Between them, Ubisoft, and Blizzard/Activision, it’s been a frantic race to the bottom.

Finally!

If there’s one thing EA’s gaming lacked, it was an opportunity to accidentally click on something that tried to charge my credit card.

I just think of it as shorthand for the very real phenomenon that some people fall off the radar in every measurable way

Sure. But there tends to be a certain distance already baked in. Unless you have a deep bound with someone - a parent / sibling / child, typically - once you stop interacting with that person IRL, there’s less and less of an incentive to engage with them remotely.

I see you’re problem. You’re using the old Fordist mode of economic growth, wherein you employ people at an income level such that they can buy the products they produce. Then you grow your capital stock by reallocating the labor surplus into new undeveloped areas of the country. That model of growth went out of fashion in the 80s.

Post Volcker-Shock, we adopted a strategy of indebting unaligned countries in exchange for modern technological improvements, then harvesting their natural resources at a functional loss to finance the USD denominated debts they struggled to pay back. Then we could effectively export dollars for cheap imports and allow Americans to buy them with money laundered through government contracts, grants, and Fed credit expansion.

But after COVID, we’re on to an even more revolutionary approach to profitability. We don’t need consumers. We don’t need to develop capital in foreign territories. We just do a direct 1:1 exchange of B2B SaaS services and American Dollars with the corporate oligarchs. Now people don’t need to buy anything, because governments buy everything. And if you’re friendly with the government, you get a slice. And if you’re not, you get shoved off a cliff.

When the definition of “friend” is “person you hung out with in HS/College and then only ever associated with via the computer”, maybe you don’t.

Box 4, in particular, is a really depressing rubric for friendship as it assumes a person vanishes the moment they stop providing new content on Social Media. I’ve got friends who occupy the first three quadrants simultaneously, but we still keep in touch by SMS and by actually visiting one another on a regular basis. We’re 100% logged the fuck off past that.

The “Why is nobody joining my games on X-Box?” answer guide.

Wife tried to unsubscribe from the WaPo a few years back and got such an insane run-around that she opted to go through her credit card company instead. They tried to re-sign her up twice before the cancellation stuck.

Chinese governments like speech that is friendly to China. US governments like speech that is friendly to the US.

We call it censorship when a government censors self-criticism, but a big part of that calculation hinges on how much criticism a government is subjected to at any given moment.

If you’re seeing a lot of Chinese criticism - and a lot of second-order “China is censoring the criticism!” stories - that’s more often the result of a national media push to divorce the US public and economy from China. If you’re seeing a lot of US self-criticism and resulting domestic government backlash, that’s more often the result of a divided US populace that’s lost sight of it’s Overseas Enemy Cold War fixation.

The day Trump leaves office, you’re going to see a tidal wave of “China Bad!” articles slam into your news feed, like the Red Sea after Moses squeezes it shut again. Then we won’t see “US censorship!” hand-wringing until the political scene starts polarizing again.

Really depends on what is in the pill and what happens if you get the formula wrong.

Quietly

I told you it was always about oil

More broadly, it is about western imperial expansion. Control of the Red Sea. Control of the Suez Canal. The ability to cut China and Russia off from international markets (specifically, trade with India and West Africa).

Oil was a big part of it, but not the whole.

It was always not only about israel colonial interests but also american imperialist interests

They’re joined at the hip.

It’ll be a clean, fast special operation that definitely won’t lead to a protracted ground war.

No, he’s right. When you’re born in Spain, you don’t speak Spanish

Morrowind, Fallout, and Dragon Age are all quality contenders.

If you’ve got enough money, and you don’t step into any big scams, sure.

But the first is hard and the second is arguably even harder. The Tech Sector was flush with greenwashing under Obama, for instance.

Carney dodged a bullet when a much more popular Conservative party took a tumble in the face of US tariffs.

Now he’s trying to placate a bunch of Trumpy Albertans on the on hand and tech sector landleeches on the other, which is roughly the place Biden found himself two years into his term.

Canadian politics is fully in the grip of the oligarchs - many of whom straddle the border.

• Very difficult for an outside investor to gauge the ethical practices of a business outside the broad brush stuff (war bad, solar good, etc)

• The volume of cash you’re investing is likely a rounding error on a rounding error for the business, nevermind the industry as a whole, so you’re unlikely to shift behaviors with your choices

• Ethical investing is riff with affinity scams.

• It’s hard to gauge long term net benefits of an investment decision, which can lead to “Longtermist” style behavior.

If only. Every Canadian politician treats sucking up to Americans like it’s half their job. Canadian businessmen, like it’s the entire job.

But rather because if all the ethical people invest in Solar Panels and Gender Affirming Care For Everyone Inc, then all the ethically neutral money (which is almost all of it) will simply shift more towards Torture Palistinian Orphans Inc.

So, there’s reasons why “ethical investing” doesn’t work well in practice, but this isn’t really one of them. Industries enjoy a networking effect and efficiencies of scale. Lowering the investing costs of a target industry will naturally improve their growth prospects. And a rising stock price can lure in growth-focused future investors, because investment cash is often dumb and prone to following trends rather than raw performance metrics.

If Good Guys Banking plans to throw $50B into solar panels over five years, that will drive up the price of solar stocks, drive down the cost of solar panels, and proliferate the number of installers and maintenance techs, all of which improve the long term economic prospects of the sector. Neutral investors will want to beat Good Guys Banking to these stocks (accelerating growth of these companies, employment in the field, etc). Retail customers will see more advertising, more local retail sales, and more of their peers getting panels installed, which will induce more spending. And competitors will seek to diversify into Solar in order to capture these gains.

Your real problem is that you’re not a bank with $50B in investing cash to toss around, much less the sophistication to know which solar companies stand the most to benefit from the sudden infusion.

(1) Small local investments.

(2) Investing in yourself and your own business.

Definitely also good choices. But for the same reasons. Local investment has the double-benefit of ramping up your local economy and providing yourself and your neighbors with more privatized amenities. But it is also riskier. If your neighborhood goes into a downturn, you’re both at risk of unemployment AND big investment losses.

Self-investment has the same problems, only magnified. You’re putting all your eggs in one basket. It’s also much more of a tax on your time, as spending more on your own business means managing more assets and staff directly. If you don’t see profit in this investment, what you’re doing isn’t going to compound your savings.

The Intelligent Investor, by Benjamin Graham

Required reading for any investing newbie.

Idk if this gets you ethical investment. But it at least lets you focus your investment cash on businesses you can expect will see a material ROI, rather than just throwing money into enterprises with a glitzy front page and sour financials.