181–190 of 535 posts
It is all about balance. I know several young adults who are smart, educated, and successful (for their age) and yet spend what for me is way too much time playing video games. But to them it is not just a game - it's another serious pursuit. And they make several to ten thousand dollars a year gaming.
Good paying jobs are scarce and video games are relatively cheap for the amount of time you can spend on them. It's escapism. They are confusing correlation with causation.
This is such bullshit . Right now you can walk into a long haul trucking job with zero years experience and be making $70k minimum with a $10-20k signing bonus after a short month long training. And that's one of myriad trades that are available today . The lie that has been sold to America's youth that everyone has a "right" to go to college and is entitled to a job upon graduation will go down as one of the greates…
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a) Where did I say that women aren't experiencing harassment on some gaming communities? In fact, I explicitly acknowledged it. Your post is kind of pointless virtue signaling or something. b) I just pointed out that it's just generally not about your gender. It doesn't matter if you're a man or woman: every newcomer gets harassed in really rough ways using the most biting insults available. A fat guy will get the ob…
Do you know what a sad cliche this nonsense is? You're just repeating the same tired, red-pill gamergate nonsense.
b) You'll notice that in my responses I didn't say that women weren't being harassed nor did I say that harassment was right. So why the hostility? I'm speaking IMO accurately about gaming culture.
c) Speaking of tired cliches, what would you call the "women are always eternal victims in every walk of life" school of thought?
PS: I love women and want them to have the same rights as men. I think telling the truth about gaming culture is honest and fair and the right thing to do.
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How about the 2 million truck drivers that are about to get replaced by robots?
They'll take up gaming. The gulf between being a truck driver and, say, a programmer is vast. Imagine losing your truck driving job and suddenly trying to figure what the hell else you're going to do to support your family. Yikes!
It really isn't. AI might not be able to take over 100% of our jobs anytime soon, but if even half of the things we spend time on, things like understanding requirements. If an AI system can coax users/managers to provide better requirements, maybe even create tests for those requirements, then every programmer could be twice as productive. That means half as many of us are needed.
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>Why are people paying those workers? In short, in modern, mainstream economic theory the ideas that explain this are what's called Market Failures . In 2001, the Nobel Prize in economics went to people who studied information asymmetries, which lead to market failures. A concrete and classic example is the Tragedy of the Commons. My earlier example of the financial sector, which in 2008 showed everyone how private g…
How would UBI solve this? If the jobs were still profitable to the employer, they'd be done. It's not clear to me how UBI solves market failures.
However, to address your general sentiment: First let's establish the premise that the most important thing to ones survival and welfare in the world today is money.
Without that--and therefore by separating the relationship between survival, social status, welfare and money--it could be argued that we would take a step in the direction of fixing incentive alignment.
It's not just video games either. Add Netflix and social media, and soon, VR, to the equation, and it's pretty clear that the game of life offers insufficient rewards relative to one's efforts. I don't believe we ended up here due to some grand conspiracy, but I do think that the top 1% have gotten so skilled at trapping wealth and therefore opportunity that it's really screwing over everyone else. Even as a relative…
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I completely agree with the sentiment, but isn't your own comment being dishonest? There's plenty of land in the United States, and plenty of cities that have hardly been met with the "hoarding" you mention. That being said, living in Boston, MA, I totally feel what you're saying (literally, most of the houses here are expensive, even in crappy areas).
>There's plenty of land in the United States, and plenty of cities that have hardly been met with the "hoarding" you mention. It doesn't matter how cheap the land/housing is if you can't get a job while living on it. I'd love to be in a world where geography doesn't matter and everyone can work remotely. For now, only a small and elite subset of software engineers can pull US cost of living (even rural cost of living…
B.S.
Unemployment in the US is relatively low even on a long term basis.
The average home prices in the US is $188K. Most people can afford that.
There is more opportunity for mortgages and financial services than at any time in history.
There is more opportunity for mobility than at any time in history.
You have it easier than any generation in history - but all you can do is complain.
If you want to 'have it like the boomers did growing up' - well, you can skip going to college because few of them did - and you can do some crap job pushing paper for most of your life, in boring but steady employment, and buy a small, mediocre home in the burbs and mow your lawn. That was the 'steady, sable American dream'. You have opportunities that they never had - and that most kids in the world would kill for.
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Even if that's the case, is that a bad thing? Should we not have the freedom to spend our own time as we please in a post-scarcity society?
I keep hearing that term lately...but nobody can explain to me how post scarcity is even possible
I really like this read, something just smells off about blaming young people for "wasting years" on video games. We've got a horribly stacked real life "game" where the boomers and elites have horded everything and fucked future generations, blaming an individual for dropping out and not wanting to really participate in that trainwreck is being dishonest at best.
I know a lot of people don't like to hear it, but I'll let you in on a little secret: if you don't feel like you're getting anywhere trying to work and live in a major city, do yourself a favor and move to a less-populated area.
Many cities have become extremely competitive, which naturally selects against all but the few who can manage to work for less (competition in the labor market drives down wages) and pay more to live (that same competitive environment drives the cost of living higher).
Get outside those inflated bubbles and life really does become easier for someone who just wants to earn a decent living.
Stop blaming other people for your choice to live in a place where the cost of living feels "out of reach".
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Even if that's the case, is that a bad thing? Should we not have the freedom to spend our own time as we please in a post-scarcity society?
I keep hearing that term lately...but nobody can explain to me how post scarcity is even possible
But post scarcity happens all the time. It used to be the domain of nobles, who had easy access to basically anything they could desire. Now it belongs to middle to upper class first world residents, a growing class of people who can lean on mommy if they ever get in trouble and who generally are never more than an Amazon Prime delivery away from any good or service they need.
People will say oh but a feudal lord didn't have an iPhone it's all relative. And sure that's one argument, but I'm sure you can see the point being made.
You can work a lousy job, and play video games, eat pizza, and be basically happy. Or you can take on tens of thousands in student debt to work a much more stressful job, and wish you had enough time to play games, and stop eating pizza because it doesn't fit your lifestyle. A growing number of people can't rationalize the latter option. There's no need to endure that hardship, goods aren't that scarce. Hence, people bring up post scarcity.