I don't get it either, but there are distributors out there that make the process fairly cheap and painless.
I used CDBaby[0] since I had only one album and don't expect the 9% revenue cut they take to amount to more than the one-time $30 fee.
If you're more prodigious and commercially ambitious, Distrokid[1] charges $20/year and takes no revenue cut at all. (It was even endorsed by the founder of CDBaby on this very site[2]!)
It's not a single player game I'm pretty sure - there are leaderboards and achievements that allow you to compete with your friends. Obviously these features are moot if the top 10,000 players have a score of MAX_INT. It would have been nice to "disconnect" your city from the leaderboards if you wanted to go crazy, but unfortunately this mode was not added.
For the record I am against always on DRM so I did not buy this game nor any other game that uses it. I don't believe we need to codify laws banning the practice or any such thing that requires software developers to build things they don't want to build (with the exception of critical fields such as healthcare and aviation).
It's desirable in that a one time purchase does not entitle a customer to a lifetime of server resources; they paid for the game and they can certainly keep the game, but they don't have a right to the services required by the game (those are recurring costs). This makes sense since the alternative is forcing EA to pay to host servers for people that violated their terms of service.
You are correct that it got an offline mode eventually, I overlooked this. But this demonstrates that the market corrected this problem: Enough consumers complained to force a change. Therefore, is there need for external intervention? The simple solution to always-on DRM seems to be to just avoid buying any products that use it.
Could you link a book that has shaped your thinking on this? Or some keywords to search? I'm not too informed on economics but the distinction between productive and unproductive economic activity sounds plausible to me.* Do you disagree with this distinction itself?
* Naive examples of what I think of as "unproductive activity" are high frequency trading, gambling, and most advertising.
Marx, Adam Smith, Ricardo, pretty much every early economist wrote about this...I think Aristole even wrote about this (very briefly: the statement that some industries are extractive is saying that the price they charge isn't related to production costs, asking where value came from was economics until the late 19th century).
And if you go back further, any period in which there was economic turmoil saw attempts to make this distinction. If you look at the late 16th century, when population pressure is starting to build up after the Black Death, you had engrossing laws. Some of these were regulations for product quality (i.e. the wheat content of bread iirc) but some of this was just plain, old: oh, these traders are evil. The most obvious historical example would be the regularity of genocides against certain groups (Jewish people, Chinese, Armenians...all were accused, very successfully I might add, of predatory behaviour).
Gambling isn't unproductive...that makes no sense. That is like saying restaurants or making films is unproductive. Advertising isn't unproductive either...that is an even worse mistake than gambling.
HFT is difficult because...is sub-second liquidity actually valuable? Probably not. Definitely, we need liquidity providers, definitely we need someone looking at prices and trying to react to information faster...but a lot of HFT is just mindless nonsense where you work out the price of X based on the price of everything else. In bad times, these relationships break down, liquidity dissolves, and you are seeing real fragility in markets even with information that moves globally (tbf, that isn't only HFT but bad regulation...ironically, these were intended to stop traders making too much money...classic). But has it lowered costs? Yes. Massively (investing two decades was nothing like today, even over the last five years the amount costs have fallen is staggering). Has it made trading easier? Yes. Massively. And do we need liquidity providers regardless? Yes (ppl forget, if you aren't paying HFT guys a fraction of a penny/share, you are paying the broker a few dollars/share).
Btw, everyone says these are unproductive because they don't see the hard work that goes into them. It is easy to throw stones when you think only the things you do has value.
> Btw, everyone says these are unproductive because they don't see the hard work that goes into them. It is easy to throw stones when you think only the things you do has value.
I'm sure it is hard work. The question I'm more interested in is whether it's work that should be done at all, and it's not obvious that "it's worth doing if people are willing to pay for it" is the right answer. That's more of an ethical concern than an economical one, though; I'm probably conflating "labor that is good/bad for individuals/society" with "productive/unproductive labor" since other comments mention exploitative pricing and rent-seeking, which weren't what I had in mind.
> It's the complete lack of organizational structure, other than date, that make my log files so useful.
A thread here about a week ago on bookmark management reinforced this idea for me.[1] When it comes to general knowledge management, complex, predefined taxonomies don't feel worth the overhead when retrieval is so often ad hoc and messy. Grepping about in log files for keywords usually does the trick. Tags are nice, but like you say, getting good at including searchable keywords performs a similar function.
I agree that it should be just as easy to suspend your account as it was to sign up, but irretrievable deletion should be harder.
Companies ideally want to stop fraud at both ends, but I would be more upset if, for example, my Airbnb account were fraudulently deleted than if someone fraudulently made one in my name.
Granted, deletion requires access to the account in question, so maybe that's enough of a hurdle already? In that sense it's already harder to delete than create.
> Granted, deletion requires access to the account in question, so maybe that's enough of a hurdle already? In that sense it's already harder to delete than create.
I tend to agree that that is enough of an additional hurdle, but note that it conflicts with
> I agree that it should be just as easy to suspend your account as it was to sign up, but irretrievable deletion should be harder.
It's definitely not appropriate for any unauthenticated person to be allowed to suspend an account. You need the same hurdle on suspension.
I think it would be reasonable to have a grace period between the deletion request and the actual deletion, during which the account was retrievable.
I used to meticulously sort and tag individual bookmarks but rarely review them. Storing sessions and other "playlists" of bookmarks puts them in a form that I actually return to.
Plus this method takes far less time and effort than tagging and bagging pages according to an ever-expanding set of custom taxonomies.
I'm sure others have been using bookmarks this way for a while but it felt like a revelation to me :)
People are not simple cost-benefit calculators, and even if they were, it's easy to screw up that calculation when 1) companies spend billions of advertising dollars each year to shift the perceived benefit (+ network effects reaped from years prior), and 2) you don't have experience with potentially addictive substances. Once you're hooked, it's no longer a fair fight, particularly if you have a susceptible personality.
I'm just going to copy pattpass' response to a similar comment here, because the decision to use Chromium makes more sense with this context:
What benefit does Microsoft have by using Mozilla instead? Earnest question.
Electron, the software framework VSCode uses, runs on Chromium. Github maintained and developed the framework and they are currently owned by Microsoft. If Microsoft contributes to Chromium and improves performance they benefit in a lot of places: their new browser is improved(Edge Chromium), their own framework(Electron), and their own product (VSCode).
I used CDBaby[0] since I had only one album and don't expect the 9% revenue cut they take to amount to more than the one-time $30 fee.
If you're more prodigious and commercially ambitious, Distrokid[1] charges $20/year and takes no revenue cut at all. (It was even endorsed by the founder of CDBaby on this very site[2]!)
[0] https://cdbaby.com/ [1] https://distrokid.com/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6519175