Headspace gets very little of their revenue from individuals. They've managed to convince employers that their nosebleed prices are justified because corporations want to be able to brag about "investing in wellness", rather than improving wages, working conditions, or meaningful benefits.
Yeah. my employers benefits don't cover most mental health services without jumping through hoops to get a referral, but we do get headspace for free. An app that is difficult to navigate and causes me anxiety when it reminds me often that Im missing my daily meditation session.
I remember reading an economic treatise from like the 60s that said more things would become public goods, like streets or streetlights, as production caused the price of certain goods to approach zero. It barely spent a couple paragraphs citing that the only alternative was artificial scarcity and dismissed that as something impossible no one would stand for. Now here we are. Now we rent everything and the few things we can own we're increasingly legally bound to throw away and replace because repairing them is a crime somehow.
I love how people in the sixties thought that capitalism will somehow evolve in to a moneyless society(e.g. communism) . You can see it even in culture, for example sci-fi like Star Trek. Also one of the best examples I can think of when it comes to artificial scarcity is food. Our society produces more food than the entire population needs, yet 9 million people still starve every year.
@@Somajsibere cold war era pro-capitalist propaganda was very effective at brainwashing the general public even when it comes to believing completely absurd nonsense fantasies like the idea that "capitalism is good for the world"
@Blaire Sovereign To be fair to people in the 60s, they could probably not have predicted the 80s, and the massive Reaganomics/Thatcherite movement towards deregulation, privatization, etc.
@Blaire Sovereign I guess at least that's better than being communists who hate brazil because they don't love the usa enough, this shit get's an extra layer in the third world
"... they might just say "fuck it" and continue paying to avoid conflict." I feel it cannot be stressed enough how big of an issue this is. Companies essentially abusing people with social anxieties has become an actual plague.
They use state of the art research in neuroscience and psychology to exploit human biases. If hell existed there would be a special place in there for them.
Ehh as someone who has experienced both abuse and social anxiety.... Calling this abuse is a stretch. You cant live in a bubble forever, speaking to people is just a basic need and even though I'm still introverted, being forced to talk to people at work at a young age saved me a lot more pain down the road. This is something that needs to be overcome not coddled through one means only: interacting with non-school kids and seeing that you're not going to die for it.
I agree it's not really abuse in the traditional sense, but psychologically/financially it's being a pain in the ass to keep your money. There are places that give u the runaround and make u waste lots of time trying to cancel a membership or dispute the charge. To the point where the time/energy u spent on the hassle was more valuable than just paying the fee and saying fuck it
I don't think we're in the minority distrusting NFTs, at least not yet. Right now the folks who own McDonald's and Rolling Stone are just revving up the ad machine to make it seem that way.
Agreed. I don't think McDonalds or Rolling Stone know or care what NFTs are, or have any serious intention of pursuing them. It's just a buzz word they're co-opting to reel in the eyeballs of crypto-bros. Getting people obsessed with NFTs talking about, and therefore doing viral marketing for, the brand. And obviously, opponents of NFTs talking about how stupid it is for brands to jump on the bandwagon are _also_ doing marketing for those brands. It's like when brands do performative "wokeness", getting positive press from the left and vocal vitriol from the right. In either case, the result is the same: people are talking about the brand.
God I love seeing you here. Your channel is literally the reason I got back into anime as an adult. Horrible dude discourse had driven me out years ago.
@@Andy-ct8be I also recently got back into some anime after a long hiatus, and I realized I enjoy it quite a bit - I just generally dislike the online anime fandom which can be insanely toxic.
Not to mention some people have much deeper wallets. The entire F2P games market is sustained off of a few players with unlimited spending money and everyone else is just along for the ride
When people use that argument, turn it on its head. I’m a democrat, one person one vote. You want to vote with your wallet, that means you want everyone to have the same wallet size. Otherwise it makes no logical sense.
@@markeschen6272 It's always important to note, so I will: "Unlimited spending money" does not mean "unlimited money". Whales often don't have a lot of money, they spend all of what could have been their savings and some of their food budget because of their **gambling addiction**.
Never buy an NFT. If you want art, go to a local gallery or art fair and hand money to an actual human artist in exchange of a piece of their work. You'll make their day, help out a (likely poor) artist who makes actual things, and you'll have an actual thing to hang on your wall and look at for as long as you want to keep it around.
NFTs aren’t about the art. It’s another con. It’s like your weird old aunt keeping shit that’s really just trash because “it might be worth something someday.” It’s trying to be the new Bitcoin. But at the end of the day its fucking memes with random character strings.
@@VisonsofFalseTruths also, with NFT art you are not buying the art, you are buying exclusivity. it's not that you have access to a thing you think is cool, it's that you are the only one who "owes" the "real" cool thing.
The scariest thing is they take it away at any time. Im an animator and Flash going to monthly subscription infuriated me. If they took it away it could literally ruin my life and my livelihood
Same with my 3D art work with Substance Painter/Suite. It causes us to worry about if/when the subscription services change, or when the companies get sold.
A huge fuck-up on Adobe's part just uninstalled my 2015 copies of Photoshop and Illustrator, and now they don't provide those versions anymore. I hate the newer builds, but I also can't use the custom scripts that are absolutely necessary for my work in them either. So now I'm forced to pirate an older, cracked version, even though I'm still paying my monthly CC license. Fuck Adobe. Pirate Flash and be done with it. I still use Flash 8 (Macromedia era) for a lot of prototyping. It never bothers me to upgrade or connect to any servers.
_> If they took it away it could literally ruin my life and my livelihood_ Communists: We told you about the means of production bro! We told you dawg!
NFT's are basically paying to have the privilege of owning a receipt to something you don't actually in any way own. I would be tempted to say this is the final stage of the monetization, where you pay to say you bought something you never really own, but I dread that we may get even worse levels or nonsense one previosuly thought only possible in parody.
in a sense aren't you actually buying the receipt of the receipt itself (which comes with a little absolutely non-binding story about something else or something)? Then again, a receipt literally saying "I received x amount from y person for this receipt" would at least be kinda funny
It's like paying for the receipt of someone's Gucci bag. You don't actually get the bag, but you can carry around the receipt in your pocket and pull it out when you want to flex about how you totally own a Gucci bag. If anyone ever questions why you aren't carrying around the actual bag you can just look at them like they're crazy and be like "Uh I have the receipt, obviously I own it??? Why else would I have this receipt. Look I have a photo of the bag right here! It's just at my friend's house now."
7:16 As a UI/UX designer, I was literally taught to make destructive actions like cancelling a subscription to be more subtle and require more effort. Yes, we were literally told that when designing a UI for subscription cancellation, you need to do whatever it takes to prevent the user from cancelling. And that can also include manipulating users to feel FOMO, guilt tripping or even removing the Cancel button altogether. And I swear, most of other designers are also mindlessly down for it. It's like dark patterns like these were implanted into their minds, that the best UX is to control the users to do the actions the company wants them to do. Most likely people who try to justify and defend these methods are those mindless startup/tech company drones.
I just had a very weird experience. I subscribed to Apple TV recently to catch Foundation and a couple other shows. Now that I've seen them, I realized it was time to cancel. It was...fairly easy. That really surprised me.
i know some furry art isnt top tier and can be pretty gnarly but i see those things and im like... please pay a furry to commission a nice piece of fursona art for you, that will be a 1k better spent.
@@pharoahcaraboo9610 yeah, but then the artist would actually be reimbursed for their efforts and not exploited to the utmost.. But if we 'pay' them in a cryptographically defined tender that has no real value outside of the people in charge, who subsequently have no obligation to respect any rule of law or public opinion?....
@@Dong_Harvey yeah. art nfts, specifically, i feel aren't made for people who like art for the inherent value of being art. its for people who think art only has value insofar as the wealth it can accrue. its an investment. not something that makes you feel things, or inspires creativity. just. money put in so more money comes out, eventually. ):
Important note: you do not get the actual rights to an NFT, the artist retains it. If you buy an NFT of a monkey in a baseball cap you can not put it on a t-shirt and sell it. All you bought was an arbitrary concept associated with the image via a URL.
Yep. All you're buying is an entry in a digital ledger on a server somewhere, that could at any time be shut down. At no point do you actually own the image itself. Indeed, the person who sold that entry in a ledger may not themselves have any right to the image they're linking to. Many NFTs being sold are of artwork stolen from artists. ("Stolen" in the sense that the NFT seller is profiting off the artist's work without their knowledge or consent).
People always say "ah its up to you what you buy" but yet companies do get sued all the time for using manipulative tactics. These people just don't understand how psychology works. These are the people who think they have far more free will than they actually do. The sort of people who see a Pepsi advert, and buy a Pepsi "because they want one, it has nothing to do with the advert"
This video got me to cancel my headspace that I haven't used in well over a year. They let you cancel on the website now but force you to click "yes I want to cancel" on 3 different screens before it finally goes through. Love subscription models!
That's what Adobe does, those little shitters with fantastic software made me question my decision several times. And I hate that I had to cancel it, because I use it too rarely and you can't even be spontaneous about it, as it is a year long contract for no reason whatsoever.
If u tried to cancel thru the app, it doesn't work. It lies. You have to cancel through your profile settings in Google play. Subscriptions section. I know I'm late to this topic, but everybody check your subscriptions in Google play. Many apps make you think you are canceling when you arent.
TOTALLY hypothetical and in a video game, but I loved Headspace.... So I have all of the "Basics" files ripped to mp3s and keep them in a Google drive folder. The monthly subscription stuff was gross... so I've shared their guided meditations with friends and family for help with their mindfulness too (in a video game).
@Domi B okay let me slip into a dream state where I could hypothetically do such a thing Edit: UA-cam won't let me link it here 😭 I don't know what to doooooo
@@DMO-DMO-DMO you might be able to add a space in there somewhere, so the person just has to remove the space from the url when they paste it into the address bar
I’m in a field that basically requires a subscription to photoshop. Adobe knows that artists need their product so a long time ago they changed to a subscription model because we’re basically permanent costumers. Even if we want to work in one time payment software we often have to use photoshop because that’s what our coworkers use and we don’t want to have to covert file formats each time we share a project and colleges mostly teach everyone photoshop. It’s a complete scam.
I’m in a similar boat. I work in audio production, and likely the most popular program for audio work is Pro Tools. Thankfully, I got a perpetual license several years ago, but their manufacturer, Avid, switched to a subscription-only model since then. If I didn’t already have a license, I would never be able to buy this industry-standard software.
@@ColourlessGreen-b5z there’s creative cloud stuff you can’t access if you pirate. That’s a great option for a lot of people though. Especially freelancers.
A lot of the recent mania around NFTs (& Pokemon cards, & “Stonks”, etc) strongly reminds me of the mania around baseball cards & comic books in the early 90s, and again in the mid-2000s. It’s a classic gold rush: someone claims there’s money in them thar hills, and everyone else rushes in, afraid of missing out, hoping to magically solve whatever financial problems they have. But the bubble inevitably bursts, and all that’s left is ecological & economic devastation - aside from a tiny number of wealthy elites who were able to get out at the right time.
Yeah I love cryptos and the concept of them but they are very oddly horrid for the environment. And also make graphics cards for gaming or a audio video project computer hard to get and that makes me mad. So yeah, well put.
Including that what they're pursuing as valuable ended up being very not valuable, because the creators of baseball cards and comic books just printed a whole bunch of them. Because they were more than glad to meet the demand. Something which runs counter to the idea of scarcity. The main difference with NFTs is that, by being digital, functionally unlimited copies can be made, rather than the finite but enormous numbers of copies of Youngblood #1. So NFTs are like those earlier bubbles, but MORE. In every respect. More copies, more financial and environmental damage, more ephemeral, and more absurd.
I mean, from what I understand, Tulip Mania was _massively_ overblown when retold because _muh moral message._ It was never as hectic or widespread as people are made to believe, though it does make a good story.
A friend suggested I try headspace, as they'd been having a good experience with it. Upon seeing the manipulative pricing scheme, I became so stressed trying to figure out what option would be best for me, I gave up and didn't subscribe. Thanks Headspace!
This really made think of an experience I had a when i was a teenager. I got caught shoplifting at a large department store, and after going through the whole process of getting banned for life, I started receiving letters demanding that I pay the company multiple hundreds of dollars to avert legal action. I'm glad I decided to look up what I should do. Because I found that this is a common tactic used by large corporations to intimidate people into paying them without going through the legal process. I'm not going to debate the morality of shoplifting here, but I think it's really shady that corporations will try to extort large amounts of money from people /after/ they retrieved their merchandise. The part that really kills me is that companies almost never sue when these demands aren't met, obviously. There's no use in paying a lawyer to sue for a couple hundred dollars, especially when the "damages" (in quotes because these letters are only sent when the shoplifters is caught and the merchandise retrieved) are often much lower than the demand.
That's what I thought about when I first learned about NFTs. They're not all that different to the "Acre of the Moon" ownership certificate that my parents bought for me when I was a kid.
@@_goopho What he means I think is that in order to view it you download it to your cache, so if you've seen it you've downloaded it but you didn't necessarily kept it.
"You might notice that I'm always holding this, I try to hide it, but you can clearly see it a lot of my videos" I have never noticed it until this very moment. I'm not surprised to find out that you have a remote for your teleprompter that you use in your videos, but I am slightly concerned that I have never actively noticed it, assuming it is indeed that obvious
Subscription services are usually awful, so thanks for making this video. I still pay Adobe because I need Flash for work, but they haven't updated it substantially for around 10 years, roughly since they changed to the subscription model. Not only that, they recently took away the option to access old versions of their software due to licensing disputes. So now I need to get the old versions from illegitimate sources, and still pay Adobe to get past their DRM! I'm literally paying to pirate stuff, when in the past I could have just bought the software outright. Total scam of a company!
I went for a job interview at a cable company once, and as part of the interview they wanted to know how I would retain someone who had called up wanting to discontinue or downscale their service. The example they used was an elderly woman, so in their hypothetical scenario my job was to wring more money out of someone on a pension, someone who was probably calling up because they were paying money they needed badly for things like... food... or medication. I did not get the job.
Speaking of automatic recurring payments, I think it's outrageous how hard it is to pay for something in a way where you, not the payee, control the transaction. Most of the ways we pay for stuff amount to giving the payee access to your account so they can reach in and pay themselves.
And then if you are unlucky enough to be living paycheck to paycheck, the bank exploits that because how dare you overdraft when you are expected to have a dozen companies come in and yoink money every month. For the record, Ive tried over and over again to have a float of $100 in my account because of this, but it always gets destroyed by things like bills, groceries, or medicine... you know, frivolities like that.
@@tsharabrown3719 if you have problems with reoccurring payments and can't cancel you can ask your bank to block transactions from that company. I've had to do it before. Much easier than jumping through a billion hoops with customer service.
This is why I am 35 but never owned anything but the gift-card-credit cards. .. I didn't feel I could trust them lol . I use the gift cards or avoid basically... occasionally use hubby's card and let him (and his undamaged brain) be responsible for checking invoices/making sure no bullshit charges.
@@SoulDevoured I think the point was more like, let me wire money to Amazon for my Prime subscription when I have it, instead of Amazon telling my bank "yo, give us $x out of that guy's account" the first of each month. And if I forget to pay one month (or can't afford it), my Prime just gets suspended until I pay again. Instead of the bank, Amazon, and whatever collection companies get involved, bombarding me with letters and additional fees for the audacity of not having enough money in my account.
this is what got me into cd's in the past year. tired of ads, tired of listening to music i don't care about, not gonna pay for a subscription service. i'd rather pay a few bucks for a secondhand cd and own it forever, or buy directly from an artist's bandcamp
I’ve got a large collection of ripped FLACs and I’ve been meaning to set it up so I can stream them to my phone from home much like my own private streaming service (but for free*). Haven’t done it yet though
Hearing NFTs explained like that sure makes them sound a lot like those DeviantART adoptions from the 00s, where you win one of a variety of palette swapped cartoon neon emo wolves from a lottery or auction, except NFTs have technical words to make Redditors sound like great big smarty pants instead of the usually dismissed (but far more endearing and earnest) interests of pre-teen girls. How's that for a long, unwieldy sentence?
it's stupid yes but the useless nft can't be deleted by DeviantArt nor will it disappear when they go bankrupt Except that's not true sometimes because some nft scams are even more of a scam than others! Sincerely a distributed software fan that wants to talk about something other than nft's
The Ferengi are basically conservatives (including Republicans and Libertarians). Conservatives don't want to stop the exploitation. They want to find a way to become the exploiters. Fortunately, that's not typical of humans. Most people actually care about others.
As someone who often buys and sells things second hand online, can honestly say everything is just made up and arbitrary. How much is something worth? It's worth however much someone is willing to pay for it. If most people don't want to pay for it, doesn't matter. If you can find one person to pay the price you want it's worth that much. That's why shit like Yeezy's or Artwork sells for a bunch of money.
There exist many theories, particularly in economics, of what value even is, and where it "comes from." I encourage anyone to look into those, if they are interested in that kind of stuff. Whatever theory you ascribe to, I think most can agree that there is definitely a psychological aspect in how humans create value.
My parents were actually asking me about this earlier. You definitely went a lot deeper into it than I did, and that's what keeps bringing me back. Love the channel and your content.
I find it interesting that in the event that capitalism encounters something that we can easily make as many copies as anyone could possibly want of the thing, its response is to look for ways to artificially make it scarce rather than say "let's take care of people who create these sorts of things somehow, and then everyone can use their stuff as much as they want".
i took a class in behavioral economics last year, and if there's one thing that jumps out from what i learned, it's how effective these exploitative patterns and billing practices are at taking advantage of human psychology. literally every cognitive bias, every irrationality, every informational asymmetry under the sun is exploited by the grifters that infest our economy, from online services to health insurance. it's one thing to abstractly smell that something's going on, it's another to look under the hood and see exactly how we're being swindled.
As a beginning buddhist, the idea of charging subscription money for *meditation* enrages me on every possible level. Meditation was invented in ancient times to improve people's lives and bring enlightenment, not make money for capitalists, smfh. Then again, they already did that with yoga - yoga is originally a type of meditation and an entire school of philosophy in Hinduism, and in the West it's a trendy exercise marketed at women.
Exactly, first they raped Christianity and made it into hyperconsumerism and now it is the other cultures religions turn to bend the fuck over. I am an atheist but this isn't how religions should be treated, they deserve a certain respect for cultural achievements they made and the community they have given to so many ppl and that is now so sorely lacking in our society.
I actually don'y mind paying for yoga videos. As I currently understand it, they provide me with detailed explanations and videos for doing yoga (as well as options to specify what part i wanna stretch). In turn I pay for these. If I'm wrong here please correct me
@@paulkothgasser6623 No like, I meant two separate things. I hate idea of meditation lessons being a paid service, and I hate the idea that yoga - which is a philosophy and a form of meditation - was turned into commercialized exercise. I don't actually care about people paying for the exercise yoga lessons, they're honestly so far removed from original cultures and religions that who cares. At this point it's just fitness training.
One can boil much of what he says in the video down to the Greater Fool Theory. People buy what they know is essentially worthless shit at an outrageous price because they believe that a greater fool will come along and buy it from them at an even more outrageous price. He's absolutely right when he says we are all becoming (and even trying to become) scammers. This will not end well.
Ouch. This comment feels like harsh mirror. Ive bought on multiple occasions “limited edition” copies or collectibles for games, on the very possibility that they may hike up in cost some time in the future and *then* ill want it. :/
@@BobPagani Techbros are always like "it's not about Bitcoin/NFTs/whatever, it's about the blockchain and its immeasurable benefits for humanity!" ok but then like why aren't we doing those actually beneficial things instead of selling (receipts of) outrageously ugly monkeys for several thousand bucks a piece
@@stug6974 The simple answer is because techbros are full of shit. Two reasons: The first is that, as I said earlier, they're counting on a greater fool to come along and buy the ugly monkey token from them at a higher price. The second is that a LOT of the crypto/NFT market is about money laundering. You gotta hide that coke money somehow, right?
We really should be pirating more. Maybe not to pirate everything everytime, but I think it's important to know how to do it and have the means ready, so we don't end up paying for things we don't want to just because we don't have another choice. Besides, it's usually fun.
hey, if u could spare a second- ive been meaning to look into this but am too worried about security to have made the jump yet, do u have somewhere trustworthy i could start please? i trust a fellow thoughtslime viewer over some reddit rando tbh
Right. I use streamers when available because of the convenience, and often bitrate, and a wide range of HDR formats, and so on. But I still know how to find magnet links for content that’ll never be streaming here, I buy my favourite movies on plastic shiny disc, and if anything disappears from streaming I’ll have an answer, even if it’s mildly less convenient. Other customers, they have by the balls.
@@KNylen see if any friends can invite you to a private tracker, not a public one (public trackers get all the fed bots hoovering up IPs onto a big list). Also some people buy a VPN which specifically calls out P2P support, if they want to obfuscate their IP, but honestly with Carrier Grade Network Address Translation (CG-NAT) you’re sharing your IP with dozens or hundreds of others at a minimum anyway.
10:23 "Vote with your dollar" only works when you limit how many votes someone can give. If dollars really were votes, politicians would absolutely milk the everlovin-- What's that? Political "donations" are a thing? And they're wildly out of control wherever there's no law specifically banning or regulating them? regulate the subscription model, regulate political donations
When buying a couple games digitally, I purchased one month of PS+ in order to get the discounted prices. I stayed away from the "free" games and unsubcribed afterwards. I probably saved ~70$ but you have to be aware of and remember the risks/temptations. Don't do this if you're not clear on how to unsubscribe and especially DON'T do this if you're not getting a good deal on games you already wanted.
You had better have gotten those Play At Home freebies! Horizon Zero Dawn Complete, Subnautica, Moss, Enter the Gungeon - to name a few! I had just got a PS4 and now it's full of free games and all my money went to the PSVR instead. I'm playing Persona 5 but that's because Persona 5 is a lot easier to play when I'm about to pass out. But you get it.
PS+ was great when I was unemployed (had gotten the subscription when I WAS employed) and buying games was not really something I wanted to use the little money I had, on.
Also billionaires - "But don't ask for better wages, because that's _my_ money and its _my_ business and telling me how to run _my_ multi-million dollar business that I built with nothing but grit, lobbyists and my own personal team of police officers would be an infringement on my rights!"
I don't know how old you are, FourtyParsecs, but as someone Thought Slime's age, I can tell you that a lot of this nonsense didn't exist in for example Summer of 1996. I had more than I needed, and while yes, I was a child back then, I still am absolutely convinced that I could live like that as an adult. I'd love to, actually. I would miss out on nothing of actual value.
@@camelopardalis84 It is my sad opinion that the ownership culture of the post-WWII era, like buying a house, a car, a dishwasher, a mower, etc, was to ideologically reinforce the supremecy of capitalism over Communism. These days, we can now see that the "middle class" that the US tauted back then has now been completely dismantled (capitalism's "creative destruction" at work). Meanwhile, China has the largest growing middle class in human history. So, the ideological pivot reverses the narrative: owning things is BAD now! You don't want to be responsible for those things! Let capitalism take care of you with a wide selection of services instead! Whereas ride sharing was once only something you did in the evil Soviet Union because "everybody's equally poor under socialism", ride sharing is now what makes you pro-capitalist. Anyway. Yes. It's all a bunch of nonsense. It always was.
We live in a timeline where capitalist grifters are doing their version of adoptable OCs, but worse in every way. At least with adoptable OCs, you actually get the right to use the character's likeness in whatever you want from the artist themselves, and its bulit off of the honor system instead of relying on a fuckton of servers to generate a blockchain so that your art is "personalized". Or you could just commission an artist to make something personalized for you that you actually own. I know I'll probably be called cringe for knowing about OC culture, but who cares
And very true lmao. It's hard to explain people as a reformed internet creep how much shit they're calling for was an internet hoax or a forum drama decades before.
This is why the Free Software Foundation is important! Free software, free society! If you don't have complete control of your software, then your software has at least partial control over you.
software have never been to open but I do agree software control is getting a bit out of hand I mean you are not even allowed to repair your own god damn stuff anymore for the software recognises something of the physical product have changed and looks the device, I'm unsure if I can even legally open up my toaster lol (the last part is a bit over the top but one never knows since they are putting computers into everything now)
"Do we want to live in a world where all doo doo dumdums just get charged money for being doo doo dumdums?" As an ADHD I've never even thought there could be an option not to
You may appreciate the somewhat recent Jimquisition video "Microtransactions Are An Accessibility Issue" I previously only thought about it in terms of addiction-prone folks, but that video made me realize just how many other neurodivergent people are harmed by these practices.
christman's been going on about it on and off tangentially like he does for a few months now, and we've all been thinking it or saying it to gullible family members who refuse to build PCs with optical drives but have subscribed to every streaming service "for the kids" for years now. it was nice to have a more succinct, guided meditation on the matter, if you will. rentology is here to stay and it finally has a name.
The space game Starsector literally has in-game NFTs for producing "physical" items, called LPCs. LPCs played a major role in the sector's technological stagnation, in the game's backstory. I think the game's too subtle in its criticism of the idea, but I got a lot of mileage out of the lore.
@@berrim26 It's on PCs! And yeah, finding an LPC in the ruins of a distant world that lets you mass produce the high tech dreadnaughts were what pushed me from "upstart colony" to "imperial superpower" overnight.
On the headspace thing, it's a whole department in most large companies that rely on subscription packages. Retention specialists, trained to upsell you while you try to cut ties. These positions are totally reliant on metrics, and satisfaction of the departing customer is usually not one of them. "I lost my job and wife and dog and now can't afford this internet." "So, you're not displeased with the service? That's good to know. I'm sorry to hear things have been hard for you lately, as a member of our family we want you to know we care and are here for you when you most need us. We want to offer you an upgrade that costs less than what you're paying now for the first 6 months, how does that sound?"
Yeah, I remember trying to help my parents cancel their cable TV, cos they were being given the classic run-around, and I don't tolerate that shit. I called, told them to cancel it, got transferred around a lot, and of course got to the specialist trained in customer retention. I just wouldn't let him talk. He'd start to say anything, and I'd just, "CANCEL IT. NOW. WE HAVE NOTHING TO DISCUSS." If all else fails, tell them that the card/account they've been billing is being closed and you're "not getting a new one; we're going OFF THE GRID!" GL, and fly safe, Comrades.
My fav NFT is the one that's attached to the first tweet on Twitter. For a cool 3 million USD, you can own it! You can't do anything with it of course, you don't own the account, you can't edit or delete it, it's not in your possession in any meaningful sense. It just exists on the internet, and a post-it note exists somewhere else on the internet that says "that thing over there, that's mine that is" *points at seagull* NFT
@@ThylineTheGay but if those things turn out to be legit and enforcable, one day someone might live at number six 'Freddie Mercury rules lane' just next to the moonbuggy offramp. A real outcome might occur. Ownership of a cartoon of something wont mean much to anyone but the seller and the owner.
"I don't got beef with Headspace in particalar. Do what you want, it don't bother me none, but what does bother me none..." Really channeling This Old Tony on that line.
I've often said it's hard to recognize grifts in today's society because even the most reputable jobs in today's society are basically grifts and scams and the most lucrative position is con man
Another reason companies push subscription services is because it's a more stable representation of income than one time sales, which keeps investors/shareholders happy and convinces them to continue investing or even invest more for continual growth. So another thing we have the literal capitalist ghouls to thank for :) Also; NFTs are the new "Beanie Babies" change my mind (Zoomers ask a Millenial what this means)
That's unfair. You can decorate your desk with Beanie Babies, practice juggling with them, use them to distract cats, or fill a duvet cover with them and use them as an improvised weighted blanket.
Dude I loooooooooooove you. You got me to watch Ghoulies based on how often you reference it. For this, I'm upset, but I also thank you for everything else you do.
It's nice to hear someone else mention how Jimphanie Sterling has been shedding light on the hypercapitalisation of games for ages. Really really thankless work for the most part. Thank God for them, and for you too Mildred
i know i am always plesantly surprised when jss is brought up anymore! it used to just be throwaway sneers in the most milquetoast fashion by people who didn't know anything about them but for the last couple years it has been references and occasionally links to the content itself showing that a lot more ears have been listening!
So last year I had some unexpected expenses and I needed to cancel a monthly donation to a charity. This was no local thing, it was a major, national organization. I googled, scoured the website, everything i could think of. There was no option to cancel. The only contact info i could find was for the literal director of this national charity.
I was so glad when my bank was sold and my checking account cash card - with which I had subscribed to a few charities when literally accosted by them on the street - was replaced without linking the new card to the old one. Instant unsubscribe. (This wasn’t a problem for anything else, as I have ACH for utilities and they did link the old checking account to the new one, and in fact, nearly three years later, I finally used up my old checks.)
Only being able to basically rent software (or other products) pisses me off to no end! Also, subscriptions make perfect sense for newspapers but the three times I've signed up to a free trial for a newspaper (cause of uni courses), there was no way to cancel without calling and/or emailing them and twice I was locked into a monthly subscription because I didn't cancel early enough. I usually cancel immediately after signing up for the trial, like before leaving the website or doing whatever it is I wanted to use the free trial for. That way, I don't forget.
Even better than renting... you're renting permission to use software even if you outright "buy" it a lot of the time. You don't even own Windows anymore even if you didn't use an activator and bought it for some reason.
For quite some time, I bought two kinds of products exclusively online. And every time I then got to pick about four out of about four dozen coupons online. "20% off any purchase above 100 francs" and "10 francs off" coupons mostly from stores I would never buy from. So I look for any that seem worth something or useful. That way I started receiving National Geographics (um, _or something_ , I am not even sure; I have never opened one of them). The first three for very, very little money, after which I should and could have cancelled the subscription. But did I do that? Of course not. The reason I picked that subscription in the first place is that I struggle picking up a book (from a giant pile close to my bed) in the first place. I thought that I could start reading _something_ (offline) again that way. Something new and shiny. Not like my books, of which I've read or started to read very many already. So here I am now, several months after subscribing to that magazine, and I ignore a call from an unknown number. I checked online who'd called and it was most likely the magazine publisher, trying to finally make me pay my bill ...
To dispute one point you make about "everyone knows it's a scam but pays in anyway," part of it is that we have little choice if we want to keep up in modern society: everything has a completely unnecessary separate app attached that requires access, everything that was once done physically or analog (even inherently simple and convenient things) has to be switched over to digital on your smartphone, and all the digital stuff fails, gets buggy, shuts you out and FORCES you to update and pay more to continue using the product after a certain amount of time. But other than that, thanks for this video as it sums up my feelings quite well. I did realize recently that the entire current day economy is about turning normal, everyday things that were once just "there" in life into subscription models on planned-obsolete technology. What really can be done about it besides just moving into the woods?
Typically DIY-ing. You can't own the nice (digital) things sold in stores. Things you can own that are old or cheap are no longer 'nice' (they lack modern conveniences that become increasingly necessary). The only way you can own 'nice' things is by rolling your own, and that's a pretty big commitment -- nobody is an expert in every field, or has the time to DIY everything, but everybody can probably DIY _something_, as an act of rebellion if nothing else. Buy "dumb" things and hook them up to off-the-shelf microcontrollers and single-board computers so you can use open-source packages to provide the missing 'intelligence' under YOUR control, don't buy the "smart" versions that are intended to stab you in the back later.
First time I heard it was a SimpleFlips VOD. I don't remember which game it was, but the point is more just that his stream has the best user-chosen soundtrack
This is a great deep dive. It's all part of the greater war on ownership. Even for properties you do buy and should reasonably own, companies are pushing the limits of the current legal systems across the world to make precedent that their property remains their property even after *you* buy it. See John Deer, see Apple, see Japan's laws making it illegal to hack your consoles, etc.
@@jacobnoelle8428 the super rich have decided that only they will own things from now on, and they are laying the groundwork in countries across the world to enforce that. You can read more about the litigations I mentioned on your own. I would understand why that sounds like a conspiracy but the actual lawsuits and pressing of lawmakers show otherwise. Maybe it is a case by case corporate basis, but if they win, it becomes the legal standing for all corporations.
@@willowtdog6449 thanks, I looked it up. They're bending to the Biden administration and regulators- thank goodness! It's a tug of war, and this is a big victory for us but the war is far from over!
Indeed! Which is why the original conception of "free market" in classical econ meant a market free of _rent_ , as rent is by definition value extracted _without_ value produced and a clear contradiction to the justifying logic of the market, correctly recognized as a residue of feudal social relations, hence the term "landlord". _"Kelp was never augmented by human industry. The landlord, however, whose estate is bounded by a kelp shore of this kind, demands a rent for it."_ - Adam Smith, ch.11, Wealth of Nations
Rom: "S-soooo, you're saying I would own THE WORMHOLE?" Quark: "Better; you'd own the ownership of the Wormhole!" Rom: "Thaaaat doesn't sound better, brother..." Odo: "Then imagine how good it will sound when you find out Quark sold the N-F-T to the wormhole to four other people"
I bought Buck Bumble. It physically harmed me. Like, every time I played it, I got a horrible migraine that lasted for days. My guess is that something about the helicopter physics just didn't agree with the contents of my skull. It was the first thing I ever sold at GameStop.
I just had to...legally obtain...this ROM and fire her up in RetroArch to see why this hurt you and if it would me (yes, I do make poor life decisions and often, if you're wondering). I have already lost my mind not knowing what I am supposed to do and being unable to control this little bugger properly. I don't do well in jerky weird 3D environments. Can't play FPS for that reason it messes my eyes and brain up.
Your long unwieldy sentences are one of the joys of this channel. Every one of them provides one of the dopamine hits that keep me addicted to this exploitative, manipulative platform.
I feel the subscription model has been used to rip a lot of people off. Photoshop for example, shouldn't be. Even if I had to be pay for updates ( I might understand that). - OMG YOU MENTIONED IT . We should be able to own things. That's why I like dvd's. I could just have them. and I can display them on the shelf in pretty ways. I don't have to buy 5 or so different services, I can just buy (even if it'll be late) it once, and watch my fun batman and titans animation.
It's just a better business model to make you pay for things forever instead of only once. That's how the world works and will work for the foreseeable future: any time someone can extract more value out of you, they will. And if their exploitative practices lose them your business in particular, it doesn't matter because they're making so much more off of the other people who continue to put up with it because we've become so desensitized to it now. Every year it'll continue getting just a little bit worse, creeping in slowly and insidiously so that most people barely even notice they're getting less and paying more as time goes on.
Photoshop absolutely should not be a subscription-based service. When I got my drawing tablet, I was excited to get Photoshop, too, and then I saw it was like $120 a year, and I was like "Absolutely f-ck that, having it be a subscription service that costs double what it does for a year of online console service on a brand new first-time hobby is f-cking ridiculous." That's what kept me from buying it and I got Affinity Photo instead. One time purchase for $60 with free updates, only having to pay extra for post-development add-ons, like new brush sets.
This is why I don't feel bad about being so analog. Mostly it's due to working at used book stores and stuff over the years, but also I never lose access to physical CDs and Blu rays unless I ruin them myself.
"Right to repair" applies to digital goods as well. You should own your computer programs and it should be 100% legal to create and distribute modifications of them. (Modding is usually considered a 'grey area' at nicest, tantamount to piracy at worst. Nothing wrong with piracy, but ) Accidentally wrote a FOSS manifesto lol.
I've said for the longest time that software companies should be forced to put their source code in escrow. And if they decide to no longer support that software or the company goes under, it becomes public domain.
@@ThylineTheGay I want people who make free products to make a liveable wage. I want freeware to be something people can live off of. Pay for things you like, even if you don't need to pay for it. If you have the disposable income. make somebody's day, click their kofi. :)
@@WannabeMarysue Thank you for encouraging people to donate. I worked on some game dev software for 10 years and released both a free and a paid version. I got $15 from it since release early this year and have been forced to get a job and I'm now too exhausted all the time from the job and already being on the brink of burnout to actually work on the software anymore.
You can vote with your money by not spending it and pirating everything instead. Piracy is great. I made the case for it when I was 14, and at 35, I'm still as convinced that we should pirate shit.
@Random Songs In Locrian That's what I use. Linux + FOSS since 2012. Still am in favour of pirating all the rest that isn't open source, as needed, including media.
"You will own nothing and be happy" is going to go down next to "Separate but equal" in the list of great historical examples of "we'll do the first thing, but not the second."
I got blocked from scrolling down on an article I was into. I caved and subscribed to the New York Times. Get this, I tried to unsubscribe, they instructed me to call them on a god damn telephone.
@@SatelliteSoundLab I am paying for a gym membership for a gym I havent actually ever stepped foot in because they require you to show up in person to cancel. Its a long sad story.
@@SatelliteSoundLab I subscribed to New York Times back when you could do that for free. Unfortunately I did so using an email address that was on a provider which went bust.
"Can [the cyberpunk genre] truly remain subversive while the establishments it meant to subvert now turn to it for direct inspirtion?" This is exactly what happened with Das Kapital
My state just passed a law requiring high schoolers to pass a financial literacy class, and a whole lot of people are like "hooray, I wish someone had been around to teach me about the intricacies of loans, taxes, health insurance, investment and operating a small business," and it just made me realize that every single one of those things should be easier to do or unnecessary for most people. Asking people to memorize more bullshit will not make the bullshit go away, or be valid.
How many people do you know that would be actually okay with working as a rubbish collector full-time? How many people do you know that would be actually okay with working as a rubbish collector for one day each week? How easy do you think it would be to train the people actually okay with working as a rubbish collector to be good enough at it to properly do it all day once a week? So many things could be simplified. And yes, you'd have to remove the financial aspect in many cases, but absolutely not at all in all of them. The world is so not organised to be efficient and run like a well-oiled machine.
God I second that feeling, learning about finances and taxes would of felt so much more important to me than just the convoluted math called algebra that's more or less just forgotten and a faded memory in my head from how little to never it gets used.
The only financial thing I learned it school was how to write checks and balance a checkbook. While learning how to balance can be useful. Most of what I learned was wasted. With my bank I don't even have checks.
I remember they taught us about various types of interest, APR, & what not, in my regular normal math class [I think freshman or sophomore year]. They don't anymore?? I mean, I don't remember fkall, but they tried.
@@mookinbabysealfurmittens well, we definitely learned about compound interest in Algebra 2, but that was nearly 20 years ago. As a person who isn't in school or a teacher, I don't know the current curriculum. However... Accounting is mostly "highly organized elementary math, plus law" so I'm not exactly convinced that the prior curriculum was insufficient, just that this is mostly a class-based grift (especially since private schools are exempt from the requirement).
Thumbs up. "Gaming as a service" is the worst idea to enter gaming since "Custer's Revenge." I say that as a game developer who runs an actual game company - yes, it makes more money for the corporations, but DAMNIT- whatever happened to JUST SELLING THE GAME?
When there are shareholders, they insist you do anything that will make more profit even if it makes an objectively worse product. I'd guess most game developers WISH they didn't have to add crap like this into games because they know it makes an objectively worse game, but have their hand forced by the higher ups who are certain this is going to be more profitable for them.
ZOS does a good job with it's subscription model for Elder Scrolls Online: you can buy the game and play for free. Period. If you want to sign up for the ESO Plus monthly sub of $15 a month, you get instant access to all DLC's (there are a LOT) an infinite crafting bag to hold all your materials, double your bank and housing space, and 1650 crowns (cash shop currency) to spend on cosmetics, and it's worth noting that you only get 1500 crowns if you just pay for those outside of the sub, and no other benefits. The sub feels like a real benefit instead of just a fee for the privilege of playing the game like WoW or FF14 do. You can still play the game without the sub and there is a TON of content even if you don't get the DLC individually and just play for free, so I feel like they have a real handle on the CORRECT and ethical way to run a subscription service for their game
@@lordmortarius538 I fail to see how that is a good example of a game with a subscription model - they literally took stuff out of the game, and made things artificially annoying and painful only to sell you the solution back - and worst part of all they don't have the common decency to make it a one time fee, they of course make it part of a monthly subscription service so you have to pay them over and over again just to maintain your access to those things. I don't know what is wrong with the model of "you pay for the game, you get the game - the whole game, without any artificially annoying systems to tempt you into paying even more". When people talk about "well you actually get your money worth from the subscription, feels like I get real benefits" the first thing I think is "great, so you are at a huge disadvantage if you don't fork out this money, and people think that is a good thing somehow..."
The thing is that they aren't, really. What they're offering is either a subscription or exactly what was said here: buy the current app and then later you can buy an upgrade to get the new features if you eventually want them. You can do one or the other, now, but turns out, yeah, they really *couldn't* afford to keep giving away new feature development for a one-time charge. The flip side of not wanting subscriptions is that you have to get used to the idea that the software you bought is never going to have more features than it did at the time you bought it.
Me: "Hi yes I would like to edit photos" Adobe: "Well well well look who's ready to pay $239.88 per year in perpetuity, bend over and lube up" Affinity Photo: "That'll be $54.99 for forever, and our program will actually work better with old PSDs"
When I went to cancel my NYT subscription I had to chat with a rep and they asked why I was cancelling, i just told them I wasn't going to answer and to cancel or I was just going to lock the card.
13:40 is the part of this whole NFT thing that makes me always go crazy! People saw how the infinite, effortless reproductability of data as a whole, didn't mesh well with the capitalist systems as they exist. And they went "Wait a minute! There's something wrong with data! Let's make it worse."
I wish it was limited to digital goods. In Belgium, the counters for electricity were something you bought once. With "smart" counters that nobody wanted, you rent/lease them, a political choice that went deeply against the popular option. Cars have become expensive to the point where new cars are almost exclusively company lease cars tied to employment. Stores are pushing leasing systems for household appliances like freezers and washing machines. Actually owning stuff is becoming something for corporations. For people (ie not corporations who aren't people) owning anything is not an option in the near future.
If you mean the electricity meters, you used to buy those in Belgium? In the UK afaik they were always property of the electrical company and not Yours. The telephone system worked like that in the UK and USA as well until the 80s or so, the “line rental” (still a thing today though) was more expensive and included the phone.
@@kaitlyn__L Yeah the electricity meters used to be a one time purchase. If the utility company wants to own them, they can pay me rent to have them in my house god damn it. It's been a huge scandal here, especially since the digital meters were specifically designed to hurt owners of solar panels by making them pay for producing electricity.
@@ahouyearno that’s very interesting about meter ownership. The rationale here is that it’s the electricity network operator’s property otherwise you would be within your legal rights to modify it and, yk, steal electricity. So they keep it their property and just provide it you “temporarily” as part of the contract (even though in practice they’re there forever since every home has to be served, and switching end-supplier doesn’t switch network operator). Re your second paragraph, that’s a software issue with two-way metering, either caused by the firmware or the electrical company not implementing it properly. It always sucks when that happens but it at least theoretically can be fixed fairly easily. Though I don’t know how the Belgian electricity suppliers are, but in the UK it’s fairly easy to get it set up for a feed-in tariff where you get paid the wholesale rate for any input. And in the USA a bunch of regions have net metering, which is an even better deal because that cancels out the taxed domestic rate rather than only being the wholesale rate. But yeah, when the meters are set up expecting one-way flow of electricity and then there’s two-way flow, it counts up both ways and that does indeed suck for home generation. But maybe the scandal is all about the electrical companies not enabling those very necessary features?
The Amazon music app keeps making it harder and harder to listen to the albums you've already bought so that you'll start paying for their monthly subscription. They don't want my money if i want to give it to them in exchange for a service. They only want my money if I'm willing to pledge it to them in perpetuity. Why are creepy longterm contacts preferable to open and honest exchanges of consideration?
This is your best video because it makes me feel smart for not ever paying subscription fees for anything (other than patreons and recurring donations to non profits)
A note about where NFTs really come from and what they represent to the folks that would pay millions of dollars for one. Imagine you're someone with millions of dollars to invest in something. You might invest that by buying paintings. Let's say you buy a famous Manet painting. (No not Monet, different guy) You'd buy the painting at auction. But now you own a piece of history. Sure, you _could_ just move the painting to your sick gaming room. But it will _slowly decay_ there - from all the weed smoke and jizz - and that's not a good investment. So instead you loan it to a museum - usually the same one that's held it all this time - and either it will stay on display there or go into their expensive climate controlled archive. Either way, you have to go _somewhere else_ to enjoy this painting that you own if you want to keep the investment as, well, an investment. What you're really buying is a piece of paper and seals and shit on it that says you own that painting. And you're buying the ability to resell that piece of paper. This is what we call _provenance_ - literally the ephemera and history that is proven about an artifact. Often the provenance increases the value of the object. It is one thing to say you own a toothbrush, but if you can prove that some famous dipshit used that toothbrush to clean grout in a youtube video, and then prove that it was then given to some other famous puddle-of-sperm and they scrubbed their toilet with it and those brown stains are literally their poop, and then it was used in a new revival of Jackass _as a toothbrush_ on the show... You get the idea. NFTs are just a digital version of this. You own _the NFT_ and you add history to the NFT by trading it. You get to prove that everyone that owned it owned it. The NFT may be _related_ to a youtube video or something, but just like with the painting - anyone in the gallery has roughly the same access to it that you do. You're really _owning a piece of paper_ that says you owned it. You're owning a record in a leger that you owned the NFT. This all isn't any less _dumb and wasteful_ than what people make NFTs out to be. But it _is_ what already happens. NFTs aren't some new concept people had to scam people better. It is a digital version of a scam that's been going for a thousand years or so.
I'm grateful you added the bit at the end where it isn't any less dumb and wasteful than the scam of owning art that's been going on for thousands of years, because I would say paying to own art is also super dumb lmao
No I think you are wrong. NFTs claim to solve that. But they simply don't because provenance literally doesn't apply to digital goods. With provenance you have an actual physical scarce thing you have control of the physical object and that thing is what it claims to be. The same literally isn't true of digital art NFT or not. The value of digital art (which has no scarcity) is purely in the copyright and reproduction rights. Not in the provenance because it's pointless. There is not provenance for digital items because it doesn't matter and is impossible to know what semiconductor held the memory of an item. It's not how digital storage or reproduction works. Digital art is not a scarce thing. And NFTs do not confer anything about rights to anything other than the NFT itself. The actual ownership of the image and the copyright still sit with the artist and that is where the value liest. Cause once an digital art, NFT or not, is out of copyright it's infinitely reproducible. And at that point because it's not a physically scarce item is worthless.
@@mytimetravellingdog You missed my point. When you buy art you aren't buying the art, you're buying the provenance. NFTs are _just_ provenance. Remember my toothbrush example. The toothbrush is worthless, but who owned it and what crazy amount of money someone paid for it increases the perceived value of it. With an NFT you aren't buying the digital art. You're buying the NFT. The digital art, at best, serves as promotion for the first purchase and maybe it helps people be a little more convinced of the value. However, it is worth pointing out that with an NFT the original owner/creator of the NFT can claim some of the resale value with some of the different NFTs out there. NFTs _are_ physically scarce. The NFT is the thing with the value in this situation. Which is still, make no bones about it, incredibly stupid. But get your stupidity correct. lol It is also worth pointing out that other points in your comment are also wrong. First, when you buy a painting, you aren't buying the copyright and people still buy paintings _and_ prints of paintings - there is value in the aesthetic. Second, digital art itself _can_ have provenance but it applies to the whole history of the work and not to any one copy. Where the work was posted and seen and by who _does_ change the value of a work. People will pay more for a famous meme on a shirt than something just as good that you made up.
@@DampeS8N no your missing the point in that there is no provenance in digital art it's just not possible because it's not a physical object and provenance is linked to the intrinsic physicality of a product. NFTs are an attempt to impose something like provenance on digital art except by definition it cannot do that because it's digital. Provenance works because the artist physically made and touched it and so on we as a society put value on that and that's why perfect forgeries would be worth less. There is no ability to have an original with digital art as it has no physicality that imparts that value. And copyright is the one thing that could make make it useful or scarce and that is the one thing that NFTs don't convey.
I like the way jetbrains does it. Pay $x for 1 year. You get all updates within that 1 year period. If you choose not to renew, you get a perpetual fallback license so you can keep using the software, but don't qualify for updates. If you do renew, you get a big discount and your fallback license is moved to the version it was upon renewal. If you renew a third year, you're paying half of what you were year 1. You can cancel anytime and still get your fallback license
@@spencerharmon4669 All depends on what you're comfortable with or using it for, I guess. Not familiar enough with them to really say. I just like the way jetbrains does it. You're essentially buying a perpetual license, and if you want to upgrade to newer versions it just gets cheaper and cheaper.
This is a tip for dealing with remembering to cancel subscriptions or trials. Put a calendar reminder in your phone or other calendar you use to remind you to cancel subscriptions. Set the notification for a week early and two days early. Or just two days early if your trial is less than a month. You need lead time to make sure cancellation goes through. Trials you might immediately lose access to, but for a pre-paid subscription-you pay for the month or year in advance-you’re supposed to be able to keep access for the full duration until the subscription runs out. But make sure by reading TOS or FAQ or you can try to ask customer service. If you retain access until the subscription runs out regardless of when you cancel, you can cancel early, then set a calendar reminder to double check. This is how I deal with subscriptions. I also keep a master list of what my subscriptions are, when they renew, and how much they cost. This lets me track my monthly budget and evaluate expenses. It also serves as another reminder that a subscription exists.
I know this works well for netflix. In fact, you can cancel as soon as you sign up for a trial, and it'll let you continue watching through the trial period without your having to worry about remembering to cancel.
I love James Sterling! They are the one person in the community I know will always stand their ground and refuse to accept the hellscape that the gaming industry has become without a fight. I have mad respect for their endurance and tenacity.
The recent Squid Game crypto rug pull was the second one in a week I've heard described as a "speed run". Nobody was even surprised. Also, Disney owns the trademark to Mickey Mouse, and owns the copyright to the cartoon Steamboat Willie. I've never heard of an NFT conferring rights like these to the owner. The language people talk about NFTs in seems to imply it does, but, no.
For apps like Headspace, I call my credit card company when they (Headspace) try to strong arm me and tell them (my credit card company) I am being scammed and to mark the charges from that company as fraudulent. If enough of us did that for these types of scummy companies credit card companies would stop allowing them to be an accepted merchant and the company would either have to change or go out of business as the only method of payment that works for them is credit cards. You wouldn’t believe how many times telling a customer service agent that I am reporting them for fraud immediately gets me a refund and maybe something extra added in to reduce my anger. Consumers have rights and need to take advantage of them more often! But alas, soon my bank will allow me to create fake (burner) credit card numbers for these sign up pay later scams and I won’t have to ever worry about canceling a free trial again… joy!!!
NFTs are like buying a receipt but not getting the item the receipt is for. Maybe one of those really long CVS receipts. In reality it's actually even more stupid than that because it's so far removed from the object that you could perhaps call it... ETHereal :)
@@donventura2116 Mate, that's a non-argument. When you are aware your actions have negative impact, and still continue, it doesn't matter if the negative impact is caused directly on not. If you speed for fun and hit a pedestrian on a crossing, you don't get to say, _"It's not my fault. If the city built bridge-crossings, that person would still be alive. The issue wasn't me speeding but the fact that the crossing design makes it possible for a car to hit a pedestrian."_ And NFTs are no more necessary than joyrides, they are *at best* an attempt to be "all quirky like that", and a downright scam... practically always. And I'm by no means advocating for abandoning blockchains, just for not using them for stupid reasons and I sincerely hope you won't try to argue that NFTs are anything other than: *downright stupid,* even though wasting energy is quite appropriate here.
In terms of talking about sinister subscriptions, some services charge their payment through a third party that handles a lot of subscription services, so the name of the charge on your bank account does not tell you what service you're paying for. I had to look for when the charges on my account started and cross reference the date with my browser history to figure out who the hell was stealing my money, talk about banking on people forgetting what their subscriptions are.
I remember I saw a youtube video sponsored by a something fresh company, you pay it monthly and they send a box of food with a recipe for all the ingredients. Not even food is safe lol
@@LorikQuinn Anything, literally ANYTHING that can be commoditized is subject to this. What you have are business owners with no scruples anymore. It's basically "Try and fucking stop me you dumb proles" from our so-called betters in the upper echelons. People have to take their right to refuse seriously. People get so caught up in the maelstrom of FOMO that they don't see they're getting screwed until they're in too deep to get out, from where they sit.
@@LorikQuinn To be fair, that doesn't seem too bad. Like, yes, it's a subscription, but if you pay monthly and they send food monthly, it's effectively the same as buying it on your own at a grocery store but in a slightly different format.
Headspace gets very little of their revenue from individuals. They've managed to convince employers that their nosebleed prices are justified because corporations want to be able to brag about "investing in wellness", rather than improving wages, working conditions, or meaningful benefits.
Can confirm. This is what Starbucks gives you instead of like, a decent mental health benefit.
I just got a year from my insurance lol which is fine since i was paying $12 a month for it already.
Yeah. my employers benefits don't cover most mental health services without jumping through hoops to get a referral, but we do get headspace for free. An app that is difficult to navigate and causes me anxiety when it reminds me often that Im missing my daily meditation session.
"Meditation is not something one needs to do all the time. It is Medicine, not Diet."
~Alan Watts
"you could treat your workers and hire a real therapist or you could give us less per month"
I remember reading an economic treatise from like the 60s that said more things would become public goods, like streets or streetlights, as production caused the price of certain goods to approach zero. It barely spent a couple paragraphs citing that the only alternative was artificial scarcity and dismissed that as something impossible no one would stand for. Now here we are. Now we rent everything and the few things we can own we're increasingly legally bound to throw away and replace because repairing them is a crime somehow.
I love how people in the sixties thought that capitalism will somehow evolve in to a moneyless society(e.g. communism) . You can see it even in culture, for example sci-fi like Star Trek.
Also one of the best examples I can think of when it comes to artificial scarcity is food. Our society produces more food than the entire population needs, yet 9 million people still starve every year.
@@Somajsibere cold war era pro-capitalist propaganda was very effective at brainwashing the general public even when it comes to believing completely absurd nonsense fantasies like the idea that "capitalism is good for the world"
@Blaire Sovereign To be fair to people in the 60s, they could probably not have predicted the 80s, and the massive Reaganomics/Thatcherite movement towards deregulation, privatization, etc.
@Blaire Sovereign I guess at least that's better than being communists who hate brazil because they don't love the usa enough, this shit get's an extra layer in the third world
any chance you can remember what treatise this was?
"... they might just say "fuck it" and continue paying to avoid conflict."
I feel it cannot be stressed enough how big of an issue this is. Companies essentially abusing people with social anxieties has become an actual plague.
They use state of the art research in neuroscience and psychology to exploit human biases. If hell existed there would be a special place in there for them.
it's like that ex that reminds you too much of your dad, except legally enforced
Ehh as someone who has experienced both abuse and social anxiety.... Calling this abuse is a stretch. You cant live in a bubble forever, speaking to people is just a basic need and even though I'm still introverted, being forced to talk to people at work at a young age saved me a lot more pain down the road. This is something that needs to be overcome not coddled through one means only: interacting with non-school kids and seeing that you're not going to die for it.
I agree it's not really abuse in the traditional sense, but psychologically/financially it's being a pain in the ass to keep your money. There are places that give u the runaround and make u waste lots of time trying to cancel a membership or dispute the charge. To the point where the time/energy u spent on the hassle was more valuable than just paying the fee and saying fuck it
i cannot stress how much i have benefited from friends willing to say "he said no pickles" on my behalf.
I don't think we're in the minority distrusting NFTs, at least not yet. Right now the folks who own McDonald's and Rolling Stone are just revving up the ad machine to make it seem that way.
I was not expecting to see you under a Thought Slime video
so true bestie
Agreed. I don't think McDonalds or Rolling Stone know or care what NFTs are, or have any serious intention of pursuing them. It's just a buzz word they're co-opting to reel in the eyeballs of crypto-bros. Getting people obsessed with NFTs talking about, and therefore doing viral marketing for, the brand.
And obviously, opponents of NFTs talking about how stupid it is for brands to jump on the bandwagon are _also_ doing marketing for those brands. It's like when brands do performative "wokeness", getting positive press from the left and vocal vitriol from the right. In either case, the result is the same: people are talking about the brand.
God I love seeing you here. Your channel is literally the reason I got back into anime as an adult. Horrible dude discourse had driven me out years ago.
@@Andy-ct8be I also recently got back into some anime after a long hiatus, and I realized I enjoy it quite a bit - I just generally dislike the online anime fandom which can be insanely toxic.
Also "voting with your wallet" is a system where 1 rube is worth dozens of otherwise missed customers.
Not to mention some people have much deeper wallets. The entire F2P games market is sustained off of a few players with unlimited spending money and everyone else is just along for the ride
@@markeschen6272 i was literally about to mention the concept of "whales" in microtransaction games, but you beat me to it.
And "voting with your wallet" gives people with more dollars, more votes.
When people use that argument, turn it on its head. I’m a democrat, one person one vote. You want to vote with your wallet, that means you want everyone to have the same wallet size. Otherwise it makes no logical sense.
@@markeschen6272 It's always important to note, so I will:
"Unlimited spending money" does not mean "unlimited money". Whales often don't have a lot of money, they spend all of what could have been their savings and some of their food budget because of their **gambling addiction**.
Never buy an NFT. If you want art, go to a local gallery or art fair and hand money to an actual human artist in exchange of a piece of their work. You'll make their day, help out a (likely poor) artist who makes actual things, and you'll have an actual thing to hang on your wall and look at for as long as you want to keep it around.
or heck, commission some furry porn to some talented artist out there, its way more helpful
NFTs aren’t about the art. It’s another con. It’s like your weird old aunt keeping shit that’s really just trash because “it might be worth something someday.” It’s trying to be the new Bitcoin. But at the end of the day its fucking memes with random character strings.
@@VisonsofFalseTruths also, with NFT art you are not buying the art, you are buying exclusivity. it's not that you have access to a thing you think is cool, it's that you are the only one who "owes" the "real" cool thing.
Even a lot of us digital artists fucking hate this shit. "Owning" a jpeg or a png, or whatever proprietary encrypted format it's in, is whack asf.
@@KBird204 fun fact about nft, nfts are literally pointing towards the link of an image, absolutely no image data stored
The scariest thing is they take it away at any time. Im an animator and Flash going to monthly subscription infuriated me. If they took it away it could literally ruin my life and my livelihood
Same with my 3D art work with Substance Painter/Suite. It causes us to worry about if/when the subscription services change, or when the companies get sold.
A huge fuck-up on Adobe's part just uninstalled my 2015 copies of Photoshop and Illustrator, and now they don't provide those versions anymore. I hate the newer builds, but I also can't use the custom scripts that are absolutely necessary for my work in them either. So now I'm forced to pirate an older, cracked version, even though I'm still paying my monthly CC license.
Fuck Adobe. Pirate Flash and be done with it. I still use Flash 8 (Macromedia era) for a lot of prototyping. It never bothers me to upgrade or connect to any servers.
It’s always morally correct to pirate adobe products
@@Max.Paprika Macromedia, now they weren’t scummy. I miss Shockwave :( and Fireworks.
_> If they took it away it could literally ruin my life and my livelihood_
Communists: We told you about the means of production bro! We told you dawg!
NFT's are basically paying to have the privilege of owning a receipt to something you don't actually in any way own. I would be tempted to say this is the final stage of the monetization, where you pay to say you bought something you never really own, but I dread that we may get even worse levels or nonsense one previosuly thought only possible in parody.
in a sense aren't you actually buying the receipt of the receipt itself (which comes with a little absolutely non-binding story about something else or something)?
Then again, a receipt literally saying "I received x amount from y person for this receipt" would at least be kinda funny
It's like paying for the receipt of someone's Gucci bag. You don't actually get the bag, but you can carry around the receipt in your pocket and pull it out when you want to flex about how you totally own a Gucci bag. If anyone ever questions why you aren't carrying around the actual bag you can just look at them like they're crazy and be like "Uh I have the receipt, obviously I own it??? Why else would I have this receipt. Look I have a photo of the bag right here! It's just at my friend's house now."
It's pure private ownership, they succesfully stripped away anything that's inherent to ownership.
NFTs do give you that elusive sense of pride and accomplishment though...
@@AshenVictor omfg lmao, wonder when we can purchase surprise Mechanics receipts
7:16 As a UI/UX designer, I was literally taught to make destructive actions like cancelling a subscription to be more subtle and require more effort. Yes, we were literally told that when designing a UI for subscription cancellation, you need to do whatever it takes to prevent the user from cancelling. And that can also include manipulating users to feel FOMO, guilt tripping or even removing the Cancel button altogether. And I swear, most of other designers are also mindlessly down for it. It's like dark patterns like these were implanted into their minds, that the best UX is to control the users to do the actions the company wants them to do. Most likely people who try to justify and defend these methods are those mindless startup/tech company drones.
I just had a very weird experience. I subscribed to Apple TV recently to catch Foundation and a couple other shows. Now that I've seen them, I realized it was time to cancel. It was...fairly easy. That really surprised me.
I maintain that those procedurally generated animal NFTs are just a way for cryptobros to have fursonas without having to admit to having fursonas
I don’t know, there was already a lot of crossover between tech bros and furries even before NFTs were inflicted upon the world.
i know some furry art isnt top tier and can be pretty gnarly but i see those things and im like... please pay a furry to commission a nice piece of fursona art for you, that will be a 1k better spent.
@@pharoahcaraboo9610 yeah, but then the artist would actually be reimbursed for their efforts and not exploited to the utmost..
But if we 'pay' them in a cryptographically defined tender that has no real value outside of the people in charge, who subsequently have no obligation to respect any rule of law or public opinion?....
@@Dong_Harvey yeah. art nfts, specifically, i feel aren't made for people who like art for the inherent value of being art. its for people who think art only has value insofar as the wealth it can accrue. its an investment. not something that makes you feel things, or inspires creativity. just. money put in so more money comes out, eventually. ):
@@pharoahcaraboo9610 Totally agree. I would even say furry art is generally better than NFT art. I'm not biased or anything. I swear.
Important note: you do not get the actual rights to an NFT, the artist retains it. If you buy an NFT of a monkey in a baseball cap you can not put it on a t-shirt and sell it. All you bought was an arbitrary concept associated with the image via a URL.
Thanks for the clarification, the only possible benefit I thought they could have doesn't even exist. Jesus Christ.
Yep. All you're buying is an entry in a digital ledger on a server somewhere, that could at any time be shut down. At no point do you actually own the image itself. Indeed, the person who sold that entry in a ledger may not themselves have any right to the image they're linking to. Many NFTs being sold are of artwork stolen from artists. ("Stolen" in the sense that the NFT seller is profiting off the artist's work without their knowledge or consent).
The thing is you can actually transfer copyright. And it doesnt destroy the environment.
That's just amazing
This. You only own the token on the block chain. It’s so fucking dumb
People always say "ah its up to you what you buy" but yet companies do get sued all the time for using manipulative tactics. These people just don't understand how psychology works. These are the people who think they have far more free will than they actually do. The sort of people who see a Pepsi advert, and buy a Pepsi "because they want one, it has nothing to do with the advert"
This video got me to cancel my headspace that I haven't used in well over a year. They let you cancel on the website now but force you to click "yes I want to cancel" on 3 different screens before it finally goes through. Love subscription models!
That's what Adobe does, those little shitters with fantastic software made me question my decision several times. And I hate that I had to cancel it, because I use it too rarely and you can't even be spontaneous about it, as it is a year long contract for no reason whatsoever.
@@wsa18 I mean, the reason is to gouge you for more money.
@@wsa18 You know what they say, "pirating Adobe softwares is morally ethical"
I should count the number of times I have to click 'yes' the next time I cancel my Amazon Prime free trial
If u tried to cancel thru the app, it doesn't work. It lies. You have to cancel through your profile settings in Google play. Subscriptions section. I know I'm late to this topic, but everybody check your subscriptions in Google play. Many apps make you think you are canceling when you arent.
TOTALLY hypothetical and in a video game, but I loved Headspace.... So I have all of the "Basics" files ripped to mp3s and keep them in a Google drive folder. The monthly subscription stuff was gross... so I've shared their guided meditations with friends and family for help with their mindfulness too (in a video game).
Pirate video games are great! Like Pirate movies, of the Caribean kind
I love to commit piracy. In Sea of Thieves, of course. Which I illegally downloaded.
@@Nuvizzle Their servers are so crappy they don't verify accounts?
@Domi B okay let me slip into a dream state where I could hypothetically do such a thing
Edit: UA-cam won't let me link it here 😭 I don't know what to doooooo
@@DMO-DMO-DMO you might be able to add a space in there somewhere, so the person just has to remove the space from the url when they paste it into the address bar
I’m in a field that basically requires a subscription to photoshop. Adobe knows that artists need their product so a long time ago they changed to a subscription model because we’re basically permanent costumers. Even if we want to work in one time payment software we often have to use photoshop because that’s what our coworkers use and we don’t want to have to covert file formats each time we share a project and colleges mostly teach everyone photoshop. It’s a complete scam.
I’m in a similar boat. I work in audio production, and likely the most popular program for audio work is Pro Tools. Thankfully, I got a perpetual license several years ago, but their manufacturer, Avid, switched to a subscription-only model since then. If I didn’t already have a license, I would never be able to buy this industry-standard software.
@@ColourlessGreen-b5z there’s creative cloud stuff you can’t access if you pirate. That’s a great option for a lot of people though. Especially freelancers.
A lot of the recent mania around NFTs (& Pokemon cards, & “Stonks”, etc) strongly reminds me of the mania around baseball cards & comic books in the early 90s, and again in the mid-2000s. It’s a classic gold rush: someone claims there’s money in them thar hills, and everyone else rushes in, afraid of missing out, hoping to magically solve whatever financial problems they have. But the bubble inevitably bursts, and all that’s left is ecological & economic devastation - aside from a tiny number of wealthy elites who were able to get out at the right time.
Yeah I love cryptos and the concept of them but they are very oddly horrid for the environment. And also make graphics cards for gaming or a audio video project computer hard to get and that makes me mad. So yeah, well put.
Beanie babies
Beanie Babies. Bitcoin. Tulipmania. We need to learn at some point.
Including that what they're pursuing as valuable ended up being very not valuable, because the creators of baseball cards and comic books just printed a whole bunch of them. Because they were more than glad to meet the demand. Something which runs counter to the idea of scarcity.
The main difference with NFTs is that, by being digital, functionally unlimited copies can be made, rather than the finite but enormous numbers of copies of Youngblood #1. So NFTs are like those earlier bubbles, but MORE. In every respect. More copies, more financial and environmental damage, more ephemeral, and more absurd.
@@bt8594 it's tulips all the way down.
My feelings on NFT: the nature of humanity is that every so often, we recreate Tulip Mania
except you can hold a tulip bulb and plant it or look at the pretty flower.
@@rring44 true. But the mania wasn't about owning and appreciating the tulips. It was pure speculation. They might as well have been NFTs
@@georgearnold841 speculation and FOMO is how wall street has always operated
I mean, from what I understand, Tulip Mania was _massively_ overblown when retold because _muh moral message._ It was never as hectic or widespread as people are made to believe, though it does make a good story.
@@leftnutt9730 What even is FOMO anyway?
NFTs are the "rare pepe collection meme" taken seriously.
Weren't there "Rare Pepes" that were actually sold as NFTs?
I think theyre like owning an art species.
@@NyanCatHerder yes I believe so
A friend suggested I try headspace, as they'd been having a good experience with it.
Upon seeing the manipulative pricing scheme, I became so stressed trying to figure out what option would be best for me, I gave up and didn't subscribe. Thanks Headspace!
You’re on UA-cam, just watch guided meditation there
A service mean to reduce stress is stressful due to a manipulative pricing scheme. brilliant. _just. brilliant._
not to be that person suggesting illegal activities but have you tried acquiring the app less than legally?
@@konirtemori6845 I don’t know if a person who is overwhelmed by looking at pricing options is gonna be totally chill with breaking the law.
@@supC_ Really? I find breaking the law reduces stress, at least for me.
It seems like Thoughtslormbo has been having more fun with editing and effects lately and I'm here for it. Also this video was a good one.
This really made think of an experience I had a when i was a teenager. I got caught shoplifting at a large department store, and after going through the whole process of getting banned for life, I started receiving letters demanding that I pay the company multiple hundreds of dollars to avert legal action. I'm glad I decided to look up what I should do. Because I found that this is a common tactic used by large corporations to intimidate people into paying them without going through the legal process. I'm not going to debate the morality of shoplifting here, but I think it's really shady that corporations will try to extort large amounts of money from people /after/ they retrieved their merchandise. The part that really kills me is that companies almost never sue when these demands aren't met, obviously. There's no use in paying a lawyer to sue for a couple hundred dollars, especially when the "damages" (in quotes because these letters are only sent when the shoplifters is caught and the merchandise retrieved) are often much lower than the demand.
NFTs are basically just those certificates that say you own a star or an asteroid, except on the blockchain
Thank you. I’ve been trying to find others that have said this as well. It’s exactly that.
That's what I thought about when I first learned about NFTs. They're not all that different to the "Acre of the Moon" ownership certificate that my parents bought for me when I was a kid.
My favorite thing about "don't download my ape" is that literally everyone who ever looked at it has downloaded it at least once
That was irony. Nobody care if ppl download jpegs.
@@OphiuchiChannel a lot of people clearly fucking do.
tbh I looked at the thing, decided it was just not pleasing at any level, and proceeded to not dl even by mistake
@@_goopho What he means I think is that in order to view it you download it to your cache, so if you've seen it you've downloaded it but you didn't necessarily kept it.
@@BlackBirdSweep I dont think so lol
"I have a bad mouth that does words wrong, often."- a line i fully intend to steal the full delivery and intonation of in the future
You'll probably fuck it up.
NFTs are just a ponzi scheme.
Your use of Tim Robinson was absolutely spot on LOL.
More true: "The bulk of NFT projects are literal ponzi schemes."
NFT is gona be come the new stock market.
@@slowgan1199 no, there's literally no legitimate use for them. it's a buzzword grift.
hey now, nfts are a perfectly reasonable method of money laundering
I would add that NFT proves that most trading/investing it's actually a ponzi scheme in general.
"You might notice that I'm always holding this, I try to hide it, but you can clearly see it a lot of my videos" I have never noticed it until this very moment. I'm not surprised to find out that you have a remote for your teleprompter that you use in your videos, but I am slightly concerned that I have never actively noticed it, assuming it is indeed that obvious
Totally agree. I’ve watched lots of Thought Slime videos and never noticed the remote
@make None whoa someone else who says elseone
Subscription services are usually awful, so thanks for making this video.
I still pay Adobe because I need Flash for work, but they haven't updated it substantially for around 10 years, roughly since they changed to the subscription model. Not only that, they recently took away the option to access old versions of their software due to licensing disputes. So now I need to get the old versions from illegitimate sources, and still pay Adobe to get past their DRM!
I'm literally paying to pirate stuff, when in the past I could have just bought the software outright. Total scam of a company!
Wait… you’re the EBF guy! I love your games!
Sounds like they need to take Soul Eater -> Legend to the face
I went for a job interview at a cable company once, and as part of the interview they wanted to know how I would retain someone who had called up wanting to discontinue or downscale their service. The example they used was an elderly woman, so in their hypothetical scenario my job was to wring more money out of someone on a pension, someone who was probably calling up because they were paying money they needed badly for things like... food... or medication.
I did not get the job.
One of the few things we can really, genuinely "own" in this day and age are our principles.
Speaking of automatic recurring payments, I think it's outrageous how hard it is to pay for something in a way where you, not the payee, control the transaction. Most of the ways we pay for stuff amount to giving the payee access to your account so they can reach in and pay themselves.
And then if you are unlucky enough to be living paycheck to paycheck, the bank exploits that because how dare you overdraft when you are expected to have a dozen companies come in and yoink money every month.
For the record, Ive tried over and over again to have a float of $100 in my account because of this, but it always gets destroyed by things like bills, groceries, or medicine... you know, frivolities like that.
@@tsharabrown3719 if you have problems with reoccurring payments and can't cancel you can ask your bank to block transactions from that company.
I've had to do it before. Much easier than jumping through a billion hoops with customer service.
This is why I am 35 but never owned anything but the gift-card-credit cards. .. I didn't feel I could trust them lol
. I use the gift cards or avoid basically... occasionally use hubby's card and let him (and his undamaged brain) be responsible for checking invoices/making sure no bullshit charges.
@@SoulDevoured I think the point was more like, let me wire money to Amazon for my Prime subscription when I have it, instead of Amazon telling my bank "yo, give us $x out of that guy's account" the first of each month. And if I forget to pay one month (or can't afford it), my Prime just gets suspended until I pay again. Instead of the bank, Amazon, and whatever collection companies get involved, bombarding me with letters and additional fees for the audacity of not having enough money in my account.
this is what got me into cd's in the past year. tired of ads, tired of listening to music i don't care about, not gonna pay for a subscription service. i'd rather pay a few bucks for a secondhand cd and own it forever, or buy directly from an artist's bandcamp
I’ve got a large collection of ripped FLACs and I’ve been meaning to set it up so I can stream them to my phone from home much like my own private streaming service (but for free*). Haven’t done it yet though
@@kaitlyn__L sick idea
Hearing NFTs explained like that sure makes them sound a lot like those DeviantART adoptions from the 00s, where you win one of a variety of palette swapped cartoon neon emo wolves from a lottery or auction, except NFTs have technical words to make Redditors sound like great big smarty pants instead of the usually dismissed (but far more endearing and earnest) interests of pre-teen girls.
How's that for a long, unwieldy sentence?
Except you can actually do things with your adopt
Just worse for th environment.
"DeviantART adoptions from the 00s"
You might want to sit down, but: those are still a thing.
@@rolfs2165 But that’s when they hit it big.
it's stupid yes but the useless nft can't be deleted by DeviantArt nor will it disappear when they go bankrupt
Except that's not true sometimes because some nft scams are even more of a scam than others!
Sincerely a distributed software fan that wants to talk about something other than nft's
Closer and closer to the Ferengi way of life
"Workers dont want to stop the exploitation. They want to find a way to become the exploiters."
Star Trek future, ladies and gentlemen.
FEEEEMALE
First plastic surgeon to invent earlobe enlargement gets to be rich!
The Ferengi are basically conservatives (including Republicans and Libertarians). Conservatives don't want to stop the exploitation. They want to find a way to become the exploiters.
Fortunately, that's not typical of humans. Most people actually care about others.
As someone who often buys and sells things second hand online, can honestly say everything is just made up and arbitrary. How much is something worth? It's worth however much someone is willing to pay for it. If most people don't want to pay for it, doesn't matter. If you can find one person to pay the price you want it's worth that much. That's why shit like Yeezy's or Artwork sells for a bunch of money.
Exactly. There could be only one of (thing you’re selling) in the entire world but if no one wants to buy it, it’s worthless.
There exist many theories, particularly in economics, of what value even is, and where it "comes from." I encourage anyone to look into those, if they are interested in that kind of stuff. Whatever theory you ascribe to, I think most can agree that there is definitely a psychological aspect in how humans create value.
My parents were actually asking me about this earlier. You definitely went a lot deeper into it than I did, and that's what keeps bringing me back. Love the channel and your content.
Just dance literally has a subscription service :/ so ima prob stop playing it soon
I find it interesting that in the event that capitalism encounters something that we can easily make as many copies as anyone could possibly want of the thing, its response is to look for ways to artificially make it scarce rather than say "let's take care of people who create these sorts of things somehow, and then everyone can use their stuff as much as they want".
Almost like capitalism hates abundance and can never actually deliver it for everyone
I hear the typical people screaming COMMIE at the mear thought of taking care of artists instead of abusing them for profit.
"It is not enough that I should win; others must lose."
Or adjusted to the topic, "it is not enough that I should have; others must have not."
i took a class in behavioral economics last year, and if there's one thing that jumps out from what i learned, it's how effective these exploitative patterns and billing practices are at taking advantage of human psychology. literally every cognitive bias, every irrationality, every informational asymmetry under the sun is exploited by the grifters that infest our economy, from online services to health insurance. it's one thing to abstractly smell that something's going on, it's another to look under the hood and see exactly how we're being swindled.
For those that need to read this: you aren’t a capitalist. You’re capital.
This is a good comment
Technically no, you're labor. Capital as a term is reserved for machinery, factories, land, etc. The non-human (labor) side of production.
@@Tetragrammaton22 There's the point. You are not a laborer, you are little more than dirt to be exploited in the eyes of megalithic corporations.
@Daddy Player One Capitalists don't seek for more of each other, they seek capital.
You are not the customer. You are the product.
As a beginning buddhist, the idea of charging subscription money for *meditation* enrages me on every possible level. Meditation was invented in ancient times to improve people's lives and bring enlightenment, not make money for capitalists, smfh.
Then again, they already did that with yoga - yoga is originally a type of meditation and an entire school of philosophy in Hinduism, and in the West it's a trendy exercise marketed at women.
Exactly, first they raped Christianity and made it into hyperconsumerism and now it is the other cultures religions turn to bend the fuck over.
I am an atheist but this isn't how religions should be treated, they deserve a certain respect for cultural achievements they made and the community they have given to so many ppl and that is now so sorely lacking in our society.
Just think of the monetization opportunities in Aztec human sacrifice! Now there's something you can put your whole heart into! /s
been saying it for ages, but capitalistm will commodify EVERYTHING even the air we breathe, given enough time, it must be stopped
I actually don'y mind paying for yoga videos. As I currently understand it, they provide me with detailed explanations and videos for doing yoga (as well as options to specify what part i wanna stretch). In turn I pay for these. If I'm wrong here please correct me
@@paulkothgasser6623 No like, I meant two separate things. I hate idea of meditation lessons being a paid service, and I hate the idea that yoga - which is a philosophy and a form of meditation - was turned into commercialized exercise.
I don't actually care about people paying for the exercise yoga lessons, they're honestly so far removed from original cultures and religions that who cares. At this point it's just fitness training.
Can’t believe that I’ve lived long enough for deviant art adoptables to become a tech bro thing
Bad timeline
HOLY SHIT ZNXNXJXNSJSSJSJS
Dude some DeviantArt adoptables are super beautiful dragons and shit though. NFTs are monkeys and coins with disturbing faces. This is a lot worse
One can boil much of what he says in the video down to the Greater Fool Theory. People buy what they know is essentially worthless shit at an outrageous price because they believe that a greater fool will come along and buy it from them at an even more outrageous price. He's absolutely right when he says we are all becoming (and even trying to become) scammers. This will not end well.
Ouch. This comment feels like harsh mirror. Ive bought on multiple occasions “limited edition” copies or collectibles for games, on the very possibility that they may hike up in cost some time in the future and *then* ill want it. :/
See Tulip Bubble circa 1634.
@@DrEnzyme To which the suckers reply, "But...blockchain."
@@BobPagani Techbros are always like "it's not about Bitcoin/NFTs/whatever, it's about the blockchain and its immeasurable benefits for humanity!"
ok but then like
why aren't we doing those actually beneficial things
instead of selling (receipts of) outrageously ugly monkeys for several thousand bucks a piece
@@stug6974 The simple answer is because techbros are full of shit. Two reasons: The first is that, as I said earlier, they're counting on a greater fool to come along and buy the ugly monkey token from them at a higher price. The second is that a LOT of the crypto/NFT market is about money laundering. You gotta hide that coke money somehow, right?
We really should be pirating more. Maybe not to pirate everything everytime, but I think it's important to know how to do it and have the means ready, so we don't end up paying for things we don't want to just because we don't have another choice.
Besides, it's usually fun.
hey, if u could spare a second- ive been meaning to look into this but am too worried about security to have made the jump yet, do u have somewhere trustworthy i could start please? i trust a fellow thoughtslime viewer over some reddit rando tbh
And emulators have a lot (especially retro) games.
There's nothing I love more than hearing "this is audible" before listening to an audiobook uploaded by some guy in Vietnam.
Right. I use streamers when available because of the convenience, and often bitrate, and a wide range of HDR formats, and so on. But I still know how to find magnet links for content that’ll never be streaming here, I buy my favourite movies on plastic shiny disc, and if anything disappears from streaming I’ll have an answer, even if it’s mildly less convenient.
Other customers, they have by the balls.
@@KNylen see if any friends can invite you to a private tracker, not a public one (public trackers get all the fed bots hoovering up IPs onto a big list).
Also some people buy a VPN which specifically calls out P2P support, if they want to obfuscate their IP, but honestly with Carrier Grade Network Address Translation (CG-NAT) you’re sharing your IP with dozens or hundreds of others at a minimum anyway.
10:23 "Vote with your dollar" only works when you limit how many votes someone can give. If dollars really were votes, politicians would absolutely milk the everlovin-- What's that? Political "donations" are a thing? And they're wildly out of control wherever there's no law specifically banning or regulating them?
regulate the subscription model, regulate political donations
Wondering in horror whether I've played a single Playstation Plus game ever.
When buying a couple games digitally, I purchased one month of PS+ in order to get the discounted prices. I stayed away from the "free" games and unsubcribed afterwards. I probably saved ~70$ but you have to be aware of and remember the risks/temptations.
Don't do this if you're not clear on how to unsubscribe and especially DON'T do this if you're not getting a good deal on games you already wanted.
You had better have gotten those Play At Home freebies! Horizon Zero Dawn Complete, Subnautica, Moss, Enter the Gungeon - to name a few!
I had just got a PS4 and now it's full of free games and all my money went to the PSVR instead.
I'm playing Persona 5 but that's because Persona 5 is a lot easier to play when I'm about to pass out. But you get it.
I have. But I live in a very harmful, self-isolated, cocoon.
PS+ was great when I was unemployed (had gotten the subscription when I WAS employed) and buying games was not really something I wanted to use the little money I had, on.
@@PanAndScanBuddy I already had horizon, Gungeon and Subnautica when that came along
"You will own nothing and you WILL be happy." - billionaires
Also billionaires - "But don't ask for better wages, because that's _my_ money and its _my_ business and telling me how to run _my_ multi-million dollar business that I built with nothing but grit, lobbyists and my own personal team of police officers would be an infringement on my rights!"
"Imagine no posessions" sang the millionaire.
I don't know how old you are, FourtyParsecs, but as someone Thought Slime's age, I can tell you that a lot of this nonsense didn't exist in for example Summer of 1996. I had more than I needed, and while yes, I was a child back then, I still am absolutely convinced that I could live like that as an adult. I'd love to, actually. I would miss out on nothing of actual value.
@@camelopardalis84 It is my sad opinion that the ownership culture of the post-WWII era, like buying a house, a car, a dishwasher, a mower, etc, was to ideologically reinforce the supremecy of capitalism over Communism. These days, we can now see that the "middle class" that the US tauted back then has now been completely dismantled (capitalism's "creative destruction" at work). Meanwhile, China has the largest growing middle class in human history. So, the ideological pivot reverses the narrative: owning things is BAD now! You don't want to be responsible for those things! Let capitalism take care of you with a wide selection of services instead!
Whereas ride sharing was once only something you did in the evil Soviet Union because "everybody's equally poor under socialism", ride sharing is now what makes you pro-capitalist.
Anyway. Yes. It's all a bunch of nonsense. It always was.
So you will not mind when we come and take your billionaire shit...
We live in a timeline where capitalist grifters are doing their version of adoptable OCs, but worse in every way. At least with adoptable OCs, you actually get the right to use the character's likeness in whatever you want from the artist themselves, and its bulit off of the honor system instead of relying on a fuckton of servers to generate a blockchain so that your art is "personalized".
Or you could just commission an artist to make something personalized for you that you actually own.
I know I'll probably be called cringe for knowing about OC culture, but who cares
This is ALL cursed knowledge.
And very true lmao.
It's hard to explain people as a reformed internet creep how much shit they're calling for was an internet hoax or a forum drama decades before.
This is why the Free Software Foundation is important! Free software, free society! If you don't have complete control of your software, then your software has at least partial control over you.
software have never been to open but I do agree software control is getting a bit out of hand I mean you are not even allowed to repair your own god damn stuff anymore for the software recognises something of the physical product have changed and looks the device, I'm unsure if I can even legally open up my toaster lol (the last part is a bit over the top but one never knows since they are putting computers into everything now)
@@link7417 get a sunbeam radiant control toaster! automatic beyond belief, without a single chip :)
"Do we want to live in a world where all doo doo dumdums just get charged money for being doo doo dumdums?" As an ADHD I've never even thought there could be an option not to
ADHD tax, it's such a thing.
You may appreciate the somewhat recent Jimquisition video "Microtransactions Are An Accessibility Issue"
I previously only thought about it in terms of addiction-prone folks, but that video made me realize just how many other neurodivergent people are harmed by these practices.
I refuse to believe that nobody said anything about 11 x 12 not being 121, but 132, yet I didn't find a single comment addressing it
The subscription = rent thing lays the whole concept bare quite succinctly
christman's been going on about it on and off tangentially like he does for a few months now, and we've all been thinking it or saying it to gullible family members who refuse to build PCs with optical drives but have subscribed to every streaming service "for the kids" for years now. it was nice to have a more succinct, guided meditation on the matter, if you will. rentology is here to stay and it finally has a name.
The space game Starsector literally has in-game NFTs for producing "physical" items, called LPCs. LPCs played a major role in the sector's technological stagnation, in the game's backstory. I think the game's too subtle in its criticism of the idea, but I got a lot of mileage out of the lore.
Really good game, too.
This sounds interesting, what platform is it on?
@@berrim26 It's on PCs! And yeah, finding an LPC in the ruins of a distant world that lets you mass produce the high tech dreadnaughts were what pushed me from "upstart colony" to "imperial superpower" overnight.
Even in far future copyright law and drm rule
I don't care about the lore, i just want to nuke native populations into oblivion to secure a 2% increase in fuel production market share
Never in a million years did I expect to encounter someone else who remembers that buck bumble opening.
On the headspace thing, it's a whole department in most large companies that rely on subscription packages. Retention specialists, trained to upsell you while you try to cut ties. These positions are totally reliant on metrics, and satisfaction of the departing customer is usually not one of them.
"I lost my job and wife and dog and now can't afford this internet."
"So, you're not displeased with the service? That's good to know. I'm sorry to hear things have been hard for you lately, as a member of our family we want you to know we care and are here for you when you most need us. We want to offer you an upgrade that costs less than what you're paying now for the first 6 months, how does that sound?"
This reminds me of when Bojack Horseman tried to cancel his newspaper subscription.
Yeah, I remember trying to help my parents cancel their cable TV, cos they were being given the classic run-around, and I don't tolerate that shit. I called, told them to cancel it, got transferred around a lot, and of course got to the specialist trained in customer retention. I just wouldn't let him talk. He'd start to say anything, and I'd just, "CANCEL IT. NOW. WE HAVE NOTHING TO DISCUSS." If all else fails, tell them that the card/account they've been billing is being closed and you're "not getting a new one; we're going OFF THE GRID!" GL, and fly safe, Comrades.
@@mookinbabysealfurmittens i think i'll just make a very loud, persistent sound until they hang up or cancel it. and if they hang up i call back.
@@pharoahcaraboo9610 Then you have to call again cos you never got confirmation that they cancelled.
My fav NFT is the one that's attached to the first tweet on Twitter. For a cool 3 million USD, you can own it! You can't do anything with it of course, you don't own the account, you can't edit or delete it, it's not in your possession in any meaningful sense. It just exists on the internet, and a post-it note exists somewhere else on the internet that says "that thing over there, that's mine that is"
*points at seagull* NFT
same vibes as "naming" a star, or "owning" land on the moon
@@ThylineTheGay but if those things turn out to be legit and enforcable, one day someone might live at number six 'Freddie Mercury rules lane' just next to the moonbuggy offramp. A real outcome might occur. Ownership of a cartoon of something wont mean much to anyone but the seller and the owner.
"I don't got beef with Headspace in particalar. Do what you want, it don't bother me none, but what does bother me none..." Really channeling This Old Tony on that line.
I've often said it's hard to recognize grifts in today's society because even the most reputable jobs in today's society are basically grifts and scams and the most lucrative position is con man
And the only people it would be ethical to grift are also the only ones where you'd actually get punished for doing it.
Another reason companies push subscription services is because it's a more stable representation of income than one time sales, which keeps investors/shareholders happy and convinces them to continue investing or even invest more for continual growth.
So another thing we have the literal capitalist ghouls to thank for :)
Also; NFTs are the new "Beanie Babies" change my mind (Zoomers ask a Millenial what this means)
That's unfair.
You can decorate your desk with Beanie Babies, practice juggling with them, use them to distract cats, or fill a duvet cover with them and use them as an improvised weighted blanket.
@@wendyheatherwood Omg, the duvet cover. X.x
"NFTs are Beanie Babies" is the most concise and tightest explanation I've read of this bullshit. I'm going to use that, I hope you don't mind.
Beanie Babies? VHS? MTV playing music videos?!
(Apparently now we are referred to as being born in the 1900's, I mean, they aren't wrong.)
@@wendyheatherwood I prefer throwing them at people who annoy me.
Dude I loooooooooooove you. You got me to watch Ghoulies based on how often you reference it. For this, I'm upset, but I also thank you for everything else you do.
It's nice to hear someone else mention how Jimphanie Sterling has been shedding light on the hypercapitalisation of games for ages. Really really thankless work for the most part. Thank God for them, and for you too Mildred
i know i am always plesantly surprised when jss is brought up anymore! it used to just be throwaway sneers in the most milquetoast fashion by people who didn't know anything about them but for the last couple years it has been references and occasionally links to the content itself showing that a lot more ears have been listening!
"them"
@@carcrashjayson yeah, them. That's their pronoun.
@@carcrashjayson oh boy, I'd really love to hear from the big brain behind this comment.
Once I learned about Planned Obsolescence I gave up on capitalism.
I love the windy long sentences every once in a while, it makes the video feel more thought slime imo
agreed, and half of them I wouldn't even classify as long winded
So last year I had some unexpected expenses and I needed to cancel a monthly donation to a charity. This was no local thing, it was a major, national organization. I googled, scoured the website, everything i could think of. There was no option to cancel. The only contact info i could find was for the literal director of this national charity.
I was so glad when my bank was sold and my checking account cash card - with which I had subscribed to a few charities when literally accosted by them on the street - was replaced without linking the new card to the old one. Instant unsubscribe. (This wasn’t a problem for anything else, as I have ACH for utilities and they did link the old checking account to the new one, and in fact, nearly three years later, I finally used up my old checks.)
for what its worth, I never noticed the remote before
Only being able to basically rent software (or other products) pisses me off to no end! Also, subscriptions make perfect sense for newspapers but the three times I've signed up to a free trial for a newspaper (cause of uni courses), there was no way to cancel without calling and/or emailing them and twice I was locked into a monthly subscription because I didn't cancel early enough. I usually cancel immediately after signing up for the trial, like before leaving the website or doing whatever it is I wanted to use the free trial for. That way, I don't forget.
Even better than renting... you're renting permission to use software even if you outright "buy" it a lot of the time. You don't even own Windows anymore even if you didn't use an activator and bought it for some reason.
For quite some time, I bought two kinds of products exclusively online. And every time I then got to pick about four out of about four dozen coupons online. "20% off any purchase above 100 francs" and "10 francs off" coupons mostly from stores I would never buy from. So I look for any that seem worth something or useful. That way I started receiving National Geographics (um, _or something_ , I am not even sure; I have never opened one of them). The first three for very, very little money, after which I should and could have cancelled the subscription. But did I do that? Of course not. The reason I picked that subscription in the first place is that I struggle picking up a book (from a giant pile close to my bed) in the first place. I thought that I could start reading _something_ (offline) again that way. Something new and shiny. Not like my books, of which I've read or started to read very many already. So here I am now, several months after subscribing to that magazine, and I ignore a call from an unknown number. I checked online who'd called and it was most likely the magazine publisher, trying to finally make me pay my bill ...
Dispute the charge with your bank. Don't let their shitty practices be rewarded.
To dispute one point you make about "everyone knows it's a scam but pays in anyway," part of it is that we have little choice if we want to keep up in modern society: everything has a completely unnecessary separate app attached that requires access, everything that was once done physically or analog (even inherently simple and convenient things) has to be switched over to digital on your smartphone, and all the digital stuff fails, gets buggy, shuts you out and FORCES you to update and pay more to continue using the product after a certain amount of time.
But other than that, thanks for this video as it sums up my feelings quite well. I did realize recently that the entire current day economy is about turning normal, everyday things that were once just "there" in life into subscription models on planned-obsolete technology. What really can be done about it besides just moving into the woods?
Like life turning consciousness into the body platform, which ends up consuming itself in the end.
We actually do have choice, but everyone wants to act like we don't. It's just conditioning.
Typically DIY-ing. You can't own the nice (digital) things sold in stores. Things you can own that are old or cheap are no longer 'nice' (they lack modern conveniences that become increasingly necessary). The only way you can own 'nice' things is by rolling your own, and that's a pretty big commitment -- nobody is an expert in every field, or has the time to DIY everything, but everybody can probably DIY _something_, as an act of rebellion if nothing else. Buy "dumb" things and hook them up to off-the-shelf microcontrollers and single-board computers so you can use open-source packages to provide the missing 'intelligence' under YOUR control, don't buy the "smart" versions that are intended to stab you in the back later.
I'm always happy to see another person who remembers what a banger Buck Bumble's theme song is.
First time I heard it was a SimpleFlips VOD. I don't remember which game it was, but the point is more just that his stream has the best user-chosen soundtrack
My eyes have been opened and I couldn't be happier
Man that was a great nostalgic flashback
Biggity Buck Bumble.
Did you now that a Mashup of Buck Bumble and Super Mario Sunshines themes exists?
It is called Super Buck Sunshine and it is amazing.
This is a great deep dive. It's all part of the greater war on ownership. Even for properties you do buy and should reasonably own, companies are pushing the limits of the current legal systems across the world to make precedent that their property remains their property even after *you* buy it. See John Deer, see Apple, see Japan's laws making it illegal to hack your consoles, etc.
Goes into the idea of Right to Repair, 100% true here.
Isn't a "perk" of capitalism is private ownship?
@@jacobnoelle8428 the super rich have decided that only they will own things from now on, and they are laying the groundwork in countries across the world to enforce that. You can read more about the litigations I mentioned on your own.
I would understand why that sounds like a conspiracy but the actual lawsuits and pressing of lawmakers show otherwise. Maybe it is a case by case corporate basis, but if they win, it becomes the legal standing for all corporations.
@@RWAsur I just heard a news blue that Apple is changing this soon. I think?
@@willowtdog6449 thanks, I looked it up. They're bending to the Biden administration and regulators- thank goodness! It's a tug of war, and this is a big victory for us but the war is far from over!
Indeed! Which is why the original conception of "free market" in classical econ meant a market free of _rent_ , as rent is by definition value extracted _without_ value produced and a clear contradiction to the justifying logic of the market, correctly recognized as a residue of feudal social relations, hence the term "landlord".
_"Kelp was never augmented by human industry. The landlord, however, whose estate is bounded by a kelp shore of this kind, demands a rent for it."_ - Adam Smith, ch.11, Wealth of Nations
Rom: "S-soooo, you're saying I would own THE WORMHOLE?"
Quark: "Better; you'd own the ownership of the Wormhole!"
Rom: "Thaaaat doesn't sound better, brother..."
Odo: "Then imagine how good it will sound when you find out Quark sold the N-F-T to the wormhole to four other people"
I wasn't expecting a DS9 here
Also lmao I read that in the characters' voices and it all checks out
@@hazelnotxyz I have watched a LOT of DS9 =)
Nefarious Ferengi Trickery...
Demonac, that was the best Star Trek fan-fiction ever written.
It’s fucking demonac? How the hell did I find this guy in the wild lol
I bought Buck Bumble. It physically harmed me. Like, every time I played it, I got a horrible migraine that lasted for days. My guess is that something about the helicopter physics just didn't agree with the contents of my skull. It was the first thing I ever sold at GameStop.
aw man i loved that game no wonder my brain is all fucked
I just had to...legally obtain...this ROM and fire her up in RetroArch to see why this hurt you and if it would me (yes, I do make poor life decisions and often, if you're wondering). I have already lost my mind not knowing what I am supposed to do and being unable to control this little bugger properly. I don't do well in jerky weird 3D environments. Can't play FPS for that reason it messes my eyes and brain up.
@@taranullius9221 I've never had much problem with most FPS games, but yeah, it's hard to navigate. Lol.
Your Skull is disgusted by the motions of the
A e r o m a c h i n a
and acts harmfully in retaliation to the Evil Physics of the machine
From someone who used to work in sales, yes they do count on you forgetting. Yes, almost everything is a scam.
Your long unwieldy sentences are one of the joys of this channel. Every one of them provides one of the dopamine hits that keep me addicted to this exploitative, manipulative platform.
Do you watch Some More News? I'm regularly overwhelmed by the sentences in their scripts.
I feel the subscription model has been used to rip a lot of people off. Photoshop for example, shouldn't be. Even if I had to be pay for updates ( I might understand that). - OMG YOU MENTIONED IT .
We should be able to own things. That's why I like dvd's. I could just have them. and I can display them on the shelf in pretty ways. I don't have to buy 5 or so different services, I can just buy (even if it'll be late) it once, and watch my fun batman and titans animation.
Get Affinity then
I own an external HDD. End of statement.
It's just a better business model to make you pay for things forever instead of only once. That's how the world works and will work for the foreseeable future: any time someone can extract more value out of you, they will. And if their exploitative practices lose them your business in particular, it doesn't matter because they're making so much more off of the other people who continue to put up with it because we've become so desensitized to it now. Every year it'll continue getting just a little bit worse, creeping in slowly and insidiously so that most people barely even notice they're getting less and paying more as time goes on.
Photoshop absolutely should not be a subscription-based service. When I got my drawing tablet, I was excited to get Photoshop, too, and then I saw it was like $120 a year, and I was like "Absolutely f-ck that, having it be a subscription service that costs double what it does for a year of online console service on a brand new first-time hobby is f-cking ridiculous."
That's what kept me from buying it and I got Affinity Photo instead. One time purchase for $60 with free updates, only having to pay extra for post-development add-ons, like new brush sets.
*YAR YAR intensifies*
Authentic, articulate, insightful, entertaining. And very well thought-out!
This is why I don't feel bad about being so analog. Mostly it's due to working at used book stores and stuff over the years, but also I never lose access to physical CDs and Blu rays unless I ruin them myself.
We live in a wild time when CDs and Blu-ray’s are labeled “analog media”
agreed plus i just like physical media.
"Information wants to be free!" I love treeware books, but sometimes the call of the high seas is too great.
"Right to repair" applies to digital goods as well. You should own your computer programs and it should be 100% legal to create and distribute modifications of them.
(Modding is usually considered a 'grey area' at nicest, tantamount to piracy at worst. Nothing wrong with piracy, but )
Accidentally wrote a FOSS manifesto lol.
and it's not like you can't make money with FOSS, especially if you host a paid only version on steam but free (exactly the same) versions on GH
I've said for the longest time that software companies should be forced to put their source code in escrow. And if they decide to no longer support that software or the company goes under, it becomes public domain.
@@TheFeldhamster 100%
@@ThylineTheGay I want people who make free products to make a liveable wage. I want freeware to be something people can live off of.
Pay for things you like, even if you don't need to pay for it. If you have the disposable income.
make somebody's day, click their kofi. :)
@@WannabeMarysue Thank you for encouraging people to donate.
I worked on some game dev software for 10 years and released both a free and a paid version. I got $15 from it since release early this year and have been forced to get a job and I'm now too exhausted all the time from the job and already being on the brink of burnout to actually work on the software anymore.
You can vote with your money by not spending it and pirating everything instead. Piracy is great. I made the case for it when I was 14, and at 35, I'm still as convinced that we should pirate shit.
@Random Songs In Locrian That's what I use. Linux + FOSS since 2012. Still am in favour of pirating all the rest that isn't open source, as needed, including media.
"You will own nothing and be happy" is going to go down next to "Separate but equal" in the list of great historical examples of "we'll do the first thing, but not the second."
Where were you when you realized capitalism did what communism wished it could do?
Headspace's cancellation policy sounds a lot like AOL's back in the 90s.
I got blocked from scrolling down on an article I was into. I caved and subscribed to the New York Times. Get this, I tried to unsubscribe, they instructed me to call them on a god damn telephone.
In conclusion, I am subscribed to the New York Times for the rest of my natural life.
@@SatelliteSoundLab I am paying for a gym membership for a gym I havent actually ever stepped foot in because they require you to show up in person to cancel. Its a long sad story.
@@FormerRuling You can always get a new debit card. Its just a pain having to update the new card info for everything else though lol
@@SatelliteSoundLab I subscribed to New York Times back when you could do that for free. Unfortunately I did so using an email address that was on a provider which went bust.
"Can [the cyberpunk genre] truly remain subversive while the establishments it meant to subvert now turn to it for direct inspirtion?"
This is exactly what happened with Das Kapital
My state just passed a law requiring high schoolers to pass a financial literacy class, and a whole lot of people are like "hooray, I wish someone had been around to teach me about the intricacies of loans, taxes, health insurance, investment and operating a small business," and it just made me realize that every single one of those things should be easier to do or unnecessary for most people. Asking people to memorize more bullshit will not make the bullshit go away, or be valid.
How many people do you know that would be actually okay with working as a rubbish collector full-time? How many people do you know that would be actually okay with working as a rubbish collector for one day each week? How easy do you think it would be to train the people actually okay with working as a rubbish collector to be good enough at it to properly do it all day once a week?
So many things could be simplified. And yes, you'd have to remove the financial aspect in many cases, but absolutely not at all in all of them. The world is so not organised to be efficient and run like a well-oiled machine.
God I second that feeling, learning about finances and taxes would of felt so much more important to me than just the convoluted math called algebra that's more or less just forgotten and a faded memory in my head from how little to never it gets used.
The only financial thing I learned it school was how to write checks and balance a checkbook. While learning how to balance can be useful. Most of what I learned was wasted. With my bank I don't even have checks.
I remember they taught us about various types of interest, APR, & what not, in my regular normal math class [I think freshman or sophomore year]. They don't anymore?? I mean, I don't remember fkall, but they tried.
@@mookinbabysealfurmittens well, we definitely learned about compound interest in Algebra 2, but that was nearly 20 years ago. As a person who isn't in school or a teacher, I don't know the current curriculum. However... Accounting is mostly "highly organized elementary math, plus law" so I'm not exactly convinced that the prior curriculum was insufficient, just that this is mostly a class-based grift (especially since private schools are exempt from the requirement).
Thumbs up.
"Gaming as a service" is the worst idea to enter gaming since "Custer's Revenge." I say that as a game developer who runs an actual game company - yes, it makes more money for the corporations, but DAMNIT- whatever happened to JUST SELLING THE GAME?
That’s why I don’t participate in them. And Blizzard can get fucked.
Games should be more art than business. Unfortunately, thanks to the ubiquity of capitalism, we can't enjoy our nice things. 😕
When there are shareholders, they insist you do anything that will make more profit even if it makes an objectively worse product. I'd guess most game developers WISH they didn't have to add crap like this into games because they know it makes an objectively worse game, but have their hand forced by the higher ups who are certain this is going to be more profitable for them.
ZOS does a good job with it's subscription model for Elder Scrolls Online: you can buy the game and play for free. Period. If you want to sign up for the ESO Plus monthly sub of $15 a month, you get instant access to all DLC's (there are a LOT) an infinite crafting bag to hold all your materials, double your bank and housing space, and 1650 crowns (cash shop currency) to spend on cosmetics, and it's worth noting that you only get 1500 crowns if you just pay for those outside of the sub, and no other benefits.
The sub feels like a real benefit instead of just a fee for the privilege of playing the game like WoW or FF14 do. You can still play the game without the sub and there is a TON of content even if you don't get the DLC individually and just play for free, so I feel like they have a real handle on the CORRECT and ethical way to run a subscription service for their game
@@lordmortarius538 I fail to see how that is a good example of a game with a subscription model - they literally took stuff out of the game, and made things artificially annoying and painful only to sell you the solution back - and worst part of all they don't have the common decency to make it a one time fee, they of course make it part of a monthly subscription service so you have to pay them over and over again just to maintain your access to those things. I don't know what is wrong with the model of "you pay for the game, you get the game - the whole game, without any artificially annoying systems to tempt you into paying even more". When people talk about "well you actually get your money worth from the subscription, feels like I get real benefits" the first thing I think is "great, so you are at a huge disadvantage if you don't fork out this money, and people think that is a good thing somehow..."
I was curious about Clip Studio Paint so I looked it up. Three days ago they announced they are moving to a subscription model. The grift continues.
The thing is that they aren't, really. What they're offering is either a subscription or exactly what was said here: buy the current app and then later you can buy an upgrade to get the new features if you eventually want them. You can do one or the other, now, but turns out, yeah, they really *couldn't* afford to keep giving away new feature development for a one-time charge.
The flip side of not wanting subscriptions is that you have to get used to the idea that the software you bought is never going to have more features than it did at the time you bought it.
Me: "Hi yes I would like to edit photos"
Adobe: "Well well well look who's ready to pay $239.88 per year in perpetuity, bend over and lube up"
Affinity Photo: "That'll be $54.99 for forever, and our program will actually work better with old PSDs"
GIMP/Glimpse: Allow me to introduce myself.
GIMP: You wanna edit some photos kid? *crackhead smile*
Can't you just pirate though?
@@kompf9099 but then you'll have a flood of 'm-muh morals' folks who don't realize that pirating doesn't actually do anything
@@pootispencer9765 I have no idea how GIMP still is this bad. But I guess Krita is alright.
“You cant stop me, we’re in too deep”
Thoughtslime is now a crypto soothsayer channel
69 likes: well done, folks
When I went to cancel my NYT subscription I had to chat with a rep and they asked why I was cancelling, i just told them I wasn't going to answer and to cancel or I was just going to lock the card.
13:40 is the part of this whole NFT thing that makes me always go crazy!
People saw how the infinite, effortless reproductability of data as a whole, didn't mesh well with the capitalist systems as they exist. And they went "Wait a minute! There's something wrong with data! Let's make it worse."
I wish it was limited to digital goods.
In Belgium, the counters for electricity were something you bought once. With "smart" counters that nobody wanted, you rent/lease them, a political choice that went deeply against the popular option.
Cars have become expensive to the point where new cars are almost exclusively company lease cars tied to employment.
Stores are pushing leasing systems for household appliances like freezers and washing machines.
Actually owning stuff is becoming something for corporations. For people (ie not corporations who aren't people) owning anything is not an option in the near future.
Yeah. In America the banks and corporations are buying up all the housing to become our nations biggest landlords.
If you mean the electricity meters, you used to buy those in Belgium? In the UK afaik they were always property of the electrical company and not Yours.
The telephone system worked like that in the UK and USA as well until the 80s or so, the “line rental” (still a thing today though) was more expensive and included the phone.
@@kaitlyn__L Yeah the electricity meters used to be a one time purchase. If the utility company wants to own them, they can pay me rent to have them in my house god damn it.
It's been a huge scandal here, especially since the digital meters were specifically designed to hurt owners of solar panels by making them pay for producing electricity.
@@kaitlyn__L Yep, my dad told me about how much employees enjoyed trying to reposes phones when people downgraded, or couldn't pay.
@@ahouyearno that’s very interesting about meter ownership. The rationale here is that it’s the electricity network operator’s property otherwise you would be within your legal rights to modify it and, yk, steal electricity. So they keep it their property and just provide it you “temporarily” as part of the contract (even though in practice they’re there forever since every home has to be served, and switching end-supplier doesn’t switch network operator).
Re your second paragraph, that’s a software issue with two-way metering, either caused by the firmware or the electrical company not implementing it properly. It always sucks when that happens but it at least theoretically can be fixed fairly easily.
Though I don’t know how the Belgian electricity suppliers are, but in the UK it’s fairly easy to get it set up for a feed-in tariff where you get paid the wholesale rate for any input. And in the USA a bunch of regions have net metering, which is an even better deal because that cancels out the taxed domestic rate rather than only being the wholesale rate.
But yeah, when the meters are set up expecting one-way flow of electricity and then there’s two-way flow, it counts up both ways and that does indeed suck for home generation.
But maybe the scandal is all about the electrical companies not enabling those very necessary features?
The Amazon music app keeps making it harder and harder to listen to the albums you've already bought so that you'll start paying for their monthly subscription. They don't want my money if i want to give it to them in exchange for a service. They only want my money if I'm willing to pledge it to them in perpetuity. Why are creepy longterm contacts preferable to open and honest exchanges of consideration?
This is your best video because it makes me feel smart for not ever paying subscription fees for anything (other than patreons and recurring donations to non profits)
A note about where NFTs really come from and what they represent to the folks that would pay millions of dollars for one.
Imagine you're someone with millions of dollars to invest in something. You might invest that by buying paintings. Let's say you buy a famous Manet painting. (No not Monet, different guy) You'd buy the painting at auction. But now you own a piece of history. Sure, you _could_ just move the painting to your sick gaming room. But it will _slowly decay_ there - from all the weed smoke and jizz - and that's not a good investment. So instead you loan it to a museum - usually the same one that's held it all this time - and either it will stay on display there or go into their expensive climate controlled archive.
Either way, you have to go _somewhere else_ to enjoy this painting that you own if you want to keep the investment as, well, an investment. What you're really buying is a piece of paper and seals and shit on it that says you own that painting. And you're buying the ability to resell that piece of paper. This is what we call _provenance_ - literally the ephemera and history that is proven about an artifact. Often the provenance increases the value of the object. It is one thing to say you own a toothbrush, but if you can prove that some famous dipshit used that toothbrush to clean grout in a youtube video, and then prove that it was then given to some other famous puddle-of-sperm and they scrubbed their toilet with it and those brown stains are literally their poop, and then it was used in a new revival of Jackass _as a toothbrush_ on the show... You get the idea.
NFTs are just a digital version of this. You own _the NFT_ and you add history to the NFT by trading it. You get to prove that everyone that owned it owned it. The NFT may be _related_ to a youtube video or something, but just like with the painting - anyone in the gallery has roughly the same access to it that you do. You're really _owning a piece of paper_ that says you owned it. You're owning a record in a leger that you owned the NFT.
This all isn't any less _dumb and wasteful_ than what people make NFTs out to be. But it _is_ what already happens. NFTs aren't some new concept people had to scam people better. It is a digital version of a scam that's been going for a thousand years or so.
I'm grateful you added the bit at the end where it isn't any less dumb and wasteful than the scam of owning art that's been going on for thousands of years, because I would say paying to own art is also super dumb lmao
This is super enlightening, thank you!
No I think you are wrong. NFTs claim to solve that. But they simply don't because provenance literally doesn't apply to digital goods.
With provenance you have an actual physical scarce thing you have control of the physical object and that thing is what it claims to be. The same literally isn't true of digital art NFT or not.
The value of digital art (which has no scarcity) is purely in the copyright and reproduction rights. Not in the provenance because it's pointless. There is not provenance for digital items because it doesn't matter and is impossible to know what semiconductor held the memory of an item. It's not how digital storage or reproduction works. Digital art is not a scarce thing.
And NFTs do not confer anything about rights to anything other than the NFT itself.
The actual ownership of the image and the copyright still sit with the artist and that is where the value liest. Cause once an digital art, NFT or not, is out of copyright it's infinitely reproducible. And at that point because it's not a physically scarce item is worthless.
@@mytimetravellingdog You missed my point. When you buy art you aren't buying the art, you're buying the provenance. NFTs are _just_ provenance.
Remember my toothbrush example. The toothbrush is worthless, but who owned it and what crazy amount of money someone paid for it increases the perceived value of it.
With an NFT you aren't buying the digital art. You're buying the NFT. The digital art, at best, serves as promotion for the first purchase and maybe it helps people be a little more convinced of the value.
However, it is worth pointing out that with an NFT the original owner/creator of the NFT can claim some of the resale value with some of the different NFTs out there.
NFTs _are_ physically scarce. The NFT is the thing with the value in this situation.
Which is still, make no bones about it, incredibly stupid. But get your stupidity correct. lol
It is also worth pointing out that other points in your comment are also wrong.
First, when you buy a painting, you aren't buying the copyright and people still buy paintings _and_ prints of paintings - there is value in the aesthetic.
Second, digital art itself _can_ have provenance but it applies to the whole history of the work and not to any one copy. Where the work was posted and seen and by who _does_ change the value of a work. People will pay more for a famous meme on a shirt than something just as good that you made up.
@@DampeS8N no your missing the point in that there is no provenance in digital art it's just not possible because it's not a physical object and provenance is linked to the intrinsic physicality of a product.
NFTs are an attempt to impose something like provenance on digital art except by definition it cannot do that because it's digital. Provenance works because the artist physically made and touched it and so on we as a society put value on that and that's why perfect forgeries would be worth less.
There is no ability to have an original with digital art as it has no physicality that imparts that value.
And copyright is the one thing that could make make it useful or scarce and that is the one thing that NFTs don't convey.
Everything is all just rent seeking now, and that will always be a scam.
I like the way jetbrains does it.
Pay $x for 1 year. You get all updates within that 1 year period. If you choose not to renew, you get a perpetual fallback license so you can keep using the software, but don't qualify for updates.
If you do renew, you get a big discount and your fallback license is moved to the version it was upon renewal.
If you renew a third year, you're paying half of what you were year 1. You can cancel anytime and still get your fallback license
Emacs is better.
@@spencerharmon4669 All depends on what you're comfortable with or using it for, I guess. Not familiar enough with them to really say. I just like the way jetbrains does it. You're essentially buying a perpetual license, and if you want to upgrade to newer versions it just gets cheaper and cheaper.
This is a tip for dealing with remembering to cancel subscriptions or trials. Put a calendar reminder in your phone or other calendar you use to remind you to cancel subscriptions. Set the notification for a week early and two days early. Or just two days early if your trial is less than a month. You need lead time to make sure cancellation goes through.
Trials you might immediately lose access to, but for a pre-paid subscription-you pay for the month or year in advance-you’re supposed to be able to keep access for the full duration until the subscription runs out. But make sure by reading TOS or FAQ or you can try to ask customer service.
If you retain access until the subscription runs out regardless of when you cancel, you can cancel early, then set a calendar reminder to double check. This is how I deal with subscriptions. I also keep a master list of what my subscriptions are, when they renew, and how much they cost. This lets me track my monthly budget and evaluate expenses. It also serves as another reminder that a subscription exists.
I know this works well for netflix. In fact, you can cancel as soon as you sign up for a trial, and it'll let you continue watching through the trial period without your having to worry about remembering to cancel.
I love James Sterling! They are the one person in the community I know will always stand their ground and refuse to accept the hellscape that the gaming industry has become without a fight. I have mad respect for their endurance and tenacity.
Wait till you find out about professional CAD software that hasn't really changed in years...
You still will save money instead of using paper. :)
FreeCAD if you can.
The recent Squid Game crypto rug pull was the second one in a week I've heard described as a "speed run". Nobody was even surprised.
Also, Disney owns the trademark to Mickey Mouse, and owns the copyright to the cartoon Steamboat Willie. I've never heard of an NFT conferring rights like these to the owner. The language people talk about NFTs in seems to imply it does, but, no.
They own Mickys image everywere 'cept in paraguay were a food company uses it.
For apps like Headspace, I call my credit card company when they (Headspace) try to strong arm me and tell them (my credit card company) I am being scammed and to mark the charges from that company as fraudulent. If enough of us did that for these types of scummy companies credit card companies would stop allowing them to be an accepted merchant and the company would either have to change or go out of business as the only method of payment that works for them is credit cards. You wouldn’t believe how many times telling a customer service agent that I am reporting them for fraud immediately gets me a refund and maybe something extra added in to reduce my anger. Consumers have rights and need to take advantage of them more often!
But alas, soon my bank will allow me to create fake (burner) credit card numbers for these sign up pay later scams and I won’t have to ever worry about canceling a free trial again… joy!!!
NFTs are like buying a receipt but not getting the item the receipt is for. Maybe one of those really long CVS receipts. In reality it's actually even more stupid than that because it's so far removed from the object that you could perhaps call it... ETHereal :)
Isn't it just the equivalent of those deeds to patches of the moon people use to sell?
@@WhichDoctor1 Pretty much, except looking at a star has a far less detrimental impact on the environment.
@@donventura2116
Mate, that's a non-argument. When you are aware your actions have negative impact, and still continue, it doesn't matter if the negative impact is caused directly on not.
If you speed for fun and hit a pedestrian on a crossing, you don't get to say, _"It's not my fault. If the city built bridge-crossings, that person would still be alive. The issue wasn't me speeding but the fact that the crossing design makes it possible for a car to hit a pedestrian."_
And NFTs are no more necessary than joyrides, they are *at best* an attempt to be "all quirky like that", and a downright scam... practically always.
And I'm by no means advocating for abandoning blockchains, just for not using them for stupid reasons and I sincerely hope you won't try to argue that NFTs are anything other than: *downright stupid,* even though wasting energy is quite appropriate here.
In terms of talking about sinister subscriptions, some services charge their payment through a third party that handles a lot of subscription services, so the name of the charge on your bank account does not tell you what service you're paying for.
I had to look for when the charges on my account started and cross reference the date with my browser history to figure out who the hell was stealing my money, talk about banking on people forgetting what their subscriptions are.
I enjoy watching your and Emerican’s videos that use dialectics to “predict” the future.
Spot on.
That’s one of the reasons I like selling food for a living. It’s so straightforward
Season passes for vegetables, coming soon.
I remember I saw a youtube video sponsored by a something fresh company, you pay it monthly and they send a box of food with a recipe for all the ingredients. Not even food is safe lol
@@LorikQuinn Anything, literally ANYTHING that can be commoditized is subject to this. What you have are business owners with no scruples anymore.
It's basically "Try and fucking stop me you dumb proles" from our so-called betters in the upper echelons. People have to take their right to refuse seriously. People get so caught up in the maelstrom of FOMO that they don't see they're getting screwed until they're in too deep to get out, from where they sit.
Look up Yubari King Melon. Just one example of how the food business is susceptible to this as well.
@@LorikQuinn To be fair, that doesn't seem too bad. Like, yes, it's a subscription, but if you pay monthly and they send food monthly, it's effectively the same as buying it on your own at a grocery store but in a slightly different format.