LengAwaits
@LengAwaits@lemmy.world
- Comment on I won’t be reading the replies 2 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 '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 Consumer, we have detected that you are above the poverty line. The 99¢ price printed on this Arizona tea can only applies to those below the poverty line. Your total comes to $3.67. 2 months ago:
Agreed. This is not a wealth tax, this is the rich realizing that they’ve squeezed nearly all they can out of the lower classes. They must now pivot to squeezing middle class harder to continue building their dragonesque hoard.
- Comment on Consumer, we have detected that you are above the poverty line. The 99¢ price printed on this Arizona tea can only applies to those below the poverty line. Your total comes to $3.67. 2 months ago:
will? They have feasted upon us.
- Comment on Consumer, we have detected that you are above the poverty line. The 99¢ price printed on this Arizona tea can only applies to those below the poverty line. Your total comes to $3.67. 2 months ago:
All this time I thought we’d eat the rich. Turns out they’ll eventually just eat each other instead.
- Consumer, we have detected that you are above the poverty line. The 99¢ price printed on this Arizona tea can only applies to those below the poverty line. Your total comes to $3.67.lemmy.world ↗Submitted 2 months ago to aboringdystopia@lemmy.world | 176 comments
- Comment on TikTok pushed far-right AfD party on young voters in Germany 3 months ago:
We’ll have to agree to disagree. I prefer nuance to oversimplification.
- Comment on TikTok pushed far-right AfD party on young voters in Germany 3 months ago:
Did anyone other than me actually read the whole article? These comments sorta read like the answer is no.
The researchers say that their findings prove no active collaboration between TikTok and far-right parties like the AfD but that the platform’s structure gives bad actors an opportunity to flourish. “TikTok’s built-in features such as the ‘Others Searched For’ suggestions provides a poorly moderated space where the far-right, especially the AfD, is able to take advantage,” Miazia Schüler, a researcher with AI Forensics, tells WIRED.
A better headline might have been “TikTok algorithm gamed by far-right AfD party in Germany”, but I doubt that would drive as many clicks.
For more info, check out this article: Germany’s AfD on TikTok: The political battle for the youth
- Comment on NSA Claims It Can’t Watch a Tape It Recorded in the 1980s 3 months ago:
They should call TechMoan or CathodeRayDude! One of them probably has the right player just sort of… lying around!
- Comment on 30% of Children Ages 5-7 Are on TikTok 6 months ago:
- Comment on pontificus maximus 9 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 9 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 Meta given 30 days to cease using the name Threads by company that trademarked it 11 years ago 1 year ago:
There’s no love lost between me and Meta, but I’m just gon’ leave this here:
- Comment on Need help with bed leveling my Ender 3 S1 Pro 1 year ago:
When I first got my Ender 3 S1 Plus (same motherboard AFAIK), it would similarly freeze during the ABL. In my case, the issue was that I’d actually leveled the bed too low, and the machine was freaking out because it had to pass the software Z limit to home the printer. I loosened all the bed screws (raised the bed) by as many full turns as it took to have the bed’s screws just barely fully through the adjustment knobs, then releveled, reran the ABL routine, and finally all worked without a crash. This may or may not be your problem.
In any case, I do recommend checking to make sure you’re on the latest official factory firmware version, and if not update it with the latest firmware from here. The instructions are there, too.
Ultimately I got it working, but I ended up moving away from the janky stock firmware and putting Klipper on it instead after a few weeks.
