Make Sony continue to pour money into the servers

I work in IT. I can pretty much guarantee that server load for a game like this is nonexistent from a cost perspective. They’re not going to be using cloud services, they’re going to privately host because it’s way cheaper. Early days playercount woes were before they added more nodes to their solution. Whatever cost they had for servers is already paid. Electricity and facilities costs are whatever because they are paying it anyway. They can’t just fire the people maintaining their solution either but that’s also baby bucks compared to the money spent building this thing or marketing it.

Gaming protests of popular games never work unless the objective doesn’t alter the bottom line.

That isn’t how it works though. Nobody is collecting billions in wages. They receive stock which isn’t counted as taxable income until sold.

Same deal almost everywhere… but firsthand experience is that a significant portion of all drivers have their phone out.

Would love to see some proportional crash rates of autopilot use vs not autopilot use too. People focus on things like crash totals or death totals. 17 deaths is a tragedy to be sure.

That being said when the US has over 40,000 auto deaths per year… and this article is telling me only 17 deaths are in any way involved with Autopilot since 2019… I really wonder why this is somehow more outrageous than the ~240,913 other vehicle deaths in the US since 2019. Given that Tesla is about 5% of all autos in the US, I would expect tesla deaths to be about 12,000 deaths in that period, or 5%.

Are so few people using autopilot? Shouldn’t the autopilot death toll be something closer to the 2000 deaths per year one would expect statistically from Tesla Drivers?

Is autopilot much safer than human drivers? Is it more dangerous?

Is Autopilot + Attentive safer than just attentive?

Is the 40k deaths per year not something that should be considered simply because people stop thinking of so many deaths as a tragedy and just think of it as a statistic?

Is the outrage and focus on car self driving just an extension of human phobia of technology and articles allow for people to have anecdotal confirmation bias?

If you try using adaptive cruise control and lane assist functions as a method to keep your hands off the wheel you’re going to be in for a bad time.

I’m sure it’s not all cars, but all the ones i’ve been in over the past 10 years generally only jerk you back to the middle of the lane. They don’t adapt well if you’re cut off suddenly at high speeds either.

Man… they use a metric of $2.57/day in 2023 dollars to define the level of extreme poverty? That’s $938.05 a year. Just wow.

Huge qol improvements in india https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXTZVKYYyig

PPP falls apart when you consider the price of consumer electronics, electricity, gasoline, airfare…

In the Dominican Republic you can’t get completely stable electricity. It just doesn’t happen without generators/batteries. Generators aren’t suddenly cheaper in DR. It’s 20DOP for 1kwh of electricity in DR, or $0.34 USD/kwh. I pay less in the greater Boston area. Wages there are way, WAY below 30k/year. The thought of having air conditioning at home is practically impossible for almost all who live there.

I love how you nitpicked the chile reference (with no counterpoint whatsoever) but it’s true across Latin America. Imported goods to poorer nations generally cost way above and beyond what the US pays…unless it’s prescription drugs because almost all other nations negotiate those prices to be much, much less than what the US pays (and only just started negotiating… for JUST Medicare.) I’m sure there are other examples as well. The PPP is so far apart on imports it’s insane. Often times things are sold in the US even if they are made locally because the price in the US is way above and beyond what the locals can afford.

The real rich

What some lower-middle class Americans don’t realize is that to the great majority of people in this world… we are the rich.

In the US we look at someone making $75,000+, $100,000+, $150,000+, $250,000+, 500,000+, 1,000,000+, 1,000,000,000+ as rich… depending on what our current income level is. The reality is that even making 30k in the middle of nowhere is still better than 85% of the world’s income and quality of living.

If you can save $10,000 a year you can save more than 60% of people in the world actually earn.

When I point this stuff out though I get a ton of downvotes. Imagine buying a car, a plane ticket, or personal electronics when your total pre-tax pay is 10k or less… that is most people’s situation who are alive today (but less than 30% of Americans!) As a bonus, imported goods are typically cheaper in the US then almost any other country. Hair Gel that is $5 here is easily $20 USD in Santiago, Chile.

There should be way more taxes on the highest earners and more mechanisms that siphon wealth away from those with extreme excess. Just be aware that Americans overall have the most to lose if this goes to a global scale. A lot of things we take for granted and expect are luxury for billions.

The ads are coming! the ads are coming! -Modern Paul Revere

most of the world

Countries that have recognized are in green: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_recognition_of_the_State_of_Palestine#/media/File:Palestine_recognition_only.svg

My second paragraph is basically: I have no faith in humanity coming out of all of it. I don’t think humanity as a whole has any chance of changing course because of how humans just are.

Maybe we’ll have runaway greenhouse gas causing catastrophic climate change. Maybe we’ll blow everybody up in what some might call world war 3. Maybe we’ll just have more and more humans be born until Earth can’t support practically any non-human, non-livestock life. Maybe we’ll have a biological outbreak that actually causes extremely high mortality rates. Maybe we’ll have a CME hit and wipe out all electronics on the majority of the developed world. There’s so many things that are more likely to happen than the majority of humanity changing course.

We can’t even stop two pointless wars or fix American politics. There’s no way humans can solve a global problem that requires believing in science and putting business owners second.

Fuck genocide. I’m not saying I have a solution, i’m just stating the problem.

As a species we are not willing to change the status quo because we’re all too inherently selfish unless it benefits us. The people who have the power to change things all have way too much to lose by taking away from anyone with money power and influence, so it won’t change.

Worldwide net humans will continue to increase until some kind of collapse comes. Human nature will not allow for any substantial change to happen. Maybe at some point some maniac(s) will go the genocide route but it still won’t change the inherent problem: human beings when considered as a whole are inherently selfish when it counts. Genocide is just another example of that selfishness.

I don’t see a selfish solution to the problem though maybe some rich assholes will start a colony on another planet before it ends and they can do it all over again.

I think the problems go much, much deeper than oil and fracking. American QOL is not sustainable for 8 billion people, and it only exists for a couple hundred million really anyway.

I’m all for making big sweeping changes but I am not one of the rich stakeholders who control how things work in this world.

With 8 billion humans it’s too hard to centralize control or do anything to realistically get people to follow the rules. Things being technically possible is one thing, but human nature means it’ll never actually happen. Humans are awful.

We’re so obsessed with rules that nobody actually follows and covering up how things actually work. Whistleblowers have their lives ruined and these giant multibillion dollar conglomerates get a slap on the wrist. This is the world we live in and the systems we push for actively dissuade it from getting better.

If I try to make the argument that the earth is overpopulated i’ll quickly get downvoted to oblivion in the typical thread.

There’s too many humans. The only hope of life surviving long term is the fall of humankind. The writing is on the wall in terms of heading towards an extinction event anyway so it’s not like we’ll need to do anything for it to happen.

It’s not the same as a traditional inspector though where you can negotiate some changes or fixes or money. Appraisers don’t seem to be very rigorous.

Of course, anything in a bubble without considering how to mitigate effects is going to be a problem. If it was just a single change necessary it would have already been done.

There are condos for boston right now that would rent for 4000-5000/mo (like 2br/2ba) but are listed for sale for 1.35-1.4 million dollars. The mortgage on these things would be like 9k/mo. This is not the common property though, just an extreme example.

I put an offer down on this small multifamily with a total of 4br and 2ba (3br 1ba main unit and 1br 1ba sub unit) and the mortgage was looking like 5k-5.5k/mo with 20% down. Rental for 3br might go for 2400-2800 and a 1br is around 1600-1800. So combined let’s call it 4300/mo for an investor. That’s a $700+/mo lost cash per month assuming you get renters. If you can’t find a renter for that 3BR unit… you’re heavily boned.) It just doesn’t make sense imo. Plus combined in the area I was looking at buying the unit, it has a penalty for non owner occupied property taxes. Plus the 1br unit needed the kitchen floor to be completely redone. I heard an investor at the open house talking about converting the nasty basement into a 3rd unit too.

Also all houses are going for about 10% over asking here, all contingencies except the mortgage one is waived (you must wave inspection. No one is accepting offers contingent on inspection in the suburbs of boston today in 2024.) A great deal many of offers show up waiving mortgage contingency as well, implying cash offers, but the last sellers agent I spoke to suggested waiving that to look like a cash offer and taking the risk of losing your job before the sale closes. It’s fucking wild

If a house doesn’t sell on it’s opening weekend it’s going to get cut every week until it finally goes. Being a greedy seller is really disadvantageous, but being just under value causes bidding wars.

Somehow I think that would be great for un-fucking our “home investment” slave system in the US where landlords buy all these homes on credit, convert them to multifamily, and then use the labor of renters indefinitely while allowing the homes to get worse and worse.