One thing to note is that the reply is only as old as the edit, so it could be a response to the comment telling people to go to Lemmy rather than whatever the original comment was. It could also be sarcasm, hard to tell.

Yeah, the things that really stand out to me on this particular example are the quotes from people in the industry saying that it’s the worst instability in the industry in the past 15 years (so since the 2008 recession) in an industry know for its lack of job stability (it used to almost be guaranteed that devs would be laid off after a project finished) and that up to 73% of developers say that they’ve been affected by the layoffs, either being laid off themselves or somebody they know getting laid off like members of their team.

I watch a lady on YouTube who works for Sony who said that the average time to find a new job is 2 months, and that with the number of layoffs it’s very likely that many of these developers will never work in the industry again.

It’s just another example of the situations like companies bragging about record-breaking profits while an increasing number of people making six-figure salaries are living paycheck to paycheck.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-video-game-industry-is-just-starting-to-feel-the-impacts-of-2023s-layoffs/

https://www.polygon.com/23964448/video-game-industry-layoffs-crisis-2023

https://publish.obsidian.md/vg-layoffs/Archive/2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/25/business/microsoft-layoffs-video-games.html

https://www.polygon.com/gaming/24074767/video-game-industry-layoffs-explainer

This is basically how I feel about Instagram. I just can’t understand why people use the platform, or even how they do.

Every time I try to use the app, I just end up closing it in frustration a couple of minutes later. What’s the point in following people when the algorithm is just going to show me a randomized assortment of their posts from the past week where every one is followed by a “suggested” post from somebody I don’t follow and then a “sponsored” post (ad). And then it stops after like 20 posts and refuses to load any more because “You’re all caught up from the past 3 days!”, even if I haven’t opened it in 5 months.

I guess following people whose content you’re interested in has gone out of style in favor of consuming whatever the algorithm vomits up in front of you. I feel like even Tik Tok does a better job of letting you see content from people you’re following, and that thing is basically all algorithm.

And now I sound like my parents in the 2010s trying to figure out why people use Facebook…

I knew there had to be something fishy considering the video game industry alone has laid off 30,000 people in the past 2 years - 20,000 last year and a further 10,000 in January and February alone of this year.

Unfortunately, it’s not something I ever got into myself. I wanna say itch.io has them fairly frequently? But I haven’t looked into it myself.

My first thought would be looking into communities of like-minded people (local if you’re lucky enough). I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the Bloodborne PSX demake or Bloodborne Kart (which was supposed to release a few months ago before it got DMCA’d, RIP), but the lady behind those is a former industry dev who streams her work on Twitch and has a Discord that has multiple channels dedicated to game dev stuff. I feel like that would be the kind of place to hop into. Her name on Twitch is b0tster if you wanna check her out.

That doesn’t surprise me at all. I’ve heard that companies like Raytheon have direct connections to some of the big colleges so that kids basically already have a job working for them by the time they graduate. The games industry occasionally has something similar. Portal, for example, was originally the senior project of a couple of kids from Digipen, and Valve hired them right out of college to turn it into a AAA game.

You could do Game Jams and the like. All the fun of making games without the horrible pay and working conditions!

That hinges on the assumption that the car he’s replacing is a beater, which isn’t necessarily true. All he said is that he could’ve bought another beater, which says that he had bought one before, but the car he’s replacing could’ve been a non-beater that he had bought because he had already learned how pricey constantly replacing beaters is. And by the sounds of it, having to replace the car was an unplanned expense, which says to me that he wasn’t driving a beater.

That’s irrelevant to the point I was making. I merely gave that as an example of how the beater could theoretically be cheaper than the car payments if it lasted that long without needing additional expenses. It could’ve been the cheaper option, but that would be gambling that it wouldn’t require additional work and still be running for a full 12 months.

My point is quite simple: He paid $400 a month in student loans. Now, he pays $760 a month due to having to buy a new car. That’s not reducing his expenditures, it’s increasing it. He didn’t go from paying $400 to $360. The $360 is an additional unplanned expense he has to pay now on top of his other monthly expenses because he had to replace his car.

I would say the biggest factor is the emboldening of the people who were already toxic, because this has been progressing for decades now in the US, if not the rest of the world.

Once the racists could hide their hatred in plain view by simply saying “it’s just a joke”, it became that much easier for them to say the quiet part out loud. And once they got bold enough with that, all bets were off. The divisiveness of media (both traditional and social) is profit-motive driven and probably comes as a direct result of the former developments. Clicks bring in the ad revenue, and nobody clicks faster or more often than an angry crowd.

There’s plenty of other factors too, I’m sure, like lead poisoning from all the lead being spewed out by cars with leaded gasoline back in the day (one of the side effects of lead poisoning is increased aggression), and the removal of third places that had once allowed people from all walks of life and social classes have a common area where they’d meet and interact. But letting the racists get away with it is definitely a big one.

I saw this happening (and was told about it by my professors who still worked in the industry) 14 years ago in college and decided that I’d rather work at the fish market I worked at as a summer job throughout high school rather than go through a 4 year degree program just to make the same amount of money I was already making.

The brain drain is real, and the companies don’t care because there’s always fresh college kids right out of Digipen, Full Sail, or wherever else, ready to work for peanuts because they’re passionate about making games.

He’s still paying $360 a month more than he was before he had to buy a car. His expenditures have increased overall, though not by as much as they possibly could have. But that doesn’t mean that they’ve reduced, unless you’re for some reason considering the cost of the previous car as being more expensive than the new payment in some way.

In fact, if he had bought the $4,000 beater and had to replace it after a year, it actually would’ve been cheaper than the new car - $4,000 over 12 months comes out to $333.33 a month. Of course, that doesn’t include anything like gas or maintenance, but neither does the monthly payment on the other car.

No, they said that their choice was either an extra expense of $360 a month for the car that they bought, or $4,000 for a cheap beater that’s guaranteed to die on you at some point and be a hole that you perpetually shovel money into if you keep replacing it with more junkers.

That doesn’t mean that they can afford the extra $360 a month. Just that it was the cheaper option.

On the bright side, 9mm is cheaper than a retirement home. Somebody’s getting a blowjob on my 60th birthday, and it ain’t gonna be me!

I think there’s a difference between High Earner and High Income that is causing a discrepancy here. Somebody making six figures is a High Earner, but isn’t really a High Income anymore. In 2020, I made about $40k, which was more than about 55-60% of Americans made that year. That puts anybody making $100k or more in the top 25%, at least, of incomes in the country. And yet the prices of things mean that more and more of them are living paycheck to paycheck, regardless of their financial planning.

In a lot of ways, what’s in the market dictates what people can buy more than what they can afford does. I had to buy an SUV the last time I bought a car because I need the 4 wheel drive for the winters here. I had a front wheel drive car once, and couldn’t get it out of my neighborhood when there was more than a half inch of snow on the road. That same SUV today is at least 25% larger than the model I bought, because “that’s what the market wants”, according to Toyota.

When I was first looking for apartments in 2010, studio apartments in my town started at the $1,500 to $1,700 per month range. The lowest rent I could find was a single room in somebody’s house with “occasional kitchen access” for $1,000 a month. And now there are cities where landlords are telling people making $100k that they need to find roommates to afford rent. A 2 bedroom house on a tiny plot of land that’s falling apart just down the street from my parent’s house got bought last week for $1.2 million. 10 years ago that house was probably worth $500k at best. The new owners intend to tear it down and replace it with an Air BnB, taking it off the housing market and further driving up housing prices in town. Builders are making luxury apartments and condos, and single family suburbs, instead of medium density multi-family housing because “that’s what the market wants” and definitely not because that’s what has the highest profit margins. I think there’s been 1 new mixed-use development built in my hometown since I was living there as a kid, but the number of condo developments has increased from 1 to 17 in that same time frame. Every year more kids leave because it’s simply unaffordable to live there. It was even when I was trying to live there, and it’s only gotten worse.

There’s people living above their means, and then there’s people making a six figure salary who just had to replace a car in a market where car prices spiked 30% in the last 3 months of 2023 alone. Personally, I probably wouldn’t even own a car if our country wasn’t built for cars instead of people. They’re priced as a luxury but considered a necessity by the powers that be. Even if you do a lot of the routine maintenance yourself, like me, it’s still prohibitively expensive for the majority of people. Even those we could consider High Earners.

You’d think I’d learn. But, nope, still do it. Every. Single. Time.

I recently heard a story about a teacher who had their class have ChatGPT write their essay for them, and then had them correct the essays afterward and come back with the results. Turns out, even when it cited sources, it was wrong something like 45% of the time and oftentimes made stuff up that wasn’t in the sources it was citing or had absolutely no relevance to the source.

Don’t forget suburbs and car-centric city planning isolating people by wealth and white collar vs. blue collar jobs by removing the places where those groups would normally intermingle. And by race. The suburbs also sorted people by race.

This is brilliant for them. They basically take the elevator pitches from the concept phase of design and toss them at players to see what sticks. Don’t even have to get to the point of a vertical slice to playtest, just a conceptual animation of gameplay.