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[pikachu17]

About Ubisoft's new Terms of Service..

Quick disclaimer:
1) I'm not affiliated with the channel I linked. I'm marely sharing the video because it might be important to some people.
2) I haven't actually fact check it, I don't use Ubisoft's staff anyway so it doesn't directly affect me. If however any of you do use their products then you are advised to check the actual document for yourselves.

How do they expect to profit from the backlash, and complete lack of people lets-playing their games?

[Dunamisdeos]

About Ubisoft's new Terms of Service..

Quick disclaimer:
1) I'm not affiliated with the channel I linked. I'm marely sharing the video because it might be important to some people.
2) I haven't actually fact check it, I don't use Ubisoft's staff anyway so it doesn't directly affect me. If however any of you do use their products then you are advised to check the actual document for yourselves.

How do they expect to profit from the backlash, and complete lack of people lets-playing their games?

Glad I already don't buy any of their games, ever. They were a bunch of shady assholes before now.

[Frumple]

Walking by tv. Commercial guy goes, "A reverse mortgage isn't some kind of trick to take your money, it's just a loan, like any other."

And I'm like. "A reverse mortgage isn't some kind of trick to take your money, it's just a trick to take your money, like any other."

Are you fucking with me, TV guy? I mean, not me, specifically, I don't own anything that could be mortgaged and the commercial was clearly aimed at the elderly to siphon money out their income or steal their homes, but you get the idea. _{Also I get the answer is "yes, TV guy, you're fucking with me"}

[Naturegirl1999]

What even is a reverse mortgage?

[Lord Shonus]

A reverse mortage is essentially selling your house to the bank. They pay you every month, and get the house when you die. It is actually a pretty good way for someone to get some extra living money if they aren't going to leave the house to anybody (no heirs, heirs don't want the house, you simply don't want to, etc) when they go.

[Eschar]

It's a reverse vampire that finances houses obviously

[Frumple]

Someone's editor might not have been paying attention. Walked by the TV to notice some suited up old guy with the words CUM SUIT along the side of the screen.

After a second or two of staring in idle incomprehension, the view zoomed back out to show it had cut off everything of "talcum powder lawsuit" except the parts I first saw. Either someone missed something, or whoever was handling their commercial editing really didn't like their talking dude :V

[Iduno]

Well, privatizing things that people rely on to not die has never worked out badly in the past, so I'm sure it's fine.

[Reelya]

The core problem in that and related issues is that the owners of privately-owned things don't have have self-interest in pricing in externalities (costs to other people if their thing fucks up).

As an example, say that there's a 1/1000 chance per year that some industrial machine will mangulate you beyond recognition, and if that happens the company will owe you $200,000 in compensation. Well, do the math. The company won't spend more than $200 per person (per year) on protective equipment or safety measures to prevent that. If preventing it costs $201 per person, they won't spend any money since it will be cheaper to allow people to keep getting mangled in the machines. If they have 1000 workers then on average, one person will get mangled per year, and they'll be self-satisfied that they saved money since the compensation payouts are less than the safer work practices would have cost.

I can't give examples from other countries, but they used to have fines for workplace accidents in Australia but they found that companies were simply budgeting that into the cost/benefit analysis I outlined above and deciding to ignore safety if there were sufficient costs. This is wasteful on a societal level since it doesn't factor in the costs of the accident to the economy *as a whole*, since management simply treats people as replaceable, whereas the country is stuck tending to the mangled person for life, and that's not even counting the costs to the person and their family.

So then they brought in mandatory prison sentences for executives and managers for deliberately ignoring safety problems, and the problem largely went away. But it only works if the threat of prison goes up to all levels who knew about the safety issues. If they can throw lower management under this bus they will still do so.

Same thing with these privatized dams. The owners only give a shit about the *direct* costs to themselves. And if they act ethically, well the free market will fuck them up then since the owners of some other dam who have less ethics will end up under-cutting them for the contracts to supply water.

[LordBaal]

Aren't all or most utilities on the US private? I can tell you that private things tend to be more effective indeed and as long a sensible regulation is in place to avoid the dickery of calculating the costs of the lives of workers then is better than public.

Public migth be percieved as cheaper but the money still comes from some place, in most cases your taxes unless your country has also some kind of state owned income source like oil used to be here. In the long run they are more vulnerable to missmanagement and corruption.

Also don't you think the dickery of accidents comes only from the suits in a bussines. I know of first hand the blue collar employees knew how much they would be paid in the loss of a part of their bodies, down to the individual "prices" of fingers, depending if it was your domninant hand or not and if it was cut off or mangled, in line of something like: "I'm rigth handed and I can live with a mangled left little finger and I really need some extra cash now." Now this obviusly were a few cases of either psycos or very desperate people, but just to point out that idiocy and dickery with human life happens on all levels.

Bottom line I would say that both private and public utilities need strict controls to prevent them going either the Umbrella way or the corrupt and useless crap no one really uses (or want to use).

Here the electric companies used to be public but decentralized and they were just fine. Then the revolution came over and centralized everything. Now we get daily rolling black outs of up to half a day, everyday. They left the electrical system in ruins.

The main phone company and the only one that has regular copper landlines was private and worked fine too. Now, well, I have more than 3 years without service at home.

[ChairmanPoo]

Aren't all or most utilities on the US private? I can tell you that private things tend to be more effective indeed and as long a sensible regulation is in place to avoid the dickery of calculating the costs of the lives of workers then is better than public.

I can tell you that it's been proven this is not the case. Particularily in the case of healthcare.

[LordBaal]

Here private health care is the only one that works. Its always have been expensive but now is simply beyond most mortals.

The public health care is basically non existant now. It used to barelly work but corruption drove it to the ground.

[scriver]

Recent example from sweden: Privatisation of the apothecaries. Used to be a fine government monopoly bringing service to the entire country. The right decided that was bad and that it needed to be privatised so it could be more effective.

What does more effective mean? Well, here are the effects so fsr:
1. Less service. Apothecaries flock to the cities and leave the countryside untended whereas the old govnopoly covered the whole country. Private business claim the countryside is unprofitable and that they can't be responsible. Government has to pay private business huge extra support just so they don't close down the venues the old govnopoly had no issue keeping open. Extortion is pretty effective though.

2. Less safety. Sales of expired or otherwise unhealthy or unsafe materials have increased. But hey, selling unsafe goods is more effective than throwing them away.

3. Less stock. Apothecaries no longer carry the amount medicine they used to. Shortages of both common and rare medicines are constant. Hope you'll never need your penicillin in a hurry. It'll take 2-3 days before it comes in. It's just not effective to keep a stock before you know what people will purchase.

4. 90% of all stores are now beauty/make up and candy. Sure, the old apothecaries carries beauty products too. They even had their own brand, actually. Aimed at people with sensitive skin and such which can't buy the usual stuff sold in supermarkets or beauty stores. And I guess they sold chewing gum and salivators before too, that's kind of candy-like I guess. But it turns out that just stocking beauty and candy products is more effective than stocking medicine.

Net result? The tax payer pays more, and gets less out of it. But it's more effective for the risk-capitalist businesses than owns them and profits off of it, while moving said profits too tax havens so they don't benefit society. Leaching hard earned wealth away from Sweden every day.

The main phone company and the only one that has regular copper landlines was private and worked fine too. Now, well, I have more than 3 years without service at home.

Our once-government phone company just decided a few years ago (I posted about it here on the forums) that copper lines was just too expensive to service and that they'll be ripping the lot of them out of the ground, starting of course with the most fringe countryside that has the least mobile phone coverage and need landlines the most. Landlines aren't effective enough I guess.

My own grandmother was one of the people left with no service. Her fucking health/help needed alarm was tied to that landline too.

So fuck private ownership, and to hell with these insipid false claims of effectivity. With government ownership you get insight, you get responsibility and accountability, and most importantly you get what you pay for. Private ownership only benefits private fat cats and liberal city-living shitheads. I'd rather measure effectivity by how much something benefits the people rather than how effective it is at stuffing a capitalist's arse with the people's tax money.

[Lord Shonus]

That assumes honest government rather than a kleptocracy, and it assumes that the government operates smoothly. If both those things are true, government monopolies on vital services can be quite good. If either is false, government monopolies become among the worst options.

[McTraveller]

Aren't all or most utilities on the US private? I can tell you that private things tend to be more effective indeed and as long a sensible regulation is in place to avoid the dickery of calculating the costs of the lives of workers then is better than public.

I can tell you that it's been proven this is not the case. Particularily in the case of healthcare.

Eh, the US doesn't have private healthcare really.  US healthcare is almost like public health care, except that instead of being funded by taxes, it is funded by health care premiums so it doesn't cover everyone.  This is only different from being funded by taxpayers on paper: in both instances, payment is disconnected from demand because payments are made out of a huge pool of customers, not from the abilities of the customers themselves.  The provider chain can charge "what the market will bear" but the market in this instance is the insurance companies ability to pay, not the individual's ability to pay.

The healthcare reforms in the US essentially did nothing because it increased (maybe) the pool of money but more importantly the pool of demand (by removing restrictions on prior conditions, for instance) while doing nothing to increase supply, which is really what has to happen in order to bring costs under control.  You could also split the system into "primary and preventative care", "chronic care", and "acute care" and probably get benefits from that too.  Health care premiums for my family are, I think, the highest expense on my budget (if you include my employer's contribution) - if not highest they are a close second to my mortgage.

There should also be legal reform on IP related to drugs; I would rather see a national lab set up for vaccine development for curing diseases; this is more attractive than companies that generally don't want to cure a disease because it's one-and-done as far as revenue goes.

With government ownership you get insight, you get responsibility and accountability,

What? Maybe sometimes and in unique situations, but as a rule? Highly irregular.  The government has about the lowest accountability of any organization out there. I am talking in aggregate - yes some individuals in the government may have accountability, but as a whole, the speed at which the government can be held accountable is just too slow to be of any meaningful use.