#government regulation. . .

[ozzgin]

There needs to be some sorta part 2 to player reader! Imagine her life is just getting kidnapped by another suitor every other day or somethin. Or gettin forcibly married to one with a legion of other monsters interrupting the weddin. Girl is livin my dream of bein desired by monsters! 😩😢

See, that’s the trouble, I feel like everything else from now on should be up to imagination. Will Reader be serially kidnapped? Serially married? Will the mayor of Monstertown have to intervene and turn Reader into some sort of publicly owned existence that can be borrowed within a strict interval like a library book, in order to avoid the monsters killing each other?

“I’m here to return Reader”, the Eldritch creature says, pushing the little card onto the counter with its tentacle appendage.

“Uh huh. That’s one week past deadline, so I’m afraid you’ll have to pay a fine.” The worker responds, checking the files.

“Of course.”

“Is Reader alright?” The employee questions upon noticing the feverish state of the human. “It looks a little worn out.”

“Yeah, sorry about that. Might’ve gotten too enthusiastic.”

“Happens, happens. I’ll let you know when it’s available again.”

Also, as a little side note, this was the initial idea I had for a header picture but I can’t be bothered to do anything beyond this doodle. Found it funny so I thought I’d share. :)

[politijohn]

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[captainjonnitkessler]

I think I've identified the reason I get so worked up about anarchism in relation to labor rights and safety in particular.

Three years ago I watched my coworker almost die when a piece of machinery we were moving unsafely fell on him. It missed his head by an inch and snapped his leg in half instead. It took months of recovery and multiple surgeries for him to walk again and he will be disabled for the rest of his life. And it didn't happen because of Capitalism or profit motive or because our evil bosses were forcing us to work unsafely. It happened because he'd done similar things a hundred times before and it had always been fine, and because I didn't know enough to clock just how dangerous what we were doing was, and just because of some plain shitty luck. Mentally it fucked me up for months in ways I didn't recognize until well after the fact.

And the thing is, almost every construction worker can tell you about the time they saw a fatal or near-fatal accident. An apprentice younger than me had a heart attack and was out of work for over a year after shocking himself on a live circuit. The woman who runs our apprenticeship program has a husband who had his arm blown off in an arc flash incident. One of my teachers had a coworker die after getting hung up on a live circuit and he wasn't found until the end of the day.

Construction is one of the single most dangerous industries to work in, and I believe this is why rates of drug and alcohol abuse and suicide are sky-high in the industry. I think many construction workers are low-key traumatized by knowing constantly that they could die or be permanently disabled due to a very simple mistake or oversight. It is simply inherently unsafe when you are working with live electricity, power tools, heights, thousands of pounds of machinery, cranes, etc. And so yes, I do believe that safety protocols and the ability to enforce them are absolutely necessary to preventing a massive amount of death. The number of worker deaths in the US has been slashed by 60% since OSHA was instated.

And so to get online and have someone who has never set foot on a jobsite in their life condescendingly explain to me that actually, we don't need OSHA or the ability to enforce safety standards because in a perfect world everyone will just suddenly start working perfectly safely, and I'm just too stupid or brainwashed to realize that The Real Villain Is Capitalism, and if we just get rid of that it will somehow also get rid of the inherent safety issues involved in the entire construction industry - well it turns out it pisses me off a little bit!

[vyeoh]

I just realized that the hermit permits have centralized the hermitcraft economy and as such, established socialism

[askagamedev]

Hello, I've been paying attention to Dustborn and the only actual question I would like to make is if you see anything worth dissecting on the fact that it got tax money from the EU? Games funded by a government are very rare, so I wonder if analyzing the game from that perspective provides something interesting into game development.

Getting tax breaks and incentives from various governments is actually very common. Government investment is often a lot like scholarships to university - they have bundles of money set aside for applicants that meet certain criteria. Most governments are interested in encouraging economic activity within their borders, especially tech industry growth. Tech pays pretty well, isn't large on space, and encourages secondary growth - tech workers that move to the area will buy usually houses and spend with local businesses, leading to a positive cycle of improved economic growth for the area.

As an example of this, in 2020 the Department of Community & Economic Development of Pennsylvania offered a [tax credit] of 25% of qualified expenses for the first four years of development and 10% for each subsequent year back in 2020 to game developers who spent at least 60% of their total production costs in Pennsylvania. The politicians were hoping to encourage game developers to move to Pennsylvania and they were offering tax credits as incentive.

Similarly, the Norwegian Film Institute offers funding to [audiovisual productions that meet their criteria]:

The screenplay, or the literary work on which the screenplay is based, has originally been written in the Norwegian or Sami language

The main theme is connected to Norwegian history, culture or social conditions

The action takes place in Norway, in another EEA country (countries of the European Union [EU] plus Iceland, Liechtenstein)

The work contains significant contributions from rights holders or artists resident in Norway or in another EEA country.

Dustborn ticked enough of these boxes that the NFI agreed to fund them. It wasn't a special thing, it was government money set aside to encourage the development of Norwegian-focused cultural audio visual works. That includes video games, movies, television, or any other kind of audio visual production. Lots of smaller works, games included, find funding through programs and grants like this.

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[ivan-fyodorovich-k]

I imagine the underlying principle of being upset by the proposed TikTok ban is that hatred of government regulation trumps all other hatreds, which makes sense, but it's weird to see how many people apparently love TikTok now, after I thought we all agreed it was in fact the worst thing in the world and that it poisoned the internet and our species incurably

[bigskydreaming]

Will never forgive the MCU for making Peter and Tony joined at the hip because of what amounts to less than a year's worth of Bendis storylines that shoved them into a weird dynamic that never made a ton of sense and also has practically never been referenced in the comics since.

[nando161mando]

The market will regulate itself

[halogalopaghost]

Really extra tired of black and white thinking around COVID like can you guys activate your brain and understand that lockdown was NECESSARY to prevent massive economic and social breakdown that would have been induced by our entire population getting infected at once before we figured out how to treat it

Not to mention the whole "young people didn't need to worry about dying they shouldn't have been locked down what about their social lives!!11!!!"

Hi. Hello. I am a youth that was disabled by COVID how are you doing today. Oh, you're not disabled by COVID? Cool shut the fuck up forever.

[loredwy]

Mmmmm okay but honest question tho

The KOSA regulations would need to be implemented even if the companies offer their services only outside of the country? 🤔 And if they are established on another country and offer its services to usa, they need to implement the regulations right?

Because like, I was thinking of how mihoyo moved from china to avoid the censorship regulations globally, for example

And like, couldnt then social media companies preassure the goverment about doing that too, then

Like, even if they had to censor stuff for usa, they would be losing a lot of potential interactions because of the content theyre hiding, so if they had to censor everything in case of being established in usa (even if it is content being shown outside of the country), wouldnt it be better for them to just move the company to another country then. To continue having those extra interactions from "censored posts" shown to other countries.

Or even, if the cost of filtering the posts was too high, its possible some companies would choose to not offer their services to usa anymore. Idk how taxes to big companies work in those cases, but that would be a loss for them in the long term too right.

Like, isnt the whole bill a bad idea even commercially?

And couldnt it happen that companies publish a statement about getting out of the country in case the regulations were stablished?

[border-collie]

not to trivialize a legitimate problem, but republicans really act like fentanyl is out there hunting them down and you can catch it by going to the grocery store and not what it really is, a problem for a select group of people who are engaging in behaviors that risk them coming in contact with it.

[deepbreakfast]

[tearfulangel]

cause of death - not having a damn vape anymore

[stickthisbig]

Deleted a big rant about solar energy because all I really had to say is stop simping for energy companies just because they're energy companies building solar farms, my God do you think they're building thousands of acres of infrastructure out of the goodness of their heart

[reasonsforhope]

"How much safer has construction really gotten? Let’s take a look.

Construction used to be incredibly dangerous

By the end of the 19th century, what’s sometimes called the second industrial revolution had made US industry incredibly productive. But it had also made working conditions more dangerous...

One source estimates 25,000 total US workplace fatalities in 1908 (Aldrich 1997). Another 1913 estimate gave 23,000 deaths against 38 million workers. Per capita, this is about 61 deaths per 100,000 workers, roughly 17 times the rate of workplace fatalities we have today...

In a world of dangerous work, construction was one of the most dangerous industries of all. By the 1930s and early 1940s the occupational death rate for all US workers had fallen to around 36-37 per 100,000 workers. At the same time [in the 1930s and early 1940s], the death rate in construction was around 150-200 deaths per 100,000 workers, roughly five times as high... By comparison, the death rate of US troops in Afghanistan in 2010 was about 500 per 100,000 troops. By the mid-20th century, the only industry sector more dangerous than construction was mining, which had a death rate roughly 50% higher than construction.

We see something similar if we look at injuries. In 1958 the rate of disabling injuries in construction was 3 times as high as the manufacturing rate, and almost 5 times as high as the overall worker rate.

Increasing safety

Over the course of the 20th century, construction steadily got safer. 

Between 1940 and 2023, the occupational death rate in construction declined from 150-200 per 100,000 workers to 13-15 per 100,000 workers, or more than 90%. Source: US Statistical Abstract, FRED

For ironworkers, the death rate went from around 250-300 per 100,000 workers in the late 1940s to 27 per 100,000 today.

Tracking trends in construction injuries is harder, due to data consistency issues. A death is a death, but what sort of injury counts as “severe,” or “disabling,” or is even worth reporting is likely to change over time. [3] But we seem to see a similar trend there. Looking at BLS Occupational Injuries and Illnesses data, between the 1970s and 2020s the injury rate per 100 workers declined from 15 to 2.5.

Source of safety improvements

Improvements in US construction safety were due to a multitude of factors, and part of a much broader trend of improving workplace safety that took place over the 20th century.

The most significant early step was the passage of workers compensation laws, which compensated workers in the event of an injury, increasing the costs to employers if workers were injured (Aldrich 1997). Prior to workers comp laws, a worker or his family would have to sue his employer for damages and prove negligence in the event of an injury or death. Wisconsin passed the first state workers comp law in 1911, and by 1921 most states had workers compensation programs.

The subsequent rising costs of worker injuries and deaths caused employers to focus more on workplace safety. According to Mark Aldrich, historian and former OSHA economist, “Companies began to guard machines and power sources while machinery makers developed safer designs. Managers began to look for hidden dangers at work, and to require that workers wear hard hats and safety glasses.” Associations and trade journals for safety engineering, such as the American Society of Safety Professionals, began to appear...

In 1934, the Department of Labor established a Division of Labor Standards, which would later become the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), to “promote worker safety and health.” The 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which legalized collective bargaining, allowed trade unions to advocate for worker safety.

Following WWII, the scale of government intervention in addressing social problems, including worker safety, dramatically increased.

In addition to OSHA and environmental protection laws, this era also saw the creation of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).

OSHA in particular dramatically changed the landscape of workplace safety, and is sometimes viewed as “the culmination of 60 or more years of effort towards a safe and hazard-free workplace.”"

-via Construction Physics (Substack newsletter by Brian Potter), 3/9/23