Barbecue Cowboy

Mastercard is living the corporate dream. They’ve colluded their way to a near monopoly and don’t have to care about the value of their brand. They just have to be invisible enough that they don’t pull heat for something or other from various governments.

New warning label unlocked: Do not eat the Batteries.

If you’re basing your value judgement on the price of similar games on the market right now then no, it’s very very unlikely to be worth 70. There are critically acclaimed open world games that will likely beat this on content and potential enjoyment / play time for $5-10 right now.

Realistically, we’re paying for the novelty though, if you’re desperate for something new it might work. I told myself my price point was $60, but there will probably be some sort of discount on the way to or shortly after launch day for the PC version.

It’s fun and I recommend it, but I’m hesitant to say you can ‘replace’ your existing systems with it. You’ll probably mostly be able do what you want to do, but we’re still in the enthusiast stage and there’s going to be annoyances and frustrations. Home assistant is also one of the easier things to setup as far as self hosting goes, but you’re going to pick up some skills on the path to getting it working.

The people who would typically be expected to push back against collective shout also typically wouldn’t be expected to do anything effective whereas the people involved with collective shout are the type of people who give politicians money.

Also like, have we all forgotten about the possibility of someone having two phones.

There’s an idea in marketing that if you create a solution, you also need to create new problems that you can market. For example, you buy a printer to allow you to print at home but now you need to buy overpriced proprietary ink. Or maybe you buy a phone, but now what can we do to make sure you come back to buy a new phone in 2 years? Truly solving a problem sells something once and that will not satisfy the infinite growth mindset.

It’s a concept up there with Edward Bernays work in popularizing applying propaganda techniques to modern advertising as the idea that may have done the most to really push capitalism to its worst possible end.