Aerroon
I'm not talking about debt.
I'm talking about the 20th century being one of constant progress. Life got better and better, which created a feeling of progress and hope. However, this progress happened while we were constantly increasing the share of taxes. Eventually we will reach a point where we simply cannot increase taxes anymore. Will it be possible to have the kind of hope and progress we had over the past century even if our taxes can't keep going up and up? Or will we devolve into trying to "nickel & dime" everything through politics?
And yes, my commentary is about the world, because we are all heading in the same direction on this. This isn't something you can grow an economy out of.
Also, I don't know if that is true in this case, but these numbers will often omit state taxes for the US and only like at federal taxes. Ie they leave the US looking better than it is.
https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/...
The IMF puts the US at 37.92%, but France at 57.17%.
If you graph these values over the 20th century you should become quite worried. It turns out that a lot of our "good times" coincide with a slow but perpetual increase in this number. But this number will have to stop increasing at some point and we're reaching that point.
All these demands always seem like rich people wanting to make sure regular people can't do anything.
A license requirement for a car makes sense - you're dealing with forces well beyond the norm for what a human body has. Small drones though? I just don't see it.
>We already prevailed in a similar legal case in Germany in 2021-2023 in which we learned an important lesson: we tried to use geoIP blocking as a “hack” in a similar circumstance at the start of the legal proceedings, allowing us to continue services in Germany until the case concluded. The plaintiff (Sony Music Entertainment GmbH) then used a VPN to access the blocked content from Germany in circumvention of the geoIP blocking. The court agreed with Sony in their assertions of noncompliance, and we were fined for contempt of court.
I guess it was Germany after all.
If free DNS is supposed to be able to block people who use a VPN to circumvent a geoIP block, then the court is effectively demanding global reach for their blocking orders. It doesn't matter whether the court doesn't have the expertise in this, it only matters that they made such a moronic decision.
Could a European competitor have even existed when even youtube struggled with the GEMA lawsuit for over half a decade? And that by the end of it they still had to pay?
It might work, but it also might bloat the whole operation so much that the social network becomes non-functional.
We had video streaming sites like youtube. We had cellphone manufacturers. We had chat applications.
But the conditions for these companies were better outside of Europe. Now we're stuck with everything not made in Europe. (South Korea is more relevant in consumer tech than the EU.)
European governments still haven't swapped off MS.
How come pretty much every modern UI is garbage? Are the devs just lazy? Like google.com on mobile does not have parity with the desktop version (there's no "set specific date range option).
In anything you do, there's a point where you've got to say "okay, this is good enough" and ship it. In fact, I would argue that using pixel art itself is "settling" in the majority of cases.
I just don't get the complaints about "use proper art" when it comes to games. Most of the time the game has some other, far more glaring, visual issues (anti-aliasing, clipping, icons-not-matching-items).
If you have a game that's available in multiple regions published by different companies, then the "playable game" will start competing with the still published game in other regions.
This creates financial risk for the developer of the game (in the original region). They might be better off not releasing the game in the US/EU to avoid this risk. Many KR and CN games already don't release globally or it's done as some kind of afterthought.
I imagine that instruction exists so that people don't end up screenshotting the bot telling users to contact DPAs because they tortured it to say that in a conversation.
"Ah, the law we came up with us unconstitutional and didn't stand up to scrutiny? We'll get em next time!"
Eventually that "next time" does pass and the people doing it will never suffer consewuences for it despite undermining the very institution of representative democracy.
Imagine a Korean company makes a game and sells a license to an American company to publish their game. Eventually the American company shuts down and is now forced to release the playable game.
This version of the game is now going to compete with the Korean version of the game, because nobody will be enforcing the region lock anymore.
Your reaction to this is probably "great, screw region locking!" but judging by how some of these Korean games do in the west it's entirely possible that they will forego a global/American release altogether. They make most of their money from the Korean or Chinese region. Why would they risk that for a smaller global region?
Personally, I wouldn't mind this, but I can certainly see how this could backfire and keep some of the eastern games exclusively eastern.
The Legend of Zelda in 1987 was $50. Adjusted for inflation it would cost $151 today.
Diablo 2 released in 1999 at $50. Today that would be $101.
Diablo 3 released in 2012 at $60. Today that would be $88.
Diablo 4 released in 2023 at $70. Even this would be $77 today, despite being only 3 years ago.
Zelda Tears of the Kingdom released in 2023 for $70.
I do agree that the lack of a secondary market is concerning, but I think that in practice subscription services, piracy, and F2P games fulfill the niche of low cost gaming (for now). Don't know what the future holds though.
But that aside, I think what we would see is a lot more Facebookification. A bunch of walled gardens that you pay a subscription for and then you get access to a whole slew of sites that FB buys up. Of course, they will make sure every site ends up toeing their line too.
And the only 'users' of these websites will be rich people? Because the moment a paywall goes up on a website it becomes unusable for a large portion of the planet.
Does anyone actually do this or is this all post hoc rationalizations on why certain things work? My experience and understanding is that it's all just a bunch of "let's try lots of things and then do more of what did well". Ie it's the result of a crazy amount of iteration rather than "employing cognitive neuroscience".
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/dashboards/pisa-education-and-s...
Ie it's been dropping since 2009.
For mathematics and reading the large drop off is between 2018 and 2022.