x2Zero7

That's just.....that's just not how this stuff works m8. By and large no, "video game workers" are not gig/contract most of the time. It does happen, especially at lower levels; but it's foolish to believe anywhere close to the majority of layoffs come from contracts. Those often have built in buy-outs anyways - this is talking about the full time artists/staff/programers who are always working on something

You don't honestly think Infinity Ward laid people off after not getting the contract for Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010) following Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) do you? Or consider the time between Naughty Dog's Crash Team Racing (1999) and Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy (2001) - That's two years. Two years without releasing a game, yet they didn't lay anyone off?

Buddy, there is always a next project. Project Managers will fill every single artist's calendar of deliverables for supporting the current game (someone has to make DLC, though it is sometimes outsourced) and any future projects. They also do buy assets and employ contract work in these domains, but again, it's small in the grand scheme of things.

Programmers will always be optimizing the engine, working on patches for an updated build, or again working on the next game because every business worth it's salt isn't going to fire experienced staff in preparation for the next project as demanded by the need for more returns

Unless other economic factors change - a company may choose to engage short term solutions to keep profits looking healthy. If it's cheaper to lay people off then it is to compete on merit (make a new game) why would you from a business perspective?

These companies are run by bean counters; not artists and devs anymore. Almost every game company was started by people who wanted to make good games, and now these same companies are laying people off regardless of their position in the market.

Idk. Games come out way too frequently to support the idea that these people are getting laid off in between projects. It doesn't add up. These layoffs are very recent in the grand scheme of the game industry.

Thanks for the link!

Thank you for the kind words :)

I think that it can be a bit tricky because there is a decent bit to know so you can debug your setup. If you're interested in giving it another shot I'll include resources i found invaluable:

The satellite GOAT (imo)

A solid guide with helpful detail

Great write up on antenna height

The extra filter and amplifier i bought do make a difference with noise but aren't strictly necessary for decent captures.

That's what I'm hearing as well! I've been trying to pull an LRPT pass from meteor 2-3 but I've yet to capture anything usable. I personally like SDR++ for capture since my bookmarks are there; but that's just me being lazy

Oh yeah. It's an RTL-SDR dongle, FM filter, low-noise amplifier, and rabbit ears on a tripod.

I should also add, the pass was really optimal tonight. Almost completely overhead!

I honestly thought the "M" meant months. Lol

Wow that's nuts. Not but 3 hours ago I captured a pass on 15 that didn't seem to be showing it (nevermind the poor quality)

I'm not so convinced human history, especially with regard to collective societies, supports that idea as general statement - animal farm isn't a bible of truth that says "wealth redistribution always works this way" it's more a warning of authoritarian governments don't implement checks/balances and try to divide the population and garner support among the elite fee

This way our economy is organized is NOT how it has always been through history. It's foolish to believe it has to be this way and every single person would absolutely just keep charging more for everything given the chance. Too many orgs are out there protecting community (see nonprofits in Canada buying up city land for the express purpose stewardship and preventing price gouging or food banks with negotiating power to bulk buy groceries cheaper) to support that idea. What do i know tho right?

The McDonald's coffee story is kinda interesting to bring up here, as it may not make the point you think you are making. It's important to remember that, at the time, it was standard policy for McDonald's to be serving hot coffee at ~190 °F. Far hotter than people would serve themselves, and dangerously hot to be handling in general. If I spill my coffee on me at work, I don't end up with third-degree burns - just a stained shirt.

Not only, in that decade prior McDonald's had received ~700 reports of people being burned this way.

The lawsuit determined that McDonalds was knowingly serving to people a dangerous product that had the capacity to cause significant, material harm and gave no warning to its inherent danger.

So, to circle back to the comparison here, are video companies creating products they know are addictive to the degree that material harm is caused and no reasonable person would have the wherewithal to foresee those addictive properties unless they were prominently displayed on packaging material prior to their purchase? I don't think it's quite like the McDonald's coffee suit in terms of the intensity of [alleged]harm, but maybe in terms of how [allegedly] widespread it is? There's more than sufficient academic material that sheds light on the addictive properties of some aspects of implementation of lootboxes and modern gaming rewards.

That being said, it's foolish the leave this problem to be solved only from the industry or regulation. Shouldn't it be enough for companies that include lootboxes or whatever somewhat addictive reward system just put a disclaimer or something? Parents shouldn't be expected to keep up-to-date on reward mechanisms that encourage replay and enable additional monetization, but it should be more apparent if such mechanisms are used so parents can stop and say "Probably don't want little Timmy playing this game...I remember what happened with the PokeMon cards" etc. etc.

McDonald's Sources:
https://www.enjuris.com/blog/resources/mcdonalds-hot-coffee-lawsuit/ https://www.rd.com/article/hot-coffee-lawsuit/ https://www.morrisdewett.com/personal-injury-blog/2022/march/mcdonald-s-hot-coffee-case-the-real-story-why-it/ https://www.thedailymeal.com/1393392/infamous-mcdonalds-coffee-story-explained/

EU Commission Report:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2020/652727/IPOL_STU(2020)652727_EN.pdf

Well, yes. We should make them as good as we can. I just don't feel cars are the only mode we should make as good as we can. Right now, it feels like we're only starting to consider cars may not always need to be the "default".

Going all in on cars is what leads to these kinds of "nothing-towns". It's like they're made for people to drive through, but not necessarily for people to exist in.

I gotta call bs chief. My city, notoriously car dependent in the 70s, just removed a lane of traffic on a major local road (leads from business/commercial to a residential area and high school) and put a grade-separated pedestrian only path.

You cannot give up on walkable cities. We can build them; EVs are for the car industry - Yes they do reduce emissions but still reinforce car dependency causing a lovely cocktail of knock effects that encourage decimating our environment, preventing investment from staying local to the community [pop up shops don't stick around in karen fortresses], and actively builds a hostile environment.

Like, yeah we gotta have cars, but don't kid yourself in that scenario preventing walkable cities. Cars are new. Walkable cities are not. If we as a nation invested in 45% of what we do on the highways Amtrak would probably run through every capital once, maybe even twice a day.

But we don't. Because for some reason we as a society simply cannot invest in transit that isn't a half-baked asphalt slap. It just isn't possible. Nope. We'll fuckin die if we do anything other than subsidize car companies that can more than afford investing in themselves because if the stock market does that go up and make a few people more rich the world is falling apart /s

Reliability is absolutely an issue that turns lots of people off - Just yesterday I had to switch to a different line in chicago bc of a delay. But to say that the "large physical size of the US" has allowed aircraft to out compete rail is disingenuous. It is so because it ignores the reality of strong city pairings for rail corridors and such line of thinking doesn't often take into account the boarding process' impact on total journey time. A 45 minute flight is going to require you to get there an hour early for security processing and boarding. You don't just show up 5 minutes before the plane takes off, yet that reality is true for the choo. Even then you still need to offboard, stop by baggage to get your goods and really hope they didn't lose them and have them unpacked in a few minutes. These bottlenecks just do not exist for rail. You get on in the city and get off right in the city. 10 minute taxi to your hotel and bob's your uncle. You simply cannot say the same for any metropolitan airport (Except metro ports that have a dedicated line from the airport to the city center). It won't be viable everywhere but that's not the point. The point is to remove the systemic barriers that prevent market competition where it can thrive (precision rail scheduling in many areas has made it physically impossible for freight to yield to passengers) and to provide reliable, predictable transportation not to the whims of traffic or those who can afford to purchase a vehicle.

Good transit utilizes the best modes for the best routes and this is why high speed rail is really starting in cali and the texas triangle - It's always gonna be faster for rail between two urban areas right next to each other than it is to fly, despite the fact that flying is far more common between such city pairs when people want to avoid driving or need to be there in the city center fast.

I'm far from an expert but I know for fact the United States has many cities that could be covered by HSR that are closer or the same distance as Tokyo -> Kyoto (one of the first HSRs); Keep in mind the shinkansen route is separate from the commuter route and only has a couple of stops. It's not like they reused significant portions of commuter rail, they built a new link.

I'll leave some reading here for more info because there's a lot of worthwhile knowledge to try and understand in projects like these:

CityNerd - Urban planner guy who knows a thing or two about transit

City Pairings for HSR by 2050 - More about city pairings, which is specifically worth focusing on for HSR bc that's how lines get started

America was quite literally built on the railroads. We take for granted the interstate highway system and don't realize its exorbitant cost, but if we had given rail even half the attention we gave the interstate since its inception rail would certainly be competitive. The interstate is national, so why not the rails too? It's not like CSX actually has to compete with BNSF - they don't serve the same area and are inherently monopolies. A business in Montana wanting to use rail for freight has to use BNSF because they're the only freight rail operating and owning lines there. For Denver you're stuck with UP for the same reasons. Most areas are lucky to have a duopoly, and anywhere there is competition is area that has several rail lines merging together, which also makes it perfect for transit.

Per Amtrak (Pg 2, 2021 Report Card) freight rail caused 900,000 minutes of passenger delay across all lines, and in 2023 (Through April, Host Railroad report pg 4) the major freight carriers were responsible for 67.8% of total delays, despite freight being legally obligated to yield to passenger trains most major operators generally ignore that law (Pg 2, Amtrak 2021 report).

So what's the point? Trucking companies don't get to clog the interstate and force passenger cars to yield so deliveries are faster. Passenger planes don't yield to FedEx/UPS/Amazon and circle above landing strips so freight planes get to land first. As a society we don't generally desire to systematically degrade the quality of transit, but we do so for rails because we're conditioned to believe that they are outmoded and just don't work for passengers. If that was true, no where in the world would they be used. Europe and Asia do in fact have more, higher density population centers but this fact does not preclude the capability of passenger rail in America, and we shouldn't believe in this logical fallacy that rail is outcompeted or out moded because of density. China is an interesting example, in that they too have a massive geography that is nearly as varied as America, and not every single city is inherently massive and super dense. Of course being a command economy makes it easy to do infrastructure projects but the viability of those projects doesn't change just because a different government is involved. While we were buying into the hype of hyperloop and slowing down California's HSR project, they built a solid 1000km+ of HSR where there originally was not.

We can do it, in many places HSR is very competitive, and it is economically viable. There does in fact exist a sweet spot of transit, long neglected in the market, where driving is just a bit too cumbersome, but taking a plane isn't any faster.

Of course, I'm just a radical who hates driving and loves trains because of the freedom to goon around with my friends in the city and bar hop without having to DUI or spend $45 on an uber.