Child.

Ok

According to that, I should be 53.

That’s over a decade older than I am right now.

Probably not. That’s basically a full week of take home pay for me.

I definitely want it. If it’s cheap, I definitely want two.

Actually everything they recently announced looks great. I really want to try to frame.

I gave up on VR after the oculus CV1 got canned. I bought one, got a few decent years out of it in spite of “meta” buying the company and making it shit, but when they stopped selling the connection cables for the CV1, which was the part that broke most frequently, I just backed the hell off and thought to myself, “this shit is cool, but it’s clearly not established enough to be predictable, maybe some day”.

Whelp, I think we’re finally there.

Until now, you had the “option” of either something mainstream like the quest 7 (or whatever number they’re on), or you can pick from either the index, which was on the pricy side for what you were getting, or the bigscreen beyond, which required an iPhone to scan your face so they can make a custom face shield just for you (and to get more you had to scan those people in and get face shields for them at a premium). Anything else was so niche that you probably were not getting support, if the company even existed in a few years to support you.

Now? A first party VR that actually looks good and works natively with steam…

So yeah… Where do I sign up?

I’ve wanted a steam deck for years but I don’t game on the go so I can’t really justify it, but the rig I’m using for couch gaming is getting pretty dated… So this seems like a great time to get back into everything… Though, finding the money I need to get the systems is going to be a challenge…

I hope this name sticks.

I would argue that capitalist monopolies are the problem.

There are examples where a “monopoly” has 100% of the market and they do a good job, usually in non-profit driven contexts. To provide an example: there’s only one organization in pretty much any given area, that handles extinguishing fires. Usually called the fire department, and it’s run by the local body of government in a monopoly context.

They still do a great job, but there’s no competition in fire fighting.

They’re not inherently profit driven.

Also, hats off to the firefighters out there, you guys are awesome. Anyways, back to my point.

There are good organizations that operate a monopoly in their service segment. They’re just typically owned and operated by a democratically elected government. Of the people, for the people, by the people.

Any monopoly that is profit driven, especially any that are capitalistic, will succumb to enshittification, 100% of the time, it’s just a matter of when it happens. The only time that it is possible to not have that happen, is in privately owned corporations, which are rare… But the leadership believes in improving the product more than profiteering. But on a long enough time line, that will also fail because inevitably someone will buy the company or inherit it, and they will want to maximize their profits over everything.

It will always happen when things are privately held, and especially if they’re publicly traded.

There’s a paradox I heard of that’s pretty relevant in this line of thought that is pretty transportable to most things. I heard it in the context of IT security.

It goes something like this: you buy security and after 2 or 3 years when you need to renew, nothing bad has happened, so it seems like you don’t need security. When in actual fact the extra security has been the reason there haven’t been any incidents.

So it’s almost impossible to prove that buying the security is helping without extensive analytics.

In many cases those analytics are either very difficult or impossible to get.

To demonstrate the transportable nature of this concept, let’s transpose it to vaccines.

If everyone is vaccinated, then nobody gets sick from those diseases, making it seem like the diseases are not a threat anymore, which means that vaccines are no longer useful.

Meanwhile, in all actual fact, the only reason why polio is so rare is because there is a safe and effective vaccine for it that everyone has taken (replace polio with whatever disease you want that has an effective vaccine).

It’s a paradox of: how do we prove this is working, without discontinuing it and possibly being eaten by rats/leopards/whatever.

If there’s only monopolies in the market then is their product the best on the market, or is everyone using it because there’s no alternatives?

Leaning that monopoly argument against capitalism, it’s almost certainly not the best product. When you have a captive audience, those that need your service and don’t have an alternative, there’s no incentive to innovate, or invest in improving the product at all. Do innovation stagnates so that corporations can maximize shareholder value; because the focus of a corporation isn’t to innovate, or improve what they do, their focus is always on extracting the most value for the least cost.

Therefore, monopolies will almost certainly lead to a sub-optimal product. The people that suffer for this are the users of that product. In the case of something like Google search, that’s basically everyone.

There’s a more modern term for this phenomenon: enshittification. Actively making a product worse specifically for the purposes of creating profits for shareholders.

Late stage capitalism is fun, isn’t it?

This. Entirely this.

The frustrating part is when there are laws in place for something, and they’re not being enforced and law makers think that making more laws about something will somehow fix the enforcement issues…

Making it more illegal only harms law abiding people, enforcement actually harms the law breakers.

It’s not rocket surgery.

I haven’t either.

Speaking of things I haven’t done… I’ve have, not once, turned the wrong way down a one way street.

… It was twice.

I’m not doing this again.

I appreciate that. I can’t say anything is better right now, but I can say that I think I’m handling it better. So that’s something, I guess?

Either way, I wanted to thank you very much for your words. Be well.

I liked continuum too.

Just saying.

I’ve been having a shit week and I don’t mean to be a dick about it.

I’m not sure why I give this much of a shit about a post that should be ha-ha funny.

I’m sorry.

There would still be less dead people.

So this is what a puppet looks like when you pull your hand out… Very interesting.

Man, y’all are wrong. People on both platforms be stupid as hell. Myself included.

What was I talkin’ about?

It happens, yes.

Just like people dying in T-bone or head-on collisions. Not to mention rollovers and other crashes.

Each of them carries the chance of fatality.

It’s unpredictable, which is why we can’t eliminate fatalities entirely.

My most recent point is that even the fatalities from being rear-ended are significantly reduced from even 10-15 years ago. Making the small (but still too high) probability of a fatality from that type of crash, smaller (but still too high).

Therefore, the most likely outcome from such an incident would be the destruction of property, not loss of life.

Which is the original point I was being pedantic about. The original comment was that stopping and not driving wouldn’t kill anyone, and the reply that kicked off this insane tangent, was that the people behind might.

And I’m staying, no, they won’t die (it is statistically very unlikely).

Edit to include original context:

Is this the only argument?

Because while that’s dangerous, modern safety standards in vehicles mean the probability of mortality in these situations is substantially reduced.

My point is that people won’t die, not that it’s a good thing to do.

Why? If people think this is an acceptable situation to go ahead and drive in, then people are going to get hurt or killed.

How calm should I be about driver’s being so irresponsible that they endanger themselves and everyone around them because “lol, what was I supposed to do?!?” … Exactly?

Can’t see? Don’t drive. It’s not fucking rocket surgery.