domain:nfinf.substack.com
jeroboam
just now
I don't know but it would make sense. US devs are overpaid to a ridiculous degree. Good luck getting them to work 80 hours a week on some video game for 50k a year.
FD4280
1m ago
If you don’t set the high bar at prodigy level, we have counterexamples in Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon.
jeroboam
2m ago
The number of people who want to bet against Elon grows larger. So far their record is pretty dismal.
I'll take the opposite bet. Elon will make money on Twitter.
jeroboam
3m ago
Thankfully, this does seem to be going away.
Walmart just canceled their DEI program, following many other companies like John Deere, Harley Davidson, etc...
It's not so much that the law required these departments. It's more that folk beliefs sprung up thinking that DEI was "best practices". This thinking is now obsolete, and DEI programs are now accurately perceived as damaging to public relations and the bottom line.
hydroacetylene
3m ago
Uh, not an expert on the video game industry, but isn’t the US tech industry far less dominant in video games than in other fields?
Templexious
4m ago
"Anti-woke" as criteria is the trouble.
The main game series we can consider "explicitly" anti-woke is the Postal series, and that devolved into cynical, low-complexity slop immediately. If the criteria of "anti-woke" was clearer, it would be easier to find a game that fits.
2016 Doom's main antagonist is a lesbianesque woman, and only the Doomguy can stop her, and Eternal even makes a few digs at hr wokeness with lines akin to "we like to think of the demons destroying earth as mortally challenged".
Relaxing the requirement from 'explicitly anti-woke' to 'games conservative white males can enjoy without feeling attacked for existing' widens those horizons dramatically.
clo
10m ago
It's perhaps useful to compare the UK's case. Many of the same problems, some different.
They imported and swallowed BLM wholesale, right down to disruptive protests. The UK has no history of African-American slavery.
Or, well, I hate bringing this up because it's common knowledge and nobody cares about old hatchets, but pretty much the entire field of eugenics and progressive curation of the human genome to remove undesirable elements was cutting-edge American science... that the Germans followed to their own conclusions, with interesting results.
People copy America and import their memeplexes because America wins. America has some natural defenses against their own memeplexes, namely that everyone knows on some level it's all kayfabe. This is frequently missed by foreign observers, who are still at the "call a spade a spade" level of meta.
This isn't a disagreement bout possible charges because it's not hard to think of any number of about a dozen federal charges if a connection between Alford and Kent/McGee is made. It's about your belief there are no facts to support such a connection, except there are some small ones: Alford told the Gaetz to direct the money towards a trust account in care of David McGee, Alford claimed he was working with Kent, McGee, and others to rescue Bob Levinson, Alford's company to handle this exchange was incorporated by... David McGee. Kent is the one who handed Don Gaetz the "Project Homecoming" document which implies a promised presidential pardon or the investigation/indictment would be ceased. Could this all be innocent connections? sure!
The scheme would be David McGee would accept the money to fund the rescue effort. Kent is the one who handed Don Gaetz the "Project Homecoming" document which implies a promised presidential pardon or the investigation/indictment would be ceased. Alford was the person who connected the payment with the reward. In the middle of this investigation by a local FBI office right as it's about to get to the McGee stage, the Gaetz charges get released to the NYT and then everything stops. As soon as the scheme falls apart, Alford falls on his sword and takes all the blame.
Here's the thing, though: The Feds only had jurisdiction over Alford because he made fraudulent statements via text message.
In the particular charge the picked, sure. That doesn't mean this was the only way they could have established jurisdiction over Alford or possible co-conspirators. This isn't some strong limitation or even much of a hurdle in the modern day and how and what communication devices are typically used. I'm not implying there is strong evidence to currently available to prove McGee or Kent knew Alford was going to send fraudulent text messages to Don Gaetz or fill out the conpiratory scheme, so I'm not sure what the point of these couple paragraphs are.
On a side note, I'm disappointed no one has made an "Alford plea" pun. It's too bad he didn't even attempt to obtain one.
Are you suggesting that they were setting him up in 2017?
Who is "they"? Our three muskateers currently being discussed? The government at large? No, I doubt it. As far as I know, there is no connection between Joel Greenberg and the trio. I'm speculating about some facts I find interesting and thought others would find them interesting as well. Other than my characterization of Joel Greenberg as looking like a honeypot operation, I'm not arguing anything in particular.
Furthermore, if you have that evidence (or fake that evidence), then what was their goal? If the goal is to destroy Matt Gaetz's public career, just charge him and move on. What's the purpose of the hare-brained fraud scheme?
To have leverage over Matt Gaetz in order to control him in some way in the the future. I find it hard to believe you cannot fathom some other purpose of having blackmail material on someone other than to burn your blackmail material to harm that person.
Or is it your contention that the Federal Government was in such dire need of somewhere between 5 and 25 million dollars that they resorted to phonying up an investigation into a congressman so they could use a twice-convicted con man and two confederates to bilk the money out of him?
The federal government wasn't in dire need of $20,000,000 in 2010 when David McGee was attempting to sell favors to a Russian Oligarch, but they did and the contention was the operation needed to be kept off of official books because the government had not admitted Bob Levinson was a likely CIA contractor or they couldn't get official approval and were attempting to save their buddy.
I don't think the entire scheme was hatched to bilk money out of Gaetz family starting from back in 2017. A plausible narrative is Greenberg was attempting to get leverage on him. Later on as that leverage was falling apart because our naughty boy Greenberg couldn't help but be a sloppy criminal who couldn't help himself to not commit a laundry list of crimes, a group of people who clearly had non-public knowledge saw an opportunity to get money out of the Gaetz family. Whether that group was large or confined to one, two, or a few is unknown.
KulakRevolt
16m ago
Why aren't there antiwoke Game devs?
Because riot games was forced to pay 100 million for gender discrimination when it hired people on the basis of whether or not they even played riots games.
Anti Discrimination law MANDATES that you continually hire hostile sexual and ethnic minorities who largely resent the cre audience, and then increasingly pander to those employees, lest they file suit for workplace discrimination.
This is why indy games don't have this problem and are still creative, sexual, violent, disturbing, male-coded, etc.
As your games company employs more people the more DEI people you're forced to hire and shove into every function you can fit them... This is why hollywood and videogame writers rooms are so woke... There's maybe 0.1% gender-queer black people who can code or 3d model at the level of the pros in the coding employment base... but you can shove anyone in a writer role, have them throw out horrible ideas, and then have some poor intern turn that into dialogue.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
17m ago
Yeah, but you'd make a lot of money doing so which might not be so good for Elon's tax bill. At least with journalism the write-off is nigh-guaranteed.
jeroboam
20m ago
Yeah that’s kinda what I was getting at. Elon has joked about buying MSNBC but he should save his $$$ and buy some game publishers instead. For a couple billion you could flip the political polarity of the games market which reaches hundreds of millions of people.
jeroboam
23m ago
Dude I don’t know. I assume none of these games have explicitly anti-woke themes. Correct me if I’m wrong.
KulakRevolt
24m ago
Yes, which means I gave "NOT a civil war" MORE than 50%, which given there were mutliple assassniation attempts on the lead candidate one of which came an inch from killing him, that sounds right or even conservative .
In reply to the "then" please read the introduction to my immediate previous piece on the topic and civil war preparedness.
The predictions for which I give probabilities are the predictions.... The long elaborate descriptions of scenarios to be prepared for NECESSARILY CANNOT BE, because everytime you describe something additional happening the overall likelihood of all of it happening lowers.
I described about 20 different possible dynamics and scenarios in that piece as preparedness exercise. NECESSARILY the value and detail of a scenario for planning and preparedness is ANTI-CORRELATED with its overall total likelihood since each additional piece of information or dynamic, which is valuable for preparedness, is another thing that may or may not happen.
In short I give probability predictions in keeping with the norms of Less-Wrong rationalism because that is valuable for declaring your priors, then I give the elaborate scenario planning, because that is how militaries and serious organizations wargame.
Specifically the mass rioting if Trump won, I expect that would have 100% happened if he had won the electoral college but lost the popular vote (which strikes me as a vastly more likely scenario than what happened given his track record) then there would have been a cause to argue Trump's win was a result of systemic white supremacy and the American system favouring white rural voters over urban voters... which could have been ginned up by media like the summer of Floyd... Trump's total electoral victory was very unlikely given available information (most odds had him 40-45% to lose and presumably another 20-30 to only win closely)
His incredibly decisive victory (contrary to his previous 2 elections) was an surprising factor... though there's still a fair amount that can go wrong between here and inauguration, or in his first year... not least 2 very unstable wars right now.
SerialStateLineXer
25m ago
Note that all of those but Slay the Spire come out of Japan.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
28m ago
He was planning to shift away from ad revenue and towards a subscription scheme before he closed the purchase.
Templexious
36m ago
Do you consider Slay the Spire to be woke? Elden Ring? Bloodborne? Mario? Pokemon? The Persona series?
Where is the line drawn?
anti_dan
38m ago
That is simply an example. But before I would consider wokeness to be in decline I'd like to see good hard data on real world results. Decline in trans prescriptions would be an interesting one; several prestigious colleges admitting 0-1 blacks in their freshman (or 1L law school) classes; several other tech companies following the Musk Model and firing 80% of the employees (the retained being overwhelmingly male and white+asian). Maybe you can think of some more, but those are ones off the top of the head.
grognard
Intel Pentium III 450 / Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra / Corsair 128MB PC133 / ABIT BH6
46m ago
There was some murmuring of Elon, who is the #1 global Diablo 4 player, starting some publisher for gaming.
Gaming studios seem to need ESG dollars which come with strings attached like requiring narrative review by DEI SweetBabyInc-like consultants.
Ubisoft and others are on a run with bomb-after-bomb releases underperforming massively. Real financial losses.
It may just be a matter of time has the market adjusts post-election.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
47m ago
The Substance was fantastic and definitely had a lot to say, and that came out just this year.
KulakRevolt
50m ago
Check out "Democracy the God That Failed" by Hoppe, "Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War" by Buchanan, and "Freedom Betrayed" by former President Herbert Hoover. Those are the good high level back to the source ones...
Also Jewish History, Jewish Religion by Israel Shahak (it's short... Pete Quinones did a podcast Audio version also)
and
200 Years together by Alexander Solzenhitzen
Those are the hot ones right now related to current events.
KulakRevolt
56m ago
1 Million people dead, in a conflict involving the US, overlapping with a 3 month window is "literally every possibility"
I mean I agree the US is a violent unstable regime, but I don't think it's quite at the point of INEVITABILITY that it will always be involved in a mass die off.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1hr ago
What exactly do you charge them with? To be clear, while Gaetz threw the word "extortion" around, there is no extortion in this case. Extortion is when someone threatens to inflict harm unless they are paid.
I believe what OP is alleging/implying is that Greenberg may have made a false allegation against Gaetz in order to save his own skin (offer to point the finger at a juicy target of a Congressman to lessen his own sentence). The implicatiom is that tbe FBI knows that this is a weak or bogus allegation, but proceed with the investigation anyway, or at least conclude as a result of the investigation that it ks bogus.
McGee, who is contected to both the Federal Prosecutor's Office and the CIA, attempts to use this knowledge to blackmail the senior Gaetz (through Alford) to get money to rescue Levinson in exchange for using his connections to get the case dropped against the junior Gaetz.
I think most people would agree that "we will drop a bogus/weak case against you in exchange for money" amounts to extortion. Rephrased, it can be "give me money and I'll won't charge you". Even with a legitimate crime being prosecuted it can still amount to extortion, as it's clearly an attempt to violate the defendant's due process rights.
Especially in the case of a high profile figure like a Congressman, there doesn't even have to be a a charge or conviction, the mere reporting that a Congressman js being investigated can be extremely damaging, which is what happened here.
jeroboam
1hr ago
It's better than ever and people who say otherwise are showing sure signs of um.. EDS, or is it MDS?
Let's remind ourselves that there is no amount of real world success that can dissuade the true believers. There are still people in 2024 who think that Venezuela is either 1) thriving or 2) only failing because of US sanctions.
The Communists have still not admitted defeat, and think that the communism would work just great if it were only tried, man. On a similar note, the anti-Muskites still think that everything Musk has achieved is just luck and, furthermore, that they personally could have done better. It's all the worst sort of cope.
Twitter never needed those grifters and it's better without them. Almost all companies which employ laptop workers are in a similar state.
jeroboam
1hr ago
As an old, I don't really play video games. But it's weird to me that the video game industry is so woke considering that the user base is so anti-woke. Why aren't there anti-woke game publishers?
Proposed answer: Political selection of devs.
Video games companies need developers who are competent, willing to work for low wages, and willing to tolerate long working hours. This is a tough sell. Competent devs in the US can easily earn 200-500k with cushy working conditions. Why get paid less than half as much and be subjected to semiannual death marches?
As a result of this rotten bargain, the men who choose this field will tend to be young, not have families, and be fixated on video games. Frankly, this is going to select for autists. To the extent that autism and MtF trans are correlated, I would expect that video game developers are trans at a rate at least far above the norm. This might explain a lot of the soy-type politics espoused by major game studios.
There's clearly a market opportunity for non-woke game publishers. But could they get devs? Conservative men tend to work in the field that pays them the best, allowing them to support their family. They aren't out there making children's toys.
Does this explanation make sense? Or is this just a $20 bill sitting on the sidewalk?
I donno man. I think a lot of things were going on at once.
The centralization of the video game journalist profession in San Francisco when Ziff Davis bought everyone and consolidated their offices there didn't help. You saw a lot of video game journalist organizing on mailing list and at conferences to bully developers into pushing their views.
There is a certain type of terminally online, always offended psychopath that always seems to work their way up the ranks from forum bully, to jannie, to "Community Manager", to holding a gun to a company's head threatening to run to their game journalist buddies if they don't get what they want. Sometimes the company calls their bluff, I think the developer behind Guild Wars did that.
Sometimes the call really is coming from inside the house, and employees feel emboldened to bully their coworkers into conforming with progressive dogma. Although given all the leaks you see Grummz getting, it's obvious some dissidents are keeping their heads down and cashing paychecks.
There are all the theories about ESG loans and other financing options only being available if games pay protection money to DEI consultants. I'm not sure how much concrete proof has ever come out about that. I've never seen a contract with it spelled out, but it wouldn't shock me.
I know the indie scene is incredibly cliquey and woke. BPD chicks who've practically never made a game somehow hold court and decide who is or isn't allowed to network and make connections, and who get's slandered by the woke games journalist. Sometimes they even drive their targets to commit suicide, and then their own family throws them under the bus and refuses to tell the dead man's side of the story because of some word salad about privilege and lived experience.
And then there is the fact that the pay and the hours suck. I make way more fucking money plying my trade literally anywhere but the video games industry, despite loving games and desperately wanting to make them my entire life. In the early 00's when I was choosing a career path, The EA Spouse scared me away from even considering it. Now I wouldn't want to subject myself to how utterly toxic the entire industry appears from the outside. And I wouldn't trust anyone who tries to sell me that it's not that bad. I don't know how you tolerate the work culture unless you are already mostly on board with progressive dogma.
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