If you want to relocate to another country focus on the "pull factors" of that place, rather than the "push factors."
I moved to Sweden because my wife and I felt that was the best place to start a family. I'm on parental leave and cherish every moment I get to spend with my kid.
We would have made the move no matter what was happening in the US. Well, unless there was a major cultural shift and a generous grant of child care benefits equivalent to SWE.
Thank you for this. Very fair point, and something I've preached to folks when changing jobs in the past: don't leave your job for another company because your current job is awful... make sure you're joining a new company you actually feel good about, otherwise you'll end up in another potentially bad situation. Thank you for the reminder.
How has Sweden treated you and your family, and how do you feel about the general economic outlook for yourself and your children?
Are expats accepted there? What kind of challenges could I expect if Sweden were a consideration?
Why would anyone put so much trust in to the US in the past?
I'm American, an army vet, and proud. Yet, I fail to identify anything other than the US acting in their own self interest since WW2. The list is long, but to name a few, Vietnam, War on terror, mass surveillance network, etc...
People are waxing poetic about an America that never was.
Sure, I really do agree and I didn't mean to romanticize the past. However, there was a time when the self-interests of the EU and the US overlapped much more than they do now. From your point of view, it might seem like nothing has changed dramatically, but from our perspective, it certainly has.
I've noticed this shift both in my professional life and personally. And I'm not talking about just eating up what the media spews in my face, but actual cold, hard and direct consequences I've had to deal with since Trump came into office.
> (Rockstar really should’ve made this a separate launch option like other games do)
This is what happens when a producer's/product manager's cherished KPIs come before UX.
In their mind, adding a toggle in the launcher would lead to lower engagement and player acquisition.
We, the players, fail to recognize how our gaming experience can be enhanced by using social features like leader boards, guilds, or in game chat. We are not enlightened.
Think about all the fun and exciting connections you'd miss out on if all the social crap was off by default or in an easily accessible place.
I'm honestly surprised it's a command line option. My guess is that the requirement originated externally.
But that's why the government had to regulate it. If companies have financial incentive to do something they're going to do it, to make them stop that incentive must be removed. I don't think that comment was intending to justify the situation.
To be fair, the societal harm from deciding to play multiplayer instead of single player is probably a few orders of magnitude less than toxic waste in the water.
Granted, but how about the societal harm from an exploitable bug in one or more of these rootkits? Millions of gaming computers could wreck some havoc in the hands of an even slightly creative attacker not restrained by moral or economic considerations…
Not sure if, at this point, it costs SpaceX more money to get to Mars, or Rockstar Games to develop GTA 6. AAA budgets are insane (with IMO meagre results - I don't like most of them).
A lot of time and money goes into AAA games and I think there’s an inverse relationship at play where the higher the budget is, the more risk averse the studio is. So you end up with a whole suite of AAA releases that all play it safe and just copy small innovations from each other, nobody really daring to push the envelope too far.
I don’t really enjoy those games either any more. Too big, too long, and the gameplay feels more like running errands and checking off a todo list than having fun.
Release cycles in the 90s and early 2000s were pretty tight, slowly getting longer as storage and graphical firepower increased. 3D was totally new and studios were trying out all kinds of crazy ideas for games. These days you can basically expect 90% of mainstream releases to follow the same playbook.
Yeah, it's just me being an idealist and projecting.
I acknowledge what the analytics show, but always allude to the hypothetical casual loner segment who we lack data on because we pushed them away or we don't measure things relevant to them.
I'm a boomer millenial, or whatever we're called now, and never took to online gaming, so I'm part of this segment.
Casual loners are irrelevant to the monetization and in game economy people, resulting in relegation to second class status.
Until someone figures out a way to milk this segment for that juicy recurring revenue, consumable$, $kins, etc..., we must accept our fate, largely an afterthought.
Yet we are the people who started gaming on PCs -- we made consumer 3D accelerators profitable and spent the time writing about them on forums in the 90s and 2000s. We certainly have the power to move markets.
People who can't be monetized sometimes are valued in their opinions.
If someone principled really likes a thing, it can gain more popularity by others who trust that person adopting it.
Maybe not loners. But there's still reason to make users happy because viral marketing impact cannot be measured well.
I wonder how much of this is familiarity (i.e. I play games in the style I did when I was sixteen) versus people in older age-groups having less sustained time for gaming (i.e. grabbing twenty minutes while the baby sleeps) and single-player being inherently better for that use-case.
Part of it is reflexes too. I used to love fast paced FPS games as a teen and was actually pretty good at them until my early 30's. As time went on, I started noticing I was doing consistently worse in 1v1 firefights. I started gravitating towards games that had a 'slower' way to contribute like playing vehicles in the battlefield series.
As time goes on I've gotten more and more into single player games, especially games that let me build stuff.
This is because the multiplayer games we played at 16 are 10-15 years old. You literally can’t go back to those happy memories again. You play halo 3 today you get wrecked by the people who haven’t stopped regularly playing in over a decade. And when you try and play the latest fps game you go this sucks, its not halo 3.
REAL-TIME multiplayer is worse for that use case. There's no reason a game that is asynchronous, like an old school play by mail game, couldn't be fun for twenty minutes when you have time, and maybe there's a limit or a turn involved so you don't get too ahead, and your partner does their thing when they get time
I have wanted to see a game like that for years and years. I think this is why chess.com is huge with the youths, as it fits my description and is fairly unique -- I just don't personally care for chess.
> We, the players, fail to recognize how our gaming experience can be enhanced by using social features like leader boards, guilds, or in game chat. We are not enlightened.
> Think about all the fun and exciting connections you'd miss out on if all the social crap was off by default or in an easily accessible place.
What I find most interesting about modern society is that every subculture has these hardcore adherents.
It's so predictable now. I was at a friend's house a month or so back. He was showing off his fancy outdoor pizza oven, in which he would be making pizza in that evening.
First thing I asked him is, "How deep in to this are you?" I immediately knew there had to be pizza oven nerds online arguing over which pizza spatula (called a peel I learned) is best, and the ongoing battle between wood purists vs metal fanatics.
He was wondering how I knew so much. If you look in to any interest or hobby, the rabbit hole is deep, and the politics and patterns are typically the same. So I'm not surprised it applies to firearms as well.
Simply remove the product managers or at least rip out their vision. Take that as violently threatening as you find appropriate from your personal experience with nested menus on touch screens replacing simple buttons you could operate without looking down.
Heh, people said the same thing in the 80s when all of our "greatest minds" were working in Finance.
The last time our great minds were put to a task that most people agree bettered humanity was in the 60s, when working as a government scientist in the space program was considered the best job you could get.
Making tools for the powerful to use while they manipulate the weak is not merely a waste. It's actively harmful. We're summoning monsters today that we'll have to fight tomorrow.
On addition to thinking about "how much better could tech be" I insist we begin thinking abt "how much simpler and more peacefully could we live?"
Why extract so many resources to run gambling and adtech servers? Why doom infants abroad to mining? Why invade international boundaries to get their resources?
The really sad part is that they could even use that same technology for good AND profit. If it's true that (for example) the facebook algorithm knows if someone is depressed, people would pay real money for the algorithm to shape their behavior and mood for the better.
That's a bit disappointing if I am reading it correctly. A photo library initially funded by the taxpayers, is now locked down by Getty Images?