Regardless of whether the underpaying allegations are true, Amazon keeping 60-75% of the sales price is absolutely egregious. People were absolutely up in arms about Apple's 30% app store cut a year ago.
Readit Newsscrooched_moose commented on Audiblegate twitter.com/wdfpodcast/st... · Posted by u/_fnqu
Here you have a summary in English[0] and the whole story in Spanish[1]. Even years after, patrons are still waiting with little hope.
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/Heroquest/comments/ixwdog/comment/g...
[1]https://www.xataka.com/literatura-comics-y-juegos/heroquest-...
Oh bizarre. I hadn't seen that one. Appears to be a very dubious Spain-only campaign.
As far as I'm aware, the official Hasbro one went quite well: https://hasbropulse.com/products/heroquest-game-system
> Board games are easier to understand the whole system from early design docs
That doesn't make them any more reliable. Check the disaster it was the crowdfunding of "HeroQuest 25 anniversary".
What happened there? From the outside I thought it was pretty smooth and successful. Delivered what was promised and only a couple months late.
I think the worst I've seen is people realizing it was never all that good to begin with, and being disappointed a reprint of a 35 year old game doesn't really stack up in the modern era.
I know it's an outside view, but at this point the Star Citizen things feels more like a cult than an actual game. Some of my friends have sunk over a hundred dollars on ships they can't fly yet seem to be so deep in their sunk-cost fallacy that they keep saying that the release is soon and sending me YouTube videos of "next-generation" gameplay to try and get me hyped up.
Yes I know about the beta, but it still seems like an extreme opposite version of the "no pre-order" movements.
There's some really bizarre tribalism that develops in the Kickstarter/preorder realm. I back a fair number of board games and see the same thing there.
Its like the people who get in that early feel like they are part of the development team and make it their mission to support the game at all costs. Any dissension among the ranks (delays, scope changes, cost increases) are violently shouted down as ITS BETTER FOR THE GAME!!!!!. Organized brigading is really common as well, even before there's an alpha release but they go around trying to force it into every "Best Of" type list out there.
I've gotten some great games out of it but avoid the comment sections at all costs.
I recently left a major part supplier for a good portion of the heavy equipment industry and Deere was one of our biggest customers. They were truly despicable to work with.
On every bid we sent them the #1 requirement was Proprietary Fit. There had to be some sort of IP lockout (always disguised as a valuable design feature, but it never was) to prevent end users from procuring replacement parts anywhere else. In many cases it even made the parts significantly worse, as useless bumps or ridges were added to the industry standard to make them physically incompatible.
The old model was we build a part for $8 and sell it to the end user for $10. Under Deere's new model, we build the part for $8, sell it exclusively to Deere for $11, and they sell it to customer for $16.
My former employer was very complicit in this behavior, but Deere was by far the most aggressive about and a big enough player to squeeze all their suppliers.
Edit: They pay all kinds of lip service to how this is better for the customer ("reliable supply chain", "Deere-guaranteed quality", etc) but that's only in their public PR. Behind the scenes it is 100% about securing a long term revenue source - customers pay out the ass for a piece of equipment, then have to keep coming back to Deere for 50 years for replacement parts.
scrooched_moose commented on The 'hidden resignation': employees are checked out tidymails.com/business-in... · Posted by u/Apocryphon
I recently left a job that I was 100% checked out of. It was a fine job before Covid but something about the switch to remote absolutely ruined it.
Things that used to take 2-3 hours to plan started taking 6 weeks as management insisted on being deeply involved. Instead of infrequent project check-ins, 18 hours a week was blocked off to management updates. Shortly before I put in my 2 weeks I had project update meeting where my status was something like Accomplishments: held status update meetings on 11/1, 11/3, 11/8, 11/12, 11/15, and 11/18.
That job broke me and I just stopped caring. The new one is much better.
Previous company went through a fairly disastrous change in management. I was the 5th person out the door on a team of 8. New manager was super "data driven" so productivity plummeted as we were inundated with piles of new processes - a 3 day lab test (no additional cost other than my labor) took me over 6 weeks to get management approval and sign offs for. But, we didn't have any "old data" (because the processes were all new) to prove that things had gotten much worse.
Wife has commented many times on the change in my personality, as I'm not ending most days furious and miserable.
Guess that's "Company Culture" for purposes of the poll.
I kinda thought all 3 of my offers during my recent job change were suspiciously close. Now I know why, as all 3 employers requested it. Fuck everything about this.
A few jobs are missing, but the most recent (and therefore most relevant) is correct.
scrooched_moose commented on Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado covid19.colorado.gov/data... · Posted by u/shrubble
But now we’ll be able to reach herd immunity. Very mild and highly transmissible. This is the best possible outcome.
There's no guarantee of that. Omicron seems to be exceptionally capable of infecting both those who had the current vaccines and/or previous variants.
Maybe Omicron provides immunity to Rho (or whatever is coming), but it may provide no protection to Sigma.
scrooched_moose commented on Bugs are evolving to eat plastic nationalobserver.com/2021... · Posted by u/gmays
I feel like I've been reading this story for well over a decade at this point. On one hand this is great news and I would think almost inevitable with enough time, but as layperson on this subject plastic eating microbes still fall into the category as nuclear fusion and anti-ageing medicine -- something just around the corner, but always a decade or so away.
Is this actually an entirely new discovery in the sense that this was an unexpected find, or is this just another find of many showing the same trend? And what kind of time frames should I be expecting before plastics are considered biodegradable like other natural materials?
I have to admit, the idea that plastic could become biodegradable in a few decades changes my perception of their use a little and I'm not sure this is a positive thing, especially if this is something that isn't likely to happen for a very long time.
It's a mixed bag and I'm not sure which side wins out.
On one hand, cleaning up plastic pollution is a fantastic thing. On the other, there is a tremendous amount of carbon currently locked up in plastics which is for all practical purposes inert. Releasing that into the atmosphere is yet one more thing that will accelerate climate change.
It also will require a massive shift in our material usage. Bacteria breaking down that plastic bag in the ocean is great. Bacteria setting in on construction, medical devices, or your NES is not so ideal.