When the levee breaks, I'll have no place to stay

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddle_point

Basically, its a mathematical function where if you start at 0,0, you might falsely believe you are at the (or a) maximum or minimum of the function, as the slope at 0,0 is 0.

But, if you go any direction in the x axis, your function value rises, any direction in the y axis, your function value falls.

Thus a saddle point is an illusory, false impression of being at the extreme extent of a function, when in fact you are not.

The idea is that there is more to determining if you're truly at a global max or min of a function than only finding a single point where the slope is 0.

Wait till this guy sees a frontal MRI of a human head.

To prevent a crash in the commercial office real estate market.

... Its a Korean beauty contest. The country with the highest rates of cosmetic plastic surgery in the world.

I... I get what you're driving at, that people in general shouldn't be so driven toward perfection in outward appearance.

But its a beauty contest, in a society where over 25% of women under 40 have had some kind of plastic surgery. and a huge cultural emphasis on perfection of physical appearance, where using AI enhanced filters is also hugely prevalent.

I'm not saying this is good, I personally don't like beauty contests, I don't like widespread unrealistic beauty standards.... but I don't see how this question, absent its fumbled lingo adding overt sexual connotations, is surprising at all.

...

It's like being a vegan who is confused and angered by someone asking contestants at a hot dog eating contest how they prep before the contest:

Why isn't the issue of meat eating being addressed at this meat eating contest?

...

Context should answer your question of 'why do people at a beauty contest get asked how they would improve their beauty?'

So what, like, 30 cents per violation?

Ok, so we are now at the performative 'I have a family' stage of our conservative politicians realizing they don't actually have any meaningful, truthfully held values.

Republicans sure talk about hating post modernism, but they've done so, so much to prove that empty signifiers are the entirety of their politics.

Well, that and hurting people they don't like.

...

Maybe when they say 'think of the children' they really do just mean it as an entirely solipsistic thought exercise.

It exists partially because many great games, for a long while, before widespread internet access, could not be played if they were no longer directly sold without either paying out the nose for a working, used cart or disc, and console... or via emulation, which is apparently basically illegal, in practice, technically, its complicated, etc.

Then the video game landscape changed with widespread internet access, much more oriented toward what used to be seen as buying a fancy pants board game into well now you're just buying a ticket to a fancy pants board game that can be revoked at any time, and now you just have an expired ticket to a box that is magically superglued shut and will light on fire if you pry it open.

Some of us olds still view software as a product, a good, not a service.

The Stop Killing Games concept is not stopping or protecting anyone from buying video games.

... Neither is slapping a warning label onto games that says 'hey you don't own this the way you own a blender.'

That's very strange framing to use.

What SKG does is mandate that your purchased product be technically possible to be usable in perpetuity, or refund the cost of it.

Everyone knows servers cost money to run, so its not reasonable to mandate every game that is totally online only just have servers up forever, maintained by the publisher.

But what is also unreasonable is needless, always online DRM that shuts down one day (Games for Windows Live, anyone?) or having a massively online game that could still be enjoyed by dedicated fans, willing to front the cost for one or two servers... but cannot, because reverse engineering network code is orders of magnitude more difficult and costly than the publisher just releasing it to the public when they no longer want to officially maintain it.

SKG would completely allow you to purchase an online game whose official server support would end someday.

It... just augments consumer rights by mandating either a refund at that point, or a pretty effortless and costless release of the server files and configs.

I am really struggling to see how you are interpreting this concept as somehow preventing the purchase of games.

It doesn't make any sense if the whole market is shitty rip offs.

In this case I'm not saying all games are bad, shitty games, but they are all shitty rip offs in the sense that they all legally can, and many do just suddenly deactivate, and you're not even compensated for this.

The whole fundamental legal trick the software industry has pulled is making everything into a license for an ongoing service, as opposed to a consumer good.

And the problem is that this is now infecting everything, expanding as much as possible into anything with a chip in it.

Even if the consumer is perfectly informed, it doesn't matter if the entire market is full of fundamentally unjust bullshit, as there aren't any alternatives.

All you get is consumers who are now informed that their digital goods can poof out of existence with no recourse.

A while back I was discussing Ross Scott's 'Stop Killing Games' proposal in the EU, in some other lemmy thread.

If passed, that law would make it so you cannot make and sell a game that becomes unplayable after a person buys the game, or you have to refund the purchase of the game itself as well as all ingame purchases.

If gameplay itself is dependant on online servers, the game has to release a working version of the server code so it at least could be run by fans, or be refunded.

If it uses some kind of DRM that no longer works, it has to be stripped of this, or properly refunded.

Someone popped in and said 'well I think they should just make it more obvious that you're not buying a game, you're buying a temporary license.'

To which I said something like 'But all that does is highlight the problem without actually changing the situation.'

So, here we are with the American version of consumer protection: We're not actually doing any kind of regulation that would actually prevent the problem, we're just requiring some wordplay and allowing the problem to exist and proliferate.

All this does is make it so you can't say 'Buy' or 'Purchase' and probably have a red box somewhere that says something like 'You are acquiring a TEMPORARY license that may be revoked at any time for any reason.'

US gets a new content warning. EU is working toward actually stopping the bullshit.

QAnon and Trump taught Republicans that its totally ok to live in an alternate reality where they are always correct and never have to admit to being wrong, or if they do want to admit to being wrong, its because of a vast elaborate conspiracy.

They live in a delusional fantasy land. Its basically mass hallucination/psychosis in service of a cult leader, but because there's a lot of them, its not seriously considered a mental illness.