LengAwaits
@LengAwaits@lemmy.world
- Comment on [Même] Which movie was this for you? 1 week ago:
Small Apartments.
- Comment on I won’t be reading the replies 3 weeks ago:
Don’t worry, it only has ≤5 lines of text because the card is cropped. The artist credit line at the bottom of every card would mean that it indeed does have >5 lines of text. You just know how to extrapolate from incomplete data!
- Comment on Why do some men dis other men who sit to pee? (& follow-up questions) 4 weeks ago:
I wiped my ass with a wadded up ball of 25 toilet paper squares for years because no one wanted to tell me about more efficient ways to do things. Bathroom things are like your paycheck. They say you shouldn’t talk about it, but it needs to be talked about.
- Comment on Why are people impressed with SpaceX? 4 weeks ago:
There’s also the issue that after the moon landing we didn’t really improve that much and much of the knowledge faded
- Comment on 'Cities: Skylines II' Found a Solution for High Rents: Get Rid of Landlords 2 months ago:
Cities: Skylines II Found a Solution for High Rents: Get Rid of Landlords
For months, players have been complaining about the high rents in the city-building sim. This week, developer Colossal Order fixed the problem by doing something real cities can’t: removing landlords.
The rent is too damn high, even in video games. For months, players of Colossal Order’s 2023 city-building sim, Cities: Skylines II, have been battling with exorbitant housing costs. Subreddits filled with users frustrated that the cost of living was too high in their burgeoning metropolises and complained there was no way to fix it. This week, the developer finally announced a solution: tossing the game’s landlords to the curb.
“First of all, we removed the virtual landlord so a building’s upkeep is now paid equally by all renters,” the developer posted in a blog on the game’s Steam page. “Second, we changed the way rent is calculated.” Now, Colossal Order says, it will be based on a household’s income: “Even if they currently don’t have enough money in their balance to pay rent, they won’t complain and will instead spend less money on resource consumption.”
The rent problem in the city sim is almost a little too on the nose. Over the last few years real-world rents have skyrocketed—in some cases, rising faster than wages. In cities like New York, advocates and tenants alike are fighting against the fees making housing less and less affordable; in the UK, rent is almost 10 percent higher than it was a year ago. From Hawaii to Berlin the cost of living is exorbitant. Landlords aren’t always to blame, but for renters they’re often the easiest targets.
From this perspective, perhaps Cities’ simulator is too good. Prior to this week’s fix, players found themselves getting tripped up on some of the same problems government officials and city planners are facing. “For the love of god I can not fix high rent,” wrote one player in April. “Anything I do re-zone, de-zone, more jobs, less jobs, taxes high or low, wait time in game. Increased education, decreased education. City services does nothing. It seems anything I try does nothing.”
On the game’s subreddit, players have also criticised “how the game’s logic around ‘high rent’ contrasts reality,” with one player conceding that centralized locations with amenities will inevitably have higher land values. “But this game makes the assumption of a hyper-capitalist hellscape where all land is owned by speculative rent-seeking landlord classes who automatically make every effort to make people homeless over provisioning housing as it is needed,” the player continued. “In the real world, socialised housing can exist centrally.”
This is true. It exists in Vienna, which the New York Times last year dubbed “a renters’ utopia.” Except, in Vienna the landlord is the city itself (it owns about 220,000 apartments). In Cities: Skylines II, the devs just got rid of landlords completely.
The change in-game will have “a transition period as the simulation adapts to the changes,” and the developer “can’t make any guarantees” with how it will impact games with mods. Although the update aims to fix most of the problems at hand, that doesn’t mean players should never expect to see rent complaints again. When household incomes are too low to pay, tenants will be loud about it. “Only when their income is too low to be able to pay rent will they complain about ‘High Rent’ and look for cheaper housing or move out of the city.” Maybe it’s time players had a few in-game tenant groups of their own.
- Comment on Watching ml and world argue in every thread be like. 2 months ago:
Call yourself whatever you want, at the end of the day we’re all utopianists who’re overly self-assured that our favorite pet-theory-system will eventually remove all suffering.
“If my vision for society were adopted, the world would be perfect!”
Keep dreaming. We’re fucked.
- Comment on Those poor plants 2 months ago:
There was a good discussion of this on Reddit recently. Sorry to link to Reddit, but it’s a good, topical post worth perusal.
- Comment on Anon's gf is unfulfilled 2 months ago:
Educating your partner on what you think love is, and what you seek in a relationship is good. How can they be expected to know, otherwise?
- Comment on Is the Federation "Communist" or Socialist? 3 months ago:
The main difference is who owns the means of production. In communism, the government does. In socialism, the people do.
What would we call a hybrid system in which the government is made up of the people and owns the means of production? Democratic Communism?
- Comment on [US] I'm hesitating launching my own business because I'd lose health insurance for my family. What are my options? 5 months ago:
I’m not sure about that, as I’ve seen conflicting information. Medicare has existed for around 60 years, and not only have patients been more satisfied with their care on average than people with private insurance, the costs have also lower than private insurance overall. Couple those factors with metrics from the most recent study I was able to find on the cost of single payer, and the picture seems a bit muddier than you’re presenting it.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8170543/
- Comment on [US] I'm hesitating launching my own business because I'd lose health insurance for my family. What are my options? 5 months ago:
Okay, thank you. I wasn’t sure. Why couldn’t they just pay them 50k and lobby for single payer to save money? It seems like you’re suggesting that they’d have to raise wages if single payer was implemented? Maybe I’m still confused, because it still seems like they’d save money in the long run?
- Comment on [US] I'm hesitating launching my own business because I'd lose health insurance for my family. What are my options? 5 months ago:
Please forgive my ignorance on the topic. You seem to know a lot about it. Are you saying that they save more money than the insurance costs them?
- Comment on [US] I'm hesitating launching my own business because I'd lose health insurance for my family. What are my options? 5 months ago:
Wow! Companies could sure save a lot of money if they lobbied for single-payer! I wonder why they don’t! 🤔
- Comment on pontificus maximus 9 months ago:
I’ve definitely considered opening a St. Paul Sandwich food truck or street-cart, but I do worry that it’s not my place to do so. People often catch flak for “cultural appropriation” these days, and I don’t want to offend, or be persecuted, as a white man selling a Chinese-American specialty.
Plus I’d have to give up my day job and take a big leap of faith. Now, I’ve never introduced the sandwich to anyone who didn’t end up enjoying it, once they tried it, but I’m just not confident enough that it would take off. Maybe I should just do it on weekends to test the waters?
- Comment on pontificus maximus 9 months ago:
Perhaps this means you’ve been called to spread the good news of the St. Paul Sandwich to other states…
You’re absolutely right, and it’s exactly why I’m here preaching! I don’t yet preach the gospel of St. Paul (the sandwich) to every single person I meet, but I’m working up to it.
I think what’s so maddening about the situation is that you can get egg foo young at nearly every Chinese take-out joint in the US, but only in Missouri are they willing to slap it on some cheap white bread for you. The best part is, it’s an incredibly cheap meal, that isn’t completely bereft of nutrition. When I lived in Missouri you could get a St. Paul sandwich for like… $2. It was always one of the cheapest things on the menu, and it saved my then-broke, kitchen-less ass more than once!
These days I just take the necessary ingredients to the restaurant with me, order the egg foo young, then assemble the sandwich right there on the takeout counter, while maintaining eye contact with the nearest employee. I think they’re getting the message.
- Comment on pontificus maximus 10 months ago:
The St. Paul sandwich is wildly underappreciated. I had never heard of it before I lived in Missouri, and after I left I found that, like me, most people have never even heard of it. It’s a sad state of affairs.
The St. Paul sandwich is a national treasure. It’s a uniquely American food that only exists by dint of the “melting pot” of cultures that we as a country used to count among our best features.
- Comment on pontificus maximus 10 months ago:
This is a pretty sad take from NdT, and it comes across as though he were attempting to dodge a question. Perhaps even to avoid being labeled, which is probably why you like it.
If 99% of the population were golfers, and 1%weren’t, there would almost certainly be a word for the people who didn’t golf. Same applies to theists. Up until very recently it would have been considered quite unusual to to not be a theist.
Atheists did not decide on that label. The word is believed to have initially been pejorative.
- Comment on Affordable self-care 11 months ago:
