Related to that, the whole physical signalling stuff is quite a mess.
For example there are cultures were waving your head up and down back and forth does not mean “Yes”, it means “No”.
I found this kind of stuff out when I moved from my homeland, Portugal, to The Netherlands: it turns out the signal for “he/she is crazy” in Portugal is the same as the signal for “he/she is intelligent” in The Netherlands. Mind you, for me it was a great source of humour.
I suspect we’re running with different versions of “middle-class”.
In Europe middle-class used to be about the kind of work one did and roughly correlated with doing or not manual work - those doing manual work were considered working class and those doing office work were middle class.
This tended to also match incomes, so middle-class usually had a middle range income, higher than the working class but not as high as the rich.
This all sorta matched because non-manual work was generally either some kind of management position or some position requring higher education - such as, say Medical Doctor, Engineer or Architect - which very few people back then had.
It wasn’t about what an income could buy, it was about the kind of work people did, their level of formal education and the level of their income compared to others.
Things have however changed a lot - a much higher percentage of people have higher education, most of the income advantage of higher education is gone and in general all layers but the rich have fallen down in the income ladder - were there was a middle class there is now mostly a gap and essentially the working class and the middle class have been squeezed together.
IMHO, what we have nowadays is a two class system:
However we were talking about the 60s and I do belive there was actually a “middle class” back then, at least per the definition we had in Europe.
The existence and purchasing power of the minimum wage is applicable to the working class and the poor, not the middle class unless your theory is that there is no such thing as a working class or poor and “middle class” starts at the bottom of pay scale, which would be strange given that being “middle class” at least back in the 60s was about what kind of work people did and were did they sit in the income scale relative to other people (hence the word “middle”) - so office workers back then were typically middle class whilst blue collar workers were typically working class, both due to the latter doing “manual” work unlike the former and having a lower income relative to the former.
That explains why I misunderstood your point as meaning that the minimum could not buy all that much, which per your clarification in this post is not what you meant.
Granted, compared to today, the working class of the 60s had more purchasing power than much if not most of today’s so-called middle-class.
The previous poster’s point wasn’t that there wasn’t a middle class, it was that blue collar workers and traders aren’t middle class which would be correct per the definition of “middle class” I provided in the 1st paragraph of this post.
So a 1960 minimum wage could buy an average home with 5 years of 40h/week and you don’t think that’s a “pretty good life” compared to the current situation?!
One of the biggest problems nowadays is exactly that the house-prices to incomes ratio is several times what it was back then.
Ah.
I have so far avoided that specific pit, but that’s because for maybe decades now and still whilst using Windows as my main I’ve avoid proprietary solutions (except for games) and went for Open Source ones instead, which has yielded the benefit that since I moved over to Linux for good a few months ago, I have yet to be faced with needing something I used to use in Windows and not finding a Linux native version.
I’m sure I’ll end up in the same kind of situation you describe.
By the way, have you tried “Bottles”? From what I’ve heard (but did not test myself yet) it might help there and it’s not specifically for games.
A lot of this was already talked about by the traditional Left, way back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The discussion back then was all about Power, and by that I mean the capacity of forcing or blocking others from doing what they want, not just the version of “Power” talked about the useful idiots nowadays which only sees the Power of the State, never the Power that comes from Money and Ownership.
This is why some of the suggested solutions they came up with back then explicitly involved things like Confiscating the Means Of Production and Land Reform, which, whether one agrees or not with it, at least recognized and tried to address the Power inherent in the Ownership of that which is needed to produce things for the rest.
The problem is that the supposedly Leftwing (but really mostly Liberal and not even honestly so) thinking since at least the 80s pointedly avoids talking about the Power Of Money as if people’s life’s aren’t shaped by access to a place to live, access to food, access to healthcare and the time they have to spend working being defined by how little of the product of their work ends up in their hands, none of which is trully their choice nowadays.
Maybe we should start again looking back at some of the best things from back then, such as Social Democracy.
Well, in the Post 2008 Crash World with the most favorable policies for the Asset Owner class since the time of the Monarchy, after the rich finished draining the Poor and Traditional Working class using rent-seeking anchored on their control of assets connected to life essentials (most obviously, Housing) and, especially in the West, their leverage of the Demand Side for Work thanks to having sent most jobs abroad with Globalization (something which was itself pushed by the rich in the 70s and is core in Neoliberalism), they would obviously go after the Middle-Class next.
I mean, did anybody really expect that the Greed of the Owner Class would somehow magically stop when the only large pool of wealth left out of their hands was the one held by the Middle-Class?
What I find funny in all this is the “Modern” “Left” parties were the scions of the Middle-Class obsess over Supposedly-Left-but-really-Liberal ideas (mainly Identity Politics) having forgotten the core concern of the old-fashioned Traditional Left (such as Communism, Socialism, Social-Democracy and independently of one agreeing with their actual solutions of not) which is about Power (in the sense of who, if any, can impose their will on others directly or indirectly) hence totally ignoring the detail that 4 decades of Neoliberalism have de facto turned Money into a Power far above the State, and which most definitelly forces on others choices such as were to live, how to live, and what to do.
The “Modern” “Left” thinking, birthed in the 80s from some ideas from American think tanks and without Equality explicitly as an Ideology (instead they had some pre-made policies for “Equalities” - i.e. Equality on a group by group basis, with how much each person’s deserving of fair and equal treatment and access to things in life depending on their “group” membership defined by their genetics, religion, gender, sexual orientation or place of birth - that avoided like the plague even mentioning Equality For All, the only real Equality) were useful idiots for the Neoliberals and now here were are, when even those priviledged scions of the Middle and Upper Middle-Class are starting to be squeezed by the wealthy, whose power they so pointedly avoided talking about and criticizing, must less trying to control and reduce.
Con-fucking-gratulations!
I just use Lutris, which generally does most of that work for me.
Calling them “prefixes” is about the total of the confusion. Call them “instances” or even just “boxes” and it’s suddenly clear what they do.
(The only reason I’m not using “sandbox” is because they don’t really provide sandboxing from a security point of view, only a kind of separate instance with its own configuration but with access to everything via the Z drive)
Once you figure out that using a different “wine prefix” only really means a separate “Windows” with it’s own config and file structure there’s nothing confusing about it.
Well, as the guy falling from the top of the Empire State Building was overheard saying on his way down: “well, so far so good”.
Or as the common caveat given to retail investors goes: past performance is no predictor of future results.
“So far” proves nothing because it can be “so far” only because the conditions for something different haven’t yet happenned or it simply hasn’t been in their best interest yet to act differently.
If their intentions were really the purest, most honest and genuine of all, they could have placed themselves under a contractual obligation to do so and put money aside for an “end of life plan” in a way such that they can’t legally use it for other things, or even done like GoG and provided offline installer to those people who want them.
Steam have chosen to maintain their ability to claw back games in your library whilst they could have done otherwise as demonstrated by GoG which let you download offline installers - no matter what they say, their actions to keep open the option of doing otherwise say the very opposite.
To add to your point, it’s amazing that so many people are still mindless fanboys, even of Steam.
Steam has restrictions on installing the games their customers supposedly own, even if it’s nothing more than “you can’t install it from a local copy of the installer and have to install it from the Steam servers” - it’s not full ownership if you can’t do what you want with it when you want it without the say so of a 3rd party.
That’s just how it is.
Now, it’s perfectly fair if one says “yeah, but I totally trust them” which IMHO is kinda naive in this day and age (personally, almost 4 decades of being a Techie and a gamer have taught me to distrust until there’s no way they can avoid their promises, but that just me), or that one knows the risks but still thinks that it’s worth it to purchase from Steam for many games and that the mere existence of Steam has allowed many games to exists that wouldn’t have existed otherwise (mainly Indie ones) - which is my own posture at least up to a point - but a whole different thing is the whole “I LoVe STeaM And tHeY CaN DO NotHInG wrONg” fanboyism.
Sorry but they have in place restrictions on game installation and often game playing which from the point of view of Customers are not needed and serve no purpose (they’re not optional and a choice for the customer, but imposed on customers), hence they serve somebody else than the customer. It being a valid business model and far too common in this day and age (hence people are used to it) doesn’t make those things be “in the interest of Customers” and similarly those being (so far) less enshittified than other similar artificial restrictions on Customers out there do not make them a good thing, only so far not as bad as others.
I mean, for fuck’s sake, this isn’t the loby of an EA multiplayer game and we’re supposed to be mostly adults here in Lemmy: lets think a bit like frigging adults rather than having knee-jerk pro-Steam reactions based on fucking brand-loyalty like mindless pimply-faced teen fanboys. (Apologies to the handful of wise-beyond-their-years pimply faced teens that might read this).
It’s even more basic than that: if there’s no escrow with money for that “end of life” “plan” and no contractual way to claw back money for it from those getting dividends from Valve, then what the “Valve representatives” said is a completelly empty promised, or in other words a shameless lie.
Genuine intentions actually have reliable funding attached to them, not just talkie talkie from people who will never suffer in even the tinyest of ways from not fulfulling what they promised.
In this day and age, we’ve been swamped with examples that we can’t simply trust in people having a genuine feeling of ethical and moral duty to do what they say they will do with no actual hard consequences for non-compliance or their money on the line for it.
PS: And by “we can’t trust in people” I really mean “we can’t trust in people who are making statements and promises as nameless representatives of a company”. Individuals personally speaking for themselves about something they control still generally are, even in this day and age, much better than people acting the role of anonymous corporate drone.
If there is one think we should all have learned by now in this Era is that talk means nothing at all: there have to be hard contractual clausules along with personal punishment for those who break them or some kind of escrow system for money meant to go into that “end of life” plan for it to actually be genuine.
“Valve reps have said” is worth as much as the paper it’s written on and that stuff is not even written on paper.
I too think that the best possible situation would be a World were it would be absolutely normal for everybody to move around as they saw fit and one’s place of birth was irrelevant.
The problem is how to realistically go from were we are now to that utopia.
Simplistic approaches of the “lets just one-sidedly act as if we lived in that utopia and hope we’ll get it” aren’t going to do it and neither will prejudices about people because of the genetics they were born with or the geographical area they were born in.
Things like for example being able to operate certain kinds of computerized industrial machinery does mean that a single individual can produce more than one who is not able to do so.
I agree with your point that such advantages for the West were for the most down to luck rather than any kind of deserving it. Some countries did use their luck more wisely than others, but that’s about it.
I also agree that quite a lot of the “extra” value being “produced” in the West is nothing more than pillaging of somebody else’s resources. My point #3 on my previous comment is anchored on that view - I might have given just a handful of the most obviously bad concrete examples, but there is a lot more than that at more levels, especially around mineral resources.
I don’t at all think that Europeans (or any other Westerners) are any more (or less) deserving or capable than the rest - my statement on the capability to do higher value added jobs was purely of the “things are as things are hence certain actions will have certain consequences” kind and not at all a value judgement, and in another comment here responding to somebody else I actually suggested that we should be investing in Adult Education, including for immigrants, and should provide Education for the children of immigrants the same as for the children of the locals.
So it’s your certainties used to dismiss as “untrue” and now again as “farcical” what I wrote based on my experience of actually living in the place NOW, knowing the language and having talked to the actual immigrants here, come for “hearing about it from somebody who lived there”.
The very racists you claim to detest have such absolute hard certainties about entire peoples based on 2nd or 3rd hand accounts of who knows who, and lots of presumptions, as the ones you have just displayed about a whole country and the people living there without even having visited, to the point that you even claim to know better than an actual native living there who knows the language.
I have literally seen that formula you just used of “I know how a people are and behave better than an actual person from that group” used by outright racists, most commonly against people of Asian origin or ancestry.
The irony of a loud anti-racist displaying that very same kind of prejudice is truly extraordinary.
Me living in the place and having talked to Brazilians about it and hearing what people around me say, including my aged parents as they start saying more and more racist shit.
I mean, if you can get me access to that peer-reviewed scientific study that made you conclude that my “claim about anti-African discrimination in Portugal is untrue” I’ll be happy to have a look at the section in it about the single biggest minority in Portugal by quite a distance - Brazilians - as any study made in the last 20 years not covering them would be highly unrepresentative.
Yes, that’s very much my point of view, only much more succinctly and well put than I managed :)
Immigration is a numbers problem: it’s the interplay of rate of arrival, rate of integration, how fast do the locals get used to immigrants and how wide are the educational and cultural differences between those already in a place and those arriving.
Immigration is also a racism problem because racism lowers the rate of “locals getting used to immigrants” and makes cultural differences seem worse than they actually are: for a racist there are no “low enough cultural differences” to make the targets of their racism feel like “one of us”, as can be seen in the US with racism against Afro-Americans who are fellow citizens with a shared culture.
All those things benefit from more Education, both adult education for the immigrants to help with flattening the educational differences (which is a good idea overall, not just for immigrants), education for their children to help integration and education for the children of the racists to stop the racism from crossing to the next generation.
This is, however a far more pragmatic take than the extremes of “we should help everybody that needs help in the World by inviting them to move over whenever they feel like” on the side of the Liberals and of “foreigners are bandits and eat other people’s pets” on the side of the Far-Right.
The kindness of that feeling if not tempered by hard-nosed pragmatism directly collides with the reality of what is actually achievable.
There are 8 billion people in this World, most of which have a lower or much lower “chance to live a life worth living” than the even the average Western.
If everybody outside the West that could have a better life in the West was allowed to come over what would happen is that the place would end up with lots of people with a far lower level of formal education (so less capable of doing the high value jobs that produce more wealth in the West), with different customs (causing lots of friction) and who do not know the language (again a problem for them to be productive alongside the natives), and its capacity to create wealth would most certainly collapse on a per-capita basis - essentially too many people coming over from places with very different quality of life and education system would kill the very golden eggs goose that justified them coming over in the first place.
There are limits to how much we can help without endangering the very thing that allows us to help, which means we have to look at it from a hard nosed pragmatic perspective. As I see it, it breaks down into 3 things:
A genuine will to “ensure that people all over the world have a chance to live a life worth living” means we have to find solutions that actually work in the context of objective reality, not high-moral-horse-ridding simplistic takes on things.
Is that but on the side of the head. It can also be tapping on the side of the head.
The Dutch gesture for intelligent is touching the side of the head with the index finger, which can be confused with the second version of the Portuguese one for crazy.
Mind you, I just realized I’m not sure about those things anymore (I lived for over 2 decades abroad) and had to google to make sure.