In summary: Neoliberalism.

It’s especially entertaining with a Dutch accent rather than a Flemish one, as that “g” in “wagen” is said in a very unusual way compared to pretty much all other European languages and accents.

Mind you, it’s strangely pleasant to say it that way for me as a non-native, and having picked up the local version of “God damn it” (which has a similar sounding “g”) as an expletive when I lived there, now - almost 2 decades later - it still just comes out in its own when I’m pissed at something.

“We’ve stopped selling paper due to the danger of paper-cuts for people. We will continue selling firearms and ammo.”

Damn magnets just kept slowing the rotation of the blades, so good thing you took them out!

The ultimate shitpost is the post which is posted on a shitpost community and turns out to be entirelly wholesome after reading it (ideally getting people to read it twice or thrice to make sure), hence shitting on everybody on that community who expected it to be a shitpost.

One more reason to, when having the choice, prefer GoG over the rest.

That “solution” suffers from the problem that requiring hundreds of thousands or even millions of people to get informed about and agree to do something all in the same time period (it won’t work if some do it now and others only later) is incredibly more hard than it is for a few tens of people or maybe a couple hundred to as individuals swarm the sales venues and take all the tickets to resell them for more money.

Or putting things another way, it’s a mountain to climb for large numbers of people to organise and stop scalpers (and that, only for a while, since if people stop doing it the scalpers will return), whilst in the current commercial environment scalpers appearing is a natural outcome.

This kind of thing usually requires changing the structures that make scalping so easy, rather than hoping that somehow (magic?) hundreds of thousands or miliions of people agree to do something.

PS: Yeah, a cultural change would be it, but expecting it to just happen and all at the same time (given that early adopters of that practice won’t actually see any upside until a large enough mass of people have adopted it and they’ll start giving up if too much time goes by whilst they’re refraining from buying from scalpers and yet scalpers keep going because so many others are still doing it) is highly unrealistic.

The problem is the taking beyond their need, not if it’s many doing a little bit each or a few doing a lot each.

A swarm of locusts still leaves you with nothing to eat, even if each one only takes a bit (and unlike people buying a handful of houses to profit from merely owning them, the locusts only eat what they need).

Actually I just checked GoG without going through a VPN (from work) and I see the same “Lowest price in the last 30 days before discount” information, so maybe GoG just does it for all of Europe or maybe even always.

In other words, I don’t think is going via na IP in that specific country that’s doing it.

Guess I’ve just chosen the right country to point my VPN to then :)

Here in Europe they’re forced to show the lowest price of the last 30 days and I was looking at some games in GoG and for several interesting games their Black Friday “discounted” price is €15 whilst the lowest price in the last 30 days is €10.

So the Black Friday “discount” is in fact 50% more expensive than the previous time that game had a “discount” which happenned not even that long ago.

Meat eating is actually a very cultural thing.

In India, for example, there is an area where most people are vegetarian and have been so for centuries.

My point about how people are psychologically pushed to consume also applies here.

Further, excessive meat eating (and the average meat consumption in most Western countries is at those levels) is actually bad for one’s health and life expectancy, so even from a pure individual selfishness point of view people aren’t doing what’s best for themselves, which would indicate there’s more to it than merelly individuals being selfish.

That said, I agree that people should eat less meat, it’s just the expectation that they’re informed enough (at various levels) to do it that I find unrealistic.

It’s another of those things which in order to change needs to be pushed as education to all of society, while what we really have is massive economic interests pushing in the very opposite direction.

Certainly that goes a long way to explain why so many think LLMs are actually intelligent.

Have you somehow missed just how car-centric just about everything is? I mean, most public space out there is taken by roads and public transport is generally insufficient.

Granted, there are much better countries in this than others.

Ditto on other things imposed on people such as planed obsolence: Can you still buy a fridge that will last you a lifetime? Does your 15 year old original iPhone still work well? How many of the electronics out there are not repairable?

Then there’s all the pressure to make people consume, using techniques from Psychology (you can go read all about how the nephew of Freud introduced into Marketing techniques from Psychology back in the 50s). Absolutelly, people should be stronger and wiser than that, but most are not and just claiming that “it’s people’s fault” when others take adavantage of natural human weaknesses is just victim blaming.

Absolutelly, Consumerism is a big part of the problem and it’s a lot down to individuals to do less of it, but lets not deceive ourselves that the environment we’re all in not only promotes it massivelly and relentlessly, but plenty of decisions which were taken for us by others mean individuals often don’t even have a choice not to buy new junk or ride a personal-polution-device, and in Capitalism those decisions were taken mainly by large Companies directly or by the politicians they bought.

Had one too many succulent Chinese meals…

Maybe “travelling as a hobby” as a women’s preference with regards to men is at about it being a man’s openness and ability to deal with totally different environments, disposable income, time availability and possibly foreign language skills.

They’ll paint flames on the side to make it go faster.

Well, sorta.

Plenty (maybe even most) of 1st level manages will see and understand, but are still unable or unwilling to push back on unrealistic expectations coming from outside (sometimes not even from above, just from customer) so from the point of view of those working under them the result is the same if they’re not doing their own internal time reporting averaging and and are honest towards them.

Further, they often fuck-up things, from planning to analysis and taking in account the dependencies on external providers and it’s the team that has to make up for it. Absolutelly, the managers will notice people going the extra mile … and do the same thing again next time around and it will be just as “unexpected” and “we have not other option” as all the previous times.

I would even go as far as saying that the “understanding” manager that fucks you up anyway (sometimes because they’ll always put themselves above those working for them and might even be fake, others because they’re not very good at playing the game that needs to be played to other stakeholders) is the most common of all.

Looking back (to almost 30 years of experience in several countries), some of my worst managers were “really nice” people but the team still suffered massivelly because they were not in fact good managers (they suffered alongside the team, for all the good that did to the rest) - essentially the team was holding the career of somebody who should probably be doing something else and at the end of the day, the managers rather than the rest were the ones getting more pay and bigger bonuses.

It’s a pretty damn sad thing having to do it if you’re a fair and honest person, but that’s just how the world works.

(There are a few managers out there whom you can be honest towards without them taking away your reward for being efficient of going the extra mile, but in my personal experience those are pretty rare).

Yeah, I’ve been there - it’s how I learned to upgrade and eventually assemble my own PCs: I couldn’t just buy a new one every time it started to run slow with newer games so I learned which parts gave the better bang for the bug (back in those days it was often memory) and would upgrade them and eventually hit another bottleneck and upgrade that part and so on, and once in a while I did need to to a big upgrade (i.e. the motherboard, which usually meant also new CPU and new memory).

I was also pretty lost - at least to begin with - back then, but, you know, doing is learning.

Anyways, I still keep the “no waste” habits from back then (for example, recently I upgraded my CPU with one which the benchmarks say is twice as powerful, only my CPU is from 2018 and I didn’t want to upgrade the motherboard so the replacement had to be a CPU for the same socket type, so something also from that time. Ended up getting a server class CPU for it, which back then was over €200 but now, 2nd hand, cost me just €17).

Over time have learned to prioritize other things also and learned that sometimes spending a bit more upfront saves a lot more over time (for example, if I aim for stuff that produces less heat (i.e. that use less power to do its work, which in todays technical lingo is “lower TDP”) and I might spend a bit more but save it all and then some in lower electricity costs over time.

Point being that with a bit of reading and looking around you can learn what you need to better chose what you get, even if 2nd hand, in such a way that the results are less of a hassle and sometimes even end up saving more money (such as how parts that use a lot of power even 2nd hand can, in year or two, add up to something more expensive than newer parts which consume less because the 2nd hand ones eat so much more power).

Also as one gets more financially able to afford it, it’s normal to trade personal time savings for money, in the sense that I don’t really need to have a fragile setup held together with chewing gum and string which is constantly giving me problems and I have to waste tons of time on it just to keep it going, when at least for some things I can get a ton of extra convenience and save a lot of my time by spending a little bit more money. There is a monetary value for one not to have to worry about something breaking all the time and having to constantly tweak and maintain it, you just have to find how much is it worth it for you (I can tell you peace of mind and no-hassle It’s worth a lot more for me nowadays than back when I was a teen).