I have always wondered how we can reconcile that things "are" objectively so great and yet "seem" subjectively so bad. In my experience both online and off, there is a pessimism about work, poverty, and basic security that persists (or is even getting worse) despite these changes. To my eyes, it has to be larger than just the state of the media.
We have a few of things we can quantify, and that are often brought out in discussions such as this one. Healthcare outcomes, wages, life expectancy, basic material goods, access to education, casualties from war, etc.
I heard another commenter here talk about the human experience being understood as a vector, with twenty or thirty dimensions. Most of those are moving in their positive directions. But the problem is that when God made the human experience, he crafted it with uncountably many components, most of them themselves unquantifiable.
Unfortunately for us "objectively" exists only in that limited set, not in the greater whole. "The number of species going extinct per unit time is more than it has ever been, maybe ever." What is the cost, paid in pessimism and hopelessness rather than dollars, of knowing that? Does it counteract a 2 month increase in my projected lifespan?
> how we can reconcile that things "are" objectively so great and yet "seem" subjectively so bad
Because one of the things that has been fueling GDP growth is disintermediating community and family support systems. Health care spending is up because you don’t have a family home where the older generation slowly ends up and where the younger generations can share elder care burdens. You don’t have people cooking for the extended family. You don’t have neighborhood sharing of homemaking tasks. Etc.
These things have been disintermediated in favor of nuclear family and individual solutions provided by commercial providers. Because that leads to GDP growth and GDP growth drives culture.
But even though you might be getting a slightly bigger piece of a much bigger pie, and even though fewer people might be starving, a much higher percentage of your personal self care burden is falling 100% on your shoulders. And that means you have more pressure on your earning potential, which means you are more sensitive to changes in employment.
Essentially, a larger portion of your well-being is bottlenecked through your checking account. So even though you may be “more taken care of”, the subjective (and possibly objective) precariousness of your well-being is much higher.
It does take time. But I would put it up in the trifecta of Most Important Things a person can do. Everyone says exercise makes you happier, but I will take it a step further: it fulfills a fundamental need for a person to be comfortable in their own body. Denying yourself exercise for any reason at all is self abuse.
What is the solution? I would rather have automated drone armies in the hands of the US government than anyone else.
The same could be said of the atomic bomb. A weapon made purely for mass scale indiscriminate destruction of humanity. But if not us, then who would we trust to develop such a technology?
Permit my inquiry but whenever i see comments like this, I can't help but think that your main reason for believing in this train of thought is majorly because the negative effects of U.s military industrial complex has pretty much never affected you. because if you were perhaps an Arab who watched his/her home town bombed to shit by a us drone and had the us write off the human casualties that resulted there in from this act as collateral damage you most likely will not feel this way about a single country trying to amass absolute power, particularly when it is a specific country that seem to have a very itchy war finger, which also just elected a very racist man as president.
If the table were turned will you still feel this way, i wonder.
And p.s i am not an Arab, I am African so yes i do sympathize somewhat with what they go through. I also do not hate the U.S but i do feel it that it was time the rest of the world closed the military and technological gap the U.S and the west really had over the rest of the world as this will stop a lot of their bullshit.
I am American, and I hear this from Americans all the time. The reality is far different, though. Does the Russian military perform more humanely in war than the US military? I don't think so. Would the Chinese? Things like My Lai and Abu Ghraib are the exception with the US military, not the rule.
I obviously don't want any single powerful entity to have access to this technology, but I can see the reality of it, which is that someone will have it. Who will it be?
I imagine knowledge over whether those are the exception or the rule for the US military is classified. they don't have to tell you when they've been doing evil
Yet it always comes out. Not because of a bug in code, or a document that fell off of a truck. It’s humans involved that know something is wrong and decide to report it.
The My Lai was reported by the American close air support crew, not a Vietnamese journalist.
The British, Russians and French have these weapons and have never used them. The South Africans developed them and gave them up. The Israelis probably have them but don’t admit to it.
Of these people, only the Americans have used them, and they used them on population centers.
I’m not taking a position on whether this was right or wrong. I’m just pointing out that you are trusting the only government that has ever killed thousands with these weapons and distrusting several governments that have not.
The atomic bomb is a blunt instrument with no finesse. The ability to vaporize large groups of people in a flashy infrastructure destroying display is not particularly conducive to control.
Atomic bombs don't let you watch, record, and analyze the movements of millions of people. They don't let you record and analyze the personal lives, conversations, and secrets of millions of people. They don't eliminate the need for human labor.
He has a point though. The author chose lawyers as a comparison point. Why? Manual laborers work long hours. People with two or three part time retail jobs work long hours.
Lawyers have a different set of qualifications and requirements than game developers do.
I think that this is sort of missing part of the comparison in that it's meant to compare similar highly demanding jobs which require a specialized education. While labor is incredibly important and I respect the hard work, it's a different skillset entirely that doesn't have the same prequisetes. I would suggest the comparison is between professions with the same demanding hours and same demanding prequisetes, not just the hours. It's not to diminish other jobs with long hours, it's just they're not the focus of the comparison.
(To further elaborate, my very first job was picking flat stone at a quarry, since it was popular for home gardens at the time and machines couldn't get the stones easily without breaking them. Long hours of hard work in the dirt and mud plus many split knuckles and crushed fingers. Still, I was able to do it as a 15 year old unsupervised and with no training. It was useful and hard work, but not really the same as the IT I do now, the majority of which is watching progress bars.)
I think your point is a little hard to discern. Who do you think educationally game programmers are more similar to: Manual laborers or Lawyers? Other than the regulation of the latter, I think it is clear they are more similar to lawyers. Serious game programming requires fairly extensive knowledge in multiple disciplines of computing particular graphics and rendering, AI, at least some basic algorithmic knowledge and competency with programming that is much more technical than "make yet another web app in a hipster JS framework," to just be honest it. There are many people in the game development industry with MS degrees and even some PhDs. This I think is more similar professional "status" than brick laying, I think.
Artstyle is far far more important than graphical capability.
A game like Team Fortress 2, released in 2007 (!) looks so much better than many modern games because there is a coherence and style to the art. It's not "HD" for the sake of "HD."
We're in a period where the graphical canvas is getting larger every year, and the temptation is to fill it with as much color and pop as possible. But some restraint really works wonders.
> We're in a period where the graphical canvas is getting larger every year, and the temptation is to fill it with as much color and pop as possible.
It's been a while, but last I looked, it seemed that the temptation was to use ever muddier and desaturated visuals, with as much glare and shiny surfaces as possible.
It comes and goes in phases according to the available technology. The first Quake was all muddy brown and gray. Quake 2 and Unreal both introduced color lighting and looked like a disco on Saturday night. Mid-2000s games added a lot of new lighting and post-processing effects but they had limitations causing harsh shadows and highlights, hence another round of gray/brown photorealism came through.
But in this decade things are finally feeling more evened out. Lighting models are sophisticated enough to allow for designs similar to a film set or photo shoot, and post-processing is getting past basic glows and filters and into a spectrum of quality/performance tradeoffs.
Of course, the games that don't aim for photorealism always age better. That's been the case since people started digitizing photographs for games.
What's funny is that it looks like Valve lowered the polycount and quality of TF2, likely to accommodate the user-added stuff like hats--which seems in the spirit of stuff this article is upset about.
I think this is a great point. It's why even cartoon-art games like Super Mario Brothers (1985) can age really well visually while games that put so much effort into graphics still age poorly.
If the main goal in a game is to make the graphics of yesterday look and feel obsolete, then that game will probably look and feel obsolete tomorrow...
TF2 has nice stylized models, but IMO the in game graphics are dated and not particularly special compared to newer genre examples like Overwatch, Splatoon, or Destiny.
I feel TF2 has a place in peoples hearts so it keeps getting wheeled out in this debate way more times than it's deserved these days (especially considering Valve compromised both the art direction and coherence in recent years).
All 3 examples here are excellent but I want to say I know a lot of people hate on Destiny but the art direction, environmental art, creature design is all magical in terms of tech and results. Honestly feels like concept art brought to life and anyone dismissing it and not even giving it a chance just are missing out on some seriously impressive visuals resting perfectly between realistic and stylistic.
I watched everything and I confirm, it’s what was the crack, and it doesn’t exist anymore, it’s filled in. At about the same place the are putting an aeration feature to mix air in the water and make it less destructive to the concrete downstream.
