Wow. What an asshole.

I think the chip on your shoulder has a chip on its shoulder.

Perhaps to you the saying is a platitude, but that seems subjective. To someone who hasn’t considered the impacts of their consumption habits, or the ways that different economic systems can serve to reward different patterns of human behavior, it can be a thought provoking statement.

There is no ethical consumption.

If you view ethics as a binary, then sure. If you view ethics as a complex and nuanced spectrum, well, not so much.

Capitalism doesn’t encourage anything.

What a reductionist take, especially considering the paragraph you’d written just above it.

WRT the first panel, I feel that way too.

That said, is this ragebait?

This is really clever if you’re okay with convincing yourself that you know exactly and completely what other people believe… Otherwise it’s a reductionist hot take filled with logical fallacy.

Don’t worry, it only has ≤5 lines of text because the card is cropped. The artist credit line at the bottom of every card would mean that it indeed does have >5 lines of text. You just know how to extrapolate from incomplete data!

Very nice work. You beat me to the punch, but I’ma ride your coat-tails and post my version here anyway!

Just in case you hadn’t seen this follow-up:

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/gold-apollo-says-it-did-not-make-pagers-used-lebanon-explosion-2024-09-18/

And some info even suggests that this B.A.C. company was a shell company owned by Israel:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/world/middleeast/israel-exploding-pagers-hezbollah.html

By all appearances, B.A.C. Consulting was a Hungary-based company that was under contract to produce the devices on behalf of a Taiwanese company, Gold Apollo. In fact, it was part of an Israeli front, according to three intelligence officers briefed on the operation. They said at least two other shell companies were created as well to mask the real identities of the people creating the pagers: Israeli intelligence officers.

B.A.C. did take on ordinary clients, for which it produced a range of ordinary pagers. But the only client that really mattered was Hezbollah, and its pagers were far from ordinary. Produced separately, they contained batteries laced with the explosive PETN, according to the three intelligence officers.

Not quite as simple as checkboxes, but the ability is there to some degree!

Cities: Skylines II Found a Solution for High Rents: Get Rid of Landlords

For months, players have been complaining about the high rents in the city-building sim. This week, developer Colossal Order fixed the problem by doing something real cities can’t: removing landlords.

The rent is too damn high, even in video games. For months, players of Colossal Order’s 2023 city-building sim, Cities: Skylines II, have been battling with exorbitant housing costs. Subreddits filled with users frustrated that the cost of living was too high in their burgeoning metropolises and complained there was no way to fix it. This week, the developer finally announced a solution: tossing the game’s landlords to the curb.

“First of all, we removed the virtual landlord so a building’s upkeep is now paid equally by all renters,” the developer posted in a blog on the game’s Steam page. “Second, we changed the way rent is calculated.” Now, Colossal Order says, it will be based on a household’s income: “Even if they currently don’t have enough money in their balance to pay rent, they won’t complain and will instead spend less money on resource consumption.”

The rent problem in the city sim is almost a little too on the nose. Over the last few years real-world rents have skyrocketed—in some cases, rising faster than wages. In cities like New York, advocates and tenants alike are fighting against the fees making housing less and less affordable; in the UK, rent is almost 10 percent higher than it was a year ago. From Hawaii to Berlin the cost of living is exorbitant. Landlords aren’t always to blame, but for renters they’re often the easiest targets.

From this perspective, perhaps Cities’ simulator is too good. Prior to this week’s fix, players found themselves getting tripped up on some of the same problems government officials and city planners are facing. “For the love of god I can not fix high rent,” wrote one player in April. “Anything I do re-zone, de-zone, more jobs, less jobs, taxes high or low, wait time in game. Increased education, decreased education. City services does nothing. It seems anything I try does nothing.”

On the game’s subreddit, players have also criticised “how the game’s logic around ‘high rent’ contrasts reality,” with one player conceding that centralized locations with amenities will inevitably have higher land values. “But this game makes the assumption of a hyper-capitalist hellscape where all land is owned by speculative rent-seeking landlord classes who automatically make every effort to make people homeless over provisioning housing as it is needed,” the player continued. “In the real world, socialised housing can exist centrally.”

This is true. It exists in Vienna, which the New York Times last year dubbed “a renters’ utopia.” Except, in Vienna the landlord is the city itself (it owns about 220,000 apartments). In Cities: Skylines II, the devs just got rid of landlords completely.

The change in-game will have “a transition period as the simulation adapts to the changes,” and the developer “can’t make any guarantees” with how it will impact games with mods. Although the update aims to fix most of the problems at hand, that doesn’t mean players should never expect to see rent complaints again. When household incomes are too low to pay, tenants will be loud about it. “Only when their income is too low to be able to pay rent will they complain about ‘High Rent’ and look for cheaper housing or move out of the city.” Maybe it’s time players had a few in-game tenant groups of their own.

Call yourself whatever you want, at the end of the day we’re all utopianists who’re overly self-assured that our favorite pet-theory-system will eventually remove all suffering.

“If my vision for society were adopted, the world would be perfect!”

Keep dreaming. We’re fucked.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKGb8KFY5F8

There was a good discussion of this on Reddit recently. Sorry to link to Reddit, but it’s a good, topical post worth perusal.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Agriculture/comments/1dv7fw9/how_much_good_land_is_used_to_grow_food_for/

ETA:

We recommend four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year). These actions have much greater potential to reduce emissions than commonly promoted strategies like comprehensive recycling (four times less effective than a plant-based diet) or changing household lightbulbs (eight times less).

^{https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/pdf}

Anomie is a real word and it is fascinating to read about, if you’re into sociology.

Thank you for mentioning FairEmail, and thank you @wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world, for elaborating on what makes it great.

Thanks to your recommendations I installed it last night and paid the $6 one-time license fee to unlock the advanced features. Being able to set custom notification sounds per sender is a feature I’ve been wanting on my phone for years. I finally have it now and it’s already changing my life for the better.

This is some top tier mental gymnastics. Holy shit, I hope you’re a troll. You’re literally on the internet discussing your plans to commit fraud. Mensa-level shit, here.

People are going to buy CP one way or another… that means you should make it and sell it to them, right?

Grow the fuck up, and maybe train a LLM on ethics, you’re going to need some education on the subject if you hope to stay out of prison.

Even if you wanted to vote for Biden you won’t be able to because he’s not going to be on the ballot either.