Quoting: 14I don't participate in review bombing games, but if Sony does not look at Discord, do they look at the Steam forum? So, I can sympathize that it may be the only effective way to get attention unfortunately, even though the gameplay does not deserve bad reviews.

There comes a point where even if the gameplay does not deserve bad reviews, the game does.

Certainly for people in regions that can't have PSN accounts, if they bought the game and then retroactively get hit with a requirement to have a PSN account, that they can't have, in order to play it . . . then for them the game has no gameplay. I think a game that cannot be played at all is worth a bad review. The fact that it's an evil corporate decision causing it, rather than say poor design that makes it crash automatically, does not make the game any more playable.

If it's just that you have to pointlessly do an annoying thing to play the game . . . well, arguably that still makes the overall experience worse. I'd say if it was a result of technical problems people would still give bad reviews until the thing causing it got fixed.

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Quoting: Mountain ManLike I said, if increasing profits was as easy as handing out raises like candy, then everybody would be doing it.

Funny nobody told the CEO that. How are you managing to not see that your argument is utterly inconsistent?

Look, there's two basic kinds of bosses of a company. There's the kind that people who wish our system worked as advertised think about: People like my son-in-law, who started from nothing or not very much and built up a business from nothing and who know it inside and out. They do exist, there are even quite a few of them, although they tend to be the bosses of small companies. And then there's the kind that was born either rich or well-to-do, went to a prestigious university and got an MBA. They know how to schmooze with other rich, connected people and how to maximize stock price next quarter so they can make a bunch of money from their stock options. They know a bit about how to move money around in companies. They know nothing about the specifics of any given company or how its business actually works, because they have been taught that money and people are completely universal and exchangeable and the specifics of the business don't matter if you know how to move money. They tend to move from company to company, often in quite different kinds of businesses because they think the specifics don't matter. And when they lay people off, it is usually because although in the long run those people probably contribute to the bottom line, in the short term dumping them will goose the stock price because most of the investors are ignorant and they only see (reduction in expenses == bigger dividends next quarter, or money plowed into share buybacks). And that second kind, is the kind that give themselves $26 million-a-year raises. And they are the kind that are most influential in the economy.

Also the kind that gives you situations like Boeing, where the product goes to shit because of all those years getting stratospheric stock prices from the visionary cost-cutting. Of course by that time a few people have made a stack of money--all the layoffs and outsourcing and elimination of quality control did create that result, so in that sense it wasn't stupid. But it wasn't good for the company, or the workers, or the customers, or the people who got killed in the planes, or the murdered whistleblowers.

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Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Mountain ManPeople who assume that if CEOs were paid less, then the workers could be paid more, have a rather simplistic and naive understanding of how business and the economy works.

And yet, going by history it seems to work out in practice. Look at places and times where the CEOs are paid less, and you find workers who are more prosperous and have better working conditions.

Perhaps, but there's no hard and fast rule that says better paid employees are necessarily more profitable employees. If raises were guaranteed to increase profits, then every company would do it, but it's rarely as simple as that, and the harsh reality is that sometimes layoffs are necessary to keep a business solvent.

I think I'd want to claim that when times are tough enough that layoffs are necessary to keep the business solvent, the CEO should not be increasing his pay by more than the money the layoffs save. Really, how hard is this?

And that's before you even get to the part where the people laid off were not just costing wages, they were presumably making the business money, whereas a raise to the same CEO, as a reward for business failure so far, is unlikely to cause more money to exist in any way. So if you lay people off, you may have a net gain if it was a money-losing area, but it will be smaller than the money saved on salary unless the idea of hiring them in the first place was an example of lunatic incompetence in the first place. So the CEO raise, which is pure loss, isn't just several times as large as the savings, it overwhelms them to a ridiculous degree.

But I guess it's justified because the CEO, from his yacht, makes the tough decisions and takes risks--what if his decisions led to the company going under and he had to make do for a while on just those 26 million smackers? Oh, the humanity!--while ordinary employees laid off face no risks at all . . .

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Quoting: TherinSPerhaps I'm pretty dumb on word meanings, but I have always considered a genocide to be a situation where there is an effort to eliminate an ENTIRE race/class of people.

An effort, yes . . . but if you look at the definition under international law, you'll find it doesn't have to be as extensive as you might imagine to qualify. So for instance, killing a bunch and ethnic cleansing the rest seems to qualify. Trying to starve them all to death qualifies too. Since top Israeli officials have repeatedly stated their intentions to do all those things, I'm not sure the fact that they have not yet succeeded means they're not trying to commit genocide. Should we wait until they're all dead before taking issue?

Quoting: TherinSAccording to https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-gaza-war-statistics-95a6407fac94e9d589be234708cd5005 [External Link] as of April 6th, about 35,000 Hamas and Hamas supporters have been killed since the events of October 7.

Ah, yes, all those vicious Hamas-supporting babies and toddlers.
In any case, that figure is not really accurate, for two reasons. The first reason is that most of the people buried under rubble aren't counted--they're just "missing" until someone digs them out, which is hard when you're likely to get bombed or sniped in the attempt. The second reason is that it doesn't count indirect deaths, such as from disease, failed surgery due to no working hospitals, or starvation. We are reaching the point where that last one will start to kill in quite large numbers, due to Israel systematically murdering aid workers trying to bring food.

Quoting: TherinSShouldn't a genocide be achieving much higher death numbers? Why aren't more Gazans dead if the goal was to eliminate them via genocide?

Mainly because it is actually quite difficult to kill truly massive numbers of people using non-nuclear bombs. Bomb supply is limited, and the victims tend to be unwilling to all stand grouped together in the open for your convenience. Although the systematic starvation is capable of causing much more widespread death. I seem to remember previous cases where a group was trapped in a ghetto and food was systematically stopped from getting in, and although it's slow it does tend to kill them.

So tell me, do you have any idea how callous you're being or is your turning of a blind eye so successful that you're unaware?

Why are we even talking about this? I thought the topic was layoffs by obscenely wealthy CEOs.

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Quoting: Mountain ManPeople who assume that if CEOs were paid less, then the workers could be paid more, have a rather simplistic and naive understanding of how business and the economy works.

And yet, going by history it seems to work out in practice. Look at places and times where the CEOs are paid less, and you find workers who are more prosperous and have better working conditions.

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Quoting: redneckdrow

Quoting: ssj17vegeta

Quoting: PublicNuisance"Incorporates 3rd-party DRM: Denuvo Anti-tamper"

While i'm glad it has a native Linux version this will be a pass for me.

I think it does not on Linux, only on Windows.

Yup, that's why we don't always get feature parity.

I think Denuvo is more of a feature parody.

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Quoting: LanzI have brought out the arm chair philosophers.

Says a guy drive-by citing Socrates, Plato, Hegel, Gnosticism and on and on. Whatever.

Quoting: LanzMarx is talking about seizing the means of production of man via seizing the means of production of culture. Culture makes man and man makes culture, and the snake eats its own tail. Marxism is in fact just the most currently relevant gnostic religion. It's a theosophy, not a philosophy. To understand this, read Socrates and Plato, then the Torah (particularly Genesis with its warning against gnosis), then the Corpus Hermeticum, then Hegel, then Marx, and then keep going to Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Gale Rubin, and Kimberle Crenshaw. Starting with Plato in contrast to Socrates position of forms of knowledge, everything afterward except Genesis is gnostic.

Wow, that's all amazingly pretentious. And incredibly wrong. To squash all that stuff together like that takes a stubborn refusal to grapple with the specifics of what any of them are actually talking about.

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Quoting: Arten

Quoting: Jarmer"It's worth noting at this point that Take-Two's CEO, Strauss Zelnick, was paid $42.1 million last year, which is more than two-and-a-half times the previous year. So once again, the people at the top are pulling in big numbers while cutting the people doing the work."

This is absolutely disgusting. I know these people have no shame, but I wish I could be dictator of earth for just a few minutes with the sole goal of throwing this person in jail for life in the bottom of a dark pit with lots of other horrible things down there to keep him company.

There is plausible genocide right now in progress in gaza, on other side you have terorists from hamas murdering civilians, there is war in ukraine where psychopath putin killing thousands of people just for his ego, and lot of anouther wars [External Link] we have totalitarian tendencies in practicaly every government and when you get power to change any of it, you just care for salary of Take Two CEO. I think you need better priorities...

OK, that's stupid. So first, does that mean you getting mugged would be perfectly OK because, after all, bigger things are happening elsewhere? Big injustices do not make smaller injustices stop existing. Virtually none of the people protesting genocide in Gaza would tell you that massive CEO salaries are just fine.

Second, there is a strong link between the general phenomenon of massive wealth at the very top and the totalitarian tendencies in government. Bottom line, rich people suppress effective democracy because it tends to oppose their project of buying the government. The interests of the very rich (such as this CEO) are somewhat opposed to the interests of most ordinary people, so they use their money to make sure they have power and everyone else doesn't, so their agenda cannot be effectively blocked. So, this particular fat cat grabbing all the money that could have gone to people he's laying off is in fact an instance of the broader problem causing most of the troubles you're talking about. Most wars represent a subset of this issue--governments operating on behalf of corporations with interests in the region (oil, minerals, sweatshops, markets) and on behalf of arms manufacturers and their profits. Recognizing the individual example helps to recognize the general issue. Your objection is completely wrongheaded.

Sidebar on Ukraine:

Spoiler, click me

(And incidentally no, Putin is not fighting that war because of his ego or any other unusual aspect of his personality. He's fighting it for reasons of realpolitik; it's ruthless, but if you transplanted any major decision maker from any NATO country into his position, they would have done the same, except maybe sooner because most of them are less patient than Putin. For various reasons, every powerbroker in Russia favours that war--trying to end it is probably one of the few things that could get him deposed. The weird thing about all this is, early on Putin wanted to join the West--he asked about Russia joining NATO, joining the EU, doing free trade agreements, all that stuff. For years after that failed he talked about security agreements/frameworks. We turned him down every time and made it clear we just wanted to beat Russia. Now he's our enemy and he's fighting to win, but that was our decision)

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Quoting: PublicNuisance

Quoting: Caldathras

It's worth noting at this point that Take-Two's CEO, Strauss Zelnick, was paid $42.1 million last year, which is more than two-and-a-half times the previous year. So once again, the people at the top are pulling in big numbers while cutting the people doing the work.

This needs to be pointed out more often. No one deserves this high a salary, especially at the expense of those that earn much less. Plain greed.

:angry:

What's the correct number for them to make ? How do you arrive at that number ? Who gets to decide ? I'm not trying to defend Take Two but at the same time trying to dictate how much people are allowed to make is a recipe for a different form of tyranny.

Well, the correct amount for those developers to make is apparently zero, and who got to decide was a guy who pocketed, as a raise, more than double their collective salary. So I'd say your question, not to mention your fears of tyranny, are a bit more urgently pointed back at you.
I'll be frank: Anyone making more than a million bucks a year, I really don't give the tiniest damn about his so-precious freedom to make all that dough, or the horrors of a tyranny that would take it away from him. Fuck those guys and the imaginary job creation they rode in on.
Who gets to decide? How about all those people he stole the salaries of? How about all the other people CEOs decide their wages shouldn't be enough to make rent?

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Quoting: slembcke

Quoting: SamsaiI'm sure there are probably plenty of people that would be annoyed by missing decorations though.

There are 2 programs I use regularly that have handwritten Wayland support and decided against using libdecor because "they shouldn't have to". The one dev is even pretty angry about it and says that people should use a sensible desktop environment if it bothers them.

I really like modern Gnome myself, so yeah I just shrugged and held down the super button. I do wonder what percentage of Gnome users know about that though. I suspect not a lot.

I haven't tried Gnome in a long time, but I get the impression that it can do a lot of cool things that aren't very discoverable, so a lot of people who try it in effect can't use those cool things.

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