And some people argue against the death penalty. Argh.

I think I heard it put like this once (paraphrasing):

Ads aren’t to make you buy the product. Few people are gonna see a regular commercial about chocolate and go out and buy it. That’s not their intent. They’re meant for brand recognition. They’re about that moment in the supermarket when you have 50 choices of what soda to get. 40 of them are noname and store brands. You’ll almost never try them unless you want to save some money and/or aren’t interested in what you’re buying. But then you have your coke and pepsi. The old reliables - the names that are stuck in your head since forever. And sometimes you’ll want to check out the new mountain dew or dr pepper flavors, cause you’re curious. But when you’re not in the mood for new, when you just want a soda and don’t wanna think about it, you’ll get a coke or a pepsi or one of the few brands whose name you recognize.

After 1000 raid shadow legends ads, guess what you’re gonna feel like trying in 3 months when you get bored of your current mobile game and are scrolling through their top picks for games? “Hmm, Raid shadow legends? I’ve heard about this before, maybe I give it a try”

Sure, it backfires sometimes - for example, I always make it a point to not try out a game if I feel it’s been in too many ads - I don’t wanna waste time in something that blew its entire budget on marketing. But with most people this doesn’t happen. And I’m pretty sure even I tried some item from an ad that I said I’d never get - the name probably just got stuck in my head and I got it without even realizing it.

Marketers make a shit load of money based on human psychology. They wouldn’t be doing it if it didn’t work.

There comes a point where being right doesn’t matter more than the fact that they’re cunts.

Sounds like a them problem. Nintendo are assholes.

Germans are allowed to shove their fingers in their ears and go “lalalala I can’t hear you therefore it’s not genocide”. In fact, all of us are allowed to. It’s just that most of those who aren’t a cunt will choose not to. It seems Germans do not pass that particular filter.

It was getting in the way of people voting for the most populist person so they got rid of it. It’s now replaced with a combination of pavlovian reward system + “stay in line” reminders, so that voters can go for the simplest campaign promise (eg: make america great again), without struggling to understand if the ‘how’ can actually accomplish the ‘what’.

Decree 770 […] signed in 1967

Gen X in Romania is actually replaced by “decreței” - loosely translated as children of the decree. About 20 years later, they’d be just old enough to take part in the revolution that brought about Ceaușescu’s execution and fast replacement with a former chief of the communist party’s propaganda department, who had strong ties to Moscow.

You think they’re going to pay when they can just use force?

privately owned

Nah sorry, conversation ends there.

Cameras on private property don’t affect you. Also, they are never because of the kindness of humanity. They’re always because someone was a bad neighbor/bad tourist/bad human. You can wish all you want for the state to not have you under surveillance - that’s fine. But if you wanna enter private property, you succumb to private rules. And if you don’t wanna do that, you can stay out.

It hurts to do this, because you’ve obviously thought out your comment and you obviously like the game and want to believe the devs are doing their best. But I think your entire premise is wrong

To combat Chinese gold farmers, Blizzard started selling gold in a bit of a roundabout way

Why do you think this? Why do you grant a greedy game dev the benefit of the doubt? They’re cashing in on Chinese gold farmers in all possible ways, man:

1. By allowing their accounts to exist instead of banning and moving on
2. By controlling the value of gold with a cash shop, ensuring economy is in their favor
3. The cash shop also brings them monetary value.

They are triple dipping, and you choose to believe they are doing it because they’re a good game dev.

A good game dev would ban accounts guilty of real money trading. A good game dev would fix the in-game economy with in-game methods. A good game dev wouldn’t have micro transactions in a subscription game. You want to believe Blizzard is doing this because of those evil Chinese farmers - I’m here to tell you they’re profiting from this and don’t have the morals to make it right.

Oh no, the treaty-breaking, nuke-threatening, war-crime-committing invading force is being discriminated against!

Holy shit, gtfo. Maybe don’t be an actual cunt if you don’t want people to “discriminate” against you? The guy didn’t even fire all Russians, only those tied to sanctioned companies. He did less than should’ve been done. But that’s only because what should be done to Russia at this point is assassinating their leader, disarming the country, executing the army, installing a puppet government that ensures economic and military inferiority, and selling tickets to piss on Putins grave for the rest of the world to blow off some steam.

Edit: here’s a view from a Russian, maybe that helps:

https://social.kernel.org/notice/AnIv3IogdUsebImO6i

I know this is the case today, but we are still in the early days of massive surveillance and everyone being globally interconnected. I have to trust legislation will follow to regulate this, just like any potentially dangerous invention is now regulated in most countries, from pharmaceuticals to firearms, to lead based paints, to news outlets.

The fact of the matter is, regular people cannot keep up with all inventions ever. It’s up to governments to protect their citizens from threats, and a failure to do so should be punished. If instead the government chooses to be that threat, the solution isn’t easy, but it is simple.

This is correct. But if you don’t work in the field, it’s fine.

You don’t have to know how to bottle wine if you’re not a wine maker. You don’t need to know how to build a dam if you’re not an engineer. You don’t have to learn everything about the architecture of an OS if you’re a user and not a programmer. Let the kids use their devices without knowing obscure shit, just like people let us wear clothes without knowing how to sew. There are things we should all know how to do - changing a light bulb is cheaper if you don’t call an electrician every time it needs to be done. But there are things that are so opaque at first sight that they need to be performed by people with specialized knowledge. And it’s okay to not have that knowledge if you’re not in that field.

Yes, there are 1-2 generations where everyone was learning how computers work. But there were also quite a few generations where everyone was learning how agriculture and farming works - you know, to survive. And I’ll be damned if I wanna have my kids birth a cow or install Linux on their PC. Unless for some godforsaken reason they decide that’s their job.

I mean at this point might as well go ahead and do it, “I was scared for my life, they were many and threatening” still works as an argument right? And what the fuck is the Klan gonna do about it? Retaliate by wearing white in other locations?

First ammendment doesn’t protect you from a baseball bat.

Babe wake up, new prime number just dropped.

Is it necessary to pay more, or is it enough to just pay for more time? If the product is good, it will be used.

This is 90% what I expected a kiwi to sound like.

Not sure. I can’t remember right now why I blocked dbzer0 completely, but my filters are blocking this instance. Which I guess is another side of the same coin: defederation (and allowing entire instances to be blocked) also contributes to fragmentation of communities. I had no idea the largest piracy community is on dbzer0, so I would subscribe to another piracy community on another instance, and thus split the memberships even more.

9 plus anything is just a 1 in front of the other digit minus 1

This is also how it works in my head, but isn’t it the same as the other guy was saying, 10+6?