kicksystem @ kicksystem @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

I'd venture to say the political system is what made the citizenry. Genetically people in the US aren't so different. My guess is that somehow your political system got fucked and that fucked the rest. I'd be interesting to know how it got to that point.

In terms of socialism, yeah I know people over there are totally brainwashed to vote against their own interest. It was just amazing to see how much people rallied against Obama when he tried to introduce some type of universal health care. "Health care for everyone? How dare you!!". Lordy lord. People are so dumb. Not just americans though, it depends so much on the system.

Here in the Netherlands we have a surplus of PhDs. Not that we are genetically superior. We just have affordable universities and a culture that stimulates learning.

It says so right there. The license is based on installs which will be tracked via downloads:

"We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user.

Which is based on downloads.

I wonder now whether that means that you feel that egg industry CEOs deserve death threats...

https://youtu.be/udSiluTAOaQ?si=QF7odI0WUCXdUmWS

It's based on downloads. It is easy to track those.

"We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user. We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed. Also we believe that an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share." https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates

"We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user. We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed. Also we believe that an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share." - https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates

Haha, well you are the joker, so maybe I can borrow yours?

Proof me wrong then. Downloads/installs is not proportional to usage? Sounds like a nice null hypothesis that is easily disproven with a bit of data.

Oh my god, I knew it was bad, but this sounds god aweful. Why is the US so broken in so many ways? Is it all to due with the 2 party political system? That would be my best guess for a root cause.

Tracking revenue of thousands of developers over the whole world is impossible. Maybe put yourself in Unity's position?

It's based on downloads. Of course those are easy to track. Outrage exists because people hate change. I get that, but it still isnt unreasonable.

You want to run a pearson correlation line throught the number of downloads and the amount of usage. You'll find P approaches 1. I don't have the data, but if you do I'm willing to take the bet.

Jesus dude chill it. Somehow hating Unity is popular here, and don't get me wrong I am also here because I hated the corporate asshole named spez, but this move Unity wants to make isn't super unreasonable. They want to charge proportionally to the amount of usage. If they'd done this right out of the gate, nobody would have thought that is unreasonable. Unity is a great engine, they should be able to charge for it.

Oh yeah, I live in the Netherlands and it is very different here. It seems big pharma is running the show in the US. Although I've heard that these kinds of things happen in the Netherlands to some extent as well, the scale of it is not comparable. We don't have ads for medicine and doctors don't reap rewards for writing certain kinds of prescriptions. These kinds of things just seem like insanity to me.

Have you seen this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_jX2KT7AMY ? :)

Would you say that the situation is getting worse, staying the same or (if ever so slightly) getting better in the US?

I am not familiar with that book. Sounds interesting.

Perhaps. I am not an expert. It was an example of a problem where the diagnosis depends more on the social context than on the biological context.

My wife is a family systems therapist and she told me once of a case, where one group of therapist had a child diagnosed with autism and another group found that the parents were the problem and that the child was only behaving in a certain way as a reaction to the parents' behavior. They had a meeting on the topic and after re-evaluation they decided that the child was not autistic after all.

Yeah, so Windows is indeed a large part of why software works, but it is infrastructure which is packaged separately. Your reasoning can be extended into even further absurdity, like we should pay Intel each time we run software, etc. But this is just not how Microsoft and Intel operate. They're not part of the product, but just make the product work. It's not like we get another Windows version and Intel chip with each game.

Think of Unity like a frozen pizza bottom. What the developers needs to do is put some ingredients on top and it can be sold. The frozen pizza is clearly sold with the pizza bottom. Should the developer not have to pay per pizza bottom? You can bake the pizza in your oven, but the pizza developer doesn't need to pay for the oven. They can assume people have that in place; it is simply a requirement in order for the pizza to be consumed.

However, if you are going to ship a Microsoft product as part of your product, you can sure as hell expect Microsoft sales people on your doorstep. They'll negotiate an OEM deal and it'll surely depend on things like: number of installs, number of downloads, number of users, time used, value extracted by the users, revenue made by you, etc. I've ran a big company for many years and did a number of OEM deals during that time (both being OEMed and OEMing). This is only reasonable.

My main point is that we’re seemingly stuck on one.

Yeah, and my point was that you're just shifting it from this one (mental health) to that one (the state of the world).

It seems we both acknowledge that mental health issues are complex. Sometimes you really do need to get out of a toxic relationship or find a new career path or move to another city. But nevertheless people need to learn to take responsibility for their mental health. Usually when people do that they also then see that they need to make a change in their circumstances. Even if the state of the world makes you sad, it is still up to you whether you are going to mope all day, do something about it and/or learn to live your best life regardless of that fact.

The good news is that your basic point is largely being acknowledged by the mental health community. My wife is a systems therapist and has been reporting an increased understanding, in the mental health community, of the fact that issues do not live in isolation in someone's brain as some kind of hormonal imbalance that can be fixed with some pills. Where I am from systems therapy gets covered by basic insurance and family systems therapy even gets funded by the government. We might be a bit ahead of the curve over here, but there are a lot of signs the mental health community is maturing.

With regard to the Biden's anxiety proposal. I don't think it is necessarily bad to screen people for anxiety. Anxiety is really out of control since covid and that affects the happiness of a lot of people. It depends what you do with the diagnosis. If that means that people are going to be prescribed mindfulness practices, which will be covered by insurance, then it might be a good thing. Even though America is the land of Xanax, it is also home to people like Dr. Jud Brewer whose book "Unwinding Anxiety" offers a very healthy approach to anxiety. And if people learn to rid themselves from anxiety based on mindfulness practices, there is a much higher likely hood that they will do something about the state of the world then if they are going to be stuck in endless anxiety loops.

There is another point that I'd like to raise. While you point out that the state of the world is pretty bad, I'd like to point out that the average mental health of people is pretty bad too. The two go hand in hand, for sure, but they are also independent to a large part. It is amazing how few tools people have to deal with their own psychological issues. People go to therapists to deal with stuff that they could trivially deal with themselves if they were somewhat better equipped to understand their own mind. From my vantage point most people could really benefit from going into some kind of therapy, meditation retreats, journalling, gratitude practice, solo hikes, etc. but people are super reluctant to do these things. Instead, most people who have mental health issues are not using their time effectively to deal with their issues, but instead complain about the state of the world and blame everybody but themselves. And usually it is also these very same people that fuck up the world. If people can not take responsibility for their own mind, then how can they take responsibility for the world?

Yeah, you can call that stupid, but I am not stupid. But regardless of your insult, let me talk to you.

I am not sure which Microsoft product you are talking about, but certain Microsoft products are indeed charged this way. It is called an OEM license and while typically every OEM license is negotiated on different terms (per license, per revenue, per download, per install, per duration of usage, etc.), the basic idea is usually that some amount of money will be made by Microsoft proportional to how much use your product is getting. In the Enterprise world it is also common to charge by how much value the user is getting out of the product, which whole sales departments are trying to figure out on a case by case basis with complicated excel sheets. I mean, it is not like Unity invented this model. In fact, Microsoft got as big as it got by selling a pay per copy version of MS-DOS to IBM.

Unity is an ingredient that makes games work. The game is made with Unity and is shipped with the Unity engine packaged inside, just like any other ingredient. So explain to my why Unity can not define some metric which will highly correlate with the amount of usage and charge based on that metric?

So what I get from Unity's site is that they will charge per download. So yeah, potentially you can download a game three times to three different devices or even to the same devices you've wiped. But I would claim that generally speaking the number of downloads is a good indicator of how often a game is used. If you don't like a game you are generally going to download it only once. If you really like the game you are likely to download it again and again to new devices and after wipes. It isn't perfect for sure, but every other metric you can come up with also has a fair share of problems. Maybe you tell me which one is the one that does not have any problems and is still simple enough to bill upon?

Ok, let me see if I get you.

“Mental health” is so all-encompassing in its breadth (It’s basically our entire subjective experience with the world) but at the same time, it’s actually quite limiting in the solutions it implies, as if there’s specific ailments or exercises or medications.

Are you saying that mental health is too limiting in terms of its solutions, because the real world is not involved? For example, I might come to a doctor saying that my child is restless. The child might be prescribed with medicine for an ADHD diagnosis, whereas the root cause is a flaky parent.

I agree with this point.

We’re miserable because our world is bad. The mental health crisis is probably better understood as all of us being sad as we collectively and simultaneously burn the world and fill it with trash, seemingly on purpose, and we’re not even having fun.

How is this not an over-simplification? People are miserable for all kinds of reasons. Of course the problem and the solution is always some combination of the world and how we interpret the world, but sometimes the problem lies more in the interpretation than in the world, right? It may have nothing or nearly nothing to do with climate change or the state of the world at large.

The mental health framework, by converting our anger, loneliness, grief, and sadness into medicalized pathologies, stops us from understanding these feelings as valid and actionable. It leads us to seek clinical or technical fixes, like whether we should limit smart phones or whatever.

Which may be valid under some circumstances, but sometimes a clinical fix as you call it might be in order. Sometimes people are just extremely unkind to themselves due to conditionings of the past, which are not relevant anymore today.

I would agree that solutions to mental health problems need to be examined in a biopsychosocial context, but whereas you say that just looking at the person and not the world is too limiting, I think just looking at the state of the world is too limiting.

Does a pizza contain an oven? No. Does a pizza contain tomatoes? Yes. Therefore tomatoes are an ingredient and an oven is not.

Does a game contain Unity? Yes. Therefore Unity is an ingredient.

The game ships with Unity which handles the rendering, physics, sound and a whole bunch more. Basically Unity is a pizza base, but it gives you a bunch of toppings too. The developer combines the base with the toppings and voila you've got a game. Not saying that last part isn't hard, but a business model where Unity, or any game engine for that matter, is charged proportionally to the amount of installs isn't a totally unreasonable business model.