trying to make sure I understand the rationale. What does the app exposes on users? because pay usually demands google play’s most privacy invasive services.

I always find it funny the reactions of men who seek hair loss treatment with a real medical service and learn that they’re most likely going bald because genetically they have way too much testosterone.

Double funnies when conservatives have to face the fact that the treatment for their bald head is hormone therapy and the irony of taking hormone blockers for gender affirming therapy never crosses their mind…

Yeah, it’s going the be a whole ordeal. I will have to block an afternoon for the migration. Definitely not a “never breaks anymore” scenario. Everything can be broken, there’s no perfectly stable software.

Funny enough I had to rollback, since it doesn’t start in the latest version in my setup. I have to make a conscious effort to keep it one or two subversions behind. It is not the first time an upgrade breaks my install. It will probably be a whole thing when I decide to actually upgrade it again.

Right now, the latest update doesn’t run in my otherwise until now perfectly working environment. It’s frustrating because there’s no easy way to downgrade it in my setup.

9000 IQ move: “If we all stink then no one stinks!”

Meanwhile, organizers pass out on the floor due to the odor.

If you don’t trust Tailscale there’s like 3 different FOSS self-hosted alternatives. Setting one up is actually not that much more complex than setting a reverse proxy and you control the tunnelling network end to end.