• 0 Posts
  • 201 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 19th, 2023
  • taanegl@beehaw.orgtoTechnology@beehaw.org•Indonesia introduced measures to fight cheap online imports from China as Chinese e-commerce platforms hurt local firms
    5·
    3 months ago

    This, and Bangladesh. All places that rely on wage slavery, child labour and unethical working conditions, because that which is unethical is also very cheap.

    You can’t really compete with slavery, because again: it’s very cheap, and the way the Chinese state leads Chinese farmers and villagers into social lock-ins, whereby they legally become stuck in an area where there’s only grueling, deadly, soul crushing and back breaking labour that leads to a life of poverty becomes a problem for the rest of the world if it’s used to manipulate the markets.

    I do of course realise this article is about “too big to fail” companies that corner every market, but I also think that the west and the east needs to think about what it means to partake in a race to the bottom where wage slavery is part and parcel of the market. It creates conditions whereby competition involves who can make the most horrible living conditions in the world, and do you really want that?

    There are Chinese labourer families who have been trying to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” for generations now, and it’s all thanks to other nations enabling the Chinese regime - especially the west.

  • taanegl@beehaw.orgtoTechnology@beehaw.org•No More Room In Hell: How Tech & Games Are Desperately Rotting (The Jimquisition)
    11·
    3 months ago

    This is why Godot is so important and that source available can be something the EU has to consider for all newly designed games. Sorry, small, mid and big time game studios, and screw you publishers, what we need is to make sure that the barrier to entry for game developers is significantly lowered. What, you think I’m taking about video game conservation? Leave that to AccursedFarms.

    What I’m saying is that you can more easily pitch games to publishers, using assets and engines that are already “standardised”, like Bethesda’s several Rube Goldberg machines, if they are available. I’m looking at Fallout London as saying to myself: why isn’t this on Steam, Switch, and every other platform Fallout 4 can run on, being sold by Bethesda?

    Even split prices, one for people who already owned Fallout 4, one for who recently purchased Fallout 4 if they don’t have Fallout 4 - if you wanna be pedantic. But the point remains the same: these lovely modder devs, though they shouldn’t be forced, could have pitched this game to Bethesda, even as an “off-universe” game. Whatever.

    But then we remember the Fallout 76 Store. Oh my god, no. And DMCA takedowns, claims of copyright infringement - even though “modified works” doesn’t exclude software - and what about actual live services and competitive games? Like could the community make the server instead? Can it be something even the Olympic Committee has a hand in, so the game can be vetted for the Olympics?

    Like update your EULA. “May be used, modified and deployed for free if it’s used for education and development purposes”. I’m not a lawyer, so take them scribblings with a grain of salt, but something like that would really just add an extra level in participation in schools, clubs, organisations, etc, even as an easy way to recruit and receive games and new worlds, for free.

    Free the engine! Free all of the engines! NOW!!! “The secret sauce” fallacy has been stupid, is stupid right now, and will continue to be stupid into the future - unless we do something about it.

    Free the engines!