What's considered cheap is relative. $12 a month is more accessible than lump sums of $500. It may be cheaper to have your own hardware in the long run, but not everyone is able to afford seeing that through.
As for laggy, Cyberpunk runs orders of magnitude better through Stadia on my only computer - a dated Core i3 laptop - than natively.
You're not wrong. Running it yourself is obviously better if you have the hardware. It's just there is a value proposition with platforms like this that I think can make it so more people can play AAA games than before.
Stadia the service is free. It's a free console. If you pay $29.99 for Madden 2021, you can play it for free forever (as long as Stadia exists). The ~$12 is a subscription that adds games to your library and is completely optional.
Modern consoles all have pay-as-you-go-plans for something like $30/mo. I hate the renting aspect of it, but they provide accessibility to the platforms to those who cannot afford it.
Yes, it's a different problem with universal health care. Here (Canada) the problem isn't oriented around the question of are you rich enough but there's a trade off in wait times. From the Fraser Institute[1]:
> There is also a great deal of variation among specialties. Patients wait longest between a GP referral and orthopaedic surgery (39.0 weeks), while those waiting for medical oncology begin treatment in 3.8 weeks.
Still, the Canadian system is demonstrably better when it comes to outcomes. Canadians live longer than Americans, and have lower infant mortality rates for instance. Canadians also pay half of what Americans do for health care, when everything is accounted for. My partner is diabetic; like most medicines its a fraction of the cost of in the US. A universal system brings with it purchasing power. No system is perfect, but this one seems much better than the American one for the average person.
It's a choice. In my case, I'd much rather the Canadian system over the American. Even when it comes to surgery, I had a vaginoplasty (took 8 months between GP consultation and surgery; $25k surgery paid for by govt). My friend got her tubes tied (took a month; paid for by govt). My other friend was in the hospital for a month (admitted immediately; paid for by govt). My uncle had heart surgery. He did not have to lose his house. My step-dad had hip surgery (took 4 months; paid for by govt). Not to mention all the doctor's visits and tests accrued over a lifetime.
The speed of the health-care system really depends on the specific area of Canada you're in. Health-care is managed by the provinces, and the amount of funding they pour into it can vary wildly. Add to that the fact that medical infrastructures are far from uniform across the provinces, and you get very different results.
I lived for a few years in southern Québec, and I was amazed at the quality of care there. My wife had some pancreatic stones, and it all got dealt with (including 2 surgeries, multiple scans and a 2-week hospital stay) within a couple weeks. No bill. My daughter fell and had a concussion, we were scared about possible brain damage so I took her to the hospital at around 8PM. We were out of there at 6AM after an X-ray, an MRI scan and a few hours of observation. Again, no bill. I had four kids, and I think in total I paid less than $100 for their births, and that was for the food I ate or for parking.
Right now I'm more in central Québec, and the quality of care is a bit lower. It's a pretty rural area, so the budget is probably lower and the points of service are more spread out. Still, I like to know that a medical issue will never bankrupt me.
I use a typewriter and write letters. It's distraction free and produces a hard copy. I use a cast iron pan daily and use a French Press/Aeropress to make my coffee. I use candles for soothing light.
I mean, as a Canadian consumer using American social media platforms, we're subject to American censorship policies. Tumblr / Facebook / YouTube being most notable in their filtering of LGBT content and suspending accounts of LGBT users, because of the American governments stance on human sexuality. This argument of who censors makes sense for Americans, but it's more about picking your poison for people from other countries.
>we're subject to American censorship policies. Tumblr / Facebook / YouTube being most notable in their filtering of LGBT content and suspending accounts of LGBT users, because of the American governments stance on human sexuality
No, you're subject to corporate censorship policies. Let's not pretend that individual platforms regulating content is the same as government censorship. Please show me how their policies are related to "the American governments stance on human sexuality".
Also, doesn't Canada have a few laws on the books regarding how people are allowed to address other people, specifically, LGBTQ people?
Those aren't being enforced, either! It's not hard to find tweets deadnaming or misgendering a person.
They're taking a fully US-centric approach, treating abortion as a political topic - see https://business.twitter.com/en/help/ads-policies/restricted... . You can't advocate for abortion in Canadian ads. Which is insane, considering abortion is fully legal here. Going down that list, it's "things that are controversial in America". It's absurd to apply the same policy globally.
> Also, doesn't Canada have a few laws on the books regarding how people are allowed to address other people, specifically, LGBTQ people?
Not really. Canada prohibits hate speech and discrimination against LGBTQ people. The whole "using the wrong pronouns is now a criminal offense" meme was made up by someone looking for something to be offended about/sell books about how PC culture is ruining everything.[1]
People can be sued for discriminating on the basis of gender identity or expression. Repeatedly using the wrong pronoun can be used as evidence of that, but probably has to fit into a larger pattern of behavior. And that's the kind of thing you could credibly sue an employer or business for in the US as well.
Oh it is when the entity with a monopoly also has a monopoly on violence a.k.a government. A Uighur detention center, U.S. concentration camp etc. can only enforce their views with threat of violence. It is on an entirely different level of cardinality. To equate them would be to undermine the misery that those that suffer under such extreme regulations of content/thought.
Why should a Canadian, or European care about the difference between US government laws affecting the services and media they consume, versus US corporate policies doing the same?
It's a distinction without a difference. They don't have any redress, or ability to influence either US corporations, or the US government, much like how Americans have no ability to influence the CPC.
Would a Canadian have more of an ability to influence a Canadian corporation? I guess I am just confused why it being a US corporation changes the equation verse a corporation from anywhere else.
What are you referring to, exactly? There certainly is no enforceable law in the United States against LGBT content. There theoretically are restrictions on "obscenity," but they are virtually nonexistent in practice. The only law I can think of that resembles what you're describing in any way is our, indeed, quite aggressive ban on child pornography. And I'm no expert on Canadian child pornography laws, but I'll bet Canada isn't too friendly to that content either.
The theoretical point is true enough, that American content restrictions would generally wind up being exported abroad. The key difference is, however, that we do not actually have Chinese-style content restrictions.
There's a pretty good meme about differences between European and American media take on censorship [0].
It's now locked behind an Imgur login due to being NSFW (over a single nipple), but the basic premise is that US media would censor a nipple away, leaving the person recognizable, while European media didn't take issue with the nipple, but instead censored her face to protect her identity.
Which is a pretty good example of how different cultures prioritize things differently. Scale that up to the reality of the tech space being dominated by US companies, and suddenly US cultural norms largely became established as global norms [1].
Before the Internet, US soldiers stationed in other countries had a very similar effect: They also brought their culture with them, which often was considered way more exotic than anything local. Decades later nobody even much cares or notices how US influenced much of our culture has become in Western Europe.
Yes. This is a fair point. I would emphasize, though, that this is about US culture, not US government or law. Interestingly, part of the whole point of the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution is to maintain a lot of separation between these two things.
> this is about US culture, not US government or law
But these things do not exist in a vacuum.
Ask anybody working on the tech and legal ends of the adult industry and you will hear quite horrific stories about having to jump through so many hoops just for finding a payment provider.
For a while, these used to be www dominating issues, and how they were dealt with in the US, often ended up being the de-facto global standard.
A very recent and relevant example for this is footage out of the Syrian Civil War on platforms like Twitter and YouTube.
Over these past years, whole swats of videos have disappeared on the basis of being tagged as "terrorist propaganda" [0]
In a very similar vein how "Napalm Girl" ended up getting censored as child pornography [1].
By now even Reddit has learned to "selectively forget", as all undeleting/uncensoring sites that used to work, have stopped working.
Just because it's not some US government agency playing the censor, but rather the US government pressuring US companies into self-censorship, doesn't make this kind of censorship any less real in its overall impact.
The thing missing from all of this is any actual evidence of government pressure.
From [0]: "YouTube is facing criticism after a new artificial intelligence program monitoring "extremist" content began flagging and removing masses of videos and blocking channels that document war crimes in the Middle East."
From [1]: "Facebook said it has to restrict nudity for cultural reasons."
I'm not saying this isn't important. I'm not even ruling out some sort of indirect and informal government role. (Government policy and culture are intertwined!) But they fall far far short of supporting the false equivalency drawn in this thread ans elsewhere between western companies removing content due to TOS violations, etc. on the one hand, and content being removed literally, and undisputedly (as far as I've seen) in response to direct commands by the Chinese government.
I don’t know that it has anything to do with the U.S. government, so much as U.S. social norms which sometimes consider mentioning the existence of gay people as a “sexual” topic (and therefore banned, demonetized, or flagged as adult content) even though many aspects of being gay are not sexual.
Pretty much all hate speech is censored on social media platforms. So is calling for or promoting violence against certain groups. Harrassment is also prohibited on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
All American social media censors their users, most people just arent producing that type of content.
Yes. But GP's comment was about the US government, not restrictions placed on content by American companies voluntarily (or due to pressure from the broader US culture). I agree, of course, the US culture is restrictive in some ways, and this can come through in the practices of US companies (the culture is also quite permissive in some ways). But this is different in important ways from the restrictions being imposed by the government.
Don't think so. We know that there are some allegedly national-security-related takedowns where the government has sought gag orders. We know about them because the companies sometimes object, and the request becomes public. Then there the other types of content being discussed in this thread such as LGBTQ content, adult material, etc. where I don't think there is any reason at all to believe that gag orders would be involved.
> Pretty much all hate speech is censored on social media platforms. So is calling for or promoting violence against certain groups. Harrassment is also prohibited on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
Social media platforms censor more than that. Try posting a picture of a nipple on Facebook.
Sorry I may of missed your point? As a lot of right wing commentary (not saying that you are right wing) suggest when talking about LGBTQ they bring up child pornography alot. Why are you doing so as well?
Yes, you missed it. My point is that the US government does not censor LGBTQ content. In fact, it censors very few types of content. One of the few areas it does censor, just by way of example, is child pornography. But this has nothing to do with LGBTQ content--thus my puzzlement over GP's comment.
Tumblr / Facebook / YouTube being most notable in their filtering of LGBT content and suspending accounts of LGBT users, because of the American governments stance on human sexuality.
Facebook removed LGBT pages because the American government forced them? Do you have a link?
I was 17 when I chose my undergrad. I got a degree in a field I didn't care about for the sole purpose of being employable. Then the 2008 recession wiped out entry-level mining and then oil sector jobs (my field). I jumped into software development, which I've been doing since. I don't have a degree in it but I make a good living.
If your argument about a generation-wide problem involves blaming individuals, instead of looking at the wider factors that caused this outcome to be predictable, you're missing an opportunity to improve matters.
Two women, but yes, agreed - we don't have confirmation on the motives. To be clear for others, that interpretation isn't in the original article. It's only on this hacker news link title.
As a trans person, Tumblr was the best place to find other trans people, having shared experiences talked about, negativity processed, and where I was able to post pics of myself as I shifted seeing myself from ugly (as reinforced in me in movies) to worth loving. It was one of the only places where I didn't have to be bombarded with the hateful remarks of transphobes, as I got to pick who I followed.
I had some of my content censored following the acquisition by Yahoo. It happened to other folk too. I really wish there wouldn't be this shame around bodies, sexuality and gender identity that companies enforce with their censorship algorithms.
The news feed feels like a stream of PR releases, people I've never met keep asking to add me presumably to help them find jobs, and the mobile website experience is inhibited by multiple disruptive banners / pop-overs to use the app.
That said, I get people reaching out to me once or twice a week with opportunities for a new job. Most of these fit my qualifications, and it's how I landed my current gig. I don't need to look for jobs anymore, they come to me.
As for laggy, Cyberpunk runs orders of magnitude better through Stadia on my only computer - a dated Core i3 laptop - than natively.
You're not wrong. Running it yourself is obviously better if you have the hardware. It's just there is a value proposition with platforms like this that I think can make it so more people can play AAA games than before.