From my own experience, “not bothering” is definitely the better business practice since chances are you won’t make back the development costs.
Maybe Steam Deck and that porting library have improved things but a decade ago it would have been better business to just give Linux users $20 to not play your game.
I understand why people would hesitate to pay the price. Realistically, the Fairphone could have put in higher quality parts but that would have just blown their costs out further.
But exploitative wages – for both foreign and domestic workers – are at the core of many problems and I hate to see customers blamed.
The one in a hundred restaurant might be full of empty tables, but where would people eat if you doubled their wages? If there were two chocolate bars with identical taste, being offered at an identical price, except one of them used child slaves (and said so on the packaging), how many people “wouldn’t care” then?
Ethical choices shouldn’t be a luxury, unethical choices just shouldn’t be an option. If that means people can’t afford chocolate, they can take it up with the executives who have been pocketing their payrises.
And millionaires could afford to pay their workers fair wages, but apparently you’d rather blame the general public instead.
It’s not at all unreasonable for people to assume the goods they buy are ethically produced.
If someone gets food poisoning from a restaurant, do you blame them for eating there? Do you try and shame them for not reading through 800 reviews to check it was safe to eat there? Do you insist they should have gone somewhere that was twice the price for half the portion?
Of course you don’t. But apparently this deeply flawed logic is only used when it comes to corporate greed and only because rich people don’t run restaurants.
Isn’t it wonderful playing a rigged game?
Here is a phone that ticks many, many boxes for sustainable and ethical production. It’s the phone that “free market will fix it” neoliberals insist should bring the downfall of companies that just release e-waste.
But of course the free market won’t fix anything.
Neoliberals built a managed democracy and giant corporations were allowed to use outsourcing, slaves and environment-unfriendly manufacturing.
The influx of cheap goods subsidised by the misery of foreign workers and future generations made it harder to notice our shrinking wages. We could still afford to fill our homes with tat, just like our parents did.
But your grandfathers tools lasted 30 years and yours will last 3 (and be worse for the duration). Very few companies even bother offering good products, let alone ethical ones.
Because nobody can actually afford “good” any more. Not the consumers who want to buy it, nor the handful of companies trying to sell it. You have to buy crap. Companies have to be unethical.
It’s dug us a very very deep hole that’s going to be a lot of hard work to climb out of and it’s looking like politicians and billionaires are only interested in selling us new shovels.
Unfortunately, protest songs could absolutely be commercialised.
While not exactly protest songs, the grunge movement of the 90s was a reaction to what was seen as shallow, packaged pop music of the late 80s.
Once their snouts smelled profit, the usual middlemen rushed in to wrap that discontent in plastic and sell it to kids at Walmart, chewing up musicians along the way.
I think it’s simply that protest songs are more difficult to wring profit from compared to creating pop music using the formula that sold the most last time.
It was never the theory that was racist, it was the amount of evidence behind it.
If “there’s a virology lab there” was all the evidence you needed to assert it was a lab leak, chances are it’s because you’re racist. That’s why early on, this theory was most popular with far-right reactionaries.
Meanwhile, what’s been the origin story of every similar virus? Animal trade. That’s why early on, this theory was most popular with actual scientists who were actually qualified to have an opinion.
Oh yeah, that’d be much less effort.
I posted this further up, but I think it’s worth pasting here too:
I suspect with a coordinated pool of posts or multiple comments on the same post, you could narrow that IP address down to an actual user account.
When a new comment is posted by a user, store, against their username, all IP addresses that visited since the last comment in that thread (by anyone). When a second comment is posted by a user, remove any IP addresses that don’t appear in both lists.
I suspect you would have a very short list after two comments, and a single address after 3. It would also be extremely easy to both lure someone into viewing an image and bait them into multiple replies. Geolocate that IP and you know know vaguely where that user lives.
Time to make sure you’re always on a VPN I guess.
Notably, this allows remote parties to associate your IP address with your interests, as revealed by the Lemmy communities that you browse.
I suspect with a coordinated pool of posts or multiple comments on the same post, you could narrow that IP address down to an actual user account.
When a new comment is posted by a user, store, against their username, all IP addresses that visited since the last comment in that thread (by anyone). When a second comment is posted by a user, remove any IP addresses that don’t appear in both lists.
I suspect you would have a very short list after two comments, and a single address after 3. It would also be extremely easy to both lure someone into viewing an image and bait them into multiple replies. Geolocate that IP and you know know vaguely where that user lives.
Time to make sure you’re always on a VPN I guess.
Don’t worry, it’s AI generated.
FYI: You’ve now escalated to making knowingly-false accusations about a specific person.
Only dark, lewd fantasies about the sexual assualt of their kids right?
Quality play. That’ll absolutely convince people that you’re the good guy if they somehow find themselves at the bottom of this thread without having read your wet mouthed defense of the sharing of photorealistic images of children being raped.
Awful pearl-clutchy for someone advocating for increased community support for photorealistic images of children being raped.
Which do you think is more acceptable to Lemmy in general? Someone saying “fuck”, or communities dedicated to photorealistic images of children being raped?
Maybe I’m not the one who should be changing their behavior.
I have no problem saying that writing stories about two children having gay sex is pretty fucked in the head, along with anyone who forms a community around sharing and creating it.
But it’s also not inherently abuse, nor is it indistinguishable from reality.
You’re advocating that people just be cool with photo-realistic images of children, of any age, being raped, by any number of people, in any possible way, with no assurances that the images are genuinely “fake” or that pedophiles won’t be driven to make it a reality, despite other pedophiles cheering them on.
I was a teenage contrarian psuedo-intellectual once upon a time too, but I never sold out other peoples children for something to jerk off too.
If you want us to believe its harmless, prove it.
And are you able to offer any evidence to reassure us that simulated child pornography doesn’t increase the risk to real children as pedophiles become normalised to the content and escalate (you know, like what already routinely happens with regular pornography)?
Or are we just supposed to sacrifice children to your gut feeling?
How ELSE do you explain how my SON went off to COLLEGE where he was no longer DEPENDANT on ME and came back without any of my HOMOPHOBIA.
That wealth imbalance also pushes companies to force dumb shit like this on thier customers.
If Google were to just come out with a $10 a month plan that removed all the sleazy ways they try and profit from you, the overwhemling response would be “Oh great yet another subscription”, because these subscriptions have become a significant chunk of people’s income each month.
But what if greedy neoliberals hadn’t been pocketing our pay rises for $20 years and that subscription was functionally $1? Most people would be happy to blow $20 supporting 20 different content providers.
Unfortunately, their greed is insatiable. There’s always a room of executives doing their grubby little sums. “If people have $1, they probably have $2. We could double our profits! Then double our salaries!”.
Inflation just means “If rich people find out you’ve got more money, they’ll fuck you out of that too”.
The $1 will never be enough. They’ll keep charging more and more until people have nothing left to hand over. Then they’ll figure out more ways to squeeze a profit out of you. Manipulating you with ads, selling your private data, turning your body into expensive dogfood – whatever makes them a few more cents.
The important part was that you got the far-right talking point out there.