Im not sure for Hell Let Loose, but Chivalry 2 is a Unreal game and all unreal games come with a server.exe that works by default and works through direct IP connection. It would cost them 0 and im sure the game could just host servers with the normal client build like all unreal engine games do by default.
Just no. There's zero reason (other than greed as you can rent your own server) as to why you can't run your own server with Chivalry 2, likely no reason for Hell Let Loose either. I ran a Chivarly 1 server for years, its just an unreal game with a server browser, its not an mmo or pubg like matchmaking style that requires more infrastructure to run. And even if you did that, you could still allow people to run their own private servers, just have an old style server browser, which comes out of the box with engines like Unreal.
Weight gain has basically happened across the whole developed world because cost per calorie has gotten so low that people just eat more calories on average. This is why semi-glutides are the first thing ever to reduce weight gain and actually make people lose weight because they encourage reduced consumption.
Don't need ultra-processed food to be unhealthy. Rich guys in the 1800s would get fat and get gout and all these issues from overconsumption. It's just they were the only ones who could back then.
Yes not gonna pull it but there's data that shows calories got meaningfully cheaper and easier to access in the United States and more plentiful from the 1980s to the 2020s.
That shift might have been plausible if it happened in the 40s or 50s when the economy switched from war to consumption - but in the 80s? What kind of massive breakthrough in food production happened there that we mysteriously never heard of?
There were a ton of programs after WWII to improve the nutrition of the country. This largely meant raising calories to prevent malnutrition. And the 80s are as good a point as any other to where that succeeded.
And in doing so you can see that what you're saying is actually not true. Look up any random advertiser and you'll see that it's pretty uncommon for ads to be based around insecurity. Almost always it's on banal product features. The insecurity-focused ads do exist but they tend to be focused on a few broad lowest hanging fruit ad categories.
That's actually really interesting about all ads being public like that! Didn't know that. Is it because of some regulatory requirement or just because it's useful business wise?
(anyway many of the coca cola ads you linked have some theme of togetherness and community, which can be said to prey on people's insecurities around being lonely. Drink this sugar+caffeine solution and you'll be less lonely. Yes you start to sound like a paranoid schizophrenic when analyzing ads like that but that is how it works.)
There are entire categories of ads that operate on insecurity, they just don’t come out and scream “this is because you’re insecure” as that would make for bad copy. E.g. you think adult diapers advertise on anything other than insecurity (even if that insecurity is well-founded)?
Also, GP was talking about enterprise (B2C) and ads for B2C are pretty scarce in consumer-focused spaces. Insecurity, FOMO, etc is absolutely used to advertise to people in middle management on up.
Tobacco is an addictive product that on average hurts the people who use it as a negative utility. Almost every other product people buy has a positive utility. Tobacco, along with other drugs, is uniquely bad.
I don’t think Marijuana is likely to land you in the ED in quite the same way but the habitual smokers I’ve met tended to way underestimate how impaired they are by it and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of them drive and operate equipment while suffering those effects. Even the framing of Marijuana as a non-addictive substance seems to be a marketing framing.
These two categories are massively different. Tobacco, you could make the case that you're just hurting people.
Industrial food conglomerates are necessary to feed the world. People would die without them. They also make plenty of nutritious food. When people eat non-nutritious food it's not because the conglomerates are pushing it on them. It's because they choose it.
I agree in part. By definition, the conglomerates have many parts. Some of those are not objectively bad.
I also agree that people have choices.
I disagree that it is simply people choice it. When large corporations perform research to find hyperpalatable foods, spend billions on marketing, and capture regulatory apparatus to lock in their dominant position, it absolutely is that they are pushing it on people.
Those things you said sound evil but they're really not. Finding hyper-palatable food is just another word for finding stuff people want to eat if you're making food, something that's tasty.
Spending billions on marketing? Marketing is how you connect to what customers want. I'm a professional marketer, right and it's really really hard. If I was trying to sell food, I'd try different positioning statements, different ways to see what actually appeals to people. Marketing is not magic; it's market discovery.
And yeah it's bad whenever any company captures regulatory power. That's bad and I agree.
Optimizing for food that costs the least in ingredients, at the same time is provenly unhealthy, and has addictive properties, is a totally valid strategy for a free market but it's far from "feeding the world".
And better accessibility of unhealthy food in comparison to healthy food is a reality for many people, especially when they cannot outsource the act of buying and preparing food to others, including family, or spend arbitrary amounts of money on luxury "health food".
I'm not saying it's impossible to buy healthy food, or the responsibility of regulation to dictate what people eat.
But what you say about marketing seems besides the point to me.
Optimizing marketing of food for profit is not equal to "feeding the world".
Every kind of food is currently being made: healthy fresh food, processed foods of various types at all different price ranges. People have options to buy what they want and that's a good thing.
By and large most people don't see any problem with marketing, they will actually get a little bit mad at the suggestion it should be abolished, evidently it fulfills some kind of need for them.
All these kinds of questions you're asking come from a specific way of looking at things that is just not how most normal people look at the world. I'm not saying this out of misanthropy or some kind of wake-up-sheeple attitude, I'm also not saying you're wrong, but when you get knee-deep into critiqueing every aspect of how the world works at some point your worldview divorces from the worldview of most people to the point that "how do they all sleep at night" becomes kind of a moot question.
My Theory: Advertising is a lot like capitalism itself.
Both ads and capitalism are messy and have some externalized harms, but are better than the alternatives.
In the "advertising led" model of customer discovery, businesses advertise to essentially tell the market that they exist and provide a service. They do so by paying for advertising space across various mediums. This includes everything from their store signage to Craigslist ads, to TV and sophisticated digital advertising.
Most modern advertising is an auction where businesses compete to serve their message to customers the algorithms think are most likely to be interested.
This function - of matching users that might be interested in products to businesses providing products - is at this point hugely scaled.
People who want to ban ads will usually give the alternative of a reviewed directory of products and services for each category. That, they say, would be the ideal method of product discovery, along with word of mouth.
However, that runs immediately into the same problem that communism has historically. Who actually controls these directories, which would be a huge source of power for society? I posit that that it is impossible to centralize this effectively, and that the most likely most effective method for idea and product dispersal is something close to modern marketing and advertising.
>People who want to ban ads will usually give the alternative of a reviewed directory of products and services for each category.
I don't know about this. The idea that it should be centrally reviewed and managed is somewhat of a strawman as far as I'm concerned. Once you outlaw third-party advertising you would naturally expect such directories to spring up (much like specialized business publications that are actually full of high-value ads that genuinely serve a purpose for people in the business) but they could operate just like normal businesses with in the capitalist system and would have to compete for quality and customers.
How will the directories get their names out and compete if they're not allowed to promote themselves?
If you remove approved commercial options for promoting yourself, like advertisements, then most of the other options left for promotion are essentially spam.
If your answer is word of mouth, that's naïve. I've worked with over 100 startups at very various stages of marketing in the last 15 years. Word of mouth is fire in a pan. It is very industry dependent, context dependent, and company dependent.
I don't know man. I just think somehow we'll manage. For example if a group of friends all feel a desperate need to find out about new products they could start a non-profit organization that will search out the new products and directories detective style. And public business directories exist in most places because they are required by law.
The deeper point is that pro-advertising people always frame it like advertising is something people want and that benefits them, but this is just a fig-leaf for the underlying ideology that businesses have the fundamental right to buy peoples' attention for money. The directories idea is mostly just a way to call this bluff, essentially saying "if people wanted to be advertised to they'd go out of their way to get it". Then the underlying ideology comes out.
It's not that businesses have a fundamental right to buy people's attention. It's that people have a right to sell ad space that they own to other people to show messages on if they want to. I dont think its right to tell (example fake website) plumbersupport.com that they cant accept $500 from a plumbing saas product to put a banner ad on their site because advertising is bad.
This kind of situation is win-win-win.
The plumbing website makes money from the ad - supporting their operations so plumbers can keep a good source of plumbing educational content.
The SaaS company gets to put their product in front of users to look at and consider buying.
The users get to see a potential product with no obligation that they may have not ever heard of before.
So basically you're saying businesses have a right to sell peoples' attention. Of course for every seller there's a buyer but I do kinda see that how this framing would make a difference, ethically, for some.
Especially in food deserts, sometimes the only places to buy food are from gas stations. Guess what they serve? Toxic shit that somehow identifies as food.
Opening state-run groceries is essential in fixing that many food deserts, but so many would howl of socialism.
Even Adam Smith warned that companies and capitalists would not help with infrastructure. Food access is one such area.
I'm not against state-run groceries, one of the best grocers in this country is operated by the federal government. Food deserts are a problem, and we already have tools to solve them.
But you're putting far too much weight on food deserts on "why do Americans eat so much junk food". 6% of Americans live in food deserts. I imagine way more than 6% of Americans regularly eat junk food.
Food deserts are a methodologically fraught concept. The inclusion criteria are basically arbitrary; vary the distance or income thresholds by modest amounts, and the maps change drastically. It also buckets everyone living in a census tract to the geometric center of that tract, so that people living five minutes walk from a grocery store still count as living in a food desert. On top of that, they don't account for public (or private) transportation, using straight line distance as a proxy for time traveled.
The store-classification criteria also tends to only count supermarkets and large grocery chains, artificially classifying neighborhoods with local, well-stocked stores as food deserts.
Supposing those methodological problems were resolved, proximity to a grocery store still only accounts for 10% of the variance in nutritious food consumption between groups. The other 90% is driven by buyer demand, as is shown in the cases where different demographics shop at the same store[1].
For the small group for which access is truly limited (further reduced to the 10% of those for which their purchasing decisions would actually change), other solutions — such as reducing grocery store "shrinkage" through better policing, therefore increasing grocery store availability in areas where elevated crime otherwise renders them economically unviable — are noticeably under-discussed in favor of the heavy handed solutions of the type you raised here.
All of which exemplifies the typical failure mode inherent to many "socialist" policies: 1. Misidentify a problem, or solution. 2. Increase government control/regulation. 3. Repeat — indefinitely, as the problem hasn't been fixed — forever tightening the ratchet of government control.
Yes it seems like the authors of this article are implying this is bad? I mean ultra-processed is a meaningless term but generally processed food lasts longer, is less perishable, often cheaper, etc.
Yeah, it kinda made me laugh too. I'm glad you could pull something out. I'd never heard of that Nova classification system. I'll have to read some more on it. The whole doctor thing, the more processed the food is, the less work your body has to do, which means the more available the calories are, which generally means the worse it is for you.
And usually the fats have to be processed because fat is generally not shelf-stable.
Truer words have never been spoken. Now set forth unto the world and transcend your ignorance to learn is meant by "meaningless". The discussion taking place will make more sense to you when you return.
Most technical and scientific terms absolutely are meaningless outside of related technical and scientific communities. All terms have at least one person who sees it as meaningful else it could not fundamentally exist as a term, but clearly the context is about trying use it in contexts where the audience is the general population. There is no shared understanding of what it means in that setting, thus it is meaningless (to that audience).
You'd find plenty of definitions if you looked for them
> generally processed food lasts longer, is less perishable, often cheaper, etc.
Go ahead and list the negatives too lmao... what do you think the additives meant to prevent living organism from developing on the food do in your gut for example ?
Exactly. Terms that are meaningful have one generally accepted definition. When everyone and their brother are coming up with their own pet definitions, that is when a term is considered meaningless.
Oh there is a very well defined and accepted definition in science, but for some reasons geniuses on this forum, and online in general, like to pull their best "ackchyually" broscience definitions.
btw feel free to open a dictionary and discover that a lot of words have multiple definitions, it doesn't mean they're meaningless...
"Meaningless" doesn't mean everyone fails to find meaning, it means that there is no general consensus on what it means. As you pointed out before, everyone holds their own pet definition. It means something to most everyone, but there isn't a shared understanding of what it means across the general population.
While it is true that words often have multiple meanings while remaining meaningful, they do not have multiple meanings within the same context as is the case here. I am surprised that wasn't obvious to you. Hey, on the bright side, at least you got to learn something new today.
I guess climate change doesn't exist either then. If by everyone you mean everyone except science, then sure, but that's why we have the scientific consensus...
"Climate change" may very well be meaningless. It was, after all, adopted for use in public messaging due to its predecessor, "global warming", never transcending meaninglessness, so there is precedent for the general population failing to find convergence in a shared understanding. If they couldn't grasp the intent beyond "global warming", it is equally likely they haven't been able to grasp the intent behind "climate change".
But it is a term that definitely exists. We can find it used often in the literature. Hell, we can find one of those instances in your very own comment... How on earth did you reach the conclusion that it doesn't exist? You didn't give that one any thought at all, did you?
Then it just has one definition, rather than plenty. You could have said that it's defined in many places. If you want to say that's what you meant, I won't argue semantics.
I know its just a joke, but Bill Hicks also constantly marketed himself and branded himself as an anti-marketing comedian. In his mind it was okay to promote yourself as a comedian but not promote your own business.
There's a different between 'promotion' and 'bait and switch'.
There's also the matter of the externalities of the products you're promoting.
If Hicks marketed his shows as life-changing experiences which'll give you a bigger dick, then just ran normal stand-up, it'd be right to criticise him.
Just as it's right to criticise companies who claim to sell 'food', show ads of nice happy, healthy families, and throw buzzwords around to manipulate customers at the detriment of their own health and lives.
The hijacking of language by megacorps is sad. Words have meaning, backed by history, tradition, and culture, and shouldn't be used as marketing tools to get consumers addicted to slop.
I didn't recall Hicks saying that people who do bait-and-switch tactics (which i also agree are bad) should kill themselves. I recall him saying all marketers and advertisers should kill themselves.
If you think buying ads is the only form of marketing, sure but advertising is probably 10% of marketing. See my other comments to see why he was a natural marketer and used some key tactics that he specifically chose for promoting himself.
I respect the hell out of Bill Hicks but the dude absolutely sat around thinking about marketing and getting his name out there. You have to if you want to be a working comic. Hell it’s not like he didn’t have an agent.
Then I don’t think you really understand comedy to be honest.
That’s a very reductive view of comedy, essentially “just a joke with no relevant context or layers allowed,” which rubs against the entire history of the art form. No working comic would agree with you.
Put another way: Not everyone is looking to do revolutionary commentary, but good luck finding a comic with no commentary at all.
I don't think this is true, do you have a source for this? What does it even mean that he constantly marketed himself, is doing lots of shows considered "marketing yourself"?
Comedy is about putting butts in seats. No comedian can be successful without promoting themselves to get attendees at their shows, and Bill Hicks was no exception.
Bill Hicks clearly did the normal career-promotion work of a comedian: he auditioned, performed constantly, toured, did TV spots, recorded specials/albums, cultivated UK audiences, and made repeated appearances on shows like Letterman. He opened for Jay Leno, appeared on Late Night with David Letterman, recorded an HBO special, played Just for Laughs, etc.
And for context he worked really hard to get those comedy specials recorded. Those specials are basically a business product, right? It's a way for him to scale his own comedy time and make more money. He partnered with big corporations to do it and they promoted those comedy specials with marketing.
All of that is part of a pretty standard self promotion/touring package of building a comedy career.
The analogy would be if whatever company releases a product that people see out in the wild and it's so good at what it does that they want more of it based on word of mouth.
Performing is just showing up at comedy shows and doing your bit. That alone would not have made him successful.
He aggressively promoted and marketed himself!
Biggest example: Going on Letterman and other corporate talk shows / interviews (he went on Letterman 12 times to promote himself, not making much money, purely for driving awareness - classic pr marketing technique that he used repeatedly)
He also went far beyond live acts when he started monetizing his recorded acts that were playing/distributing through corporate partners. Those recordings and specials were heavily marketed and he benefited from it because it created scale.
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